Is never Youth austere?
Spring-fruits are sour to eat;
Autumn's the mellow time.
Nay, very late in the year,
Short day and frosty rime,
Thought, like a winter pear,
Stone-cold in summer's prime,
May turn from harsh to sweet.
From 'Ballads and Songs.'
SONG
O spirit of the Summer-time!
Bring back the roses to the dells;
The swallow from her distant clime,
The honey-bee from drowsy cells.
Bring back the friendship of the sun;
The gilded evenings calm and late,
When weary children homeward run,
And peeping stars bid lovers wait.
Bring back the singing; and the scent
Of meadow-lands at dewy prime;
Oh, bring again my heart's content,
Thou Spirit of the Summer-time!
From 'Day and Night Songs.'
THE BUBBLE
See the pretty planet!
Floating sphere!
Faintest breeze will fan it
Far or near;
World as light as feather;
Moonshine rays,
Rainbow tints together,
As it plays.
Drooping, sinking, failing,
Nigh to earth,
Mounting, whirling, sailing,
Full of mirth;
Life there, welling, flowing,
Waving round;
Pictures coming, going,
Without sound.
Quick now, be this airy
Globe repelled!
Never can the fairy
Star be held.
Touched--it in a twinkle
Disappears!
Leaving but a sprinkle,
As of tears.
From 'Ballads and Songs.'
ST. MARGARET'S EVE
I built my castle upon the seaside,
The waves roll so gayly O,
Half on the land and half in the tide,
Love me true!
Within was silk, without was stone,
The waves roll so gayly O,
It lacks a queen, and that alone,
Love me true!
The gray old harper sang to me,
The waves roll so gayly O,
"Beware of the Damsel of the Sea!"
Love me true!
Saint Margaret's Eve it did befall,
The waves roll so gayly O,
The tide came creeping up the wall,
Love me true!
I opened my gate; who there should stand--
The waves roll so gayly O,
But a fair lady, with a cup in her hand,
Love me true!
The cup was gold, and full of wine,
The waves roll so gayly O,
"Drink," said the lady, "and I will be thine,"
Love me true!
"Enter my castle, lady fair,"
The waves roll so gayly O,
"You shall be queen of all that's there,"
Love me true!
A gray old harper sang to me,
The waves roll so gayly O,
"Beware of the Damsel of the Sea!"
Love me true!
In hall he harpeth many a year,
The waves roll so gayly O,
And we will sit his song to hear,
Love me true!
"I love thee deep, I love thee true,"
The waves roll so gayly O,
"But ah! I know not how to woo,"
Love me true!
Down dashed the cup, with a sudden shock,
The waves roll so gayly O,
The wine like blood ran over the rock,
Love me true!
She said no word, but shrieked aloud,
The waves roll so gayly O,
And vanished away from where she stood,
Love me true!
I locked and barred my castle door,
The waves roll so gayly O,
Three summer days I grieved sore,
Love me true!
For myself a day, a night,
The waves roll so gayly O,
And two to moan that lady bright,
Love me true!
From 'Ballads and Songs.'
THE FAIRIES
(A CHILD'S SONG)
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a hunting
For fear of little men:
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl's feather.
Down along the rocky shore
Some have made their home;
They live on crispy pancakes
Of yellow-tide foam.
Some in the reeds
Of the black mountain-lake,
With frogs for their watch-dogs,
All night awake.
High on the hill-top
The old King sits;
He is now so old and gray
He's nigh lost his wits.
With a bridge of white mist
Columbkill he crosses,
On his stately journeys
From Sliveleague to Rosses;
Or going up with music
On cold starry nights,
To sup with the Queen
Of the gay northern lights.
They stole little Bridget
For seven years long;
When she came down again
Her friends were all gone.
They took her lightly back,
Between the night and morrow,
They thought that she was fast asleep,
But she was dead with sorrow.
They have kept her ever since
Deep within the lakes,
On a bed of flag leaves
Watching till she wakes.
By the craggy hillside,
Through the mosses bare,
They have planted thorn-trees
For pleasure here and there.
Is any man so daring
As dig them up in spite,
He shall feel their sharpest thorns
In his bed at night.
Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren't go a hunting
For fear of little men:
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping all together;
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl's feather.
From 'Ballads and Songs.'
ROBIN REDBREAST
(A CHILD'S SONG)
Good-by, good-by, to Summer!
For Summer's nearly done;
The garden smiling faintly,
Cool breezes in the sun;
Our Thrushes now are silent,
Our Swallows flown away--
But Robin's here, in coat of brown,
With ruddy breast-knot gay.
Robin, Robin Redbreast,
Oh, Robin, dear!
Robin singing sweetly
In the falling of the year.
Bright yellow, red, and orange,
The leaves come down in hosts;
The trees are Indian Princes,
But soon they'll turn to Ghosts;
The scanty pears and apples
Hang russet on the bough,
It's Autumn, Autumn, Autumn late,
'Twill soon be winter now.
Robin, Robin Redbreast,
Oh, Robin, dear!
And welaway! my Robin,
For pinching times are near.
The fireside for the Cricket,
The wheatstack for the Mouse,
When trembling night-winds whistle
And moan all round the house.
The frosty ways like iron,
The branches plumed with snow--
Alas! in Winter, dead and dark,
Where can poor Robin go?
Robin, Robin Redbreast,
Oh, Robin, dear!
And a crumb of bread for Robin,
His little heart to cheer.
From 'Ballads and Songs.'
AN EVENING
Sunset's mounded cloud;
A diamond evening-star;
Sad blue hills afar:
Love in his shroud.
Scarcely a tear to shed;
Hardly a word to say;
The end of a summer's day;
Sweet Love is dead.
From 'Day and Night Songs.'
DAFFODIL
Gold tassel upon March's bugle-horn,
Whose blithe reveille blows from hill to hill
And every valley rings--O Daffodil!
What promise for the season newly born?
Shall wave on wave of flow'rs, full tide of corn,
O'erflow the world, then fruited Autumn fill
Hedgerow and garth? Shall tempest, blight, or chill
Turn all felicity to scathe and scorn?
Tantarrara! the joyous Book of Spring
Lies open, writ in blossoms; not a bird
Of evil augury is seen or heard:
Come now, like Pan's old crew, we'll dance and sing,
Or Oberon's: for hill and valley ring
To March's bugle-horn,--Earth's blood is stirred.
From 'Flower Pieces.'
LOVELY MARY DONNELLY
(To an Irish Tune)
O lovely Mary Donnelly, it's you I love the best!
If fifty girls were round you, I'd hardly see the rest.
Be what it may the time of day, the place be where it will,
Sweet looks of Mary Donnelly, they bloom before me still.
Her eyes like mountain water that's flowing on a rock,
How clear they are, how dark they are! and they give me many a shock.
Red rowans warm in sunshine and wetted with a shower,
Could ne'er express the charming lip that has me in its power.
Her nose is straight and handsome, her eyebrows lifted up;
Her chin is very neat and pert, and smooth like a china cup;
Her hair's the brag of Ireland, so weighty and so fine,
It's rolling down upon her neck and gathered in a twine.
The dance o' last Whit Monday night exceeded all before;
No pretty girl for miles about was missing from the floor;
But Mary kept the belt of love, and oh, but she was gay!
She danced a jig, she sung a song, that took my heart away.
When she stood up for dancing, her steps were so complete,
The music nearly killed itself to listen to her feet;
The fiddler moaned his blindness, he heard her so much praised,
But blessed himself he wasn't deaf, when once her voice she raised.
And evermore I'm whistling or lilting what you sung,
Your smile is always in my heart, your name beside my tongue;
But you've as many sweethearts as you'd count on both your hands,
And for myself there's not a thumb or little finger stands.
Oh, you're the flower o' womankind in country or in town;
The higher I exalt you, the lower I'm cast down.
If some great lord should come this way, and see your beauty bright,
And you to be his lady, I'd own it was but right.
Oh, might we live together in a lofty palace hall,
Where joyful music rises, and where scarlet curtains fall!
Oh, might we live together in a cottage mean and small,
With sods of grass the only roof, and mud the only wall!
O lovely Mary Donnelly, your beauty's my distress:
It's far too beauteous to be mine, but I'll never wish it less.
The proudest place would fit your face, and I am poor and low;
But blessings be about you, dear, wherever you may go!
From 'Ballads and Songs.'
KARL JONAS LUDVIG ALMQUIST
(1793-1866)
Almquist, one of the most versatile writers of Sweden, was a man of
strange contrasts, a genius as uncertain as a will-o'-the-wisp. His
contemporary, the famous poet and critic Atterbom, writes:--
"What did the great poets of past times possess which upheld
them under even the bitterest worldly circumstances? Two
things: one a strong and conscientious will, the other a
single--not double, much less manifold--determination for
their work, oneness. They were not self-seekers; they sought,
they worshiped something better than themselves. The aim
which stood dimly before their inmost souls was not the
enjoyment of flattered vanity; it was a high, heroic symbol
of love of honor and love of country, of heavenly wisdom. For
this they thought it worth while to fight, for this they even
thought it worth while to suffer, without finding the
suffering in itself strange, or calling earth to witness
thereof.... The writer of 'Törnrosens Bok' [The Book of the
Rose] is one of these few; he does therefore already reign
over a number of youthful hearts, and out of them will rise
his time of honor, a time when many of the celebrities of the
present moment will have faded away."
Almquist was born in Stockholm in 1793. When still a very young man he
obtained a good official position, but gave it up in 1823 to lead a
colony of friends into the forests of Värmland, where they intended to
return to a primitive life close to the heart of nature. He called this
colony a "Man's-home Association," and ordained that in the primeval
forest the members should live in turf-covered huts, wear homespun, eat
porridge with a wooden spoon, and enact the ancient freeholder. The
experiment was not successful, he tired of the manual work, and
returning to Stockholm, became master of the new Elementary School, and
began to write text-books and educational works. His publication of a
number of epics, dramas, lyrics, and romances made him suddenly famous.
Viewed as a whole, this collection is generally called 'The Book of the
Rose,' but at times 'En Irrande Hind' (A Stray Deer). Of this, the two
dramas, 'Signora Luna' and 'Ramido Marinesco,' contain some of the
pearls of Swedish literature. Uneven in the plan and execution, they are
yet masterly in dialogue, and their dramatic and tragic force is great.
Almquist's imagination showed itself as individual as it is fantastic.
Coming from a man hitherto known as the writer of text-books and the
advocate of popular social ideas, the volumes aroused extraordinary
interest. The author revealed himself as akin to Novalis and Victor
Hugo, with a power of language like that of Atterbom, and a richness of
color resembling Tegnèr's. Atterbom himself wrote of 'Törnrosens Bok'
that it was a work whose "faults were exceedingly easy to overlook and
whose beauties exceedingly difficult to match."
After this appeared in rapid succession, and written with equal ease,
lyrical, dramatic, educational, poetical, aesthetical, philosophical,
moral, and religious treatises, as well as lectures and studies in
history and law; for Almquist now gave all his time to literary labors.
His novels showed socialistic sympathies, and he put forth newspaper
articles and pamphlets on Socialism which aroused considerable
opposition. Moreover, he delighted in contradictions. One day he wrote
as an avowed Christian, extolling virtue, piety, and Christian
knowledge; the next, he abrogated religion as entirely unnecessary: and
his own explanation of this variability was merely--"I paint so because
it pleases me to paint so, and life is not otherwise."
In 1851 was heard the startling rumor that he was accused of forgery and
charged with murder. He fled from Sweden and disappeared from the
knowledge of men. Going to America, he earned under a fictitious name a
scanty living, and became, it is said, the private secretary of Abraham
Lincoln. In 1866 he found himself again under the ban of the law, his
papers were destroyed, and he escaped with difficulty to Bremen,
where he died.
One of his latest works was his excellent modern novel, 'Det Går An'
(It's All Right), a forerunner of the "problem novel" of the day. It is
an attack upon conventional marriage, and pictures the helplessness of a
woman in the hands of a depraved man. Its extreme views called out
violent criticism.
He was a romanticist through and through, with a strong leaning toward
the French school. Among the best of his tales are 'Araminta May,'
'Skällnora Quarn' (Skällnora's Mill), and 'Grimstahamns Nybygge'
(Grimstahamn's Settlement). His idyl 'Kapellet' (The Chapel) is
wonderfully true to nature, and his novel 'Palatset' (The Palace) is
rich in humor and true poesy. His literary fame will probably rest on
his romances, which are the best of their kind in Swedish literature.
