Parallels have been drawn between Jan Steen and Hogarth, and there are critics who would make Jan a moralist too. But I do not see how we can compare them. Steen did what Hogarth could not, Hogarth did what Steen would not. Hogarth is rarely charming, Steen is rarely otherwise. It is not Hogarth with whom I should associate Jan, but Burns. He is the Dutch Burns—in colour.

I wish we had more facts concerning him, for he must have been a great man and humorist. The story is told of Hogarth that on being commissioned to paint a scriptural picture of the Red Sea for a too parsimonious patron who had beaten him down and down, he rebuked him for his meanness by producing a canvas entirely covered with red paint. "But what is this?" the patron asked. "The Red Sea—surely." "Where then are the Israelites?" "They have all crossed over." "And Pharaoh's hosts?" "They are all drowned." The story is perhaps an invention; but a somewhat similar joke is credited to Jan Steen. His commission was the Flood, and his picture when finished consisted of a sheet of water with a Dutch cheese in the midst bearing the arms of Leyden. The cheese and the arms, he pointed out, proved that people had been on the earth; as for Noah and the ark, they were out of the picture.

Jan Steen's picture of "A Quaker's Funeral" I have not seen, but according to Pilkington it is impossible to behold it and refrain from laughter. The subject does not strike one as being in itself mirthful.

A century earlier Leyden had produced another Jan, separated from Jan Steen by a difference wide asunder as the poles. Yet a very wonderful man in his brief season, standing high among the world's great madmen. I mean Jan Bockelson, the Anabaptist, known as Jan of Leyden, who, beginning as pure enthusiast, succumbed, as so many a leader of women has done, to the intoxication of authority, and became the slave of grandiose ambition and excesses. Every country has had its mock Messiahs: they rise periodically in England, not less at the present day than in the darker ages (hysteria being more powerful than light); yet the history of none of these spiritual monarchs can compare with that of the tailor's son of Leyden.

The story is told in many places, but nowhere with such dramatic picturesqueness as by Professor Karl Pearson in his Ethic of Freethought. "As the illegitimate son of a tailor in Leyden," says Professor Pearson—Jan's mother was the maid of his father's wife—"his early life was probably a harsh and bitter one. Very young he wandered from home, impressed with the miseries of his class and with a general feeling of much injustice in the world. Four years he spent in England seeing the poor driven off the land by the sheep; then we find him in Flanders, married, but still in vague search of the Eldorado; again roaming, he visits Lisbon and Luebeck as a sailor, ever seeking and inquiring. Suddenly a new light bursts upon him in the teaching of Melchior Hofmann [the Anabaptist]; he fills himself with dreams of a glorious kingdom on earth, the rule of justice and of love. Still a little while and the prophet Mathys crosses his path, and tells him of the New Sion and the extermination of the godless."

Mathys, or Jan Mathiesen, was a baker of Haarlem, who, constituted an Anabaptist bishop, was preaching the new gospel through the Netherlands and gathering recruits to the community of God's saints which had been established at Muenster. "Full of hope for the future," says Professor Pearson, "Jan sets out for Muenster to join the saints. Still young, handsome, imbued with a fiery enthusiasm, actor by nature and even by choice, he has no small influence on the spread of Anabaptism in that city. The youth of twenty-three expounds to the followers of Rottmann the beauties of his ideal kingdom of the good and the true. With his whole soul he preaches to them the redemption of the oppressed, the destruction of tyranny, the community of goods, and the rule of justice and brotherly love. Women and maidens slip away to the secret gatherings of the youthful enthusiast; the glowing young prophet of Leyden becomes the centre of interest in Muenster. Dangerous, very dangerous ground, when the pure of heart are not around him; when the spirit 'chosen by God' is to proclaim itself free of the flesh.

