“SPOTLESS TOWN”
At three o’clock I left these pleasant people to visit the Ryks Museum
and the next morning ran over to Haarlem, a half-hour away, to look
at the Frans Hals in the Stadhuis. Haarlem was the city, I remember
with pleasure, that once suffered the amazing tulip craze that swept
over Holland in the sixteenth century--the city in which single rare
tulips, like single rare carnations to-day, commanded enormous sums of
money. Rare species, because of the value of the subsequent bulb sale,
sold for hundreds of thousands of gulden. I had heard of the long line
of colored tulip beds that lay between here and Haarlem and The Hague
and I was prepared to judge for myself whether they were beautiful--as
beautiful as the picture post-cards sold everywhere indicated. I found
this so, but even more than the tulip beds I found the country round
about from Amsterdam to Haarlem, The Hague and Rotterdam delightful.
I traveled by foot and by train, passing by some thirty miles of
vari-colored flower-beds in blocks of red, white, blue, purple, pink,
and yellow, that lie between the several cities. I stood in the old
Groote Kerk of St. Bavo in Haarlem, the Groote Kerk of St. James in
The Hague--both as bare of ornament as an anchorite’s cell--I wandered
among the art treasures of the Ryks Museum in Amsterdam and the
Mauritshuis and the Mesdag Museum in The Hague; I walked in the forests
of moss-tinted trees at Haarlem and again at The Hague; my impression
was that compact little Holland had all the charm of a great private
estate, beautifully kept and intimately delightful.
But the canals of Holland--what an airy impression of romance, of pure
poetry, they left on my mind! There are certain visions or memories
to which the heart of every individual instinctively responds. The
canals of Holland are one such to me. I can see them now, in the early
morning, when the sun was just touching them with the faintest pearls,
pinks, lavenders, blues, their level surfaces as smooth as glass,
their banks rising no whit above the level of the water, but lying
even with it like a black or emerald frame, their long straight lines
broken at one point or another by a low brown or red or drab cottage or
windmill! I can see them again at evening, the twilight hour, when in
that poetically suffused mood of nature, which obtains then, they lie,
liquid masses of silver, a shred of tinted cloud reflected in their
surface, the level green grass turning black about them, a homing bird,
a mass of trees in the distance, or humble cottage, its windows faintly
gold from within, lending those last touches of artistry which make the
perfection of nature. As in London and Venice the sails of their boats
were colored a soft brown, and now and again one appeared in the fading
light, a healthy Hollander smoking his pipe at the tiller, a cool wind
fanning his brow. The world may hold more charming pictures but I have
not encountered them.
And across the level spaces of lush grass that seemingly stretch
unbroken for miles--bordered on this side or that with a little patch
of filigree trees; ribboned and segmented by straight silvery threads
of water; ornamented in the foreground by a cow or two, perhaps, or
a boatman steering his motor-power canal boat; remotely ended by the
seeming outlines of a distant city, as delicately penciled as a line
by Vierge--stand the windmills. I have seen ten, twelve, fifteen,
marching serenely across the fields in a row, of an afternoon, like
great, heavy, fat Dutchmen, their sails going in slow, patient
motions, their great sides rounding out like solid Dutch ribs,--naïve,
delicious things. There were times when their outlines took on classic
significance. Combined with the utterly level land, the canals and the
artistically martialed trees, they constitute the very atmosphere of
Holland.
* * * * *
Haarlem, when I reached it, pleased me almost as much as Amsterdam,
though it had no canals to speak of--by comparison. It was so clean and
fresh and altogether lovely. It reminded me of _Spotless Town_--the
city of advertising fame--and I was quite ready to encounter the mayor,
the butcher, the doctor and other worthies of that ultra-respectable
city. Coming over from Amsterdam, I saw a little Dutch girl in wooden
shoes come down to a low gate which opened directly upon a canal and
dip up a pitcher of water. That was enough to key up my mood to the
most romantic pitch. I ventured forth right gaily in a warm spring sun
and spent the better portion of an utterly delightful day idling about
its streets and museums.