CHARACTERISTICS OF CATTLE
Any one with a taste for physiognomy should carefully observe the
features of the ox and the cow; their demeanor and the expression of
their eyes. They are figures which bear an extraordinary stamp of
respectability. They look neither joyful nor melancholy. They are seldom
evilly disposed, but never sportive. They are full of gravity, and
always seem to be going about their business. They are not merely of
great economic service, but their whole persons carry the look of it.
They are the very models of earthly carefulness.
Nothing is ever to be seen more dignified, more official-looking, than
the whole behavior of the ox; his way of carrying his head, and looking
around him. If anybody thinks I mean these words for a sarcasm, he is
mistaken: no slur on official life, or on what the world calls a man's
vocation, is intended. I hold them all in as much respect as could be
asked. And though I have an eye for contours, no feeling of ridicule is
connected in my mind with any of these. On the contrary, I regard the ox
and the cow with the warmest feelings of esteem. I admire in them a
naïve and striking picture of one who minds his own business; who
submits to the claims of duty, not using the word in its highest sense;
who in the world's estimate is dignified, steady, conventional, and
middle-aged,--that is to say, neither youthful nor stricken in years.
Look at that ox which stands before you, chewing his cud and gazing
around him with such unspeakable thoughtfulness--but which you will
find, when you look more closely into his eyes, is thinking about
nothing at all. Look at that discreet, excellent Dutch cow, which,
gifted with an inexhaustible udder, stands quietly and allows herself to
be milked as a matter of course, while she gazes into space with a most
sensible expression. Whatever she does, she does with the same
imperturbable calmness, and as when a person leaves an important trust
to his own time and to posterity. If the worth of this creature is thus
great on the one side, yet on the other it must be confessed that she
possesses not a single trait of grace, not a particle of vivacity, and
none of that quick characteristic retreating from an object which
indicates an internal buoyancy, an elastic temperament, such as we see
in a bird or fish.... There is something very agreeable in the varied
lowing of cattle when heard in the distant country, and when replied to
by a large herd, especially toward evening and amid echoes. On the other
hand, nothing is more unpleasant than to hear all at once, and just
beside one, the bellowing of a bull, who thus authoritatively announces
himself, as if nobody else had any right to utter a syllable in
his presence.
A NEW UNDINE
From 'The Book of the Rose'
Miss Rudensköld and her companion sat in one of the pews in the cheerful
and beautiful church of Normalm, which is all that is left of the once
famous cloister of St. Clara, and still bears the saint's name. The
sermon was finished, and the strong full tones of the organ, called out
by the skillful hands of an excellent organist, hovered like the voices
of unseen angel choirs in the high vaults of the church, floated down to
the listeners, and sank deep into their hearts.
Azouras did not speak a single word; neither did she sing, for she did
not know a whole hymn through. Nor did Miss Rudensköld sing, because it
was not her custom to sing in church. During the organ solo, however,
Miss Rudensköld ventured to make some remarks about Dr. Asplund's sermon
which was so beautiful, and about the notices afterward which were so
tiresome. But when her neighbor did not answer, but sat looking ahead
with large, almost motionless eyes, as people stare without looking at
anything in particular, she changed her subject.
At one of the organ tones which finished a cadence, Azouras started, and
blinked quickly with her eyelids, and a light sigh showed that she came
back to herself and her friend, from her vague contemplative state of
mind. Something indescribable, very sad, shone in her eyes, and made
them almost black; and with a childlike look at Miss Rudensköld she
asked, "Tell me what that large painting over there represents."
"The altar-piece? Don't you know? The altar-piece in Clara is one of the
most beautiful we possess."
"What is going on there?" asked Azouras.
Miss Rudensköld gave her a side glance; she did not know that her
neighbor in the pew was a girl without baptism, without Christianity,
without the slightest knowledge of holy religion, a heathen--and knew
less than a heathen, for such a one has his teachings, although they are
not Christian. Miss Rudensköld thought the girl's question came of a
momentary forgetfulness, and answered, to remind her:--
"Well, you see, it is one of the usual subjects, but unusually well
painted, that is all. High up among the other figures in the painting
you will see the half-reclining figure of one that is dead--see what an
expression the painter has put into the face!--That is the Saviour."
"The Saviour?"
"Yes, God's son, you know; or God Himself."
"And he is dead?" repeated Azouras to herself with wondering eyes. "Yes,
I believe that; it must be so: it is godlike to die!"
Miss Rudensköld looked at her neighbor with wide-opened eyes. "You must
not misunderstand this subject," she said. "It is human to live and want
to live; you can see that, too, in the altar-piece, for all the persons
who are human beings, like ourselves, are alive."
"Let us go out! I feel oppressed by fear--no, I will tarry here until my
fear passes away. Go, dearest, I will send you word."
Miss Rudensköld took leave of her; went out of the church and over the
churchyard to the Eastern Gate, which faces Oden's lane....
The girl meanwhile stayed inside; came to a corner in the organ stairs;
saw people go out little by little; remained unobserved, and finally
heard the sexton and the church-keeper go away. When the last door was
closed, Azouras stepped out of her hiding-place. Shut out from the
entire world, severed from all human beings, she found herself the only
occupant of the large, light building, into which the sun lavishly
poured his gold.
Although she was entirely ignorant of our holy church customs and the
meaning of the things she saw around her, she had nevertheless,
sometimes in the past, when her mother was in better health, been
present at the church service as a pastime, and so remembered one thing
and another. The persons with whom she lived, in the halls and corridors
of the opera, hardly ever went to God's house; and generally speaking,
church-going was not practiced much during this time. No wonder, then,
that a child who was not a member of any religious body, and who had
never received an enlightening word from any minister, should neglect
what the initiated themselves did not attend to assiduously.
She walked up the aisle, and never had the sad, strange feeling of utter
loneliness taken hold of her as it did now; it was coupled with the
apprehension of a great, overhanging danger. Her heart beat wildly; she
longed unspeakably--but for what? for her wild free forest out there,
where she ran around quick as a deer? or for what?
She walked up toward the choir and approached the altar railing. "Here
at least--I remember that once--but that was long ago, and it stands
like a shadow before my memory--I saw many people kneel here: it must
have been of some use to them? Suppose I did likewise?"
Nevertheless she thought it would be improper for her to kneel down on
the decorated cushions around the chancel. She folded her hands and
knelt outside of the choir on the bare stone floor. But what more was
she to do or say now? Of what use was it all? Where was she to turn?
She knew nothing. She looked down into her own thoughts as into an
immense, silent dwelling. Feelings of sorrow and a sense of transiency
moved in slow swells, like shining, breaking waves, through her
consciousness. "Oh--something to lean on--a help--where? where? where?"
She looked quietly about her; she saw nobody. She was sure to meet the
most awful danger when the door was opened, if help did not come first.
She turned her eyes back toward the organ, and in her thoughts she
besought grace of the straight, long, shining pipes. But all their
mouths were silent now.
She looked up to the pulpit; nobody was standing there. In the pews
nobody. She had sent everybody away from here and from herself.
She turned her head again toward the choir. She remembered that when she
had seen so many gathered here, two ministers in vestments had moved
about inside of the railing and had offered the kneeling worshipers
something. No doubt to help them! But now--there was nobody inside
there. To be sure she was kneeling here with folded hands and praying
eyes; but there was nobody, nobody, nobody who offered her the least
little thing. She wept.
She looked out of the great church windows to the clear noonday sky;
her eyes beheld the delicate azure light which spread itself over
everything far, far away, but on nothing could her eyes rest. There were
no stars to be seen now, and the sun itself was hidden by the window
post, although its mild golden light flooded the world.
She looked away again, and her eyes sank to the ground. Her knees were
resting on a tombstone, and she saw many of the same kind about her. She
read the names engraven on the stones; they were all Swedish, correct
and well-known. "Oh," she said to herself with a sigh, "I have not a
name like others! My names have been many, borrowed,--and oh, often
changed. I did not get one to be my very own! If only I had one like
other people! Nobody has written me down in a book as I have heard it
said others are written down. Nobody asks about me. I have nothing to do
with anybody! Poor Azouras," she whispered low to herself. She
wept much.
There was no one else who said "poor Azouras Tintomara!" but it was as
if an inner, higher, invisible being felt sorry for the outer, bodily,
visible being, both one and the same person in her. She wept bitterly
over herself.
"God is dead," she thought, and looked up at the large altar-piece
again. "But I am a human being; I must live." And she wept more
heartily, more bitterly....
The afternoon passed, and the hour for vespers struck. The bells in the
tower began to lift their solemn voices, and keys rattled in the lock.
Then the heathen girl sprang up, and, much like a thin vanishing mist,
disappeared from the altar. She hid in her corner again. It seemed to
her that she had been forward, and had taken liberties in the choir of
the church to which she had no right; and that in the congregation
coming in now, she saw persons who had a right to everything.
Nevertheless, when the harmonious tones of the organ began to mix with
the fragrant summer air in the church, Azouras stood radiant, and she
felt quickly how the weight lifted from her breast. Was it because of
the tears she had shed? Or did an unknown helper at this moment scatter
the fear in her heart?
She felt no more that it would be dangerous to leave the church; she
stole away, before vespers were over, came out into the churchyard and
turned off to the northern gate.
GOD'S WAR
His mighty weapon drawing,
God smites the world he loves;
Thus, worthy of him growing,
She his reflection proves.
God's war like lightning striking,
The heart's deep core lays bare,
Which fair grows to his liking
Who is supremely fair.
Escapes no weakness shame,
No hid, ignoble feeling;
But when his thunder pealing
Enkindles life's deep flame,
And water clear upwelleth,
Flowing unto its goal,
God's grand cross standing, telleth
His truth unto the soul.
Sing, God's war, earth that shakes!
Sing, sing the peace he makes!
JOHANNA AMBROSIUS
(1854-)
Before the year 1895 the name of the German peasant, Johanna Ambrosius,
was hardly known, even within her own country. Now her melodious verse
has made her one of the most popular writers in Germany. Her genius
found its way from the humble farm in Eastern Prussia, where she worked
in the field beside her husband, to the very heart of the great literary
circles. She was born in Lengwethen, a parish village in Eastern
Prussia, on the 3d of August, 1854. She received only the commonest
education, and every day was filled with the coarsest toil. But her mind
and soul were uplifted by the gift of poetry, to which she gave voice in
her rare moments of leisure. A delicate, middle-aged woman, whose
simplicity is undisturbed by the lavish praises of literary men, she
leads the most unpretending of lives. Her work became known by the
merest chance. She sent a poem to a German weekly, where it attracted
the attention of a Viennese gentleman, Dr. Schrattenthal, who collected
her verses and sent the little volume into the world with a preface by
himself. This work has already gone through twenty-six editions. The
short sketch cited, written some years ago, is the only prose of hers
that has been published.
The distinguishing characteristics of the poetry of this singularly
gifted woman are the deep, almost painfully intense earnestness
pervading its every line, the fine sense of harmony and rhythmic
felicity attending the comparatively few attempts she has thus far made,
and her tender touch when dwelling upon themes of the heart and home.
One cannot predict what her success will be when she attempts more
ambitious flights, but thus far she seems to have probed the aesthetic
heart of Germany to its centre.
A PEASANT'S THOUGHTS
The first snow, in large and thick flakes, fell gently and silently on
the barren branches of the ancient pear-tree, standing like a sentinel
at my house door. The first snow of the year speaks both of joy and
sadness. It is so comfortable to sit in a warm room and watch the
falling flakes, eternally pure and lovely. There are neither flowers nor
birds about, to make you see and hear the beautiful great world. Now the
busy peasant has time to read the stories in his calendar. And I, too,
stopped my spinning-wheel, the holy Christ-child's gift on my thirteenth
birthday, to fold my hands and to look through the calendar of
my thoughts.
I did not hear a knock at the door, but a little man came in with a
cordial "Good morning, little sister!" I knew him well enough, though we
were not acquaintances. Half familiar, half strange, this little
time-worn figure looked. His queer face seemed stamped out of rubber,
the upper part sad, the lower full of laughing wrinkles. But his address
surprised me, for we were not in the least related. I shook his horny
hand, responding, "Hearty thanks, little brother." "I call this good
luck," began little brother: "a room freshly scoured, apples roasting in
the chimney, half a cold duck in the cupboard; and you all alone with
cat and clock. It is easier talking when there are two, for the third is
always in the way."
