EUROPEAN ART AND GRUB.
EUROPEAN ART AND GRUB.
Bruges,Belgium, Aug. 8, 1905.
In this quaint old town we are spending the last day of our stay on the continent of Europe. To-morrow we sail from Ostend to Dover, and the prospect of a return to a land where the English language is spoken is next to getting home.
Of all the cities of the Netherlands, Bruges has best held on to the ancient appearance and ways. The fact may be explained by the figures. During the boom in Belgium a few centuries ago, Bruges had a population of 200,000, while now there are only 54,000. There was no necessity to tear down the old buildings to make room for modern structures or provide wide boulevards and promenades. Consequently the old buildings stand, only modified in appearance by the wear and tear of weather and years. The sole business of the town as near as I could see is lace-making, and as the women do that there is little left for the men, except to drive cabs and hold the offices. We walked down a little narrow street, perhaps twelve feet wide, lined from one end to the other on this pleasant day with women sitting on stools making lace. The advent of a few Americans almost caused a riot in the desire to see and be seen, and the little street seemed to swarm with women and with children. Working over the pillow these women make lace to be sold at15 or 20 cents for their day’s labor. Girls hardly into their teens and grandmothers up in the 80’s were laboring side by side. One old lady with whom we had a most delightful visit, although neither could understand the other’s language, and from whom Mrs. Morgan bought some of the handiwork, is 86 years old, and yet she cheerfully and ably manipulates the hand-shuttles that make the lace as if she were not half that age. There is a special provision of Providence that nearly always applies. These women of all ages who have to make lace or starve, work in abominable light and yet have excellent eyesight and never wear spectacles or glasses. In America, where the lace is bought and where such work is a delicate, eye-trying task, the women have trouble with their eyesight and must have artificial help to see the lace that the Belgian women make. The wind is tempered to the shorn lamb.
Bruges is also the depository of the earliest specimens of Dutch and Flemish art, for here nearly 500 years ago lived Jan Van Eyck, and he and his brother were the pioneers in the style of painting which is generally known as “Dutch.” They were followed a few years later by Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, De Crayer, Jordaens, and their crowd, who went to Italy and learned a good deal, but who were really followers of the Van Eycks. I have spent some time in the art galleries at Amsterdam, The Hague, Antwerp and Brussels, and have picked up a smattering of knowledge of Dutch and Flemish art which I would like to unload. The “whole shooting-match,” as the Germans wouldsay, is generally called Dutch, but there is a perceptible difference between the work in Holland and Belgium, although the artists lived so close together that they naturally formed one great school. Peter Paul Rubens, who generally gets first place, was a Belgian, although he was born out of that country when his parents were politically exiled. He lived at Antwerp and was brought up in a Jesuit school in a Catholic country. Rembrandt was a Dutchman, born at Leyden, Holland, and a politician as well as an artist in a Protestant country. If one will reflect upon the religious situation in Europe in the early seventeenth century, he will see that no matter if both used the same colors and the same rules for drawing, they were bound to treat different subjects, or have different conceptions of the same subject. Van Dyck, the third of the celebrated trio, was born in Antwerp, but went to London, and there did most of his work in portrait-painting, his specialty, because he was better paid by Englishmen. The Catholic Rubens and his followers painted for the churches and cathedrals, and for a Catholic constituency, and usually portrayed religious subjects, while Rembrandt and his pupils painted for the Dutch burghers, and their best pictures are of men, grouped in military companies or trade guilds. Rubens is more ideal and spiritual, Rembrandt more material and human. Therefore it is that people who like one often do not appreciate the other. I really like the Dutch art better than the Italian, although it is a good deal like a boy trying to decide whether he will have cherry pie or custard pie, and wanting both. The influenceof environment and education is clearly seen in the fat Madonnas and the pictures of public-houses and drinking-bouts which are favorite subjects. The Dutch artists also lean to “realism,” and about nine times in ten a picture of the realist school is unpleasant and therefore to my mind inartistic. For example, one of Rubens’s great masterpieces represents the martyrdom of a saint who had his tongue torn out, and in the picture the executioner is handing the red, bleeding tongue to a dog. Another picture shows an execution, the axeman holding up the head, and the body with the stump of a neck the main feature of the foreground. Some people like this sort of thing, but I don’t. For a hundred years after Rubens and Rembrandt, the Netherlands produced no art, at the time the countries themselves were demoralized and the prey of the larger powers. Recently Dutch art has revived in the portraying of Dutch landscapes, windmills, canals and such, and to my mind it is the pleasantest and most effective art now alive in Europe, away ahead of the Italians, who persist in imitating the old masters and tackling subjects which have been thoroughly covered so much that there is hardly a chance for a new impression.
Every town of any size in Belgium and Holland has a public art gallery, and the people ought to be artists merely from association. But as a matter of fact three-fourths of the visitors to the galleries when I was there were Americans and English.
Speaking of art reminds me of hotels. Before leaving Europe I want to pay a tribute to the hotel-keepers of the continent. I must have been wrongly impressed by what I had read and heard, for I had looked forward with dread to the queer ways and the strange dishes I was to go against on the trip. As a matter of fact the hotels in Europe are better and cheaper than those of America. The management is more courteous, the service better, and the eating far surpasses the equivalent in the United States. The “tipping system” is not bad at all and the effort of the landlord to get at your money is concealed by a show of cordiality and hospitality which I have never experienced in a strange hostelry in my own country. I am overcharged and worked ten times more in Kansas City, Chicago and New York than in Rome, Cologne, Brussels, or any other European city.
