0063
Having got our engine more or less repaired, we departed from Sneek, a spot that beyond most spots abounds in its own individuality. Sneek is memorable. Impossible to credit that it has fewer than thirteen thousand inhabitants!
As, at breakfast, we dropped down the canal on the way to Leeuwarden, a new guest on board, whose foible is the search for the ideal, and who had been declaiming against the unattractiveness of the women of Munich, spoke thus:
“Is this Dutch bread? I think I should like to become a Dutchman, and live at Sneek, and marry a Dutch girl. They have such nice blue eyes, and they ‘re so calm.”
I remarked that I should have thought that his recent experiences in Munich would have frightened him right off the entire sex. He said:
“Well, they ‘re all beautiful in Vienna, and that worries you just as much in another way. Sneek is the mean.”
WE reached the Zuyder Zee, out of a canal, at Monnikendam, which is a respectably picturesque townlet and the port of embarkation for Marken, the alleged jewel of the Zuyder Zee, the precious isle where the customs and the costumes of a pure age are mingled with the prices of New York for the instruction of tourists. We saw Marken, but only from the mainland, a long, serrated silhouette on the verge. The skipper said that Marken was a side-show and a swindle, and a disgrace to his native country. So I decided to cut it out of the program, and be the owner of the only foreign yacht that had cruised in the Zuyder Zee without visiting Marken. My real reason was undoubtedly that the day’s program had been upset by undue lolling in the second-hand shops of Monnikendam. Thus we sailed due north for Hoorn, secretly fearing that at Marken there might be something lovely, unforgetable, that we had missed.
The Zuyder is a sea agreeable to sail upon, provided you don’t mind rain, and provided your craft does not draw more than about six feet. It has the appearance of a sea, but we could generally touch the bottom with our sounding-pole; after all, it is not a sea, but a submerged field. The skipper would tell inclement stories of the Zuyder Zee under ice, and how he had crossed it on foot between Enkhuizen and Stavoren, risking his life for fun; and how he had been obliged to recross it the next day, with more fatigue, as much risk, and far less fun, because there was no other way home. We ourselves knew it only as a ruffled and immense pond, with a bracing atmosphere and the silhouettes of diminished trees and houses sticking up out of its horizons here and there. When these low silhouettes happen to denote your destination, they have the strange faculty of receding from your prow just as fast as you sail toward them, a magic sea of an exquisite monotony; and when you arrive anywhere, you are so surprised at having overtaken the silhouette that your arrival is a dream, in the unreal image of a city.
The one fault of Hoorn is that it is not dead.
We navigated the Zuyder Zee in order to see dead cities, and never saw one. Hoorn is a delightful vision for the eye—beautiful domestic architecture, beautiful warehouses, beautiful towers, beautiful water-gate, beautiful aniline colors on the surface of dreadful canals. If it were as near to London and Paris as Bruges is, it would be inhabited exclusively by water-colorists. At Hoorn I went mad, and did eight sketches in one day, a record which approaches my highest break at billiards. Actually, it is inhabited by cheese-makers and dealers. No other town, not even Chicago, can possibly contain so many cheeses per head of the population as Hoorn. At Hoorn I saw three men in blue blouses throwing down spherical cheeses in pairs from the second story of a brown and yellow and green warehouse into a yellow cart. One man was in the second story, one in the first, and one in the cart. They were flinging cheeses from hand to hand when we arrived and when we left, and they never dropped a cheese or ceased to fling. They flung into the mysterious night, when the great forms of little cargo-steamers floated soundless over romance to moor at the dark quays, and the long, white English steam-yacht, with its two decks, and its chef and its flulfy chambermaid, and its polished mahogany motor-launch, and its myriad lights and gleams, glided to a berth by the water-tower, and hung there like a cloud beyond the town, keeping me awake half the night while I proved to myself that I did not really envy its owner and that the Velsa was really a much better yacht.
0070
The recondite enchantment of Hoorn was intensified by the fact that the English tongue was not current in it. I met only one Dutchman there who spoke it even a little, a military officer. Being on furlough, he was selling cigars in a cigar shop on behalf of his parents. Oh, British army officer! Oh, West Point Academy! He told me that officers of the Dutch army had to be able to speak English, French, and German. Oh, British army officer! Oh, West Point Academy! But he did not understand the phrase “East Indian cigar.” He said there were no such cigars in his parents’ shop. When I said “Sumatra,” he understood, and fetched his mother. When I said that I desired the finest cigars in Hoorn, his mother put away all the samples already exhibited and fetched his father. The family had begun to comprehend that a serious customer had strayed into the shop. The father, in apron, with a gesture of solemnity and deference went up-stairs, and returned in majesty with boxes of cigars that were warm to the touch. “These are the best?”