The old man amused me immensely. I sat down on the bench beside him and
asked after his wife and family. "Thanks, thanks," he nodded, "all well
and happy except our nestling Ille. She leaves home to-morrow, to eat
her bread as a dress-maker in B--."--"And the other children, where are
they?" "Flown away, long ago! Do you suppose, little sister, that I
want to keep all fifteen at home like so many cabbages in a single bed?"
Fifteen children! Almost triumphantly, little brother watched me. I
owned almost as many brothers and sisters myself, and fifteen children
were no marvel to me. So I asked if he were a grandfather too.
"Of course," he answered gravely. "But I am going to tell you how I came
by fifteen children. You know how we peasant folk give house and land to
the eldest son, and only a few coppers to the youngest children. A bad
custom, that leads to quarrels, and ends sometimes in murder. Fathers
and mothers can't bring themselves to part with the property, and so
they live with the eldest son, who doles out food and shelter, and gets
the farm in the end. So, in time, a family has some rich members and
more paupers. Now, we'd better sell the land and let the children share
alike; but then that way breaks estates too. I was a younger child, and
I received four hundred thalers;--a large sum forty years ago. I didn't
know anything but field work. The saying that 'The peasant must be kept
stupid or he will not obey' was still printed in all the books. So I had
to look about for a family where a son was needed. One day, with my four
hundred thalers in my pocket, I went to a farm where there was an
unmarried daughter. When you go a-courting among us, you pretend to mean
to buy a horse. That's the fashion. With us, a lie doesn't wear French
rouge. The parents of Marianne (that was her name) made me welcome.
Brown Bess was brought from the stable, and her neck, legs, and teeth
examined. I showed my willingness to buy her, which meant as much as to
say, 'Your daughter pleases me.' As proud as you please, I walked
through the buildings. Everything in plenty, all right, not a nail
wanting on the harrow, nor a cord missing from the harness. How I
strutted! I saw myself master, and I was tickled to death to be as rich
as my brother.
"But I reckoned without my host. On tiptoe I stole into the kitchen,
where my sweetheart was frying ham and eggs. I thought I might snatch a
kiss. Above the noise of the sizzling frying-pan and the crackling wood,
I plainly heard the voice of my--well, let us say it--bride, weeping and
complaining to an old house servant: 'It's a shame and a sin to enter
matrimony with a lie. I can't wed this Michael: not because he is ugly;
that doesn't matter in a man, but he comes too late! My heart belongs
to poor Joseph, the woodcutter, and I'd sooner be turned out of doors
than to make a false promise. Money blinds my mother's eyes!' Don't be
surprised, little sister, that I remember these words so well. A son
doesn't forget his father's blessing, nor a prisoner his sentence. This
was my sentence to poverty and single-blessedness. I sent word to
Marianne that she should be happy--and so she was.
"But now to my own story. I worked six years as farm hand for my rich
brother, and then love overtook me. The little housemaid caught me in
the net of her golden locks. What a fuss it made in our family! A
peasant's pride is as stiff as that of your 'Vous' and 'Zus.' My girl
had only a pair of willing hands and a good heart to give to an ugly,
pock-marked being like me. My mother (God grant her peace!) caused her
many a tear, and when I brought home my Lotte she wouldn't keep the
peace until at last she found out that happiness depends on kindness
more than on money. On the patch of land that I bought, my wife and I
lived as happily as people live when there's love in the house and a bit
of bread to spare. We worked hard and spent little. A long, scoured
table, a wooden bench or so, a chest or two of coarse linen, and a few
pots and pans--that was our furniture. The walls had never tasted
whitewash, but Lotte kept them scoured. She went to church barefoot, and
put on her shoes at the door. Good things such as coffee and plums, that
the poorest hut has now-a-days, we never saw. We didn't save much, for
crops sold cheap. But I didn't speculate, nor squeeze money from the
sweat of the poor. In time five pretty little chatterboxes arrived, all
flaxen-haired girls with blue eyes, or brown. I was satisfied with
girls, but the mother hankered after a boy. That's a poor father that
prefers a son to a daughter. A man ought to take boys and girls alike,
just as God sends them. I was glad enough to work for my girls, and I
didn't worry about their future, nor build castles in the air for them
to live in. After fifteen years the boy arrived, but he took himself
quickly out of the world and coaxed his mother away with him."
Little brother was silent, and bowed his snow-white head. My heart felt
as if the dead wife flitted through the room and gently touched the old
fellow's thin locks. I saw him kneeling at her death-bed, heard the
little girls sobbing, and waited in silence till he drew himself up,
sighing deeply:--
"My Lotte died; she left me alone. What didn't I promise the dear Lord
in those black hours! My life, my savings, yea, all my children if He
would but leave her to me. In vain. 'My thoughts are not thy thoughts,
saith the Lord, and My ways are not thy ways.' It was night in my soul.
I cried over my children, and I only half did my work. At night I
tumbled into bed tearless and prayerless. Oh, sad time! God vainly
knocked at my heart's door until the children fell ill. Oh, what would
become of me if these flowers were gathered? What wealth these rosy
mouths meant to me, how gladly would they smile away my sorrow! I had
set myself up above the Lord. But by my children's bedside I prayed for
grace. They all recovered. I took my motherless brood to God's temple to
thank Him there. Church-going won't bring salvation, but staying away
from church makes a man stupid and coarse.
"But I am forgetting, little sister. I started to tell you about my
fifteen children. You see I made up my mind that I had to find a mother
for the chicks. I wouldn't chain a young thing to my bonds, even if she
understood housekeeping. I held to the saying, 'Equal wealth, equal
birth, equal years make a good match.' When an old widower courts a
young girl he looks at her faults with a hundred eyes when he measures
her with his first wife. But a home without a wife is like spring
without blossoms. So, thinking this way, I chose a widow with ten
children."
Twirling his thumbs, little brother smiled gayly as he looked at me.
"Five and ten make fifteen, I thought, and when fifteen prayers rise to
heaven, the Lord must hear. My two eldest stepsons entered military
service. We wouldn't spend all our money on the boys and then console
our poor girls with a husband. I put three sons to trades. But my girls
were my pride. They learned every kind of work. When they could cook,
wash, and spin, we sent them into good households to learn more. Two
married young. Some of the rest are seamstresses and housekeepers. One
is a secretary, and our golden-haired Miez is lady's-maid to the
Countess H----. Both these girls are betrothed. Miez is the brightest,
and she managed to learn, even at the village school. So much is written
about education nowadays," (little brother drew himself up proudly as he
added, "I take a newspaper,") "but the real education is to keep
children at work and make them unselfish. They must love their work.
Work and pray, these were my rules, and thank Heaven! all my children
are good and industrious.
"Just think, last summer my dear girls sent me a suit of fine city
clothes and money to go a journey, begging their old father to make them
a visit. Oh, how pretty they looked when they showed me round the city
in spite of my homespun, for I couldn't bring myself to wear the fine
clothes, after all. The best dressed one was our little lady's-maid, who
had a gold watch in her belt. So I said: 'Listen, child, that is not fit
for you.' But she only laughed. 'Indeed it is, little father. If my
gracious lady makes me a present, I'm not likely to be mistaken for her
on that account.'--'And girls, are you contented to be in
service?'--'Certainly, father: unless there are both masters and
servants the world would go out of its grooves. My good Countess makes
service so light, that we love and serve her. Yes, little father,' added
Miez, 'my gracious mistress chose Gustav for me, and is going to pay for
the wedding and start us in housekeeping--God bless her!' Now see what
good such a woman does. If people would but learn that it takes wits to
command as well as to obey, they would get along well enough in these
new times of equality. Thank heaven! we country folk shan't be ruined by
idleness. When I saw my thatched roof again, among the fir-trees, I felt
as solemn as if I were going to prayers. The blue smoke looked like
incense. I folded my hands, I thanked God."
Little brother arose, his eyes bright with tears. He cast a wistful look
toward the apples in the chimney: "My old wife, little sister?"--
"Certainly, take them all, little brother, you are heartily
welcome to them."--"We are like children, my wife and I, we carry
tidbits to each other, now that our birds have all flown away."--"That
is right, old boy, and God keep thee!" I said. From the threshold the
words echoed back, "God keep thee!"
Translation of Miss H. Geist.
STRUGGLE AND PEACE
A quarter-century warfare woke
No sabre clash nor powder smoke,
No triumph song nor battle cry;
Their shields no templared knights stood by.
Though fought were many battles hot,
Of any fight the world knew not
How great the perils often grew--
God only knew.
Within my deepest soul-depths torn,
In hands and feet wounds bleeding borne,
Trodden beneath the chargers' tread,
How I endured, felt, suffered, bled,
How wept and groaned I in my woe,
When scoffed the malice-breathing foe,
How pierced his scorn my spirit through,
God only knew.
The evening nears; cool zephyrs blow;
The struggle wild doth weaker grow;
The air with scarce a sigh is filled
From the pale mouth; the blood is stilled.
Quieted now my bitter pain;
A faint star lights the heavenly plain;
Peace cometh after want and woe--
My God doth know.
DO THOU LOVE, TOO!
The waves they whisper
In Luna's glance,
Entrancing music
For the nixies' dance.
They beckon, smiling,
And wavewise woo,
While softly plashing:--
"Do thou love, too!"
In blossoming lindens
Doves fondly rear
Their tender fledglings
From year to year.
With never a pausing,
They bill and coo,
And twitter gently:--
"Do thou love, too!"
INVITATION
How long wilt stand outside and cower?
Come straight within, beloved guest.
The winds are fierce this wintry hour:
Come, stay awhile with me and rest.
You wander begging shelter vainly
A weary time from door to door;
I see what you have suffered plainly:
Come, rest with me and stray no more!
And nestle by me, trusting-hearted;
Lay in my loving hands your head:
Then back shall come your peace departed,
Through the world's baseness long since fled;
And deep from out your heart upspringing,
Love's downy wings will soar to view,
The darling smiles like magic bringing
Around your gloomy lips anew.
Come, rest: myself will here detain you,
So long as pulse of mine shall beat;
Nor shall my heart grow cold and pain you,
Till carried to your last retreat.
You gaze at me in doubting fashion,
Before the offered rapture dumb;
Tears and still tears your sole expression:
Bedew my bosom with them--come!
EDMONDO DE AMICIS
(1846-)
In 1869, 'Vita Militare' (Military Life), a collection of short stories,
was perhaps the most popular Italian volume of the year. Read alike in
court and cottage, it was everywhere discussed and enthusiastically
praised. Its prime quality was that quivering sympathy which insures
some success to any imaginative work, however crudely written. But these
sketches of all the grim and amusing phases of Italian soldier life are
drawn with an exquisite precision. The reader feels the breathless
discouragement of the tired soldiers when new dusty vistas are revealed
by a sudden turn in the road ('A Midsummer March'); understands the
strong silent love between officer and orderly, suppressed by military
etiquette ('The Orderly'); smiles with the soldiers at the pretty
runaway boy, idol of the regiment ('The Son of the Regiment'); pities
the humiliations of the conscript novice ('The Conscript'); thrills with
the proud sorrow of the old man whose son's colonel tells the story of
his heroic death ('Dead on the Field of Battle'). "When I had finished
reading it," said an Italian workman, "I would gladly have pressed the
hand of the first soldier whom I happened to meet." The author was only
twenty-three, and has since given the world many delightful volumes, but
nothing finer.
These sketches were founded upon personal knowledge, for De Amicis began
life as a soldier. After his early education at Coni and Turin, he
entered the military school at Modena, from which he was sent out as
sub-lieutenant in the third regiment of the line. He saw active service
in various expeditions against Sicilian brigands; and in the war with
Austria he fought at the battle of Custozza.
His literary power seems to have been early manifest; for in 1867 he
became manager of a newspaper, L'Italia Militare, at Florence; and in
1871, yielding to his friends' persuasions, he settled down to
authorship at Turin. His second book was the 'Ricordi,' memorials
dedicated to the youth of Italy, of national events which had come
within his experience. Half a dozen later stories published together
were also very popular, especially 'Gli Amici di Collegio' (College
Friends), 'Fortezza,' and 'La Casa Paterna' (The Paternal Home). He has
written some graceful verse as well.