"The world has judged Jan harshly, condemned him to endless execration. It were better to have cursed the generations of oppression, the flood of persecution, which forced the toiler to revolt, the Anabaptists to madness. Under other circumstances the noble enthusiasm, with other surroundings the strong will, of Jan of Leyden might have left a different mark on the page of history. Dragged down in this whirlpool of fanaticism, sensuality, and despair, we can only look upon him as a factor of the historic judgment, a necessary actor in that tragedy of Muenster, which forms one of the most solemn chapters of the Greater Bible."

Gradually Jan rose to be head of the saints, Mathiesen having been killed, and none other displaying so much strength of purpose or magnetic enthusiasm. And here his mind gave way. Like so many absolute rulers before and since, he could not resist the ecstacies of supremacy. To resume Professor Pearson's narrative: "The sovereign of Sion—although 'since the flesh is dead, gold to him is but as dung'—yet thinks fit to appear in all the pomp of earthly majesty. He appoints a court, of which Knipperdollinch is chancellor, and wherein there are many officers from chamberlain to cook. He forms a body-guard, whose members are dressed in silk. Two pages wait upon the king, one of whom is a son of his grace the bishop of Muenster. The great officers of state are somewhat wondrously attired, one breech red, the other grey, and on the sleeves of their coats are embroidered the arms of Sion—the earth-sphere pierced by two crossed swords, a sign of universal sway and its instruments—while a golden finger-ring is token of their authority in Sion. The king himself is magnificently arrayed in gold and purple, and as insignia of his office, he causes sceptre and spurs of gold to be made. Gold ducats are melted down to form crowns for the queen and himself; and lastly a golden globe pierced by two swords and surmounted by a cross with the words, 'A King of Righteousness o'er all' is borne before him. The attendants of the Chancellor Knipperdollinch are dressed in red with the crest, a hand raising aloft the sword of justice. Nay, even the queen and the fourteen queenlets must have a separate court and brilliant uniforms.

"Thrice a week the king goes in glorious array to the market-place accompanied by his body-guards and officers of state, while behind ride the fifteen queens. On the market-place stands a magnificent throne with silken cushions and canopy, whereon the tailor-monarch takes his seat, and alongside him sits his chief queen. Knipperdollinch sits at his feet. A page on his left bears the book of the law, the Old Testament; another on his right an unsheathed sword. The book denotes that he sits on the throne of David; the sword that he is the king of the just, who is appointed to exterminate all unrighteousness. Bannock-Bernt is court-chaplain, and preaches in the market-place before the king. The sermon over, justice is administered, often of the most terrible kind; and then in like state the king and his court return home. On the streets he is greeted with cries of: 'Hail in the name of the Lord. God be praised!'"

Meanwhile underneath all this riot of splendour and power and sensuality, the pangs of starvation were beginning to be felt. For the army of the bishop of Muenster was outside the city and the siege was very studiously maintained. The privations became more and more terrible, and more and more terrible the means of allaying them. The bodies of citizens that had died were eaten; and then men and women and children were killed in order that they might be eaten too. Under such conditions, is it any wonder that Muenster became a city of the mad, mad beyond the sane man's wildest dreams of excess?

A few of the least demented of Jan's followers at length determined that the tragedy must cease, and the city was delivered into the bishop's hands. "What judgment," writes Professor Pearson, "his grace the bishop thinks fit to pass on the leaders of Sion at least deserves record. Rottmann has fallen by St. Martin's Church, fighting sword in hand, but Jan of Leyden and Knipperdollinch are brought prisoners before this shepherd of the folk. Scoffingly he asks Jan: 'Art thou a king?' Simple, yet endlessly deep the reply: 'Art thou a bishop?' Both alike false to their callings—as father of men and shepherd of souls. Yet the one cold, self-seeking sceptic, the other ignorant, passionate, fanatic idealist. 'Why hast thou destroyed the town and my folk?' 'Priest, I have not destroyed one little maid of thine. Thou hast again thy town, and I can repay thee a hundredfold.' The bishop demands with much curiosity how this miserable captive can possibly repay him. 'I know we must die, and die terribly, yet before we die, shut us up in an iron cage, and send us round through the land, charge the curious folk a few pence to see us, and thou wilt soon gather together all thy heart's desire.' The jest is grim, but the king of Sion has the advantage of his grace the bishop. Then follows torture, but there is little to extract, for the king still holds himself an instrument sent by God—though it were for the punishment of the world. Sentence is read on these men—placed in an iron cage they shall be shown round the bishop's diocese, a terrible warning to his subjects, and then brought back to Muenster; there with glowing pincers their flesh shall be torn from the bones, till the death-stroke be given with red-hot dagger in throat and heart. For the rest let the mangled remains be placed in iron cages swung from the tower of St. Lambert's Church.

