A Wanderer in Holland Part 6

With labour a.s.siduous due pleasure I mix, And in one day atone for the bus'ness of six.

In a little Dutch chaise, on a Sat.u.r.day night, On my left hand my Horace, a nymph on my right: No memoirs to compose, and no post-boy to move, That on Sunday may hinder the softness of love; For her, neither visits, nor parties at tea, Nor the long-winded cant of a dull refugee: This night and the next shall be hers, shall be mine To good or ill-fortune the third we resign.

Thus scorning the world, and superior to Fate, I drive in my car in professional state; So with Phia thro' Athens Pisistratus rode, Men thought her Minerva, and him a new G.o.d.

But why should I stories of Athens rehea.r.s.e, Where people knew love, and were partial to verse, Since none can with justice my pleasures oppose In Holland half-drowned in int'rest and prose?

By Greece and past ages what need I be tried When The Hague and the present are both on my side?

And is it enough for the joys of the day To think what Anacreon or Sappho would say, When good Vandergoes and his provident Vrow, As they gaze on my triumph, do freely allow, That, search all the province, you'll find no man dar is So blest as the _Englishen Heer Secretar is_?

Let me close this rambling account of The Hague with a pa.s.sage from James Howell, in one of his conspicuously elaborate _Familiar Letters_, written in 1622, describing some of the odd things to be seen at that day in or about the Dutch city: "We went afterwards to the _Hague_, where there are hard by, though in several places, two wonderful things to be seen, the one of _Art_, the other of _Nature_; that of _Art_ is a Waggon or s.h.i.+p, or a monster mixt of both like the _Hippocentaure_ who was half man and half horse; this Engin hath wheels and sails that will hold above twenty people, and goes with the wind, being drawn or mov'd by nothing else, and will run, the wind being good, and the sails hois'd up, above fifteen miles an hour upon the even hard sands: they say this Invention was found out to entertain _Spinola_ when he came thither to treat of the last Truce." Upon this wonder, which I did not see, civilisation has now improved, the wind being but a captious and untrustworthy servant compared with petrol or steam. None the less there is still a very rapid wheeled s.h.i.+p at Zandvoort.

But the record of Howell's other wonder is visible still. He continues: "That wonder of _Nature_ is a Church-monument, where an Earl and a Lady are engraven with 365 children about them, which were all delivered at one birth; they were half male, half female; the two Basons in which they were Christened hang still in the Church, and the Bishop's Name who did it; and the story of this Miracle, with the year and the day of the month mentioned, which is not yet 200 years ago; and the story is this: That the Countess walking about her door after dinner, there came a Begger-woman with two Children upon her back to beg alms, the Countess asking whether those children were her own, she answer'd, she had them both at one birth, and by one Father, who was her husband. The Countess would not only not give her any alms, but reviled her bitterly, saying, it was impossible for one man to get two children at once. The Begger-woman being thus provok'd with ill words, and without alms, fell to imprecations, that it should please G.o.d to show His judgment upon her, and that she might bear at one birth as many children as there be days in the year, which she did before the same year's end, having never born child before."

The legend was naturally popular in a land of large families, and it was certainly credited without any reservation for many years. In England the rabbit-breeding woman of Dorking had her adherents too. What the beggar really wished for the Dutch lady was as many children at one birth as there were days in the year in which the conversation occurred--namely three, for the encounter was on January 3rd. Or so I have somewhere read. But it is more amusing to believe in the greater number, especially as a Dutch author has put it on record that he saw the children with his own eyes. They were of the size of shrimps, and were baptised either singly or collectively by Guy, Bishop of Utrecht. All the boys were named John and all the girls Elizabeth, They died the same day.

Thomas Coryate of the _Crudities_, who also tells the tale, believed it implicitly. "This strange history," he says, "will seem incredible (I suppose) to all readers. But it is so absolutely and undoubtedly true as nothing in the world more."

And here, hand in hand with Veritas, we leave The Hague.

Chapter VI

Scheveningen and Katwyk

The Dutch heaven--Huyghens' road--Sorgh Vliet's builder--Jacob Cats--Homely wisdom--President Kruger--A monstrous resort--Giant snails--The black-headed mannikins--The etiquette of petticoats--Katwyk--The old Rhine--Noordwyk--Noordwyk-Binnen.