[Illustration: EDMONDO DE AMICIS]
But De Amicis soon craved the stimulus of novel environments, of
differing personalities; and he set out upon the travels which he has so
delightfully recounted. This ardent Italian longed for the repose of "a
gray sky," a critic tells us. He went first to Holland, and experienced
a joyous satisfaction in the careful art of that trim little land.
Later, a visit to North Africa in the suite of the Italian ambassador
prompted a brilliant volume, "Morocco," "which glitters and flashes like
a Damascus blade." Among his other well-known books, descriptive of
other trips, are 'Holland and Its People,' 'Spain,' 'London,' 'Paris,'
and 'Constantinople,' which, translated into many languages, have been
widely read.
That unfortunate though not uncommon traveler who finds _ennui_
everywhere must envy De Amicis his inexhaustible enthusiasm, his power
of epicurean enjoyment in the color and glory of every land. His is a
curiously optimistic nature. Always perceiving the beautiful and
picturesque in art and nature, he treats other aspects hopefully, and
ignores them when he may. He catches what is characteristic in every
nation as inevitably as he catches the physiognomy of a land with its
skies and its waters, its flowers and its atmosphere. His is a realism
transfigured by poetic imagination, which divines essential things and
places them in high relief.
Very early in life De Amicis announced his love and admiration of
Manzoni, of whom he called himself a disciple. But his is a very
different mind. This Italian, born at Onéglia of Genoese parents, has
inherited the emotional nature of his country. He sees everything with
feeling, penetrating below the surface with sympathetic insight. Italy
gives him his sensuous zest in life. But from France, through his love
of her vigor and grace, his cordial admiration of her literature, he has
gained a refining and strengthening influence. She has taught him that
direct diction, that choice simplicity, which forsakes the stilted
Italian of literary tradition for a style far simpler, stronger, and
more natural.
All selections used by permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons.
THE LIGHT
From 'Constantinople'
And first of all, the light! One of my dearest delights at
Constantinople was to see the sun rise and set, standing upon the bridge
of the Sultana Validé. At dawn, in autumn, the Golden Horn is almost
always covered by a light fog, behind which the city is seen vaguely,
like those gauze curtains that descend upon the stage to conceal the
preparations for a scenic spectacle. Scutari is quite hidden; nothing is
to be seen but the dark uncertain outline of her hills. The bridge and
the shores are deserted, Constantinople sleeps; the solitude and silence
render the spectacle more solemn. The sky begins to grow golden behind
the hills of Scutari. Upon that luminous strip are drawn, one by one,
black and clear, the tops of the cypress trees in the vast cemetery,
like an army of giants ranged upon the heights; and from one cape of the
Golden Horn to the other there shines a tremulous light, faint as the
first murmur of the awakening city. Then behind the cypresses of the
Asiatic shore comes forth an eye of fire, and suddenly the white tops of
the four minarets of Saint Sophia are tinted with deep rose. In a few
minutes, from hill to hill, from mosque to mosque, down to the end of
the Golden Horn, all the minarets, one after the other, turn rose color;
all the domes, one by one, are silvered, the flush descends from terrace
to terrace, the tremulous light spreads, the great veil melts, and all
Stamboul appears, rosy and resplendent upon her heights, blue and violet
along the shores, fresh and young, as if just risen from the waters.
As the sun rises, the delicacy of the first tints vanishes in an immense
illumination, and everything remains bathed in white light until toward
evening. Then the divine spectacle begins again. The air is so limpid
that from Galata one can see clearly every distant tree, as far as
Kadi-Kioi. The whole of the immense profile of Stamboul stands out
against the sky with such a clearness of line and rigor of color, that
every minaret, obelisk, and cypress-tree can be counted, one by one,
from Seraglio Point to the cemetery of Eyub. The Golden Horn and the
Bosphorus assume a wonderful ultramarine color; the heavens, the color
of amethyst in the East, are afire behind Stamboul, tinting the horizon
with infinite lights of rose and carbuncle, that make one think of the
first day of the creation; Stamboul darkens, Galata becomes golden, and
Scutari, struck by the last rays of the setting sun, with every pane of
glass giving back the glow, looks like a city on fire.
And this is the moment to contemplate Constantinople. There is one rapid
succession of the softest tints, pallid gold, rose and lilac, which
quiver and float over the sides of the hills and the water, every moment
giving and taking away the prize of beauty from each part of the city,
and revealing a thousand modest graces of the landscape that have not
dared to show themselves in the full light. Great melancholy suburbs are
lost in the shadow of the valleys; little purple cities smile upon the
heights; villages faint as if about to die; others die at once like
extinguished flames; others, that seemed already dead, revive, and glow,
and quiver yet a moment longer under the last ray of the sun. Then there
is nothing left but two resplendent points upon the Asiatic shore,--the
summit of Mount Bulgurlu, and the extremity of the cape that guards the
entrance to the Propontis; they are at first two golden crowns, then two
purple caps, then two rubies; then all Constantinople is in shadow, and
ten thousand voices from ten thousand minarets announce the close of
the day.
RESEMBLANCES
From 'Constantinople'
In the first days, fresh as I was from the perusal of Oriental
literature, I saw everywhere the famous personages of history and
legend, and the figures that recalled them resembled sometimes so
faithfully those that were fixed in my imagination, that I was
constrained to stop and look at them. How many times have I seized my
friend by the arm, and pointing to a person passing by, have exclaimed:
"It is he, _cospetto!_ do you not recognize him?" In the square of the
Sultana Validé, I frequently saw the gigantic Turk who threw down
millstones from the walls of Nicaea on the heads of the soldiers of
Baglione; I saw in front of a mosque Umm Djemil, that old fury that
sowed brambles and nettles before Mahomet's house; I met in the book
bazaar, with a volume under his arm, Djemaleddin, the learned man of
Broussa, who knew the whole of the Arab dictionary by heart; I passed
quite close to the side of Ayesha, the favorite wife of the Prophet, and
she fixed upon my face her eyes, brilliant and humid, like the
reflection of stars in a well; I have recognized, in the At-Meidan, the
famous beauty of that poor Greek woman killed by a cannon ball at the
base of the serpentine column; I have been face to face, in the Fanar,
with Kara-Abderrahman, the handsome young Turk of the time of Orkhan; I
have seen Coswa, the she-camel of the Prophet; I have encountered
Kara-bulut, Selim's black steed; I have met the poor poet Fignahi,
condemned to go about Stamboul tied to an ass for having pierced with an
insolent distich the Grand Vizier of Ibrahim; I have been in the same
café with Soliman the Big, the monstrous admiral, whom four robust
slaves hardly succeeded in lifting from the divan; Ali, the Grand
Vizier, who could not find in all Arabia a horse that could carry him;
Mahmoud Pasha, the ferocious Hercules that strangled the son of Soliman;
and the stupid Ahmed Second, who continually repeated "Koso! Koso!"
(Very well, very well) crouching before the door of the copyists'
bazaar, in the square of Bajazet. All the personages of the 'Thousand
and One Nights,' the Aladdins, the Zobeides, the Sindbads, the Gulnares,
the old Jewish merchants, possessors of enchanted carpets and wonderful
lamps, passed before me like a procession of phantoms.
BIRDS
From 'Constantinople'
Constantinople has one grace and gayety peculiar to itself, that comes
from an infinite number of birds of every kind, for which the Turks
nourish a warm sentiment and regard. Mosques, groves, old walls,
gardens, palaces, all resound with song, the whistling and twittering of
birds; everywhere wings are fluttering, and life and harmony abound. The
sparrows enter the houses boldly, and eat out of women's and children's
hands; swallows nest over the café doors, and under the arches of the
bazaars; pigeons in innumerable swarms, maintained by legacies from
sultans and private individuals, form garlands of black and white along
the cornices of the cupolas and around the terraces of the minarets;
sea-gulls dart and play over the water; thousands of turtle-doves coo
amorously among the cypresses in the cemeteries; crows croak about the
Castle of the Seven Towers halcyons come and go in long files between
the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmora; and storks sit upon the cupolas of
the mausoleums. For the Turk, each one of these birds has a gentle
meaning, or a benignant virtue: turtle-doves are favorable to lovers,
swallows keep away fire from the roofs where they build their nests,
storks make yearly pilgrimages to Mecca, halcyons carry the souls of the
faithful to Paradise. Thus he protects and feeds them, through a
sentiment of gratitude and piety; and they enliven the house, the sea,
and the sepulchre. Every quarter of Stamboul is full of the noise of
them, bringing to the city a sense of the pleasures of country life, and
continually refreshing the soul with a reminder of nature.
CORDOVA
From 'Spain'
For a long distance the country offers no new aspect to the feverish
curiosity of the tourist. At Vilches there is a vast plain, and beyond
there the open country of Tolosa, where Alphonso VIII., King of Castile,
gained the celebrated victory "de las Navas" over the Mussulman army.
The sky was very clear, and in the distance one could see the mountains
of the Sierra de Segura. Suddenly, there comes over one a sensation
which seems to respond to a suppressed exclamation of surprise: the
first aloes with their thick leaves, the unexpected heralds of tropical
vegetation, rise on both sides of the road. Beyond, the fields studded
with flowers begin to appear. The first are studded, those which follow
almost covered, then come vast stretches of ground entirely clothed with
poppies, daisies, lilies, wild mushrooms, and ranunculuses, so that the
country (as it presents itself to view) looks like a succession of
immense purple, gold, and snowy-hued carpets. In the distance, among the
trees, are innumerable blue, white, and yellow streaks, as far as the
eye can reach; and nearer, on the banks of the ditches, the elevations
of ground, the slopes, and even on the edge of the road are flowers in
beds, clumps, and clusters, one above the other, grouped in the form of
great bouquets, and trembling on their stalks, which one can almost
touch with his hand. Then there are fields white with great blades of
grain, flanked by plantations of roses, orange groves, immense olive
groves, and hillsides varied by a thousand shades of green, surmounted
by ancient Moorish towers, scattered with many-colored houses; and
between the one and the other are white and slender bridges that cross
rivulets hidden by the trees.
On the horizon appear the snowy caps of the Sierra Nevada; under that
white streak lie the undulating blue ones of the nearer mountains. The
country becomes more varied and flourishing; Arjonilla lies in a grove
of olives, whose boundary one cannot see; Pedro Abad, in the midst of a
plain, covered with vineyards and fruit-trees; Ventas di Alcolea, on the
last hills of the Sierra Nevada, peopled with villas and gardens. We are
approaching Cordova, the train flies along, we see little stations half
hidden by trees and flowers, the wind carries the rose leaves into the
carriages, great butterflies fly near the windows, a delicious perfume
permeates the air, the travelers sing; we pass through an enchanted
garden, the aloes, oranges, palms, and villas grow more frequent; and at
last we hear a cry--"Here is Cordova!"
How many lovely pictures and grand recollections the sound of that name
awakens in one's mind! Cordova,--the ancient pearl of the East, as the
Arabian poets call it,--the city of cities; Cordova of the thirty
suburbs and three thousand mosques, which inclosed within her walls the
greatest temple of Islam! Her fame extended throughout the East, and
obscured the glory of ancient Damascus. The faithful came from the most
remote regions of Asia to banks of the Guadalquivir to prostrate
themselves in the marvelous Mihrab of her mosque, in the light of the
thousand bronze lamps cast from the bells of the cathedrals of Spain.
Hither flocked artists, savants, poets from every part of the Mahometan
world to her flourishing schools, immense libraries, and the magnificent
courts of her caliphs. Riches and beauty flowed in, attracted by the
fame of her splendor. From here they scattered, eager for knowledge,
along the coasts of Africa, through the schools of Tunis, Cairo, Bagdad,
Cufa, and even to India and China, in order to gather inspiration and
records; and the poetry sung on the slopes of the Sierra Morena flew
from lyre to lyre, as far as the valleys of the Caucasus, to excite the
ardor for pilgrimages. The beautiful, powerful, and wise Cordova,
crowned with three thousand villages, proudly raised her white minarets
in the midst of orange groves, and spread around the valley a voluptuous
atmosphere of joy and glory.