"On the 26th of January, 1536, Jan Bockelson and Knipperdollinch meet their fate. A high scaffolding is erected in the market-place, and before it a lofty throne for his grace the bishop, that he may glut his vengeance to the full. Let the rest pass in silence. The most reliable authorities tell us that the Anabaptists remained calm and firm to the last. 'Art thou a king?' 'Art thou a bishop?' The iron cages still hang on the church tower at Muenster; placed as a warning, they have become a show; perhaps some day they will be treasured as weird mentors of the truth which the world has yet to learn from the story of the Kingdom of God in Muenster."

A living German artist of great power, named Joseph Sattler, too much of whose time has recently been given to designing book-plates, produced some few years ago an extraordinary illustrated history of the Anabaptists in Muenster. Many artists have essayed to portray madness, but I know of no work more terrible than his.

We have travelled far from Leyden's peaceful studios. It is time to look at the work of Gerard Dou. Rembrandt we have seen was the son of a miller, Jan Steen of a brewer; the elder Dou was a glazier. His son Gerard was born in Leyden in 1613. The father was so far interested in the boy's gifts that he apprenticed him to an engraver when he was nine. At the age of eleven he passed to the studio of a painter on glass, and on St. Valentine's day, 1628, he became a pupil of Rembrandt. From Rembrandt, however, he seems to have learned only the charm of contrasts of light and shade. None of the great rugged strength of the master is to be seen in his minute and patient work, in which the genius of taking pains is always apparent. "He would frequently," says Ireland, "paint six or seven days on a hand, and, still more wonderful, twice the time on the handle of a broom.... The minuteness of his performance so affected his sight that he wore spectacles at the age of thirty."

Gerard Dou's success was not only artistic; it was also financial. Rembrandt's prices did not compare with those of his pupil, whose art coming more within the sympathetic range and understanding of the ordinary man naturally was more sought after than the Titanic and less comfortable canvasses of the greater craftsman.

Dou did exceedingly well, one of his patrons even paying him a yearly honorarium of a thousand florins for the privilege of having the refusal of each new picture. "The Poulterer's Shop" at our National Gallery is a perfect example of his fastidious minuteness and charm. But he painted pictures also with a tenderer brush. I give on the opposite page a reproduction of the most charming picture by Gerard Dou that I know—"The Young Housekeeper" at The Hague. This is a very miracle of painting in every inch, and yet the pains that have been expended upon the cabbage and the fish are not for a moment disproportionate: the cabbage and the fish, for all their finish, remain subordinate and appropriate details. The picture is the picture of the mother and the children. "The Night School"—No. 795 in the Ryks Museum at Amsterdam—is, I believe, more generally admired, but "The Young Housekeeper" is the better. "The Night School" might be described as the work of a pocket Rembrandt; "The Young Housekeeper" is the work of an artist of rare individuality and sympathy. At the Wallace Collection may be seen a hermit by Dou quite in his best nocturnal manner.

Gerard Dou died at Leyden, where he had spent nearly all his quiet life, in 1676. He is buried at St. Peter's, but his grave does not seem to be known there.

