A Wanderer in Holland Part 12

_Officer_.--He cut up her body in little pieces, and salted them.

_Judge_.--He is a great criminal. He must hang for it.

_Lothario_.--My Lord, I did not murder Betsy: I fed and clothed and cherished her. I can call witnesses who will prove me to be a good man, and no murderer.

_Judge_.--You must hang. You blacken your crime by your self-sufficiency. It ill becomes one who ... is accused of anything to set up for a good man.

_Lothario_,--But, my Lord, ... there are witnesses to prove it; and as I am now accused of murder....

_Judge_.--You must hang for it. You cut up Betsy--you salted the pieces--and you are satisfied with your conduct--three capital counts--who are you, my good woman?

_Woman_.--I am Betsy.

_Lothario_.--Thank G.o.d! You see, my Lord, that I did not murder her.

_Judge_.--Humph!--ay--what!--What about the salting?

_Betsy_.--No, my Lord, he did not salt me:--on the contrary, he did many things for me ... he is a worthy man!

_Lothario_.--You hear, my Lord, she says I am an honest man!

_Judge_.--Humph!--the third count remains. Officer, remove the prisoner, he must hang for it; he is guilty of self-conceit.

Shopkeeping--to return to Amsterdam--is the Dutch people's life. An idle rich cla.s.s they may have, but it does not a.s.sert itself. It is hidden away at The Hague or at Arnheim. In Amsterdam every one is busy in one trade or another. There is no Pall Mall, no Rotten Row. There is no Bond Street or Rue de la Paix, for this is a country where money tries to procure money's worth, a country of essentials. Nor has Holland a Lord's or an Oval, Epsom Downs or Hurlingham.

Perhaps the quickest way to visualise the differences of nations is to imagine them exchanging countries. If the English were to move to Holland the whole face of the land would immediately be changed. In summer the flat meadows near the towns, now given up to cows and plovers, would be dotted with cricketers; in winter with football-players. Outriggers and canoes, punts and house-boats, would break out on the ca.n.a.ls. In the villages such strange phenomena as idle gentlemen in knickerbockers and idle ladies with parasols would suddenly appear.

To continue the list of changes (but not for too long) the trains would begin to be late; from the waiting-rooms all free newspapers would be stolen; churches would be made more comfortable; hundreds of newspapers would exist where now only a handful are sufficient; the hour of breakfast would be later; business would begin later; drunken men would be seen in the streets, dirt in the cottages.

If the Dutch came to England the converse would happen. The athletic grounds would become pasture land; the dirt of our slums and the gentry of our villages would alike vanish; Westminster Abbey would be whitewashed; and ... But I have said enough.

It must not be thought that the Dutch play no games. As a matter of fact they were playing golf, as old pictures tell, before it had found its way to England at all; and there are now many golf clubs in Holland. The Dutch are excellent also at lawn tennis; and I saw the youth of Franeker very busy in a curious variety of rounders. There are horse-racing meetings and trotting compet.i.tions too. But the nation is not naturally athletic or sporting. It does not even walk except on business.

In winter, however, the Dutch are completely transformed. No sooner does the ice bear than the whole people begin to glide, and swirl, and live their lives to the poetry of motion. The ca.n.a.ls then become the real streets of Amsterdam. A Dutch lady--a mother and a grandmother--threw up her hands as she told me about the skating parties to the Zuyder Zee. The skate, it seems, is as much the enemy of the chaperon as the bicycle, although its reign is briefer. Upon this subject I am personally ignorant, but I take that gesture of alarm as final.

And yet M. Havard, who had a Frenchman's eye and therefore knew, says that if Etna in full eruption were taken to Holland, at the end of the week it would have ceased even to smoke, so destructive to enthusiasm is the well-disciplined nature of the Dutch woman.

M. Havard referred rather to the women of the open country than the dwellers in the town. I can understand the rural coolness, for Holland is a land without mystery. Everything is plain and bare: a man in a balloon would know the amours of the whole populace. What chance has Cupid when there are no groves? But let Holland be afforested and her daughters would keep Etna burning warmly enough; for I am persuaded that it is not that they are cold but that the physical development of the country is against them.