I leave the train, cross a garden, look around me. I am alone. The
travelers who were with me disappear here and there; I still hear the
noise of a carriage which is rolling off; then all is quiet. It is
midday, the sky is very clear, and the air suffocating. I see two white
houses; it is the opening of a street; I enter and go on. The street is
narrow, the houses as small as the little villas on the slopes of
artificial gardens, almost all one story in height, with windows a few
feet from the ground, the roofs so low that one could almost touch them
with a stick, and the walls very white. The street turns; I look, see no
one, and hear neither step nor voice. I say to myself:--"This must be an
abandoned street!" and try another one, in which the houses are white,
the windows closed, and there is nothing but silence and solitude around
me. "Why, where am I?" I ask myself. I go on; the street, which is so
narrow that a carriage could not pass, begins to wind; on the right and
left I see other deserted streets, white houses, and closed windows. My
step resounds as if in a corridor. The whiteness of the walls is so
vivid that even the reflection is trying, and I am obliged to walk with
my eyes half closed, for it really seems as if I were making my way
through the snow. I reach a small square; everything is closed, and no
one is to be seen. At this point a vague feeling of melancholy seizes
me, such as I have never experienced before; a mixture of pleasure and
sadness, similar to that which comes to children when, after a long run,
they reach a lonely rural spot and rejoice in their discovery, but with
a certain trepidation lest they should be too far from home. Above many
roofs rise the palm-trees of inner gardens. Oh, fantastic legends of
Odalisk and Caliph! On I go from street to street, and square to square;
I begin to meet some people, but they pass and disappear like phantoms.
All the streets resemble each other; the houses have only three or four
windows; and not a spot, scrawl, or crack is to be seen on the walls,
which are as smooth and white as a sheet of paper. From time to time I
hear a whisper behind a blind, and see, almost at the same moment, a
dark head, with a flower in the hair, appear and disappear. I look in at
a door....
A _patio!_ How shall I describe a _patio?_ It is not a court, nor a
garden, nor a room; but it is all three things combined. Between the
patio and the street there is a vestibule. On the four sides of the
patio rise slender columns, which support, up to a level with the first
floor, a species of gallery inclosed in glass; above the gallery is
stretched a canvas, which shades the court. The vestibule is paved with
marble, the door flanked by columns, surmounted by bas-reliefs, and
closed by a slender iron gate of graceful design. At the end of the
patio there is a fountain; and all around are scattered chairs,
work-tables, pictures, and vases of flowers. I run to another door:
there is another patio, with its walls covered with ivy, and a number of
niches holding little statues, busts, and urns. I look in at a third
door: here is another patio, with its walls worked in mosaics, a palm in
the centre, and a mass of flowers all around. I stop at a fourth door:
after the patio there is another vestibule, after this a second patio,
in which one sees other statues, columns, and fountains. All these rooms
and gardens are so neat and clean that one could pass his hand over the
walls and on the ground without leaving a trace; and they are fresh,
odorous, and lighted by an uncertain light, which increases their beauty
and mysterious appearance.
On I go at random from street to street. As I walk, my curiosity
increases and I quicken my pace. It seems impossible that a whole city
can be like this; I am afraid of stumbling across some house or coming
into some street that will remind me of other cities, and disturb my
beautiful dream. But no, the dream lasts; for everything is small,
lovely, and mysterious. At every hundred steps I reach a deserted
square, in which I stop and hold my breath; from time to time there
appears a cross-road, and not a living soul is to be seen; everything is
white, the windows closed, and silence reigns on all sides. At each door
there is a new spectacle; there are arches, columns, flowers, jets of
water, and palms; a marvelous variety of design, tints, light, and
perfume; here the odor of roses, there of oranges, farther on of pinks;
and with this perfume a whiff of fresh air, and with the air a subdued
sound of women's voices, the rustling of leaves, and the singing of
birds. It is a sweet and varied harmony, that without disturbing the
silence of the streets, soothes the ear like the echo of distant music.
Ah! it is not a dream! Madrid, Italy, Europe, are indeed far away! Here
one lives another life, and breathes the air of a different world,--for
I am in the East.
THE LAND OF PLUCK
From 'Holland and Its People'
Whoever looks for the first time at a large map of Holland wonders that
a country so constituted can continue to exist. At the first glance it
is difficult to see whether land or water predominates, or whether
Holland belongs most to the continent or to the sea. Those broken and
compressed coasts; those deep bays; those great rivers that, losing the
aspect of rivers, seem bringing new seas to the sea; that sea which,
changing itself into rivers, penetrates the land and breaks it into
archipelagoes; the lakes, the vast morasses, the canals crossing and
recrossing each other, all combine to give the idea of a country that
may at any moment disintegrate and disappear. Seals and beavers would
seem to be its rightful inhabitants; but since there are men bold enough
to live in it, they surely cannot ever sleep in peace.
[Illustration: A DUTCH GIRL. Photogravure from Painting by [*illegible
name]]
What sort of a country Holland is, has been told by many in few words.
Napoleon said it was an alluvion of French rivers,--the Rhine, the
Scheldt, and the Meuse,--and with this pretext he added it to the
Empire. One writer has defined it as a sort of transition between land
and sea. Another, as an immense crust of earth floating on the water.
Others, an annex of the old continent, the China of Europe, the end
of the earth and the beginning of the ocean, a measureless raft of mud
and sand; and Philip II. called it the country nearest to hell.
But they all agreed upon one point, and all expressed it in the same
words:--Holland is a conquest made by man over the sea; it is an
artificial country: the Hollanders made it; it exists because the
Hollanders preserve it; it will vanish whenever the Hollanders shall
abandon it.
To comprehend this truth, we must imagine Holland as it was when first
inhabited by the first German tribes that wandered away in search of
a country.
It was almost uninhabitable. There were vast tempestuous lakes, like
seas, touching one another; morass beside morass; one tract after
another covered with brushwood; immense forests of pines, oaks, and
alders, traversed by herds of wild horses, and so thick were these
forests that tradition says one could travel leagues passing from tree
to tree without ever putting foot to the ground. The deep bays and gulfs
carried into the heart of the country the fury of the northern tempests.
Some provinces disappeared once every year under the waters of the sea,
and were nothing but muddy tracts, neither land nor water, where it was
impossible either to walk or to sail. The large rivers, without
sufficient inclination to descend to the sea, wandered here and there
uncertain of their way, and slept in monstrous pools and ponds among the
sands of the coasts. It was a sinister place, swept by furious winds,
beaten by obstinate rains, veiled in a perpetual fog, where nothing was
heard but the roar of the sea and the voices of wild beasts and birds of
the ocean. The first people who had the courage to plant their tents
there, had to raise with their own hands dikes of earth to keep out the
rivers and the sea, and lived within them like shipwrecked men upon
desolate islands, venturing forth at the subsidence of the waters in
quest of food in the shape of fish and game, and gathering the eggs of
marine birds upon the sand.
Caesar, passing by, was the first to name this people. The other Latin
historians speak with compassion and respect of these intrepid
barbarians who lived upon a "floating land," exposed to the intemperance
of a cruel sky and the fury of the mysterious northern sea; and the
imagination pictures the Roman soldiers, who, from the heights of the
uttermost citadels of the empire, beaten by the waves, contemplated with
wonder and pity those wandering tribes upon their desolate land, like a
race accursed of heaven.
Now, if we remember that such a region has become one of the most
fertile, wealthiest, and best regulated of the countries of the world,
we shall understand the justice of the saying that Holland is a conquest
made by man. But, it must be added, the conquest goes on forever.
To explain this fact--to show how the existence of Holland, in spite of
the great defensive works constructed by the inhabitants, demands an
incessant and most perilous struggle--it will be enough to touch here
and there upon a few of the principal vicissitudes of her physical
history, from the time when her inhabitants had already reduced her to a
habitable country.
Tradition speaks of a great inundation in Friesland in the sixth
century. From that time every gulf, every island, and it may be said
every city, in Holland has its catastrophe to record. In thirteen
centuries, it is recorded that one great inundation, beside smaller
ones, has occurred every seven years; and the country being all plain,
these inundations were veritable floods. Towards the end of the
thirteenth century, the sea destroyed a part of a fertile peninsula near
the mouth of the Ems, and swallowed up more than thirty villages. In the
course of the same century, a series of inundations opened an immense
chasm in northern Holland, and formed the Zuyder Zee, causing the death
of more than eighty thousand persons. In 1421 a tempest swelled the
Meuse, so that in one night the waters overwhelmed seventy-two villages
and one hundred thousand inhabitants. In 1532 the sea burst the dikes of
Zealand, destroying hundreds of villages, and covering forever a large
tract of country. In 1570 a storm caused another inundation in Zealand
and in the province of Utrecht; Amsterdam was invaded by the waters, and
in Friesland twenty thousand people were drowned. Other great
inundations took place in the seventeenth century; two terrible ones at
the beginning and the end of the eighteenth; one in 1825 that desolated
North Holland, Friesland, Over-Yssel, and Gueldres; and another great
one of the Rhine, in 1855, which invaded Gueldres and the province of
Utrecht, and covered a great part of North Brabant. Beside these great
catastrophes, there happened in different centuries innumerable smaller
ones, which would have been famous in any other country, but which in
Holland are scarcely remembered: like the rising of the lake of
Haarlem, itself the result of an inundation of the sea; flourishing
cities of the gulf of Zuyder Zee vanished under the waters; the islands
of Zealand covered again and again by the sea, and again emerging;
villages of the coast, from Helder to the mouths of the Meuse, from time
to time inundated and destroyed; and in all these inundations immense
loss of life of men and animals. It is plain that miracles of courage,
constancy, and industry must have been accomplished by the Hollanders,
first in creating and afterwards in preserving such a country. The enemy
from which they had to wrest it was triple: the sea, the lakes, the
rivers. They drained the lakes, drove back the sea, and imprisoned
the rivers.
To drain the lakes the Hollanders pressed the air into their service.
The lakes, the marshes, were surrounded by dikes, the dikes by canals;
and an army of windmills, putting in motion force-pumps, turned the
water into the canals, which carried it off to the rivers and the sea.
Thus vast tracts of land buried under the water saw the sun, and were
transformed, as if by magic, into fertile fields, covered with villages,
and intersected by canals and roads. In the seventeenth century, in less
than forty years, twenty-six lakes were drained. At the beginning of the
present century, in North Holland alone, more than six thousand hectares
(or fifteen thousand acres) were thus redeemed from the waters; in South
Holland, before 1844, twenty-nine thousand hectares; in the whole of
Holland, from 1500 to 1858, three hundred and fifty-five thousand
hectares. Substituting steam-mills for windmills, in thirty-nine months
was completed the great undertaking of the draining of the lake of
Haarlem, which measured forty-four kilometres in circumference, and
forever threatened with its tempests the cities of Haarlem, Amsterdam,
and Leyden. And they are now meditating the prodigious work of drying up
the Zuyder Zee, which embraces an area of more than seven hundred square
kilometres.
The rivers, another eternal enemy, cost no less of labor and sacrifice.
Some, like the Rhine, which lost itself in the sands before reaching the
sea, had to be channeled and defended at their mouths, against the
tides, by formidable cataracts; others, like the Meuse, bordered by
dikes as powerful as those that were raised against the ocean; others,
turned from their course; the wandering waters gathered together; the
course of the affluents regulated; the waters divided with rigorous
measure in order to retain that enormous mass of liquid in equilibrium,
where the slightest inequality might cost a province; and in this way
all the rivers that formerly spread their devastating floods about the
country were disciplined into channels and constrained to do service.
But the most tremendous struggle was the battle with the ocean. Holland
is in great part lower than the level of the sea; consequently,
everywhere that the coast is not defended by sand banks it has to be
protected by dikes. If these interminable bulwarks of earth, granite,
and wood were not there to attest the indomitable courage and
perseverance of the Hollanders, it would not be believed that the hand
of man could, even in many centuries, have accomplished such a work. In
Zealand alone the dikes extend to a distance of more than four hundred
kilometres. The western coast of the island of Walcheren is defended by
a dike, in which it is computed that the expense of construction added
to that of preservation, if it were put out at interest, would amount to
a sum equal in value to that which the dike itself would be worth were
it made of massive copper. Around the city of Helder, at the northern
extremity of North Holland, extends a dike ten kilometres long,
constructed of masses of Norwegian granite, which descends more than
sixty metres into the sea. The whole province of Friesland, for the
length of eighty-eight kilometres, is defended by three rows of piles
sustained by masses of Norwegian and German granite. Amsterdam, all the
cities of the Zuyder Zee, and all the islands,--fragments of vanished
lands,--which are strung like beads between Friesland and North Holland,
are protected by dikes. From the mouths of the Ems to those of the
Scheldt, Holland is an impenetrable fortress, of whose immense bastions
the mills are the towers, the cataracts are the gates, the islands the
advanced forts; and like a true fortress, it shows to its enemy, the
sea, only the tops of its bell-towers and the roofs of its houses, as if
in defiance and derision.