Good Dutchmen when they die go to Scheveningen; but my heaven is elsewhere. To go thither is, however, no calamity, so long as one chooses the old road. It is being there that so lowers the spirits. The Oude Scheveningen Weg is perhaps the pleasantest, and certainly the shadiest, road in Holland: not one avenue but many, straight as a line in Euclid. On either side is a spreading wood, among the trees of which, on the left hand, as one leaves The Hague, is Sorgh Vliet, once the retreat of old Jacob Cats, lately one of the residences of a royal Duke, and now sold to a building company. The road dates from 1666, its projector being Constantin Huyghens, poet and statesman, whose statue may be seen at the half-way halting-place. By the time this is reached the charm of the road is nearly over: thenceforward it is all villas and Scheveningen.

But we must pause for a little while at Sorgh Vliet (which has the same meaning as _Sans Souci_), where two hundred years ago lived in genial retirement the writer who best represents the shrewd sagacity of the Dutch character--Jacob Cats, or Vader Cats as he was affectionately called, the author of the Dutch "Household Bible,"

a huge miscellaneous collection of wise saws and modern instances, humour and satire, upon all the businesses of life.

Mr. Austin Dobson, who leaves grains of gold on all he touches, has described in his _Side-Walk Studies_ the huge, ill.u.s.trated edition of Cats' Works (Amsterdam, 1655) which is held sacred in all rightly const.i.tuted old-fas.h.i.+oned Dutch households. I have seen it at the British Museum, and it seems to me to be one of the best picture-books in the world.

As Mr. Dobson says, the life of old Holland is reproduced in it. "What would one not give for such an ill.u.s.trated copy of Shakespeare! In these pages of Jacob Cats we have the authentic Holland of the seventeenth century:--its vanes and spires and steep-roofed houses; its gardens with their geometric tulip-beds, their formally-clipped alleys and arches, their s.h.i.+ning parallelograms of water. Here are its old-fas.h.i.+oned interiors, with the deep fire-places and queer andirons, the huge four-posters, the prim portraits on the wall, the great bra.s.s-clamped coffers and carved _armories_ for the ruffs and starched collars and stiff farthingales of the women. In one picture you may see the careful housewife mournfully inspecting a moth-eaten garment which she has just taken from a chest that Wardour Street might envy; in another she is energetically cuffing the 'foolish fat scullion,' who has let the spotted Dalmatian coach-dog overturn the cauldron at the fire. Here an old crone, with her spectacles on, is cautiously probing the contents of the said cauldron with a fork; here the mistress of the house is peeling pears; here the plump and soft-hearted cheese-wife is entertaining an admirer--outside there are pictures as vivid. Here are the clumsy leather-topped coach with its masked occupant and stumbling horses; the towed _trekschuit_, with its merry freight, sliding swiftly through the low-lying landscape; the windy mole, stretching seaward, with its blown and flaring beacon-fire. Here again in the street is the toy-shop with its open front and store of mimic drums and halberds for the martial little burghers; here are the fruiteress with her stall of grapes and melons, the rat-catcher with his string of trophies, the fowler and his clap-net, the furrier with his stock of skins."

In 1860 a number of Van der Venne's best pictures were redrawn by John Leighton to accompany translations of the fables by Richard Pigot. As a taste of Cats' quality I quote two of the pieces. Why the pictures should have been redrawn when they might have been reproduced exactly is beyond my understanding. This is one poem:--

LIKE MELONS, FRIENDS ARE TO BE FOUND IN PLENTY OF WHICH NOT EVEN ONE IS GOOD IN TWENTY.

In choosing Friends, it's requisite to use The self-same care as when we Melons choose: No one in haste a Melon ever buys, Nor makes his choice till three or four he tries; And oft indeed when purchasing this fruit, Before the buyer can find one to suit, He's e'en obliged t' examine half a score, And p'rhaps not find one when his search is o'er.

Be cautious how you choose a friend; For Friends.h.i.+ps that are lightly made, Have seldom any other end Than grief to see one's trust betray'd!

And here is another:--

SMOKE IS THE FOOD OF LOVERS.

When Cupid open'd Shop, the Trade he chose Was just the very one you might suppose.

Love keep a shop?--his trade, Oh! quickly name!

A Dealer in tobacco--Fie for shame!

No less than true, and set aside all joke, From oldest time he ever dealt in Smoke; Than Smoke, no other thing he sold, or made; Smoke all the substance of his stock in trade; His Capital all Smoke, Smoke all his store, 'Twas nothing else; but Lovers ask no more-- And thousands enter daily at his door!

Hence it was ever, and it e'er will be The trade most suited to his faculty:-- Fed by the vapours of their heart's desire, No other food his Votaries require; For, that they seek--The Favour of the Fair, Is unsubstantial as the Smoke and air.