Haarlem, to me, aside from the tulip craze, was where Frans Hals
lived and where in 1610, when he was thirty years of age, he married
and where six years later he was brought before the Burgomaster
for ill-treating his wife, and ordered to abstain from “_dronken
schnappe_.” Poor Frans Hals! The day I was there a line of motor-cars
stood outside the Stadhuis waiting while their owners contemplated
the wonders of the ten Regents pictures inside which are the pride
of Haarlem. When I left London Sir Scorp was holding his recently
discovered portrait by Hals at forty thousand pounds or more. I fancy
to-day any of the numerous portraits by Hals in his best manner would
bring two hundred thousand dollars and very likely much more. Yet at
seventy-two Hals’s goods and chattels--three mattresses, one chair,
one table, three bolsters, and five pictures--were sold to satisfy a
baker’s bill, and from then on, until he died fourteen years later, at
eighty-six, his “rent and firing” were paid for by the municipality.
Fate probably saved a very great artist from endless misery by letting
his first wife die. As it was he appears to have had his share of
wretchedness.
The business of being really great is one of the most pathetic things
in the world. When I was in London a close friend of Herbert Spencer
told me the story of his last days, and how, save for herself, there
was scarcely any one to cheer him in his loneliness. It was not that
he lacked living means--he had that--but living as he did, aloft
in the eternal snows of speculation, there was no one to share his
thoughts,--no one. It was the fate of that gigantic mind to be lonely.
What a pity the pleasures of the bottle or a drug might not eventually
have allured him. Old Omar knew the proper antidote for these
speculative miseries.
And Rembrandt van Ryn--there was another. It is probably true that from
1606, when he was born, until 1634, when he married at twenty-eight,
he was gay enough. He had the delicious pleasure of discovering that
he was an artist. Then he married Saskia van Uylenborch--the fair
Saskia whom he painted sitting so gaily on his knee--and for eight
years he was probably supremely happy. Saskia had forty thousand gulden
to contribute to this _ménage_. Rembrandt’s skill and fame were just
attaining their most significant proportions, when she died. Then,
being an artist, his affairs went from bad to worse; and you have the
spectacle of this other seer, Holland’s metaphysician, color-genius,
life-interpreter, descending to an entanglement with a rather dull
housekeeper, losing his money, having all his possessions sold to pay
his debts and living out his last days in absolute loneliness at the
Keizerskroon Inn in Amsterdam--quite neglected; for the local taste for
art had changed, and the public was a little sick of Hals and Rembrandt.
As I sat in the Kroon restaurant, in Haarlem, opposite the Groote Kerk,
watching some pigeons fly about the belfry, looking at Lieven de Key’s
meat market, the prototype of Dutch quaintness, and meditating on the
pictures of these great masters that I had just seen in the Stadhuis,
the insignificance of the individual as compared with the business of
life came to me with overwhelming force. We are such minute, dusty
insects at best, great or small. The old age of most people is so
trivial and insignificant. We become mere shells--“granthers,” “Goody
Two-Shoes,” “lean and slippered pantaloons.” The spirit of life works
in masses--not individuals. It prefers a school or species to a single
specimen. A great man or woman is an accident. A great work of art of
almost any kind is almost always fortuitous--like this meat market
over the way. Life, for instance, I speculated sitting here, cared no
more for Frans Hals or Rembrandt or Lieven de Key than I cared for the
meanest butcher or baker of their day. If they chanced to find a means
of subsistence--well and good; if not, well and good also. “Vanity,
vanity, saith the preacher, all is vanity.” Even so.
From Haarlem I went on to The Hague, about fifty minutes away; from The
Hague, late that evening, to Rotterdam; from Rotterdam to Dordrecht,
and so into Belgium, where I was amused to see everything change
again--the people, language, signs,--all. Belgium appeared to be
French, with only the faintest suggestion of Holland about it--but
it was different enough from France also to be interesting on its own
account.
After a quick trip across Belgium with short but delightful stops at
Bruges, that exquisite shell of a once great city, at Ghent and at
Brussels, the little Paris, I arrived once more at the French capital.