Chapter XI

Amsterdam's Pictures

Dutch art in the palmy days--The Renaissance--A miracle--What Holland did for painting--The "Night Watch"--Rembrandt's isolation--Captain Franz Banning Cocq--Elizabeth Bas--The Staalmeesters--If one might choose one picture--Vermeer of Delft again--Whistler--"Paternal Advice"--Terburg--The romantic Frenchmen again--The Dutch painter's ideal--The two Maris--Old Dutch rooms--The Six Collection--"Six's Bridge"

and the wager--The Fodor Museum.

The superlative excellence of Dutch painting in the seventeenth century has never been explained, and probably never will be. The ordinary story is that on settling down to a period of independence and comparative peace and prosperity after the cessation of the Spanish war, the Dutch people called for good art, and good art came. But that is too simple. That a poet, a statesman or a novelist should be produced in response to a national desire is not inconceivable; for poets, statesmen and novelists find their material in the air, as we say, in the ideas of the moment. They are for the most part products of their time. But the great Dutch painters of the seventeenth century were expressing no real idea. Nor, even supposing they had done so, is it to be understood how the demand for them should yield such a supply of unsurpa.s.sed technical power: how a perfectly disciplined hand should be instantly at the public service.

That Holland in an expansive mood of satisfaction at her success should have wished to see groups of her gallant arquebusiers and portraits of her eminent burghers is not to be wondered at, and we can understand that respectable painters of such pictures should arise in some force to supply the need--just as wherever in this country at the present day there are cricketers and actresses, there also are photographers. That painters of ordinary merit should be forthcoming is, as I have said, no wonder: the mystery is that masters of technique whose equal has never been before or since should have arisen in such numbers; that in the s.p.a.ce of a few years--between say 1590 and 1635--should have been born in a country never before given to the cultivation of the arts Rembrandt and Jan Steen, Vermeer and De Hooch, Van der Helst and Gerard Dou, Fabritius and Maes, Ostade and Van Goyen, Potter and Ruisdael, Terburg and Cuyp. That is the staggering thing.

Another curious circ.u.mstance is that by 1700 it was practically all over, and Dutch art had become a convention. The G.o.ds had gone. Not until very recently has Holland had any but half G.o.ds since.

It may of course be urged that Italy had witnessed a somewhat similar phenomenon. But the spiritual stimulus of the Renaissance among the naturally artistic southerners cannot, I think, be compared with the stimulus given by the establishment of prosperity to these cold and material northerners. The making of great Italian art was a gradual process: the Dutch masters sprang forth fully armed at the first word of command. In the preceding generation the Rembrandts had been millers; the Steens brewers; the Dous glaziers; and so forth. But the demand for pictures having sounded, their sons were prepared to be painters of the first magnitude. Why try to explain this amazing event? Let there rather be miracles.

I have said that the great Dutch painters expressed no idea; and yet this is not perfectly true. They expressed no constructive idea, in the way that a poet or statesman does; but all had this in common, that they were informed by the desire to represent things--intimate and local things--as they are. The great Italians had gone to religion and mythology for their subjects: nearer at hand, in Antwerp, Rubens was pursuing, according to his lights, the same tradition. The great Dutchmen were the first painters to bend their genius exclusively to the honour of their own country, its worthies, its excesses, its domestic virtues, its trivial dailiness. Hals and Rembrandt lavished their power on Dutch arquebusiers and governors of hospitals, Dutch burgomasters and physicians; Ostade and Brouwer saw no indignity in painting Dutch sots as well as Dutch sots could be painted; De Hooch introduced miracles of sunlight into Dutch cottages; Maes painted old Dutch housewives, and Metsu young Dutch housewives, to the life; Vermeer and Terburg immortalised Dutch ladies at their spinets; Albert Cuyp toiled to suffuse Dutch meadows and Dutch cows with a golden glow; Jan Steen glorified the humblest Dutch family scenes; Gerard Dou spent whole weeks upon the fingers of a common Dutch hand. In short, art that so long had been at the service only of the Church and the proud, became suddenly, without losing any of its divinity, a fireside friend. That is what Holland did for painting.