“These are the best.” I bought. They were threepence apiece.
A mild, deliciously courteous family, recalling the tobacco-selling sisters at Zieriksee, and a pair of tobacconist brothers in the Kalver-Straat, Amsterdam, whose politeness and soft voices would have atoned for a thousand Schiedams. The Hutch middle and upper classes have adorable manners. It was an ordeal to quit the soothing tobacco shop for the terrors of the long, exposed Iloorn High Street, infested, like too many Hutch streets, by wolves and tigers in the outward form of dogs—dogs that will threaten you for a milt and then bite, in order to prove that they are of the race that has always ended by expelling invaders with bloodshed.
I was safer in the yacht’s dinghy, on a surface of aniline hues, though the odors were murderous, and though for two hours, while I sketched, three violent young housewives were continually splashing buckets into the canal behind me as they laved and scrubbed every separate stone on the quay. If canals were foul, streets were as clean as table-tops—cleaner.
The other cities of the Zuyder Zee were not more dead than Hoorn, though Enkhuizen, our next port, was more tranquil, possibly because we arrived there on a Saturday evening. Enkhuizen, disappointing at the first glance, exerts a more subtle fascination than Iloorn. However, I remember it as the place where we saw another yacht come in, the owner steering, and foul the piles at the entrance. My skipper looked at his owner, as if to say, “You see what owners do when they take charge.” I admitted it.
We crossed from Enkhuizen to Stavoren in bad weather, lost the dinghy and recovered it, and nearly lost the yacht, owing to the cook having taken to his bunk without notice when it was imperative to shorten sail in a jiffy. The last that I heard of this cook was that he had become an omnibus conductor. Some people are born to rise, and the born omnibus conductor will reach that estate somehow. He was a pleasant, sad young man, and himself painted in water-colors.
0076
I dare say that at Stavoren we were too excited to notice the town; but I know that it was a busy port. Lemmer also was busy, a severely practical town, with a superb harbor-master, and a doctor who cured the cook. We were disappointed with Kampen, a reputed beauty-spot, praised even by E. V. Lucas, who never praises save on extreme provocation. Kampen has architecture,—wonderful gates,—but it also has the crudest pavements in Holland, and it does not smile hospitably, and the east wind was driving through it, and the rain. The most agreeable corner of Kampen was the charcoal-heated saloon of the yacht. We left Kampen, which perhaps, after all, really was dead, on September 21. The morning was warm and perfect. I had been afloat in various countries for seven weeks continuously, and this was my first warm, sunny morning. In three hours we were at the mouth of the tiny canal leading to Elburg. I was steering.
“Please keep the center of the channel,” the skipper enjoined me.
I did so, but we grounded. The skipper glanced at me as skippers are privileged to glance at owners, but I made him admit that we were within half an inch of the mathematical center of the channel. We got a line on to the pier, and hauled the ship off the sand by brute force. When I had seen El-burg, I was glad that this incident had occurred; for Elburg is the pearl of the Zuyder. Where we, drawing under four feet, grounded at high water in mid-channel, no smart, deep-draft English yacht with chefs and chambermaids can ever venture. And assuredly tourists will not go to Elburg by train. Elburg is safe. Therefore I feel free to mention the town.
Smacks were following one another up the canal for the week-end surcease, and all their long-coloredweins(vanes) streamed in the wind against the blue sky. And the charm of the inefficient canal was the spreading hay-fields on each side, with big wagons, and fat horses that pricked up their ears (doubtless at the unusual sight of our blue ensign), and a young mother who snatched her rolling infant from the hay and held him up to behold us. And then the skipper was excited by the spectacle of his aged father’s trading barge, unexpectedly making for the same port, with his mother, brother, and sister on deck—the crew! Arrived in port, we lay under the enormous flank of this barge, and the skipper boarded his old home with becoming placidity.
The port was a magnificent medley of primary colors, and the beautiful forms of boats, and the heavy curves of dark, drying sails, all dom nated by the toeing streaming in the hot sunshine. Every few minutes a smack arrived, and took its appointed place for Sunday. The basin seemed to be always full and always receptive. Nothing lacked for perfect picturesqueness, even to a little ship-repairing yard, and an establishment for raddling sails stretched largely out on green grass. The town was separated from the basin by a narrow canal and a red-brick water-gate. The main street ran straight away inland, and merged into an avenue of yellowish-green trees. At intervals straight streets branched off at right angles from the main. In the center of the burg was a square. Everywhere rich ancient roofs, gables, masonry, and brickwork in Indian reds and slaty-blues; everywhere glimpses of courtyards precisely imitated from the pictures of Pieter de Hooch. The interior of the church was a picture by Bosboom. It had a fine organ-case, and a sacristan out of a late novel by Huysmans.