From these rhymes, with their home-spun philosophy, one might a.s.sume Cats to have been merely a witty peasant. But he was a man of the highest culture, a great jurist, twice amba.s.sador to England, where Charles I. laid his sword on his shoulder and bade him rise Sir Jacob, a traveller and the friend of the best intellects. From an interesting article on Dutch poetry in an old _Foreign Quarterly Review_ I take an account of the aphorist: "Vondel had for his contemporary a man, of whose popularity we can hardly give an idea, unless we say that to speak Dutch and to have learnt Cats by heart, are almost the same thing. Old Father Jacob Cats--(we beg to apologize for his unhappy name--and know not why, like the rest of his countrymen, he did not euphonize it into some well-sounding epithet, taken from Greece or Rome--Elouros, for example, or Felisius; Catsius was ventured upon by his contemporaries, but the honest grey-beard stuck to his paternities)--was a man of practical wisdom--great experience--much travel--considerable learning--and wonderful fluency. He had occupied high offices of state, and retired a patriarch amidst children and children's children, to that agreeable retreat which we mentioned as not far from The Hague, where we have often dreamed his sober and serious--but withal cheerful and happy, spirit, might still preside. His moralities are sometimes prolix, and sometimes rather dull. He often sweeps the bloom away from the imaginative antic.i.p.ations of youth--and in that does little service. He will have everything substantial, useful, permanent. He has no other notion of love than that it is meant to make good husbands and wives, and to produce painstaking and obedient children.

"His poetry is rhymed counsel--kind, wise, and good. He calculates all results, and has no mercy for thoughts, or feelings, or actions, which leave behind them weariness, regret or misery. His volumes are a storehouse of prudence and worldly wisdom. For every state of life he has fit lessons, so nicely dovetailed into rhyme, that the morality seems made expressly for the language, or the language for the morality. His thoughts--all running about among the duties of life--voluntarily move in harmonious numbers, as if to think and to rhyme were one solitary attribute. For the nurse who wants a song for her babe--the boy who is tormented by the dread of the birch--the youth whose beard begins to grow--the lover who desires a posey for his lady's ring--for the husband--father--grandsire--for all there is a store--to encourage--to console--and to be grateful for. The t.i.tles of his works are indices to their contents. Among them are _De Ouderdom_, Old Age; _Buyten Leven_, Out-of-Doors Life; _Hofgedachten_, Garden Thoughts; _Gedachten op Slapelooze Nachten_, Thoughts of Sleepless Nights; _Trouwring_, Marriage Ring; _Zelfstrijt_, Self-struggle, etc. Never was a poet so essentially the poet of the people. He is always intelligible--always sensible--and, as was well said of him by Kruijff,

Smiling he teaches truth, and sporting wins to virtue."

When President Kruger died last year the memoirs of him agreed in fixing upon the Bible as his only reading. But I am certain he knew Vader Cats by heart too. If ever a master had a faithful pupil, Vader Cats had one in Oom Paul. The vivid yet homely metaphors and allegories in which Oom Paul conveyed so many of his thoughts were drawn from the same source as the emblems of Vader Cats. Both had the aesopian gift.

We have no one English writer with whom to compare Cats; but a syndicate formed of Fuller and Burton, Cobbett and Quarles might produce something akin.

Scheveningen is half squalid town, half monstrous pleasure resort. Upon its sea ramparts are a series of gigantic buildings, greatest of which is the Curhaus, where the best music in Holland is to be heard. Its pier and its promenade are not at the first glimpse unlike Brighton's; but the vast buildings have no counterpart with us, except perhaps at Blackpool. What is, however, peculiar to Scheveningen is its expanse of sand covered with sentry-box wicker chairs. To stand on the pier on a fine day in the season and look down on these thousands of chairs and people is to receive an impression of insect-like activity that I think cannot be equalled. Immovable as they are, the chairs seem to add to the restlessness of the seething ma.s.s. What a visitor from Mars would make of it is a mystery; but he could hardly fail to connect chair and occupant. Here, he would say, is surely the abode of giant snails!

On a windy day the chairs must be of great use; but in heat they seem to me too vertical and too hard. One must, however, either sit in them or lie upon sand. There is not a pebble on the whole coast: indeed there is not a pebble in Holland. Life after lying upon sand can become to some of us a burden almost too difficult to bear; but the Dutch holiday-maker does not seem to find it so. As for the children, they are truly in Paradise. There can be no sand better to dig in than that of Scheveningen; and they dig in it all day. A favourite game seems to be to surround the parental sentry-boxes with a fosse. Every family has its castle, and every castle its moat.