It would have been a great enjoyment to me to have made this chapter a companion to the Ryks Museum: to have said a few words about all the pictures which I like best. But had I done so the rest of the book would have had to go, for all my s.p.a.ce would have been exhausted. And therefore, as I cannot say all I want to say, I propose to say very little, keeping only to the most importunate pictures. Here and there in this book, particularly in the chapters on Dordrecht, Haarlem, and Leyden's painters, I have already touched on many of them.

The particular s.h.i.+ning glory of the Ryks Museum is Rembrandt's "Night Watch," and it is well, I think, to make for that picture at once. The direct approach is down the Gallery of Honour, where one has this wonderful canvas before one all the way, as near life as perhaps any picture ever painted. It is possible at first to be disappointed: expectation perhaps had been running too high; the figure of the lieutenant (in the yellow jerkin) may strike one as a little mean. But do not let this distress you. Settle down on one of the seats and take Rembrandt easily, "as the leaf upon the tree"; settle down on another, and from the new point of view take him easily, "as the gra.s.s upon the weir". Look at Van der Helst's fine company of arquebusiers on one of the side walls; look at Franz Hals' company of arquebusiers on the other; then look at Rembrandt again. Every minute his astounding power is winning upon you. Walk again up the Gallery of Honour and turning quickly at the end, see how much light there is in the "Night Watch". Advance upon it slowly.... This is certainly the finest technical triumph of pigment that you have seen. What a glow and greatness.

After a while it becomes evident that Rembrandt was the only man who ought to have painted arquebusiers at all. Van der Heist and Frans Hals are sinking to the level of gifted amateurs. Why did not Rembrandt paint all the pictures? you begin to wonder. And yet the Hals and the Van der Helsts were so good a little while ago.

Hals and Van der Helst are, however, to recover their own again; for the "Night Watch," I am told, is to be moved to a building especially erected for it, where the lighting will be more satisfactory than connoisseurs now consider it. Perhaps it is as well. It is hard to be so near the rose; and there are few pictures in the recesses of the Gallery of Honour which the "Night Watch" does not weaken; some indeed it makes quite foolish.

It is not of course really a night watch at all. Captain Franz Banning Cocq's arquebusiers are leaving their Doelen in broad day; the centralisation of sunlight from a high window led to the mistake, and nothing now will ever change the t.i.tle.

How little these careless gallant arquebusiers, who paid the painter-man a hundred florins apiece to be included in the picture, can have thought of the destiny of the work! Of Captain Franz Banning Cocq as a soldier we know nothing, but as a sitter he is hardly second to any in the world.

But it is not the "Night Watch" that I recall with the greatest pleasure when I think of the Ryks Rembrandts. It is that wise and serene old lady in the Van der Poll room--Elizabeth Bas--who sits there for all time, unsurpa.s.sed among portraits. This picture alone is worth a visit to Holland. I recall also, not with more pleasure than the "Night Watch," but with little less, the superb group of syndics in the Staalmeester room. It is this picture--with the "School of Anatomy"

at The Hague--that in particular makes one wish it had been possible for all the Corporation pieces to have been from Rembrandt's brush. It is this picture which deprives even Hals of some of his divinity, and makes Van der Helst a dull dog. If ever a picture of Dutch gentlemen was painted by a Dutch gentleman it is this.

Having seen the "Night Watch" again, it is a good plan to study the Gallery of Honour. To pick out one's favourite picture is here not difficult: it is No. 1501, "The Endless Prayer," by Nicolas Maes, of which I have said something in the chapter on Dordrecht, the painter's birthplace. Its place is very little below that of Elizabeth Bas, by Maes's master.