Holland is a fortress, and her people live as in a fortress, on a war
footing with the sea. An army of engineers, directed by the Minister of
the Interior, spread over the country, and, ordered like an army,
continually spy the enemy, watch over the internal waters, foresee the
bursting of the dikes, order and direct the defensive works. The
expenses of the war are divided,--one part to the State, one part to the
provinces; every proprietor pays, beside the general imposts, a special
impost for the dikes, in proportion to the extent of his lands and
their proximity to the water. An accidental rupture, an inadvertence,
may cause a flood; the peril is unceasing; the sentinels are at their
posts upon the bulwarks; at the first assault of the sea, they shout the
war-cry, and Holland sends men, material, and money. And even when there
is no great battle, a quiet, silent struggle is forever going on. The
innumerable mills, even in the drained districts, continue to work
unresting, to absorb and turn into the canals the water that falls in
rain and that which filters in from the sea. Every day the cataracts of
the bays and rivers close their gigantic gates against the high tide
trying to rush into the heart of the land. The work of strengthening
dikes, fortifying sand-banks with plantations, throwing out new dikes
where the banks are low, straight as great lances, vibrating in the
bosom of the sea and breaking the first impetus of the wave, is forever
going on. And the sea eternally knocks at the river-gates, beats upon
the ramparts, growls on every side her ceaseless menace, lifting her
curious waves as if to see the land she counts as hers, piling up banks
of sand before the gates to kill the commerce of the cities, forever
gnawing, scratching, digging at the coast; and failing to overthrow the
ramparts upon which she foams and fumes in angry effort, she casts at
their feet ships full of the dead, that they may announce to the
rebellious country her fury and her strength.
In the midst of this great and terrible struggle Holland is transformed:
Holland is the land of transformations. A geographical map of that
country as it existed eight centuries ago is not recognizable.
Transforming the sea, men also are transformed. The sea, at some points,
drives back the land; it takes portions from the continent, leaves them
and takes them again; joins islands to the mainland with ropes of sand,
as in the case of Zealand; breaks off bits from the mainland and makes
new islands, as in Wieringen; retires from certain coasts and makes land
cities out of what were cities of the sea, as Leuvarde; converts vast
tracts of plain into archipelagoes of a hundred islets, as Biisbosch;
separates a city from the land, as Dordrecht; forms new gulfs two
leagues broad, like the gulf of Dollart; divides two provinces with a
new sea, like North Holland and Friesland. The effect of the inundations
is to cause the level of the sea to rise in some places and to sink in
others; sterile lands are fertilized by the slime of the rivers, fertile
lands are changed into deserts of sand. With the transformations of the
waters alternate the transformations of labor. Islands are united to
continents, like the island of Ameland; entire provinces are reduced to
islands, as North Holland will be by the new canal of Amsterdam, which
is to separate it from South Holland; lakes as large as provinces
disappear altogether, like the lake of Beemster; by the extraction of
peat, land is converted into lakes, and these lakes are again
transformed into meadows. And thus the country changes its aspect
according to the violence of nature or the needs of men. And while one
goes over it with the latest map in hand, one may be sure that the map
will be useless in a few years, because even now there are new gulfs in
process of formation, tracts of land just ready to be detached from the
mainland, and great canals being cut that will carry life to uninhabited
districts.
But Holland has done more than defend herself against the waters; she
has made herself mistress of them, and has used them for her own
defense. Should a foreign army invade her territory, she has but to open
her dikes and unchain the sea and the rivers, as she did against the
Romans, against the Spaniards, against the army of Louis XIV., and
defend the land cities with her fleet. Water was the source of her
poverty, she has made it the source of wealth. Over the whole country
extends an immense network of canals, which serves both for the
irrigation of the land and as a means of communication. The cities, by
means of canals, communicate with the sea; canals run from town to town,
and from them to villages, which are themselves bound together by these
watery ways, and are connected even to the houses scattered over the
country; smaller canals surround the fields and orchards, pastures and
kitchen-gardens, serving at once as boundary wall, hedge, and road-way;
every house is a little port. Ships, boats, rafts, move about in all
directions, as in other places carts and carriages. The canals are the
arteries of Holland, and the water her life-blood. But even setting
aside the canals, the draining of the lakes, and the defensive works, on
every side are seen the traces of marvelous undertakings. The soil,
which in other countries is a gift of nature, is in Holland a work of
men's hands. Holland draws the greater part of her wealth from commerce;
but before commerce comes the cultivation of the soil; and the soil had
to be created. There were sand-banks interspersed with layers of peat,
broad downs swept by the winds, great tracts of barren land apparently
condemned to an eternal sterility. The first elements of manufacture,
iron and coal, were wanting; there was no wood, because the forests had
already been destroyed by tempests when agriculture began; there was no
stone, there were no metals. Nature, says a Dutch poet, had refused all
her gifts to Holland; the Hollanders had to do everything in spite of
nature. They began by fertilizing the sand. In some places they formed a
productive soil with earth brought from a distance, as a garden is made;
they spread the siliceous dust of the downs over the too watery meadows;
they mixed with the sandy earth the remains of peat taken from the
bottoms; they extracted clay to lend fertility to the surface of their
lands; they labored to break up the downs with the plow: and thus in a
thousand ways, and continually fighting off the menacing waters, they
succeeded in bringing Holland to a state of cultivation not inferior to
that of more favored regions. That Holland, that sandy, marshy country
which the ancients considered all but uninhabitable, now sends out
yearly from her confines agricultural products to the value of a hundred
millions of francs, possesses about one million three hundred thousand
head of cattle, and in proportion to the extent of her territory may be
accounted one of the most populous of European States.
It may be easily understood how the physical peculiarities of their
country must influence the Dutch people; and their genius is in perfect
harmony with the character of Holland. It is sufficient to contemplate
the monuments of their great struggle with the sea in order to
understand that their distinctive characteristics must be firmness and
patience, accompanied by a calm and constant courage. That glorious
battle, and the consciousness of owing everything to their own strength,
must have infused and fortified in them a high sense of dignity and an
indomitable spirit of liberty and independence. The necessity of a
constant struggle, of a continuous labor, and of perpetual sacrifices in
defense of their existence, forever taking them back to a sense of
reality, must have made them a highly practical and economical people;
good sense should be their most salient quality, economy one of their
chief virtues; they must be excellent in all useful arts, sparing of
diversion, simple even in their greatness; succeeding in what they
undertake by dint of tenacity and a thoughtful and orderly activity;
more wise than heroic; more conservative than creative; giving no great
architects to the edifice of modern thought, but the ablest of workmen,
a legion of patient and laborious artisans. And by virtue of these
qualities of prudence, phlegmatic activity, and the spirit of
conservatism, they are ever advancing, though by slow degrees; they
acquire gradually, but never lose what they have gained; holding
stubbornly to their ancient customs; preserving almost intact, and
despite the neighborhood of three great nations, their own originality;
preserving it through every form of government, through foreign
invasions, through political and religious wars, and in spite of the
immense concourse of strangers from every country that are always coming
among them; and remaining, in short, of all the northern races, that one
which, though ever advancing in the path of civilization, has kept its
antique stamp most clearly.
It is enough also to remember its form in order to comprehend that this
country of three millions and a half of inhabitants, although bound in
so compact a political union, although recognizable among all the other
northern peoples by certain traits peculiar to the population of all its
provinces, must present a great variety. And so it is in fact. Between
Zealand and Holland proper, between Holland and Friesland, between
Friesland and Gueldres, between Groningen and Brabant, in spite of
vicinity and so many common tics, there is no less difference than
between the more distant provinces of Italy and France; difference of
language, costume, and character; difference of race and of religion.
The communal regime has impressed an indelible mark upon this people,
because in no other country does it so conform to the nature of things.
The country is divided into various groups of interests organized in the
same manner as the hydraulic system. Whence, association and mutual help
against the common enemy, the sea; but liberty for local institutions
and forces. Monarchy has not extinguished the ancient municipal spirit,
and this it is that renders impossible a complete fusion of the State,
in all the great States that have made the attempt. The great rivers and
gulfs are at the same time commercial roads serving as national bonds
between the different provinces, and barriers which defend old
traditions and old customs in each.
THE DUTCH MASTERS
From 'Holland and Its People'
The Dutch school of painting has one quality which renders it
particularly attractive to us Italians; it is above all others the most
different from our own, the very antithesis or the opposite pole of art.
The Dutch and Italian schools are the most original, or, as has been
said, the only two to which the title rigorously belongs; the others
being only daughters or younger sisters, more or less resembling them.
Thus even in painting Holland offers that which is most sought after in
travel and in books of travel: the new.
Dutch painting was born with the liberty and independence of Holland. As
long as the northern and southern provinces of the Low Countries
remained under the Spanish rule and in the Catholic faith, Dutch
painters painted like Belgian painters; they studied in Belgium,
Germany, and Italy; Heemskerk imitated Michael Angelo, Bloemart followed
Correggio, and "Il Moro" copied Titian, not to indicate others: and they
were one and all pedantic imitators, who added to the exaggerations of
the Italian style a certain German coarsenesss, the result of which was
a bastard style of painting, still inferior to the first, childish,
stiff in design, crude in color, and completely wanting in chiaroscuro,
but at least not a servile imitation, and becoming, as it were, a faint
prelude of the true Dutch art that was to be.
With the war of independence, liberty, reform, and painting also were
renewed. With religious traditions fell artistic traditions; the nude
nymphs, Madonnas, saints, allegory, mythology, the ideal--all the old
edifice fell to pieces. Holland, animated by a new life, felt the need
of manifesting and expanding it in a new way; the small country, become
all at once glorious and formidable, felt the desire for illustration;
the faculties which had been excited and strengthened in the grand
undertaking of creating a nation, now that the work was completed,
overflowed and ran into new channels. The conditions of the country were
favorable to the revival of art. The supreme dangers were conjured away;
there was security, prosperity, a splendid future; the heroes had done
their duty, and the artists were permitted to come to the front;
Holland, after many sacrifices, and much suffering, issued victoriously
from the struggle, lifted her face among her people and smiled. And that
smile is art.
What that art would necessarily be, might have been guessed even had no
monument of it remained. A pacific, laborious, practical people,
continually beaten down, to quote a great German poet, to prosaic
realities by the occupations of a vulgar burgher life; cultivating its
reason at the expense of its imagination; living, consequently, more in
clear ideas than in beautiful images; taking refuge from abstractions;
never darting its thoughts beyond that nature with which it is in
perpetual battle; seeing only that which is, enjoying only that which it
can possess, making its happiness consist in the tranquil ease and
honest sensuality of a life without violent passions or exorbitant
desires;--such a people must have tranquillity also in their art, they
must love an art that pleases without startling the mind, which
addresses the senses rather than the spirit; an art full of repose,
precision, and delicacy, though material like their lives: in one word,
a realistic art, in which they can see themselves as they are and as
they are content to be.
The artists began by tracing that which they saw before their eyes--the
house. The long winters, the persistent rains, the dampness, the
variableness of the climate, obliged the Hollander to stay within doors
the greater part of the year. He loved his little house, his shell, much
better than we love our abodes, for the reason that he had more need of
it, and stayed more within it; he provided it with all sorts of
conveniences, caressed it, made much of it; he liked to look out from
his well-stopped windows at the falling snow and the drenching rain, and
to hug himself with the thought, "Rage, tempest, I am warm and safe!"
Snug in his shell, his faithful housewife beside him, his children about
him, he passed the long autumn and winter evenings in eating much,
drinking much, smoking much, and taking his well-earned ease after the
cares of the day were over. The Dutch painters represented these houses
and this life in little pictures proportionate to the size of the walls
on which they were to hang; the bedchambers that make one feel a desire
to sleep, the kitchens, the tables set out, the fresh and smiling faces
of the house-mothers, the men at their ease around the fire; and with
that conscientious realism which never forsakes them, they depict the
dozing cat, the yawning dog, the clucking hen, the broom, the
vegetables, the scattered pots and pans, the chicken ready for the spit.
