AMSTERDAM
Amsterdam I should certainly include among my cities of light and
charm, a place to live in. Not that it has, in my judgment, any of
that capital significance of Paris or Rome or Venice. Though greater
by a hundred thousand in population than Frankfort, it has not even
the forceful commercial texture of that place. The spirit of the city
seemed so much more unbusinesslike,--so much slower and easier-going.
Before I sent forth a single letter of introduction I spent an entire
day idling about its so often semicircular streets, following the
canals which thread their centers like made pools, rejoicing in the
cool brick walks which line the sides, looking at the reflection of
houses and buildings in the ever-present water.
Holland is obviously a land of canals and windmills, but much more
than that it is a land of atmosphere. I have often speculated as to
just what it is that the sea does to its children that marks them so
definitely for its own. And here in Amsterdam the thought came to me
again. It is this: Your waterside idler, whether he traverses the
wide stretches of the ocean or remains at home near the sea, has a
seeming vacuity or dreaminess of soul that no rush of ordinary life
can disturb. I have noted it of every port of the sea, that the eager
intensity of men so often melts away at the water’s edge. Boats are not
loaded with the hard realism that marks the lading of trains. A sense
of the idle-devil-may-care indifference of water seems to play about
the affairs of these people, of those who have to do with them--the
unhastening indifference of the sea. Perhaps the suggestion of the
soundless, timeless, heartless deep that is in every channel, inlet,
sluice, and dock-basin is the element that is at the base of their
lagging motions. Your sailor and seafaring man will not hurry. His eyes
are wide with a strange suspicion of the deep. He knows by contact what
the subtlety and the fury of the waters are. The word of the sea is to
be indifferent. “Never you mind, dearie. As it was in the beginning, so
it ever shall be.”
I think the peace and sweetness of Amsterdam bear some relationship
to this wonderful, soporific spirit of the endless deep. As I walked
along these “grachts” and “kades” and through these “pleins”--seemingly
enameled worlds in which water and trees and red brick houses swam in a
soft light, exactly the light and atmosphere you find in Dutch art--I
felt as though I had come out of a hard modern existence such as one
finds in Germany and back into something kindly, rural, intellectual,
philosophic. Spinoza was, I believe, Holland’s contribution to
philosophy,--and a worthy Dutch philosopher he was--and Erasmus its
great scholar. Both Rembrandt and Frans Hals have indicated in their
lives the spirit of their country. I think, if you could look into the
spirits and homes of thousands of simple Hollanders, you would find
that same kindly, cleanly realism which you admire in their paintings.
It is so placid. It was so here in Amsterdam. One gathered it from the
very air. I had a feeling of peaceful, meditative delight in life and
the simplicities of living all the time I was in Holland, which I take
to be significant. All the while I was there I was wishing that I might
remain throughout the spring and summer, and dream. In Germany I was
haunted by the necessity of effort.
It was while I was in Amsterdam this first morning that the
realization that my travels were fast drawing to a close dawned upon
me. I had been having such a good time! That fresh, interested feeling
of something new to look forward to with each morning was still
enduring; but now I saw that my splendid world of adventure was all but
ended. Thoreau has proved, as I recalled now with some satisfaction,
that life can be lived, with great intellectual and spiritual
distinction in a meager way and in small compass, but oh, the wonder of
the world’s highways--the going to and fro amid the things of eminence
and memory, seeing how, thus far, this wordly house of ours has been
furnished by man and by nature.
All those wonderful lands and objects that I had looked forward to with
such keen interest a few months before were now in their way things of
the past. England, France, Italy, Germany, London, Paris, Rome, Berlin,
Canterbury, Amiens, St. Peter’s, Pisa--I could not look on those any
more with fresh and wondering eyes. How brief life is, I thought! How
taciturn in its mood! It gives us a brief sip, some of us, once and
then takes the cup away. It seemed to me, as I sat here looking out on
the fresh and sweet canals of Holland, that I could idle thus forever
jotting down foolish impressions, exclaiming over fleeting phases of
beauty, wiping my eyes at the hails and farewells that are so precious
and so sad. Holland was before me, and Belgium, and one more sip of
Paris, and a few days in England, perhaps, and then I should go back to
New York to write. I could see it--New York with its high buildings,
its clanging cars, its rough incivility. Oh, why might I not idle
abroad indefinitely?
* * * * *
The second morning of my arrival I received a telephone message from a
sister of Madame A., Madame J., the wife of an eminent Dutch jurist who
had something to do with the International Peace Court. Would I come
to lunch this day? Her husband would be a little late, but I would not
mind. Her sister had written her. She would be so glad to see me. I
promptly accepted.
The house was near the Ryks Museum, with a charming view of water from
the windows. I can see it now--this very pleasant Holland interior.
The rooms into which I was introduced were bluish-gray in tone, the
contents spare and in good taste. Flowers in abundance. Much brass and
old copper. Madame J. was herself a study in steel blue and silver
gray, a reserved yet temperamental woman. A better linguist than Madame
A., she spoke English perfectly. She had read my book, the latest one,
and had liked it, she told me. Then she folded her hands in her lap,
leaned forward and looked at me. “I have been so curious to see what
you looked like.”