The churchyard was a mass of tall flowers.
The women’s costumes here showed a difference, the gilt casque being more visibly divided into two halves. All bodices were black, all skirts blue. Some of the fishermen make majestic figures, tall, proud, commanding, fit adversaries of Alva; in a word, exemplifications of the grand manner. Their salutes were sometimes royal.
The gaiety of the color; the distinction of the forms; the strange warmth; the completeness of the entity of the town, which seemed to have been constructed at one effort; the content of the inhabitants, especially the visible, unconscious gladness of the women at the return of their mariners; the urbanity of everybody—all these things helped to produce a comfortable and yet disconcerting sensation that the old, unreformed world was not quite ripe for utter destruction.
All day until late in the evening smacks ceased not to creep up the canal. The aspect of the basin altered from minute to minute, with disastrous effect on water-colorists. In the dusk we ferreted In a gloomy and spellbound second-hand shop, amid dozens of rococo wall-clocks, and bought a few little things. As we finally boarded the yacht in the dark, we could see a group of sailors in a bosky arbor bending over a table on which was a lamp that harshly lighted their grave faces. They may have thought that they were calculating and apportioning the week’s profits; but in reality they were playing at masterpieces by Rembrandt.
0081
HAARLEM is the capital of a province, and has the airs of a minor metropolis. When we moored in the Donkere Spaarne, all the architecture seemed to be saying to us, with innocent pride, that this was the city of the illustrious Frans Hals, and the only place where Frans Hals could be truly appreciated. Haarlem did not stare at strangers, as did other towns. The shops in the narrow, busy Saturday-night streets were small and slow, and it took us most of an evening, in and out of the heavy rain, to buy three shawls, two pairs of white stockings, and some cigarettes; but the shopmen and shop-women, despite their ignorance of English, American, and French, showed no openmouthed provinciality at our fantastic demands. The impression upon us of the mysterious entity of the town was favorable; we felt at home.
The yacht was just opposite the habitation of a nice middle-class family, and on Sunday morning, through the heavy rain, I could see a boy of sixteen, a girl of fourteen, and a child of five or six, all dressing slowly together in a bedroom that overlooked us, while the father in shirt-sleeves constantly popped to and fro. They were calmly content to see and be seen. Presently father and son, still in shirt-sleeves, appeared on the stoop, each smoking a cigar, and the girl above, arrayed in Sunday white, moved about setting the bedroom in order. It was a pleasant average sight, enhanced by the good architecture of the house, and by a certain metropolitan self-unconsciousness.
We went to church later, or rather into a church, and saw beautiful models of ships hung in the nave, and aged men entering, with their hats on and good cigars in their mouths. For the rest, they resembled superintendents of English Sunday-schools or sidesmen of small parishes. In another church we saw a Sunday-school in full session, a parson in a high pulpit exhorting, secretary and minor officials beneath him, and all the boys standing up with shut eyes and all the girls sitting down with shut eyes. We felt that we were perhaps in the most Protestant country in Europe.
In the afternoon, when the rain-clouds lifted for a few moments and the museums were closed, we viewed the residential prosperity of Haarlem, of which the chief seat is the Nieuwe Gracht, a broad canal, forbidden to barges, flanked by broad quays beautifully paved in small red brick, and magnificent houses. A feature of the noble architecture here was that the light ornamentation round the front doors was carried up and round the central windows of the first and second stories. A grand street! One properly expected to see elegant women at the windows of these lovely houses,—some were almost palaces,—and one was disappointed. Women there were, for at nearly every splendid window, the family was seated, reading, talking, gazing, or drinking tea; but all the women were dowdy; the majority were middle-aged; none was beautiful or elegant. Nor was any of the visible furniture distinguished.
The beauty of Haarlem seems to be limited to architecture, pavements, and the moral comeliness of being neat and clean. The esthetic sense apparently stops there. Charm must be regarded in Haarlem with suspicion, as a quality dangerous and unrespectable. As daylight failed, the groups within gathered closer and closer to the windows, to catch the last yellow drops of it, and their curiosity about the phenomena of the streets grew more frank. We were examined. In return we examined. And a discussion arose as to whether inspection from within justified inquisitiveness from the street. The decision was that it did not; that a person inside a house had the right to quiz without being quizzed. But this merely academic verdict was not allowed to influence our immediate deportment. In many houses of the lesser streets tables were already laid for supper, and one noticed heavy silver napkin-rings and other silver. In one house the shadowy figures of a family were already grouped round a repast, and beyond them, through another white-curtained window at the back of the spacious room, could be discerned a dim courtyard full of green and yellow foliage. This agreeable picture, typifying all the domestic tranquillity and dignity of prosperous Holland, was the last thing we saw before the dark and the rain fell, and the gas-lamps flickered in.