It is always interesting in a fine gallery to ask oneself which single picture one would choose before all others if such a privilege were offered. The answer if honest is a sure revelation of temperament, for one would select of a certainty a picture satisfying one's prevailing moods rather than a picture of any sensational character. In other words, the picture would have to be good to live with. To choose from thousands of masterpieces one only is a very delicate test.

If the Dutch Government, stimulated to grat.i.tude for the encomiastic character of the present book, were to offer me my choice of the Ryks Museum pictures I should not hesitate a moment. I should take No. 2527--"Woman Reading a Letter" (damaged), by Vermeer of Delft. You will see a reproduction in black and white on the opposite page; but how wide a gulf between the picture and the process block. The jacket, for example, is the most lovely cool blue imaginable.

This picture, apart from its beauty, is interesting as an ill.u.s.tration of the innovating courage of Vermeer. Who else at that date would have placed the woman's head against a map almost its own colour? Many persons think that such daring began with Whistler. It is, however, Terburg who most often suggests Whistler. Vermeer had, I think, a rarer distinction than Terburg. Vermeer would never have painted such a crowded group (however masterly) as that of Terburg's "Peace of Munster" in our National Gallery; he could not have brought himself so to pack humanity. Among all the Dutch masters I find no such fastidious aristocrat.

He, Vermeer, has another picture at the Ryks--"De brief"

(No. 2528)--which technically is wonderful; but the whole effect is artificial and sophisticated, very different from his best transparent mood.

Any mortification, by the way, which I might suffer from the knowledge that No. 2527 can never be mine is allayed by the knowledge, equally certain, that it can never be any one else's. Money is powerless here. To the offer of a Rothschild the Government would return as emphatic a negative as to a request from me.

The room in which is Vermeer's "Reader" contains also Maes's "Spinning Woman" (see page 230), two or three Peter de Hoochs and the best Jan Steen in the Ryks. It is indeed a room to linger in, and to return to, indefinitely. De Hooch's "Store Room" (No. 1248), of which I have already spoken, is in one of the little "Cabinet piece" rooms, which are not too well lighted. Here also one may spend many hours, and then many hours more.

The "Peace of Munster" has been called Terburg's masterpiece: but the girl in his "Paternal Advice," No. 570 at the Ryks, seems to me a finer achievement. The grace and beauty and truth of her pose and the miraculous painting of her dress are unrivalled. Yet judged as a picture it is, I think, dull. The colouring is dingy, time has not dealt kindly with the background; but the figure of the girl is perfect. I give a reproduction opposite page 190. It was this picture, in one of its replicas, that Goethe describes in his _Elective Affinities_: a description which procured for it the probably inaccurate t.i.tle "Parental Advice".

We have a fine Terburg in our National Gallery--"The Music Lesson"--and here too is his "Peace of Munster," which certainly was a great feat of painting, but which does not, I think, reproduce his peculiar characteristics and charm. These may be found somewhere between "The Music Lesson" and the portrait next the Vermeer in the smallest of the three Dutch rooms. Even more ingratiating than "The Music Lesson"

is "The Toilet" at the Wallace Collection. Terburg might be called a pocket Velasquez--a description of him which will be appreciated at the Ryks Museum in the presence of his tiny and captivating "Helena van der Schalcke," No. 573, one of the gems of the Cabinet pieces (see opposite page 290), and his companion pictures of a man and his wife, each standing by a piece of red furniture--I think Nos. 574 and 575. The execution of the woman's muslin collar is among the most dexterous things in Dutch art.

From the Ryks Museum it is but a little way (past the model Dutch garden) to the Stedelijk Museum, where modern painting may be studied--Israels and Bosboom, Mesdag and James Maris, Breitner and Jan van Beers, Blommers and Weissenbruch.

There is also one room dedicated to paintings of the Barbizon school, and of this I would advise instant search. I rested my eyes here for an hour. A vast scene of cattle by Troyon (who, such is the poverty of the Dutch alphabet, comes out monstrously upon the frame as Troijon); a mysterious valley of trees by Corot; a wave by Courbet; a mere at evening by Daubigny--these are like cool firm hands upon one's forehead.

The statement