ON THE WAY TO HOLLAND
I came near finding myself in serious straights financially on leaving
Berlin; for, owing to an oversight, and the fact that I was lost in
pleasant entertainment up to quite the parting hour, on examining
my cash in hand I found I had only fifteen marks all told. This was
Saturday night and my train was leaving in just thirty minutes. My taxi
fare would be two marks. I had my ticket, but excess baggage!--I saw
that looming up largely. It could mean anything in Europe--ten, twenty,
thirty marks. “Good Heavens!” I thought. “Who is there to cash a letter
of credit for me on Saturday night?” I thought of porters, taxis,
train hands at Amsterdam. “If I get there at all,” I sighed, “I get
there without a cent.” For a minute I thought seriously of delaying my
departure and seeking the aid of Herr A. However, I hurried on to the
depot where I first had my trunk weighed and found that I should have
to pay ten marks excess baggage. That was not so bad. My taxi chauffeur
demanded two. My _Packträger_ took one more, my parcel-room clerk, one
mark in fees, leaving me exactly one mark and my letter of credit.
“Good Heavens!” I sighed. “I can see the expectant customs officers at
the border! Without money I shall have to open every one of my bags. I
can see the conductor expecting four or five marks and getting nothing.
I can see--oh, Lord!”
Still I did not propose to turn back, I did not have time. The clerk at
the Amsterdam hotel would have to loan me money on my letter of credit.
So I bustled ruminatively into the train. It was a long, dusty affair,
coming from St. Petersburg and bound for Holland, Paris, and the boats
for England. It was crowded with passengers but, thank Heaven, all of
them safely bestowed in separate compartments or “drawing-rooms” after
the European fashion. I drew my blinds, undressed swiftly and got into
bed. Let all conductors rage, I thought. Porters be damned. Frontier
inspectors could go to blazes. I am going to sleep, my one mark in my
coat pocket.
I was just dozing off when the conductor called to ask if I did not
want to surrender the keys to my baggage in order to avoid being waked
in the morning at the frontier. This service merited a tip which, of
course, I was in no position to give. “Let me explain to you,” I said.
“This is the way it is. I got on this train with just one mark.” I
tried to make it clear how it all happened, in my halting German.
He was a fine, tall, military, solid-chested fellow. He looked at me
with grave, inquisitive eyes. “I will come in a little later,” he
grunted. Instead, he shook me rudely at five-thirty A. M., at some
small place in Holland, and told me that I would have to go out and
open my trunk. Short shrift for the man who cannot or will not tip!
Still I was not so downcast. For one thing we were in Holland, actually
and truly,--quaint little Holland with its five million population
crowded into cities so close together that you could get from one
to another in a half-hour or a little over. To me, it was first and
foremost the land of Frans Hals and Rembrandt van Ryn and that whole
noble company of Dutch painters. All my life I had been more or
less fascinated by those smooth surfaces, the spirited atmosphere,
those radiant simplicities of the Dutch interiors, the village inns,
windmills, canal scenes, housewives, fishwives, old topers, cattle,
and nature scenes which are the basis and substance of Dutch art.