0087
We entered The Hague through canals pitted by heavy rain, the banks of which showed many suburban residences, undistinguished, but set in the midst of good gardens. And because it was the holiday week,—the week containing the queen’s birthday,—and we desired quietude, we obtained permission to lie at the private quay of the gasworks. The creators of The Hague gas-works have made only one mistake: they ought to have accomplished their act much earlier, so that Balzac might have described it; for example, in “The Alkahest,” which has the best imaginative descriptions of Dutch life yet written. The Hague gas-works are like a toy, gigantic; but a toy. Impossible to believe that in this vast, clean, scrubbed, swept expanse, where every bit of coal is scrupulously in place, real gas is made. To believe, you must go into the city and see the gas actually burning. Even the immense traveling-cranes, when at work or otherwise, have the air of life-size playthings. Our quay was bordered with flower-beds. The workmen, however, seemed quite real workmen, realistically dirty, who were not playing at work, nor rising at five-thirty a.m. out of mere joyous ecstasy.
Nor did the bargemen who day and night ceaselessly and silently propelled their barges past us into the city by means of poles and sweat, seem to be toying with existence. The procession of these barges never stopped. On the queen’s birthday, when our ship was dressed, and the whole town was flagged, it went on, just as the decorated trams and tram-drivers went on. Some of the barges penetrated right through the populous districts, and emerged into the oligarchic quarter of ministries, bureaus, official residences, palaces, parks, art dealers, and shops of expensive lingerie—the quarter, as in every capital, where the precious traditions of correctness, patriotism, red-tape, order, luxury, and the moral grandeur of devising rules for the nice conduct of others are carefully conserved and nourished. This quarter was very well done, and the bargemen, with their perspiring industry, might have had the good taste to keep out of it.
The business center of The Hague, lying between the palaces and the gas-works, is cramped, crowded, and unimpressive. The cafés do not glitter, and everybody knows that the illumination of cafés in a capital is a sure index of a nation’s true greatness. Many small cafés, veiled in costly curtains at window and door, showed stray dazzling shafts of bright light, but whether the true greatness of Holland was hidden in these seductive arcana I never knew. Even in the holiday week the principal cafés were emptying soon after ten o’clock. On the other hand, the large stores were still open at that hour, and the shop-girls, whose pale faces made an admirable contrast to their black robes, were still serving ladies therein. At intervals, in the afternoons, one saw a chic woman, moving with a consciousness of her own elegance; but she was very exceptional. The rest might have run over for the day from Haarlem, Delft, Utrecht, or Leyden. In the really excellent and well-frequented music-halls there was no elegance either. I have never anywhere seen better music-hall entertainments than in Holland. In certain major capitals of Europe and elsewhere the public is apt to prove its own essential naïveté by allowing itself to be swindled nightly in gorgeous music-halls. The Dutch are more astute, if less elegant.
The dying engine of the yacht lost consciousness, for about the twentieth time during this trip, as we were nearing Amsterdam; but a high wind, carrying with it tremendous showers of rain, kindly blew us, under bare poles, up the last half-mile of the North Sea Canal into the private haven of the Royal Dutch Yacht-Club, where we were most amicably received, as, indeed, in all the yacht-club basins of Holland. Baths, telephones, and smoking-rooms were at our disposal without any charge, in addition to the security of the haven, and it was possible to get taxicabs from the somewhat distant city. We demanded a chauffeur who could speak English. They sent us a taxi with two chauffeurs neither of whom could speak any language whatsoever known to philologists. But by the use of maps and a modification of the pictorial writing of the ancient Aztecs, we contrived to be driven almost where we wanted. At the end of the excursion I had made, in my quality of observer, two generalizations: first, that Amsterdam taxis had two drivers for safety; and, second, that taxi-travel in Amsterdam was very exciting and dangerous. But our drivers were so amiable, soft-tongued, and energetic that I tipped them both. I then, somehow, learned the truth: one of the men was driving a taxi for the first time, and the other was teaching him.