Dou had many imitators, some of whom studied under him. One of the chief was Godfried Schalcken of Dort, whose picture of an "Old Woman Scouring a Pan" may be seen in the National Gallery, while the Wallace Collection has several examples of his skill. Schalcken seems to have been a man of great brusquerie, if two stories told by Ireland of his sojourn in England are true. William III., for example, when sitting for his picture, with a candle in his hand, was suffered by Schalcken to burn his fingers. "One is at a loss," says Ireland, "to determine which was most to blame, the monarch for want of feeling, or the painter of politeness. The following circumstance, however, will place the deficiency of the latter beyond controversy. A lady sitting for her portrait, who was more admired for a beautiful hand than a handsome face, after the head was finished, asked him if she should take off her glove, that he might insert the hand in the picture, to which he replied, he always painted the hands from those of his valet." The most attractive picture by Schalcken that I have seen is a girl sewing by candle light, in the Wallace Collection. It pairs off with the charming little Gerard Dou at the Ryks—No. 796.

Dou said that the "Prince of his pupils" was Frans van Mieris of Delft, who combined the manner and predilections of his master with those of Terburg. He was very popular with collectors, but I do not experience any great joy in the presence of his work, which, with all its miraculous deftness, is yet lacking in personal feeling. Mieris, says Ireland, "was frequently paid a ducat per hour for his works. His intimacy and friendship for Jan Steen, that excellent painter and bon vivant, seems to have led him into much inconvenience. After a night's debauch, quitting Jan Steen, he fell into a common drain; whence he was extricated by a poor cobbler and his wife, and, treated by them with much kindness, he repaid the obligation by presenting them with a small picture, which, by his recommendation, was sold for a considerable sum."

The amazingly minute picture of "The Poulterer's Shop" which hangs in the National Gallery as a pendant to Dou's work with the same title, is by William van Mieris, the son of Dou's favourite pupil. He also was born at Leyden, that teeming mother of painters. Frans van Mieris, his father, died at Leyden in 1681; William died at Leyden in 1747.

Above the work of Frans van Mieris I would put that of Gabriel Metsu, another of Dou's pupils, and also a son of Leyden, where he was born in 1630. Upon Metsu's work Terburg, however, exercised more influence than did Gerard Dou. "The Music Lesson" and "The Duet" at the National Gallery are good examples of his pleasant painting. Even better is his work at the Wallace Collection. He died in 1667 in Amsterdam, where one of his best pictures "The Breakfast"—No. 1553 at the Ryks—may be seen. There are many fine examples at the Louvre. He was always graceful, always charming, with a favourite model—perhaps his wife—the pleasant plump woman who occurs again and again in his work. She is in "The Breakfast" (see the opposite page).

Mention of Gerard Dou and his pupils reminds me of a little-known satire on art-criticism written by "Vathek" Beckford. Biographical Memoirs of Extraordinary Painters it is called, among the painters being Sucrewasser of Vienna, and Watersouchy of Amsterdam. It is Watersouchy who concerns us, for he was a Dutch figure painter who carried the art of detail farther than it had been carried before. I quote a little from Beckford's account of this genius, since it helps to bring back a day when the one thing most desired by the English collector was a Dutch picture—still life, boors, cows, ruins, or domestic interior—no matter what subject or how mechanically painted so long as it was done minutely enough.

"Whilst he remained at Amsterdam, young Watersouchy was continually improving, and arrived to such perfection in copying point lace, that Mierhop entreated his father to cultivate these talents, and to place his son under the patronage of Gerard Dow, ever renowned for the exquisite finish of his pieces. Old Watersouchy stared at the proposal, and solemnly asked his wife, to whose opinion he always paid a deference, whether painting was a genteel profession for their son. Mierhop, who overheard their conversation, smiled disdainfully at the question, and Madam Watersouchy answered, that she believed it was one of your liberal arts. In few words, the father was persuaded, and Gerard Dow, then resident at Leyden, prevailed upon to receive the son as a disciple.