I will admit, for argument’s sake, that the Dutch costume with its
snowy neck and head-piece and cuffs, the Dutch windmill, with its
huge wind-bellied sails, the Dutch landscape so flat and grassy and
the Dutch temperament, broad-faced and phlegmatic, have had much to
do with my art attraction, but over and beyond those there has always
been so much more than this--an indefinable something which, for want
of a better phrase, I can only call the wonder of the Dutch soul, the
most perfect expression of commonplace beauty that the world has yet
seen. So easily life runs off into the mystical, the metaphysical, the
emotional, the immoral, the passionate and the suggestive, that for
those delicate flaws of perfection in which life is revealed static,
quiescent, undisturbed, innocently gay, naïvely beautiful, how can we
be grateful enough! For those lovely, idyllic minds that were content
to paint the receipt of a letter, an evening school, dancing peasants,
a gust of wind, skaters, wild ducks, milk-time, a market, playing at
draughts, the fruiterer, a woman darning stockings, a woman scouring,
the drunken roysterers, a cow stall, cat and kittens, the grocer’s
shop, the chemist’s shop, the blacksmith’s shop, feeding-time, and the
like, my heart has only reverence. And it is not (again) this choice
of subject alone, nor the favorable atmosphere of Holland in which
these were found, so much as it is that delicate refinement of soul, of
perception, of feeling--the miracle of temperament--through which these
things were seen. _Life seen through a temperament! that is the miracle
of art._
Yet the worst illusion that can be entertained concerning art is
that it is apt to appear at any time in any country, through a given
personality or a group of individuals without any deep relation to
much deeper mystical and metaphysical things. Some little suggestion
of the artistry of life may present itself now and then through a
personality, but art in the truest sense is the substance of an age,
the significance of a country--a nationality. Even more than that,
it is a time-spirit (the _Zeitgeist_ of the Germans) that appears of
occasion to glorify a land, to make great a nation. You would think
that somewhere in the sightless substance of things--the chemistry back
of the material evidence of life--there was a lovely, roseate milling
of superior principle at times. Strange and lovely things come to the
fore--the restoration in England, the Renaissance in Italy, Florence’s
golden period, Holland’s classic art--all done in a century. “And the
spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,” and there was that
which we know as art.
I think it was years before those two towering figures--Rembrandt and
Frans Hals (and of the two, Frans Hals is to me the greater)--appeared
in my consciousness and emphasized the distinction of Holland for me,
showing me that the loveliness of Dutch art,--the naïveté of Wouverman,
the poetic realism of Nicolaes Maes, the ultimate artistry of Vermeer,
de Hoogh, Ruysdael and all that sweet company of simple painters of
simple things,--had finally come to mean _to me_ all that _I_ can
really hope for in art--those last final reflections of halcyon days
which are the best that life has to show.
Sometimes when I think of the homely splendors of Dutch art, which
in its delicate commonplaceness has nothing to do with the more
universal significance of both Hals and Rembrandt, I get a little
wild artistically. Those smooth persuasive surfaces--pure enamel--and
symphonies of blue light which are Vermeer; those genial household
intimacies and candle-light romances which are Dou; those alleluiahs
of light and water which are Vandervelde, Backhysen, Van Goyen; those
merry-makings, perambulations, doorway chats, poultry intimacies, small
trade affections and exchanges which are Terburg and Van Ostade! Truly,
words fail me. I do not know how to suggest the poetry, the realism,
the mood, the artistic craftsmanship that go with these things.
They suggest a time, a country, an age, a mood, which is at once a
philosophy, a system, a spirit of life. What more can art be? What
more can it suggest? How, in that fortune of chance, which combines it
with color-sense, temperament, craft, can it be exceeded? And all of
this is what Dutch art--those seemingly minor phases, after Hals and
Rembrandt--means to me.
But I was in Holland now, and not concerned so much for the moment
with Dutch art as with my trunks. Still I felt here, at the frontier,
that already I was in an entirely different world. Gone was that
fever of the blood which is Germany. Gone the heavy, involute,
enduring, Teutonic architecture. The upstanding German,--kaiserlich,
self-opinionated, drastic, aggressive--was no longer about me. The
men who were unlocking trunks and bags here exemplified a softer,
milder, less military type. This mystery of national temperaments--was
I never to get done with it? As I looked about me against a pleasant
rising Sunday sun I could see and feel that not only the people but
the landscape and the architecture had changed. The architecture was
obviously so different, low, modest, one-story cottages standing out
on a smooth, green level land, so smooth and so green and so level
that anything projected against the skyline--it mattered not how
modest--thereby became significant. And I saw my first Holland windmill
turning its scarecrow arms in the distance. It was like coming out of a
Russian steam bath into the cool marble precincts of the plunge, to be
thus projected from Germany into Holland. If you will believe me I was
glad that I had no money in order that I might be driven out to see all
this.