Thus they represent life in all its scenes, and in every grade of the
social scale--the dance, the _conversazione_, the orgie, the feast, the
game; and thus did Terburg, Metzu, Netscher, Dow, Mieris, Steen,
Brouwer, and Van Ostade become famous.
After depicting the house, they turned their attention to the country.
The stern climate allowed but a brief time for the admiration of nature,
but for this very reason Dutch artists admired her all the more; they
saluted the spring with a livelier joy, and permitted that fugitive
smile of heaven to stamp itself more deeply on their fancy. The country
was not beautiful, but it was twice dear because it had been torn from
the sea and from the foreign oppressor. The Dutch artist painted it
lovingly; he represented it simply, ingenuously, with a sense of
intimacy which at that time was not to be found in Italian or Belgian
landscape. The flat, monotonous country had, to the Dutch painter's
eyes, a marvelous variety. He caught all the mutations of the sky, and
knew the value of the water, with its reflections, its grace and
freshness, and its power of illuminating everything. Having no
mountains, he took the dikes for background; with no forests, he
imparted to a single group of trees all the mystery of a forest; and he
animated the whole with beautiful animals and white sails.
The subjects of their pictures are poor enough,--a windmill, a canal, a
gray sky; but how they make one think! A few Dutch painters, not content
with nature in their own country, came to Italy in search of hills,
luminous skies, and famous ruins; and another band of select artists is
the result,--Both, Swanevelt, Pynacker, Breenberg, Van Laer, Asselyn.
But the palm remains with the landscapists of Holland; with Wynants the
painter of morning, with Van der Neer the painter of night, with
Ruysdael the painter of melancholy, with Hobbema the illustrator of
windmills, cabins, and kitchen gardens, and with others who have
restricted themselves to the expression of the enchantment of nature as
she is in Holland.
Simultaneously with landscape art was born another kind of painting,
especially peculiar to Holland,--animal painting. Animals are the riches
of the country; that magnificent race of cattle which has no rival in
Europe for fecundity and beauty. The Hollanders, who owe so much to
them, treat them, one may say, as part of the population; they wash
them, comb them, dress them, and love them dearly. They are to be seen
everywhere; they are reflected in all the canals, and dot with points of
black and white the immense fields that stretch on every side, giving
an air of peace and comfort to every place, and exciting in the
spectator's heart a sentiment of Arcadian gentleness and patriarchal
serenity. The Dutch artists studied these animals in all their
varieties, in all their habits, and divined, as one may say, their inner
life and sentiments, animating the tranquil beauty of the landscape with
their forms. Rubens, Luyders, Paul de Vos, and other Belgian painters,
had drawn animals with admirable mastery; but all these are surpassed by
the Dutch artists Van der Velde, Berghem, Karel du Jardin, and by the
prince of animal painters, Paul Potter, whose famous "Bull," in the
gallery of the Hague, deserves to be placed in the Vatican beside the
"Transfiguration" by Raphael.
In yet another field are the Dutch painters great,--the sea. The sea,
their enemy, their power, and their glory, forever threatening their
country, and entering in a hundred ways into their lives and fortunes;
that turbulent North Sea, full of sinister color, with a light of
infinite melancholy upon it, beating forever upon a desolate coast, must
subjugate the imagination of the artist. He passes, indeed, long hours
on the shore, contemplating its tremendous beauty, ventures upon its
waves to study the effects of tempests, buys a vessel and sails with his
wife and family, observing and making notes, follows the fleet into
battle and takes part in the fight; and in this way are made marine
painters like William Van der Velde the elder and William the younger,
like Backhuysen, Dubbels, and Stork.
Another kind of painting was to arise in Holland, as the expression of
the character of the people and of republican manners. A people which
without greatness had done so many great things, as Michelet says, must
have its heroic painters, if we call them so, destined to illustrate men
and events. But this school of painting,--precisely because the people
were without greatness, or to express it better, without the form of
greatness,--modest, inclined to consider all equal before the country,
because all had done their duty, abhorring adulation, and the
glorification in one only of the virtues and the triumph of many,--this
school has to illustrate not a few men who have excelled, and a few
extraordinary facts, but all classes of citizenship gathered among the
most ordinary and pacific of burgher life. From this come the great
pictures which represent five, ten, thirty persons together,
arquebusiers, mayors, officers, professors, magistrates, administrators;
seated or standing around a table, feasting and conversing; of life
size, most faithful likenesses; grave, open faces, expressing that
secure serenity of conscience by which may be divined rather than seen
the nobleness of a life consecrated to one's country, the character of
that strong, laborious epoch, the masculine virtues of that excellent
generation; all this set off by the fine costume of the time, so
admirably combining grace and dignity,--those gorgets, those doublets,
those black mantles, those silken scarves and ribbons, those arms and
banners. In this field stand pre-eminent Van der Helst, Hals, Govaert,
Flink, and Bol.
Descending from the consideration of the various kinds of painting, to
the special manner by means of which the artist excelled in treatment,
one leads all the rest as the distinctive feature of Dutch
painting--the light.
The light in Holland, by reason of the particular conditions of its
manifestation, could not fail to give rise to a special manner of
painting. A pale light, waving with marvelous mobility through an
atmosphere impregnated with vapor, a nebulous veil continually and
abruptly torn, a perpetual struggle between light and shadow,--such was
the spectacle which attracted the eye of the artist. He began to observe
and to reproduce all this agitation of the heavens, this struggle which
animates with varied and fantastic life the solitude of nature in
Holland; and in representing it, the struggle passed into his soul, and
instead of representing he created. Then he caused the two elements to
contend under his hand; he accumulated darkness that he might split and
seam it with all manner of luminous effects and sudden gleams of light;
sunbeams darted through the rifts, sunset reflections and the yellow
rays of lamp-light were blended with delicate manipulation into
mysterious shadows, and their dim depths were peopled with half-seen
forms; and thus he created all sorts of contrasts, enigmas, play and
effect of strange and unexpected chiaroscuro. In this field, among many,
stand conspicuous Gerard Dow, the author of the famous four-candle
picture, and the great magician and sovereign illuminator Rembrandt.
Another marked feature of Dutch painting was to be color. Besides the
generally accepted reasons that in a country where there are no
mountainous horizons, no varied prospects, no great _coup d'oeil_,--no
forms, in short, that lend themselves to design,--the artist's eye must
inevitably be attracted by color; and that this might be peculiarly the
case in Holland, where the uncertain light, the fog-veiled atmosphere,
confuse and blend the outlines of all objects, so that the eye, unable
to fix itself upon the form, flies to color as the principal attribute
that nature presents to it,--besides these reasons, there is the fact
that in a country so flat, so uniform, and so gray as Holland, there is
the same need of color as in southern lands there is need of shade. The
Dutch artists did but follow the imperious taste of their countrymen,
who painted their houses in vivid colors, as well as their ships, and in
some places the trunks of their trees and the palings and fences of
their fields and gardens; whose dress was of the gayest, richest hues;
who loved tulips and hyacinths even to madness. And thus the Dutch
painters were potent colorists, and Rembrandt was their chief.
Realism, natural to the calmness and slowness of the Dutch character,
was to give to their art yet another distinctive feature,--finish,
which was carried to the very extreme of possibility. It is truly said
that the leading quality of the people may be found in their pictures;
viz., patience. Everything is represented with the minuteness of a
daguerreotype; every vein in the wood of a piece of furniture, every
fibre in a leaf, the threads of cloth, the stitches in a patch, every
hair upon an animal's coat, every wrinkle in a man's face; everything
finished with microscopic precision, as if done with a fairy pencil, or
at the expense of the painter's eyes and reason. In reality a defect
rather than an excellence, since the office of painting is to represent
not what _is_, but what the eye sees, and the eye does not see
everything; but a defect carried to such a pitch of perfection that one
admires, and does not find fault. In this respect the most famous
prodigies of patience were Dow, Mieris, Potter, and Van der Heist, but
more or less all the Dutch painters.
But realism, which gives to Dutch art so original a stamp and such
admirable qualities, is yet the root of its most serious defects. The
artists, desirous only of representing material truths, gave to their
figures no expression save that of their physical sentiments. Grief,
love, enthusiasm, and the thousand delicate shades of feeling that have
no name, or take a different one with the different causes that give
rise to them, they express rarely, or not at all. For them the heart
does not beat, the eyes do not weep, the lips do not quiver. One whole
side of the human soul, the noblest and highest, is wanting in their
pictures. More: in their faithful reproduction of everything, even the
ugly, and especially the ugly, they end by exaggerating even that,
making defects into deformities and portraits into caricatures; they
calumniate the national type; they give a burlesque and graceless aspect
to the human countenance. In order to have the proper background for
such figures, they are constrained to choose trivial subjects: hence the
great number of pictures representing beer-shops, and drinkers with
grotesque, stupid faces, in absurd attitudes; ugly women and ridiculous
old men; scenes in which one can almost hear the brutal laughter and the
obscene words. Looking at these pictures, one would naturally conclude
that Holland was inhabited by the ugliest and most ill-mannered people
on the earth. We will not speak of greater and worse license. Steen,
Potter, and Brouwer, the great Rembrandt himself, have all painted
incidents that are scarcely to be mentioned to civilized ears, and
certainly should not be looked at. But even setting aside these
excesses, in the picture galleries of Holland there is to be found
nothing that elevates the mind, or moves it to high and gentle thoughts.
You admire, you enjoy, you laugh, you stand pensive for a moment before
some canvas; but coming out, you feel that something is lacking to your
pleasure, you experience a desire to look upon a handsome countenance,
to read inspired verses, and sometimes you catch yourself murmuring,
half unconsciously, "O Raphael!"
Finally, there are still two important excellences to be recorded of
this school of painting: its variety, and its importance as the
expression--the mirror, so to speak--of the country. If we except
Rembrandt with his group of followers and imitators, almost all the
other artists differ very much from one another; no other school
presents so great a number of original masters. The realism of the Dutch
painters is born of their common love of nature: but each one has shown
in his work a kind of love peculiarly his own; each one has rendered a
different impression which he has received from nature; and all,
starting from the same point, which was the worship of material truth,
have arrived at separate and distinct goals. Their realism, then,
inciting them to disdain nothing as food for the pencil, has so acted
that Dutch art succeeds in representing Holland more completely than has
ever been accomplished by any other school in any other country. It has
been truly said that should every other visible witness of the existence
of Holland in the seventeenth century--her period of greatness--vanish
from the earth, and the pictures remain, in them would be found
preserved entire the city, the country, the ports, the ships, the
markets, the shops, the costumes, the arms, the linen, the stuffs, the
merchandise, the kitchen utensils, the food, the pleasures, the habits,
the religious belief and superstitions, the qualities and effects of the
people; and all this, which is great praise for literature, is no less
praise for her sister art.
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
(1821-1881)
BY RICHARD BURTON
The French have long been writers of what they call 'Pensées,'--those
detached thoughts or meditations which, for depth, illumination, and
beauty, have a power of life, and come under the term "literature."
Their language lends itself to the expression of subjective ideas with
lucidity, brilliance, charm. The French quality of mind allows that
expression to be at once dignified and happily urbane. Sometimes these
sayings take the form of the cynical epigrams of a La Rochefoucauld; are
expanded into sententious aphorisms by a La Bruyère; or reveal more
earnest and athletic souls, who pierce below the social surface froth to
do battle with the demons of the intellect. To this class belong men
like the seventeenth-century Pascal and the nineteenth-century Amiel.
The career of Henri Frédéric Amiel illustrates the dubiety of too hasty
judgment of a man's place or power in the world. A Genevese by birth, of
good parentage, early orphaned, well educated, much traveled, he was
deemed, on his return in the springtime of his manhood to his native
town as professor in the Academy of Geneva, to be a youth of great
promise, destined to become distinguished. But the years slipped by, and
his literary performance, consisting of desultory essays and several
slight volumes of verse, was not enough to justify the prophecy. His
life more and more became that of a bachelor recluse and valetudinarian.
When he died, in 1881, at sixty years of age, after much suffering
heroically borne, as pathetic entries in the last leaves of his Diary
remain to show, there was a feeling that here was "one more faithful
failure." But the quiet, brooding teacher in the Swiss city which has at
one time or another immured so many rare minds, had for years been
jotting down his reflections in a private journal. It constitutes the
story of his inner life, never told in his published writings. When a
volume of the 'Journal Intime' appeared the year after his taking off,
the world recognized in it not only an intellect of clarity and
keenness, and a heart sensitive to the widest spiritual problems, but
the revelation of a typical modern mood. The result was that Amiel,
being dead, yet spoke to his generation, and his fame was quick and
genuine. The apparent disadvantage point of Geneva proved, after all,
the fittest abiding-place for the poet-philosopher. A second volume of
extracts, two years later, found him in an assured place as a writer of
'Pensées.'