0094
After driving and walking about Amsterdam for several days, I decided that it would be completely civilized when it was repaved, and not before. It is the paradise of stomachs and the hell of feet. Happily, owing to its canals and its pavements, it has rather fewer of the rash cyclists who menace life in other Dutch cities. In Holland, outside Amsterdam, everybody uses a cycle. If you are ran down, as you are, it is just as likely to be by an aged and toothless female peasant as by an office boy. Also there are fewer homicidal dogs in Amsterdam than elsewhere, and there is the same general absence of public monuments which makes other Dutch cities so agreeably strange to the English and American traveler. You can scarcely be afflicted by a grotesque statue of a nonentity in Holland, because there are scarcely any statues.
Amsterdam is a grand city, easily outclassing any other in Holland. Its architecture is distinguished. Its historic past is impressively immanent in the masonry of the city itself, though there is no trace of it in the mild, commonplace demeanor of the inhabitants. Nevertheless, the inhabitants understand solidity, luxury, wealth, and good cheer. Amsterdam has a bourse which is the most peculiar caprice that ever passed through the head of a stock-broker. It is excessively ugly and graceless, but I admire it for being a caprice, and especially for being a stock-broker’s caprice. No English stock-broker would have a caprice. Amsterdam has small and dear restaurants of the first order, where a few people with more money than appetite can do themselves very well indeed in hushed privacy. It also has prodigious cafés. Krasnopolshy’s—a town, not a café—is said in Amsterdam to be the largest café in Europe. It isn’t; but it is large, and wondrously so for a city of only half a million people.
0099
In the prodigious cafés you perceive that Amsterdam possesses the quality which above all others a great city ought to possess. It pullulates. Vast masses of human beings simmer in its thoroughfares and boil over into its public resorts. The narrow Kalver-Straat, even in the rain, is thronged with modest persons who gaze at the superb luxury of its shops. The Kalver-Straat will compete handsomely with Bond Street. Go along the length of it, and you will come out of it thoughtful. Make your way thence to the Rembrandt-Plein, where pleasure concentrates, and you will have to conclude that the whole of Amsterdam is there, and all its habitations empty. The mirrored, scintillating cafés, huge and lofty and golden, are crowded with tables and drinkers and waiters, and dominated by rhapsodic orchestras of women in white who do what they can against the hum of ten thousand conversations, the hoarse calls of waiters, and the clatter of crockery. It is a pandemonium with a certain stolidity. The excellent music-halls and circuses are equally crowded, and curiously, so are the suburban resorts on the rim of the city. Among the larger places, perhaps, the Café Américain, on the Leidsche-Plein, was the least feverish, and this was not to be counted in its favor, because the visitor to a city which pullulates is, and should he, happiest in pullulating. The crowd, the din, the elbowing, the glitter for me, in a town like Amsterdam! In a town like Gouda, which none should fail to visit for the incomparable stained-glass in its church, I am content to be as placid and solitary as anybody, and I will follow a dancing bear and a Gipsy girl up and down the streets thereof with as much simplicity as anybody. But Amsterdam is the great, vulgar, inspiring world.
IDID not go yachting in Holland in order to visit museums; nevertheless, I saw a few. When it is possible to step off a yacht clean into a museum, and heavy rain is falling, the temptation to remain on board is not sufficiently powerful to keep you out of the museum. At Dordrecht there is a municipal museum manned by four officials. They received us with hope, with enthusiasm, with the most touching gratitude. Their interest in us was pathetic. They were all dying of ennui in those large rooms, where the infection hung in clouds almost visible, and we were a specific stimulant. They seized on us as the morphinomaniac seizes on an unexpected find of the drug.
0106
Just as Haarlem is the city of Frans Hals, so Dordrecht is the city of Ary Scheffer. Posterity in the end is a good judge of painters, if not of heroes, but posterity makes mistakes sometimes, and Ary Scheffer is one of its more glaring mistakes. (Josef Israels seems likely to be another.) And posterity is very slow in acknowledging an error. The Dordrecht museum is waiting for such an acknowledgment. When that comes, the museum will be burned down, or turned into a brewery, and the officials will be delivered from their dreadful daily martyrdom of feigning ecstatic admiration for Ary Scheffer. Only at Dordrecht is it possible to comprehend the full baseness, the exquisite unimportance, of Scheffer’s talent. The best thing of his in a museum full of him is a free, brilliant copy of a head by Rembrandt done at the age of eleven. It was, I imagine, his last tolerable work. His worst pictures, solemnly hung here, would be justifiably laughed at in a girls’ schoolroom. But his sentimentality, conventionality, and ugliness arouse less laughter than nausea. By chance a few fine pictures have come into the Dordrecht museum, as into most museums. Jakob Maris and Bosboom are refreshing, but even their strong influence cannot disinfect the place nor keep the officials alive. We left the museum in the nick of time, and saw no other visitors.