* * * * *
I had no trouble with trunks and bags other than opening them and
being compelled to look as though I thought it a crime to tip anybody.
I strolled about the station in the early light of a clear, soft day
and speculated on this matter of national temperaments. What a pity,
I thought, if Holland were ever annexed by Germany or France or any
country and made to modify its individuality. Before I was done with
it I was inclined to believe that its individuality would never be
modified, come any authority that might.
The balance of the trip to Amsterdam was nothing, a matter of two
hours, but it visualized all I had fancied concerning Holland. Such
a mild little land it is. So level, so smooth, so green. I began to
puzzle out the signs along the way; they seemed such a hodge-podge
of German and English badly mixed, that I had to laugh. The train
passed up the center of a street in one village where cool brick
pavements fronted cool brick houses and stores, and on one shop window
appeared the legend: “Haar Sniden.” Would not that as a statement of
hair-cutting make any German-American laugh? “Telefoon,” “stoom boot,”
“treins noor Ostend,” “land te koop” (for sale) and the like brought a
mild grin of amusement.
When we reached Amsterdam I had scarcely time to get a sense of it
before I was whisked away in an electric omnibus to the hotel; and I
was eager to get there, too, in order to replenish my purse which was
now without a single penny. The last mark had gone to the porter at
the depot to carry my bags to this ’bus. I was being deceived as to
the character of the city by this ride from the central station to the
hotel, for curiously its course gave not a glimpse of the canals that
are the most charming and pleasing features of Amsterdam--more so than
in any other city in Holland.
And now what struggles for a little ready money! My bags and fur coat
had been duly carried into the hotel and I had signified to the porter
in a lordly way that he should pay the ’busman, but seeing that I had
letters which might result in local invitations this very day a little
ready cash was necessary.
“I tell you what I should like you to do,” I observed to the clerk,
after I had properly entered my name and accepted a room. “Yesterday in
Berlin, until it was too late, I forgot to draw any money on my letter
of credit. Let me have forty gulden and I will settle with you in the
morning.”
“But, my dear sir,” he said, very doubtfully indeed and in very polite
English, “I do not see how we can do that. We do not know you.”
“It is surely not so unusual,” I suggested ingratiatingly, “you must
have done it before. You see my bags and trunk are here. Here is my
letter of credit. Let me speak to the manager.”
The dapper Dutchman looked at my fur coat and bags quite critically,
looked at my letter of credit as if he felt sure it was a forgery
and then retired into an inner office. Presently a polished creature
appeared, dark, immaculate, and after eyeing me solemnly, shook his
head. “It can’t be done,” he said.
He turned to go.
“But here, here!” I called. “This won’t do. You must be sensible.
What sort of a hotel do you keep here, anyhow? I must have forty
gulden--thirty, anyhow. My letter of credit is good. Examine it. Good
heavens! You have at least eight hundred gulden worth of luggage
there.”
He had turned and was surveying me again. “It can’t be done,” he said.
“Impossible!” I cried. “I must have it. Why, I haven’t a cent. You must
trust me until to-morrow morning.”
“Give him twenty gulden,” he said to the clerk, wearily, and turned
away.
“Good Heavens!” I said to the clerk, “give me the twenty gulden before
I die of rage.” And so he counted them out to me and I went in to
breakfast.
I was charmed to find that the room overlooked one of the lovely canals
with a distant view of others--all of them alive with canal-boats poled
along slowly by solid, placid Hollanders, the spring sunlight giving
them a warm, alluring, mildly adventurous aspect. The sense of light on
water was so delightful from the breakfast-room, a great airy place,
that it gave an added flavor to my Sunday morning breakfast of eggs and
bacon. I was so pleased with my general surroundings here that I even
hummed a tune while I ate.