The 'Journal' of Amiel is symptomatic of his time,--perhaps one reason
why it met with so sympathetic a response. It mirrors the intellectual
doubtings, the spiritual yearnings and despairs of a strenuous and pure
soul in a rationalistic atmosphere. In the day of scientific test and of
skepticism, of the readjustment of conventions and the overthrow of
sacrosanct traditions, one whose life is that of thought rather than of
action finds much to perplex, to weary, and to sadden. So it was with
the Swiss professor. He was always in the sanctum sanctorum of his
spirit, striving to attain the truth; with Hamlet-like irresolution he
poised in mind before the antinomies of the universe, alert to see
around a subject, having the modern thinker's inability to be partisan.
This way of thought is obviously unhealthy, or at least has in it
something of the morbid. It implies the undue introspection which is
well-nigh the disease of this century. There is in it the failure to
lose one's life in objective incident and action, that one may find it
again in regained balance of mind and bodily health. Amiel had the
defect of his quality; but he is clearly to be separated from those
shallow or exaggerated specimens of subjectivity illustrated by
present-day women diarists, like Bashkirtseff and Kovalevsky. The Swiss
poet-thinker had a vigor of thought and a broad culture; his aim was
high, his desire pure, and his meditations were often touched with
imaginative beauty. Again and again he flashes light into the darkest
penetralia of the human soul. At times, too, there is in him a mystic
fervor worthy of St. Augustine. If his dominant tone is melancholy, he
is not to be called a pessimist. He believed in the Good at the central
core of things. Hence is he a fascinating personality, a stimulative
force. And these outpourings of an acute intellect, and a nature
sensitive to the Ideal, are conveyed in a diction full of literary
feeling and flavor. Subtlety, depth, tenderness, poetry, succeed each
other; nor are the crisp, compressed sayings, the happy _mots_ of the
epigrammatist, entirely lacking. And pervading all is an impression of
character.
Like Pascal, Amiel was a thinker interested above all in the soul of
man. He was a psychologist, seeking to know the secret of the Whence,
the Why, and the Whither. Like Joubert, whose journal resembled his own
in its posthumous publication, his reflections will live by their
weight, their quality, their beauty of form. Nor are these earlier
writers of "Pensées" likely to have a more permanent place among the
seed-sowers of thought. Amiel himself declared that "the pensée-writer
is to the philosopher what the dilettante is to the artist. He plays
with thought, and makes it produce a crowd of pretty things of detail;
but he is more anxious about truths than truth, and what is essential in
thought, its sequence, its unity, escapes him.... In a word, the
pensée-writer deals with what is superficial and fragmentary." While
these words show the fine critical sense of the man, they do an
injustice to his own work. Fragmentary it is, but neither superficial
nor petty. One recognizes in reading his wonderfully suggestive pages
that here is a rare personality, indeed,--albeit "sicklied o'er with the
pale cast of thought."
In 1889 an admirable English translation of Amiel by Mrs. Humphry Ward,
the novelist, appeared in London. The introductory essay by Mrs. Ward is
the best study of him in our language. The appended selections are taken
from the Ward translation.
Richard Burton
EXTRACTS FROM AMIEL'S JOURNAL
October 1st, 1849.--Yesterday, Sunday, I read through and made extracts
from the Gospel of St. John. It confirmed me in my belief that about
Jesus we must believe no one but Himself, and that what we have to do is
to discover the true image of the Founder behind all the prismatic
refractions through which it comes to us, and which alter it more or
less. A ray of heavenly light traversing human life, the message of
Christ has been broken into a thousand rainbow colors, and carried in a
thousand directions. It is the historical task of Christianity to assume
with every succeeding age a fresh metamorphosis, and to be forever
spiritualizing more and more her understanding of the Christ and of
salvation.
I am astounded at the incredible amount of Judaism and formalism which
still exists nineteen centuries after the Redeemer's proclamation, "It
is the letter which killeth"--after his protest against a dead
symbolism. The new religion is so profound that it is not understood
even now, and would seem a blasphemy to the greater number of
Christians. The person of Christ is the centre of it. Redemption,
eternal life, divinity, humanity, propitiation, incarnation, judgment,
Satan, heaven and hell,--all these beliefs have been so materialized and
coarsened that with a strange irony they present to us the spectacle of
things having a profound meaning and yet carnally interpreted. Christian
boldness and Christian liberty must be reconquered; it is the Church
which is heretical, the Church whose sight is troubled and her heart
timid. Whether we will or no, there is an esoteric doctrine--there is a
relative revelation; each man enters into God so much as God enters into
him; or, as Angelus, I think, said, "The eye by which I see God is the
same eye by which He sees me."
Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive world
while at the same time detaching us from it.
February 20th, 1851.--I have almost finished these two volumes of
[Joubert's] 'Pensées' and the greater part of the 'Correspondance.' This
last has especially charmed me; it is remarkable for grace, delicacy,
atticism, and precision. The chapters on metaphysics and philosophy are
the most insignificant. All that has to do with large views, with the
whole of things, is very little at Joubert's command: he has no
philosophy of history, no speculative intuition. He is the thinker of
detail, and his proper field is psychology and matters of taste. In this
sphere of the subtleties and delicacies of imagination and feeling,
within the circle of personal affections and preoccupations, of social
and educational interests, he abounds in ingenuity and sagacity, in fine
criticisms, in exquisite touches. It is like a bee going from flower to
flower, a teasing, plundering, wayward zephyr, an aeolian harp, a ray of
furtive light stealing through the leaves. Taken as a whole, there is
something impalpable and immaterial about him, which I will not venture
to call effeminate, but which is scarcely manly. He wants bone and body:
timid, dreamy, and clairvoyant, he hovers far above reality. He is
rather a soul, a breath, than a man. It is the mind of a woman in the
character of a child, so that we feel for him less admiration than
tenderness and gratitude.
November 10th, 1852.--How much have we not to learn from the Greeks,
those immortal ancestors of ours! And how much better they solved their
problem than we have solved ours! Their ideal man is not ours; but they
understood infinitely better than we, how to reverence, cultivate, and
ennoble the man whom they knew. In a thousand respects we are still
barbarians beside them, as Béranger said to me with a sigh in 1843:
barbarians in education, in eloquence, in public life, in poetry, in
matters of art, etc. We must have millions of men in order to produce a
few elect spirits: a thousand was enough in Greece. If the measure of a
civilization is to be the number of perfected men that it produces, we
are still far from this model people. The slaves are no longer below us,
but they are among us. Barbarism is no longer at our frontiers: it lives
side by side with us. We carry within us much greater things than they,
but we ourselves are smaller. It is a strange result. Objective
civilization produced great men while making no conscious effort toward
such a result; subjective civilization produces a miserable and
imperfect race, contrary to its mission and its earnest desire. The
world grows more majestic, but man diminishes. Why is this?
We have too much barbarian blood in our veins, and we lack measure,
harmony, and grace. Christianity, in breaking man up into outer and
inner, the world into earth and heaven, hell and paradise, has
decomposed the human unity, in order, it is true, to reconstruct it more
profoundly and more truly. But Christianity has not yet digested this
powerful leaven. She has not yet conquered the true humanity; she is
still living under the antinomy of sin and grace, of here below and
there above. She has not penetrated into the whole heart of Jesus. She
is still in the _narthex_ of penitence; she is not reconciled, and even
the churches still wear the livery of service, and have none of the joy
of the daughters of God, baptized of the Holy Spirit.
Then, again, there is our excessive division of labor; our bad and
foolish education which does not develop the whole man; and the problem
of poverty. We have abolished slavery, but without having solved the
question of labor. In law, there are no more slaves--in fact, there are
many. And while the majority of men are not free, the free man, in the
true sense of the term, can neither be conceived nor realized. Here are
enough causes for our inferiority.
November 12th, 1852.--St. Martin's summer is still lingering, and the
days all begin in mist. I ran for a quarter of an hour round the garden
to get some warmth and suppleness. Nothing could be lovelier than the
last rosebuds, or the delicate gaufred edges of the strawberry leaves
embroidered with hoar-frost, while above them Arachne's delicate webs
hung swaying in the green branches of the pines,--little ball-rooms for
the fairies, carpeted with powdered pearls, and kept in place by a
thousand dewy strands, hanging from above like the chains of a lamp, and
supporting them from below like the anchors of a vessel. These little
airy edifices had all the fantastic lightness of the elf-world, and all
the vaporous freshness of dawn. They recalled to me the poetry of the
North, wafting to me a breath from Caledonia or Iceland or Sweden,
Frithjof and the Edda, Ossian and the Hebrides. All that world of cold
and mist, of genius and of reverie, where warmth comes not from the sun
but from the heart, where man is more noticeable than nature,--that
chaste and vigorous world, in which will plays a greater part than
sensation, and thought has more power than instinct,--in short, the
whole romantic cycle of German and Northern poetry, awoke little by
little in my memory and laid claim upon my sympathy. It is a poetry of
bracing quality, and acts upon one like a moral tonic. Strange charm of
imagination! A twig of pine-wood and a few spider-webs are enough to
make countries, epochs, and nations live again before her.
January 6th, 1853.--Self-government with tenderness,--here you have the
condition of all authority over children. The child must discover in us
no passion, no weakness of which he can make use; he must feel himself
powerless to deceive or to trouble us; then he will recognize in us his
natural superiors, and he will attach a special value to our kindness,
because he will respect it. The child who can rouse in us anger, or
impatience, or excitement, feels himself stronger than we, and a child
respects strength only. The mother should consider herself as her
child's sun, a changeless and ever radiant world, whither the small
restless creature, quick at tears and laughter, light, fickle,
passionate, full of storms, may come for fresh stores of light, warmth,
and electricity, of calm and of courage. The mother represents goodness,
providence, law; that is to say, the divinity, under that form of it
which is accessible to childhood. If she is herself passionate, she will
inculcate in her child a capricious and despotic God, or even several
discordant gods. The religion of a child depends on what its mother and
its father are, and not on what they say. The inner and unconscious
ideal which guides their life is precisely what touches the child;
their words, their remonstrances, their punishments, their bursts of
feeling even, are for him merely thunder and comedy; what they
worship--this it is which his instinct divines and reflects.
The child sees what we are, behind what we wish to be. Hence his
reputation as a physiognomist. He extends his power as far as he can
with each of us; he is the most subtle of diplomatists. Unconsciously he
passes under the influence of each person about him, and reflects it
while transforming it after his his own nature. He is a magnifying
mirror. This is why the first principle of education is, Train yourself;
and the first rule to follow, if you wish to possess yourself of a
child's will, is, Master your own.
December 17th, 1856.--This evening was the second quartet concert. It
stirred me much more than the first; the music chosen was loftier and
stronger. It was the quartette in D minor of Mozart, and the quartette
in C major of Beethoven, separated by a Spohr concerto.
The work of Mozart, penetrated as it is with mind and thought,
represents a solved problem, a balance struck between aspiration and
executive capacity, the sovereignty of a grace which is always mistress
of itself, marvelous harmony and perfect unity. His quartette describes
a day in one of those Attic souls who prefigure on earth the serenity
of Elysium.
In Beethoven's, on the other hand, a spirit of tragic irony paints for
you the mad tumult of existence, as it dances forever above the
threatening abyss of the infinite. No more unity, no more satisfaction,
no more serenity! We are spectators of the eternal duel between the two
great forces, that of the abyss which absorbs all finite things, and
that of life which defends and asserts itself, expands, and enjoys.
The soul of Beethoven was a tormented soul. The passion and the awe of
the infinite seemed to toss it to and fro from heaven to hell. Hence its
vastness. Which is the greater, Mozart or Beethoven? Idle question! The
one is more perfect, the other more colossal. The first gives you the
peace of perfect art, beauty at first sight. The second gives you
sublimity, terror, pity, a beauty of second impression. The one gives
that for which the other rouses a desire. Mozart has the classic purity
of light and the blue ocean. Beethoven the romantic grandeur
which belongs
(Continued in Volume II)