When a traveler arrives at a continental hotel he is greeted at the entrance by the hall porter or clerk, and instead of being bulldozed over a counter by a gentleman with a diamond stud into paying twice the ordinary price for a room, he is quietly and pleasantly told what rooms are vacant, what are their rates, and allowed to make a selection. He does not have to tip a porter or a bell-boy for every little favor. From the proprietor to the “boots” everyone in the hotel is at your service and nothing to pay—not then. Of course you expect to do the right thing when you leave, but for the time this cordial service seems to be spontaneous and animated with a sincere desire for your comfort. In Germany the proprietor of the hotel keepsup the pretense that you are his guest, and every day he inquires after your welfare. In the German restaurants the proprietor walks around and speaks pleasantly to everyone and you feel that he is really glad to see you without associating that sensation with the payment of the bill. Everything and everybody in the hotel is at your service. There is always a reading-room with newspapers, often American papers, smoking-rooms, lounging-rooms, and comfortable parlors where it is a pleasure to spend the time. In nearly every hotel there is a free library, mostly books of the country, but always some in English. At the Parker House in Boston, my last stopping-place in America, I had been surprised and delighted to find a well-selected library for the use of the guests of the hotel. I supposed that was a Boston innovation and was prepared to brag about it, but I have found a similar library in nearly every hotel at which I have stayed in Europe. An American hotel does not give half the space to the general use and comfort of guests that a European hotel does, and what it does offer is usually only a big office and stiff parlors in which people stay only when they can find nowhere else to go.
European cooking is far ahead of American cooking. A cook in this country is not an accident, not a man or woman who is cooking until a better job offers. A cook is something between a professional man and a skilled mechanic, and young men learn the business as thoroughly as they do engineering or banking. Labor is cheap, so that in the kitchen as well as in the front rooms there is always plenty of service, and it is bypeople who are brought up to it and not by boys or men who are down on their luck. I expected to be “fussy” over the cooking and cookery, but I have hardly had a poor meal in Europe and not a bad one at all. There is not much difference in the stuff used or in the way of serving, but the work is better done, and all the good American dishes like beefsteak and eggs are found in Europe looking as natural as life. The Europeans do more with mutton, veal and fish and less with beef than our cooks, and the small farms raise vegetables that are delicious.
When one leaves the hotel the proprietor or manager always comes to see him off and say good-by. There isn’t such a crowd of servants waiting for tips as is generally alleged. Your porter, who has polished your shoes and carried your baggage, is on hand, and the chambermaid casually meets you on the stairs. The head waiter expects a tip and so does the hall porter, and there are usually a couple of other attendants ready to receive, but not obnoxiously so. I learned that the best way to do was to be as polite as the Europeans. A few minutes before time to leave I would say good-by to the head waiter, the smoking-room attendant, and any other who had rendered special service, giving each a small tip which he always took with many expressions of good-will and appreciation. That prevented any assemblage at the door when we left, and the last good-bys and tips were only expected by the man who brought the baggage and the hall porter who put us in the carriage and gave me full information as regards the coming journey and the next stop.
The rates at European hotels are much less than in ours. The prices for rooms are about half what they would be in America for similar accommodations in the same-sized places. The restaurant prices are a little less than ours. I should say that in Europe you pay about $2 to $3 a day for what would cost $3 to $4 in America. In small hotels and boarding-houses the same ratio is maintained, and there is no doubt in my mind that “room and board” on a European trip for an American is little more than half what it would be for a European in America. In these prices I include tips. The ordinary American will greatly enjoy life on the continent, provided, of course, he does not always eat at the “table d’hôte,” or regular meal-table, which is monotonous everywhere. And also he must not want a room with a bath, or an elevator. Very few buildings in Europe have elevators, and the natives do not use them. It is an inconvenience to walk up two or three flights of stairs to your room, but in the hotels that do not have “lifts” you must remember that is the way the nobility and everybody does in Europe, and quit kicking. You can get a bath in the bathroom or you can scrub yourself with the contents of the washbowl, after you have had some experience. That is the custom of the country, and the thing to do is not to be telling about the rooms with baths in America, but accept the situation, look pleasant, and you will get along all right. It is the same way in Europe that it is everywhere else in this vale of tears: if you look for trouble you easily find it, and if you are constantly talking and thinking of the conveniences whichAmerican customs have provided and which are not used in Europe, you can make yourself miserable and unpopular. But if you accept the ways of the country, enjoy the novelties even if they seem old-fashioned and strange, you will have a grand old time and will make yourself solid with the people.
In Europe the name “United States” is rarely used. We are “Americans.” The people of Canada are Canadians and the people of the United States have the sole use of the title of Americans. They consider us the whole thing, and we always admit it without argument. There is a general impression in the Old World that all Americans are rich. There is a general impression that sometime we will fight the rest of the world, and I think there is an impression that we will lick. So far as I can see, Americans are treated about as well as dukes, and the ways of traveling are greased for them by everybody along the line. (Grease to be paid for, of course.) In two months’ travel on the continent, usually not knowing the language, we have never missed a train or connection, been mistreated or imposed upon, allowed to suffer inconvenience or annoyance. That is a record it would be hard to equal in America.