“Well,” I replied smilingly, “take a long look. I am not as wild as
early rumors would indicate, I hope. You mustn’t start with prejudices.”
She smiled engagingly. “It isn’t that. There are so many things in your
book which make me curious. It is such a strange book--self-revealing,
I imagine.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure.”
She merely continued to look at me and smile in a placid way, but her
inspection was so sympathetic and in a way alluring that it was rather
flattering than otherwise. I, in turn, studied her. Here was a woman
that, I had been told, had made an ideal marriage. And she obviously
displayed the quiet content that few achieve.
* * * * *
Like Shakespeare, I would be the last one to admit an impediment to
the marriage of true minds. Unquestionably in this world in spite
of endless liaisons, sex diversions, divorces, marital conflicts
innumerable, the right people do occasionally find each other. There
are true chemical-physical affinities, which remain so until death
and dissolution undo their mysterious spell. Yet, on the other hand,
I should say this is the rarest of events and if I should try to
formulate the mystery of the marital trouble of this earth I should
devote considerable percentages to: a--ungovernable passion not willed
or able to be controlled by the individual; b--dull, thick-hided
irresponsiveness which sees nothing in the emotional mood of another
and knows no guiding impulse save self-interest and gluttony;
c--fickleness of that unreasoning, unthinking character which is based
on shallowness of soul and emotions--the pains resulting from such a
state are negligible; d--diverging mental conceptions of life due to
the hastened or retarded mental growth of one or the other of the high
contracting parties; e--mistaken unions, wrong from the beginning,
based on mistaken affections--cases where youth, inexperience, early
ungovernable desire lead to a union based on sex and end, of course,
in mental incompatibility; f--a hounding compulsion to seek for a high
spiritual and intellectual ideal which almost no individual can realize
for another and which yet _may_ be realized in a lightning flash, out
of a clear sky, as it were. In which case the last two will naturally
forsake all others and cleave only the one to the other. Such is sex’s
affection, mental and spiritual compatibility.
But in marriage, as in no other trade, profession, or contract, once
a bargain is struck--a mistake made--society suggests that there is
no solution save in death. You cannot back out. It is almost the
only place where you cannot correct a mistake and start all over.
Until death do us part! Think of that being written and accepted of
a mistaken marriage! My answer is that death would better hurry up.
If the history of human marriage indicates anything, it is that the
conditions which make for the union of two individuals, male and
female, are purely fortuitous, that marriages are not made in heaven
but in life’s conditioning social laboratory, and that the marriage
relation, as we understand it, is quite as much subject to modification
and revision as anything else. Radical as it may seem, I predict a
complete revision of the home standards as we know them. I would not be
in the least surprised if the home, as we know it, were to disappear
entirely. New, modifying conditions are daily manifesting themselves.
Aside from easy divorce which is a mere safety valve and cannot safely
(and probably will not) be dispensed with, there are other things which
are steadily undermining the old home system as it has been practised.
For instance, endless agencies which tend to influence, inspire, and
direct the individual or child, entirely apart from the control and
suggestion of parents, are now at work. In the rearing of the _average_
child the influence of the average parent is steadily growing less.
Intellectual, social, spiritual freedom are constantly being suggested
to the individual, but not by the home. People are beginning to see
that they have a right to seek and seek until they find that which is
best suited to their intellectual, physical, spiritual development,
home or no home. No mistake, however great, or disturbing in its
consequences, it is beginning to be seen, should be irretrievable.
The greater the mistake, really, the easier it should be to right it.
Society _must_ and _is_ opening the prison doors of human misery, and
old sorrows are walking out into the sunlight where they are being
dispelled and forgotten. As sure as there are such things as mental
processes, spiritual affinities, significant individualities and as
sure as these things are increasing in force, volume, numbers, so
sure, also, is it that the marriage state and the sex relation with
which these things are so curiously and indissolubly involved will be
modified, given greater scope, greater ease of adjustment, greater
simplicity of initiation, greater freedom as to duration, greater
kindliness as to termination. And the state will guarantee the right,
privileges and immunities of the children to the entire satisfaction of
the state, the parents, and the children. It cannot be otherwise.
* * * * *
Mynheer J. joined us presently. He was rather spare, very waxy, very
intellectual, very unattached philosophically--apparently--and yet
very rigid in his feeling for established principle. The type is quite
common among intellectuals. Much reading had not made him mad but a
little pedantic. He was speculatively interested in international peace
though he did not believe that it could readily be established. Much
more, apparently, he was interested in the necessity of building up a
code or body of international laws which would be flexible and binding
on all nations. Imaginatively I could see him at his heavy tomes. He
had thin, delicate, rather handsome hands; a thin, dapper, wiry body.
He was older than Madame J.,--say fifty-five or sixty. He had nice,
well-barbered, short gray whiskers, a short, effective mustache, loose,
well-trained, rather upstanding hair. Some such intellectual Northman
Ibsen intended to give Hedda.