Now, the tea-shop into which we next went was far more interesting and esthetically valuable than the museum. The skipper, who knew every shop, buoy, bridge, and shoal in Holland, had indicated this shop to me as a high-class shop for costly teas. It was. I wanted the best tea, and here I got it. The establishment might have survived from the age when Dordrecht was the wealthiest city in Holland. Probably it had so survived. It was full of beautiful utensils in practical daily use. It had an architectural air, and was aware of its own dignity. The head-salesman managed to convey to me that the best tea—that was, tea that a connoisseur would calltea—cost two and a half florins a pound. I conveyed to him that I would take two pounds of the same. The head-salesman then displayed to me the tea in its japanned receptacle. He next stood upright and expectant, whereupon an acolyte, in a lovely white apron, silently appeared from the Jan-Steen shadows at the back of the shop, and with solemn gestures held a tun-dish over a paper bag for his superior to pour tea into. Having performed his share in the rite, he disappeared. The parcel was slowly made up, every part of the process being evidently a matter of secular tradition. I tendered a forty-gulden note. Whereon the merchant himself arrived in majesty at the counter from his office, and offered the change with punctilio. He would have been perfect, but for a hole in the elbow of his black alpaca coat. I regretted this hole. We left the shop stimulated, and were glad to admit that Dordrecht had atoned to us for its museum. Ary Scheffer might have made an excellent tea-dealer.
The museum at Dordrecht only showed in excess an aspect of displayed art which is in some degree common to all museums. For there is no museum which is not a place of desolation. Indeed, I remember to have seen only one collection of pictures, public or private, in which every item was a cause of joy—that of Mr. Widener, near Philadelphia. Perhaps the most wonderful thing in the tourist’s Holland is the fact that the small museum at Haarlem, with its prodigious renown, does not disappoint. You enter it with disturbing preliminaries, each visitor having to ring a bell, and thelocusis antipathetic; but one’s pulse is immediately quickened by the verve of those headstrong masterpieces of Hals. And Ruysdael and Jan Steen are influential here, and even the mediocre paintings have often an interest of perversity, as to which naturally the guide-books say naught.
The Teyler Museum at Haarlem also has a few intoxicating works, mixed up with a sinister assortment of mechanical models. And its aged attendant, who watched over his finger-nails as over adored children, had acquired the proper attitude, at once sardonic and benevolent, for a museum of the kind. He was peculiarly in charge of very fine sketches by Rembrandt, of which he managed to exaggerate the value.
Few national museums of art contain a higher percentage of masterpieces than the Mauritshuis at The Hague. And one’s first sight of Rembrandt’s “Lesson in Anatomy” therein would constitute a dramatic event in any yachting cruise. But my impression of the Mauritshuis was a melancholy one, owing to the hazard of my visit being on the great public holiday of the year, when it was filled with a simple populace, who stared coarsely around, and understood nothing—nothing. True, they gazed in a hypnotized semicircle at “The Lesson in Anatomy,” and I can hear amiable persons saying that the greatest art will conquer even the ignorant and the simple. I don’t believe it. I believe that if “The Lesson in Anatomy” had been painted by Carolus-Duran, in the manner of Carolus-Duran, the ignorant and the simple would have been hypnotized just the same. And I have known the ignorant and the simple to be overwhelmed with emotion by spurious trickery of the most absurd and offensive kind.
An hour or two in a public museum on a national holiday is a tragic experience, because it forces you to realize that in an artistic sense the majority and backbone of the world have not yet begun to be artistically civilized. Ages must elapse before such civilization can make any appreciable headway. And in the meantime the little hierarchy of art, by which alone art lives and develops, exists precariously in the midst of a vast, dangerous population—a few adventurous whites among indigenous hordes in a painful climate. The indigenous hordes may have splendid qualities, but they have not that one quality which more than any other vivifies. They are jockeyed into paying for the manifestations of art which they cannot enjoy, and this detail is not very agreeable either. A string of fishermen, in their best blue cloth, came into the Mauritshuis out of the rain, and mildly and politely scorned it. Their attitude was unmistakable. They were not intimidated. Well, I like that. I preferred that, for example, to the cant of ten thousand tourists.