"Our young artist had no sooner his foot within his master's apartment, than he found every object in harmony with his own disposition. The colours finely ground, and ranged in the neatest boxes, the pencils so delicate as to be almost imperceptible, the varnish in elegant phials, the easel just where it ought to be, filled him with agreeable sensations, and exalted ideas of his master's merit. Gerard Dow on his side was equally pleased, when he saw him moving about with all due circumspection, and noticing his little prettinesses at every step. He therefore began his pupil's initiation with great alacrity, first teaching him cautiously to open the cabinet door, lest any particles of dust should be dislodged and fix upon his canvas, and advising him never to take up his pencil without sitting motionless a few minutes, till every mote casually floating in the air should be settled. Such instructions were not thrown away upon Watersouchy: he treasured them up, and refined, if possible, upon such refinements."

In course of time Watersouchy gained the patronage of a rich but frugal banker named Baise-la-Main, who seeing his value, arranged for the painter to occupy a room in his house, "Nobody," Beckford continues, "but the master of the house was allowed to enter this sanctuary. Here our artist remained six weeks in grinding his colours, composing an admirable varnish, and preparing his canvass, for a performance he intended as his chef d'oeuvre. A fortnight more passed before he decided upon a subject. At last he determined to commemorate the opulence of Monsieur Baise-la-Main, by a perspective of his counting-house. He chose an interesting moment, when heaps of gold lay glittering on the counter, and citizens of distinction were soliciting a secure repository for their plate and jewels. A Muscovite wrapped in fur, and an Italian glistening in brocade, occupied the foreground. The eye glancing over these figures highly finished, was directed through the windows of the shop into the area in front of the cathedral; of which, however, nothing was discovered, except two sheds before its entrance, where several barbers were represented at their different occupations. An effect of sunshine upon the counter discovered every coin that was scattered upon its surface. On these the painter had bestowed such intense labour, that their very legends were distinguishable.

"It would be in vain to attempt conveying, by words, an idea adequate to this chef d'oeuvre, which must have been seen to have been duly admired. In three months it was far advanced; during which time our artist employed his leisure hours in practising jigs and minuets on the violin, and writing the first chapter of Genesis on a watchpaper, which he adorned with a miniature of Adam and Eve, so exquisitely finished, that every ligament in their fig-leaves was visible. This little jeu d'esprit he presented to Madam Merian."

Leyden's earliest painter was Lucas Jacobz, known as Lucas van Leyden, who was born in 1494. He painted in oil, in distemper and on glass; he took his subjects from nature and from scripture; he engraved better than he painted; and he was the friend of Duerer. Leyden possesses his triptych, "The Last Judgment," which to me is interesting rather as a piece of pioneering than as a work apart. After settling for a while at Middelburg and Antwerp, he returned to Leyden, where he died in 1533.

In spite of her record as the mother of great painters, Leyden treats pictures with some indifference. The Municipal Museum has little that is of value. Of most interest perhaps is the Peter van Veen, opposite "The Last Judgment," representing a scene in the siege of Leyden by the Spaniards under Valdez in 1574, which has a companion upstairs by Van Bree, depicting the Burgomaster's heroic feat of opportunism in the same period of stress.