I have been twice to Scheveningen, and on each occasion I acquired beneath its glittering magnitude a sense of depression. That leaven of tenderness which every collection of human beings must have was harder to find at Scheveningen than anywhere in Holland--everything was so ordered, so organised, for pleasure, pleasure at any price, pleasure almost at the point of the bayonet.

But on the second occasion one little incident saved the day--an encounter with a strolling bird-fancier who dealt in Black-Headed Mannikins. Two of these tiny brisk birds, in their Quaker black and brown, sat upon his cane to attract purchasers. They fluttered to his finger, perched on his hat, simulated death in the palm of his hand, and went through other evolutions with the speed of thought and the bright spontaneous alacrity possible only to a small loyal bird. These, however, were not for sale: these were decoys; the saleable birds lay, packed far too close, in little wooden boxes in the man's bag. And Scheveningen to me means no longer a mile of palaces, no longer a "hot huddle of humanity" on the sand among myriad sentry-boxes: its symbol is just two Black-Headed Mannikins.

From the Curhaus it is better to return to the Hague by electric tram along the new road. Save for pa.s.sing a field where the fishwives of Scheveningen in their blue shawls spread and mend their nets, this road is dull and suburban; but from it, when the light is failing, a view of Scheveningen's domes and spires may be gained which, softened and made mysterious by the gloaming, translates the chief watering-place of Holland into an Eastern city of romance.

The fishwives of Scheveningen, I am told, carry the art of petticoat wearing to a higher point than any of their sisters. The appearance of the homing fleet in the offing is a signal for as many as thirty of these garments to be put on as a mark of welcome to a returning husband.

Probably no sh.o.r.e anywhere in the world has been so often painted as that of Scheveningen--ever since the painting of landscape seemed a worthy pursuit. James Maris' pictures of Scheveningen's wet sand, grey sea, and huge flat-bottomed s.h.i.+ps must run into scores; Mesdag's too. Perhaps it was the artists that prevailed on the fishermen to wear crimson knickerbockers--the note of warm colour that the scene demands.

Here, although it is separated from Scheveningen by some miles of sand, I should like to say something of Katwyk--which is Leyden's marine resort. A steam-tram carries people thither many times a day. The rail, when first I travelled upon it, in April, ran through tulips; in August, when I was there again, the patches of scarlet and orange had given way to acres of ma.s.sive purple-green cabbages which, in the evening light, were vastly more beautiful.

At Rynsburg, one of the villages on the way, dwelt in 1650-51 Benedict Spinoza, the philosopher, and there he wrote his abridgement of the Meditations of Descartes, his master in philosophy, who had for a while lived close by at Endegeest. Spinoza, who was born at Amsterdam in 1632, died in 1677. His house at Rynsburg, which he shared with a Colleginat (one of a sect of Remonstrants who had their headquarters there) is now a Spinoza museum; his statue is at The Hague.

Katwyk-aan-Zee is a compact little pleasure resort with the usual fantastic childish villas. Its most interesting possession is the mouth of the Old Rhine, now restricted by a ca.n.a.l and controlled by locks. There is perhaps no better example of the Dutch power over water than the contrast between the present narrow ca.n.a.l through which the river must disembogue and the unprofitable marsh which once spread here. The locks, which are nearly a hundred years old, were among the works of the engineer Conrad, whose monument is in Haarlem church.

From the Old Rhine's mouth to Noordwyk is a lonely but very bracing walk of three miles along the sand, with the dunes on one's right hand and the sea on one's left. One may meet perhaps a few sh.e.l.l gatherers, but no one else. We drove before us all the way a white company consisting of a score of gulls, twice as many tern, two oyster catchers and one curlew. They rose and settled, rose and settled, always some thirty yards away, until Noordwyk was reached, when we left them behind. Never was a j.a.panese screen so realised as by these birds against the pearl grey sea and yellow sand.

Katwyk is more cheery than Noordwyk; but Noordwyk has a prettier street--indeed, in its old part there is no prettier street in Holland in the light of sunset. As Hastings is to Eastbourne, so is Katwyk to Noordwyk; Scheveningen is Brighton, Yarmouth, and Blackpool in one. A very pretty lace cap is worn at Noordwyk by villagers and visitors alike, to hold the hair against the west wind.

From Noordwyk we walked to Noordwyk-Binnen, the real town, parent of the seaside resort; and there, at a table at the side of the main street, by an avenue so leafy as to exclude even glints of the sky, we sipped something Dutch whose name I could not a.s.similate, and waited for the tram for Leyden. It was the greenest tunnel I ever saw.

Chapter VII

Leyden