Nor was I uplifted by a visit to the Mesdag Museum at The Hague. Mesdag was a second-rate painter with a first-rate reputation, and his taste, as illustrated here, was unworthy of him, even allowing for the fact that many of the pictures were forced upon him as gifts. One or two superb works—a Delacroix, a Dupre, a Rousseau—could not make up for the prevalence of Mesdag, Josef Israels, etc. And yet the place was full of good names. I departed from the museum in a hurry, and, having time to spare, drove to Scheveningen in search of joy. Scheveningen is famous, and is supposed to rival Ostend. It is washed by the same sea, but it does not rival Ostend. It is a yellow and a gloomy spot, with a sky full of kites. Dutchmen ought not to try to rival Ostend. As I left Scheveningen, my secret melancholy was profoundly established within me, and in that there is something final and splendid. Melancholy when it becomes uncompromisingly sardonic, is as bracing as a bath.
0112
The remarkable thing about the two art museums at Amsterdam, a town of fine architecture, is that they should both—the Ryks and the municipal—be housed in such ugly, imposing buildings. Now, as in the age of Michelangelo, the best architects seldom get the best jobs, and the result is the permanent disfigurement of beautiful cities. Michelangelo often had to sit glum and idle while mediocre architects and artists more skilled than he in pleasing city councils and building-committees muddled away opportunities which he would have glorified; but he did obtain part of a job now and then, subject to it being “improved” by some duffer like Bernini, who of course contrived to leave a large fortune, whereas if Michelangelo had lived to-day he might never have got any job at all.
Incontestably, the exterior, together with much of the interior, of the Ryks depresses. Moreover, the showpiece of the museum, “The Night-Watch” of Rembrandt, is displayed with a too particular self-consciousness on the part of the curator, as though the functionary were saying to you: “Hats off! Speak low! You are in church, and Rembrandt is the god.” The truth is that “The Night-Watch” is neither very lovable nor very beautiful. It is an exhibition-picture, meant to hit the wondering centuries in the eye, and it does so. But how long it will continue to do so is a nice question.
Give me the modern side of the Ryks, where there is always plenty of room, despite its sickly Josef Israels. The modern side reëndowed me with youth. It is an unequal collection, and comprises some dreadful mistakes, but at any rate it is being made under the guidance of somebody who is not afraid of his epoch or of being in the wrong. Faced with such a collection, one realizes the shortcomings of London museums and the horror of that steely English official conservatism, at once timid and ruthless, which will never permit itself to discover a foreign artist until the rest of the world has begun to forget him. At the Ryks there are Van Goghs and Cézannes and Bonnards. They are not the best, but they are there. Also there are some of the most superb water-colors of the age, and good things by a dozen classic moderns who are still totally unrepresented in London. I looked at a celestial picture of women—the kind of thing that Guys would have done if he could—painted perhaps fifty years ago, and as modern as the latest Sargent water-color. It was boldly signed T. C. T. C.? T. C.? Who on earth could T. C. he? I summoned an attendant. Thomas Couture, of course! A great artist! He will appear in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, about the middle of the twenty-first century.
Then there was Daumier’s “Christ and His Disciples,” a picture that I would have stolen had it been possible and quite safe to do so. It might seen incredible that any artist of the nineteenth century should take the subject from the great artists of the past, and treat it so as to make you think that it had never been treated before. But Daumier did this. It is true that he was a very great artist indeed. Who that has seen it and understood its tender sarcasm can forget that group of the exalted, mystical Christ talking to semi-incredulous, unperceptive disciples in the gloomy and vague evening landscape? I went back to the yacht and its ignoble and decrepit engine, full of the conviction that art still lives. And I thought of Wilson Steer’s “The Music-Room” in the Tate Gallery, London, which magnificent picture is a proof that in London also art still lives.
0117
OUR adventures toward the Baltic began almost disastrously, because I put into the planning of them too much wisdom and calculation. We had a month of time at our disposal. Now, a fifty-ton yacht in foreign parts thinks nothing of a month. It is capable of using up a month in mere preliminaries. Hence, with admirable forethought, I determined to send the yacht on in advance. TheVelsawas to cross from her home port, Brightlingsea, to the Dutch coast, and then, sheltered by many islands, to creep along the coasts of Hanover, Holstein, Schleswig, and Denmark, past the mouths of the Elbe, Weser, and Eider, to the port of Esbjerg, where we were to join her by a fast steamer from Harwich. She was then to mount still farther the Danish coast, as far as Liim Fjord and, by a route combining fjords and canals, cross the top of the Jutland peninsula, and enter the desired Baltic by Randers Fjord. The banal way would have been through the Kiel Canal. Yachts never take the Liim Fjord; but to me this was a fine reason for taking the Liim Fjord. Moreover, English yachts have a habit of getting into trouble with the German Empire in the Kiel Canal, and English yachtsmen are apt to languish in German prisons on charges of espionage. I was uncertain about the comforts provided for spies in German prisons, and I did not wish to acquire certitude.