Adrian Van der Werf was this Burgomaster's name (his monument stands in the Van der Werf park), and nothing but his courage and address at a critical moment saved the city. Motley tells the story in a fine passage. "Meantime, the besieged city was at its last gasp. The burghers had been in a state of uncertainty for many days; being aware that the fleet had set forth for their relief, but knowing full well the thousand obstacles which it had to surmount. They had guessed its progress by the illumination from the blazing villages; they had heard its salvos of artillery on its arrival at North Aa; but since then, all had been dark and mournful again, hope and fear, in sickening alternation, distracting every breast. They knew that the wind was unfavourable, and, at the dawn of each day, every eye was turned wistfully to the vanes of the steeples. So long as the easterly breeze prevailed, they felt, as they anxiously stood on towers and house-tops that they must look in vain for the welcome ocean. Yet, while thus patiently waiting, they were literally starving; for even the misery endured at Harlem had not reached that depth and intensity of agony to which Leyden was now reduced. Bread, maltcake, horse-flesh, had entirely disappeared; dogs, cats, rats, and other vermin were esteemed luxuries. A small number of cows, kept as long as possible, for their milk, still remained; but a few were killed from day to day, and distributed in minute proportions, hardly sufficient to support life among the famishing population. Starving wretches swarmed daily around the shambles where these cattle were slaughtered, contending for any morsel which might fall, and lapping eagerly the blood as it ran along the pavement; while the hides, chopped and boiled, were greedily devoured.

"Women and children, all day long, were seen searching gutters and dung hills for morsels of food, which they disputed fiercely with the famishing dogs. The green leaves were stripped from the trees, every living herb was converted into human food, but these expedients could not avert starvation. The daily mortality was frightful,—infants starved to death on the maternal breasts, which famine had parched and withered; mothers dropped dead in the streets, with their dead children in their arms.

"In many a house the watchmen, in their rounds, found a whole family of corpses, father, mother and children, side by side; for a disorder called the plague, naturally engendered of hardship and famine, now came, as if in kindness, to abridge the agony of the people. The pestilence stalked at noonday through the city, and the doomed inhabitants fell like grass beneath it scythe. From six thousand to eight thousand human beings sank before this scourge alone, yet the people resolutely held out—women and men mutually encouraging each other to resist the entrance of their foreign foe—an evil more horrible than pest or famine. [3]

"The missives from Valdez, who saw more vividly than the besieged could do, the uncertainty of his own position, now poured daily into the city, the enemy becoming more prodigal of his vows, as he felt that the ocean might yet save the victims from his grasp. The inhabitants, in their ignorance, had gradually abandoned their hopes of relief, but they spurned the summons to surrender. Leyden was sublime in its despair. A few murmurs were, however, occasionally heard at the steadfastness of the magistrates, and a dead body was placed at the door of the burgomaster, as a silent witness against his inflexibility. A party of the more faint-hearted even assailed the heroic Adrian Van der Werf with threats and reproaches as he passed through the streets.

"A crowd had gathered around him, as he reached a triangular place in the centre of the town, into which many of the principal streets emptied themselves, and upon one side of which stood the church of St. Pancras, with its high brick tower surmounted by two pointed turrets, and with two ancient lime trees at its entrance. There stood the burgomaster, a tall, haggard, imposing figure, with dark visage, and a tranquil but commanding eye. He waved his broad-leaved felt hat for silence, and then exclaimed, in language which has been almost literally preserved, 'What would ye, my friends? Why do ye murmur that we do not break our vows and surrender our city to the Spaniards?—a fate more horrible than the agony which she now endures. I tell you I have made an oath to hold this city, and may God give me strength to keep my oath! I can die but once; whether by your hands, the enemy's, or by the hand of God. My own fate is indifferent to me, not so that of the city intrusted to my care. I know that we shall starve if not soon relieved; but starvation is preferable to the dishonoured death which is the only alternative. Your menaces move me not; my life is at your disposal; here is my sword, plunge it into my breast, and divide my flesh among you. Take my body to appease your hunger, but expect no surrender, so long as I remain alive.'"

Leyden was at last relieved by William of Orange, who from his sick-bed had arranged for the piercing of the dykes and letting in enough water to swim his ships and rout the Spaniards.

Out of tribulation comes good. For their constancy and endurance in the siege the Prince offered the people of Leyden one of two benefits—exemption from taxes or the establishment of a University. They took the University.