So the yacht was despatched. The skipper gave himself the large allowance of a fortnight for the journey to Esbjerg. He had a beautiful new 30-horse-power engine, new sails, a new mast. Nothing could stop him except an east wind. It is notorious that in the North Sea the east wind never blows for more than three days together, and that in July it never blows at all. Still, in this July it did start to blow a few days before the yacht’s intended departure. And it continued to blow hard. In a week the skipper had only reached Harwich, a bare twenty miles from Brightlingsea. Then the yacht vanished into the North Sea. The wind held in the east. After another week I learned by cable that my ship had reached the Helder, in North Holland. By a wondrous coincidence, my Dutch skipper’s wife and family are established at the Helder. The east wind still held. The skipper spent money daily in saddening me by cable. Then he left the Helder, and the day came for us to board the mail-steamer at Harwich for Esbjerg.
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She was a grand steamer, newest and largest of her fine. This was her very first trip. She was officered by flaxen, ingenuous, soft-voiced Danes, who had a lot of agreeable Danish friends about them, with whom they chattered in the romantic Danish language, to us exquisite and incomprehensible. Also she was full of original Danish food, and especially of marvelous and mysterious sandwiches, which, with small quantities of champagne, we ate at intervals in a veranda cafe passably imitated from Atlantic liners. Despite the east wind, which still held, that steamer reached Esbjerg in the twinkling of an eye.
When I say the twinkling of an eye, I mean twenty-two hours. It was in the dusk of a Saturday evening that we had the thrill of entering an unknown foreign country. A dangerous harbor, and we penetrated into it as great ships do, with the extreme deliberation of an elephant. There was a vast fleet of small vessels in the basin, and as we slid imperceptibly past the mouth of the basin in the twilight, I scanned the multitudinous masts for the mast of theVelsa. Her long Dutch streamer was ever unmistakable. It seemed to us that she ought to be there. What the mail-steamer could do in less than a day she surely ought to have done in more than a fortnight, east wind or no east wind. On the map the distance was simply nothing.
I saw her not. Still, it was growing dark, and my eyes were human eyes, though the eyes of love. The skipper would probably, after all, be on the quay to greet us with his energetic optimism. In fact, he was bound to be on the quay, somewhere in the dark crowd staring up at the great ship, because he never failed. Were miracles necessary, he would have accomplished miracles. But he was not on the quay. TheVelsawas definitely not at Eshjerg. We felt lonely, forlorn. The head waiter of the Hotel Spangsberg, a man in his way as great as the skipper, singled us out. He had a voice that would have soothed the inhabitants of purgatory. He did us good. We were convinced that so long as he consented to be our friend, no serious harm could happen to our universe. And the hotel was excellent, the food was excellent, the cigars were excellent. And the three chambermaids of the hotel, flitting demurely about the long corridor at their nightly tasks, fair, clad in prints, foreign, separated romantically from us by the palisades of language—the three modest chambermaids were all young and beautiful, with astounding complexions.
The next morning the wind was north by east, which was still worse than east or northeast for the progress of the yacht toward us. Nevertheless, I more than once walked down across the wharves of the port to the extreme end of the jetty—about a mile each way each time—in the hope of descrying theVelsa’slong, red streamer in the offing. It was Sunday. The town of Esbjerg, whose interest for the stranger is strictly modern and sociological, was not attractive. Its main street, though extremely creditable to a small town, and a rare lesson to towns of the same size in England, was not a thoroughfare in which to linger, especially on Sunday. In the entire town we saw not a single beautiful or even ancient building. Further, the port was asleep, and the strong, gusty breeze positively offensive in the deceptive sunshine.
We should have been bored, we might even have been distressed, had we not gradually perceived, in one passing figure after another, that the standard of female beauty in Esbjerg was far higher than in any other place we had ever seen. These women and girls, in their light Sunday summer frocks, had beauty, fine complexions, grace, softness, to a degree really unusual; and in transparent sleeves or in no sleeves at all they wandered amiably in that northerly gale as though it had been a southern zephyr. We saw that our overcoats were an inelegance, but we retained them. And we saw that life in Esbjerg must have profound compensations. There were two types of beautiful women, one with straight lips, and the other with the upper lip like the traditional bow. The latter, of course, was the more generously formed, acquiescent and yet pouting, more blonde than the blonde. Both types had the effect of making the foreigner feel that to be a foreigner and a stranger in Esbjerg, forcibly aloof from all the daily frequentations and intimacies of the social organism, was a mistake.