Chapter IX

Haarlem

Tulip culture—Early speculation—The song of the tulip—Dutch gardening new and old—A horticultural pilgrimage—The Haarlem dunes—Gardens without secrets—Zaandvoort—Through Noord-Holland and its charms—The church of St. Bavo—Whitewash v. Mystery—The true father of the Reformation—Printing paves the way—The Hout—Laocooen and his sons—The siege of Haarlem—Dutch fortitude—The real Dutch courage—The implacable Alva—Broken promises—A tonic for Philip—The women of Haarlem—A pledge to mothers—The great organ—Three curious inhabitants—The Teyler Museum—Frans Hals—A king of abundance—Regent pieces—The secondary pictures in the Museum—Dirck Hals—Van der Helst—Adrian Brouwer—Nicolas Berchem—Ruisdael—The lost mastery—Echoes of the past.

Haarlem being the capital of the tulip country, the time to visit it is the spring. To travel from Leyden to Haarlem by rail in April is to pass through floods of colour, reaching their finest quality about Hillegom. The beds are too formal, too exactly parallel, to be beautiful, except as sheets of scarlet or yellow; for careless beauty one must look to the heaps of blossoms piled up in the corners (later to be used on the beds as a fertiliser), which are always beautiful, and doubly so when reflected in a canal. From a balloon, in the flowering season, the tulip gardens must look like patchwork quilts.

Tulip Sunday, which represents the height of the season (corresponding to Chestnut Sunday at Bushey Park) is about the third Sunday in April. One should be in Holland then. It is no country for hot weather: it has no shade, the trains become unbearable, and the canals are very unpleasant. But in spring it is always fresh.

Tulip cultivation is now a steady humdrum business, very different from the early days of the fashion for the flower, in the seventeenth century, when speculators lost their heads over bulbs as thoroughly as over South-Sea stock in the great Bubble period. Thousands of florins were given for a single bulb. The bulb, however, did not always change hands, often serving merely as a gambling basis; it even may not have existed at all. Among genuine connoisseurs genuine sales would of course be made, and it is recorded that a "Semper Augustus" bulb was once bought for 13,000 florins. At last the Government interfered; gambling was put down; and "Semper Augustus" fell to fifty florins.

It was to Haarlem, it will be remembered, that the fair Frisian travelled with Cornelius van Baerle's solitary flower in La Tulipe Noire, and won the prize of 100,000 florins offered for a blossom of pure nigritude by the Horticultural Society of Haarlem. Hence the addition of the Tulipa Nigra Rosa Baerleensis to the list of desirable bulbs. Dumas puts into the mouth of Cornelius a very charming song of the tulip:—

Nous sommes les filles du feu secret, Du feu qui circule dans les veines de la terre; Nous sommes les filles de l'aurore et de la rosee, Nous sommes les filles de l'air, Nous sommes les filles de l'eau; Mais nous sommes avant tout les filles du ciel.

The Dutch are now wholly practical. Their reputation as gardeners has become a commercial one, resting upon the fortunate discovery that the tulip and the hyacinth thrive in the sandy soil about Haarlem. For flowers as flowers they seem to me to care little or nothing. Their cottages have no pretty confusion of blossoms as in our villages. You never see the cottager at work among his roses; once his necessary labours are over, he smokes and talks to his neighbours: to grow flowers for aesthetic reasons were too ornamental, too unproductive a hobby. AEsthetically the Dutch are dead, or are alive only in the matter of green paint, which they use with such charming effect on their houses, their mills and their boats. What is pretty is old—as indeed is the case in our own country, if we except gardens. Modern Dutch architecture is without attraction, modern Delft porcelain a thing to cry over.

If any one would know how an old formal Dutch garden looked, there is a model one at the back of the Ryks Museum in Amsterdam. But the art is no more practised. A few circular beds in the lawn, surrounded by high wire netting—that is for the most part the modern notion of gardening. In an interesting report of a visit paid to the Netherlands and France in 1817 by the secretary of the Caledonia Horticultural Society and some congenial companions, may be read excellent descriptions of old Dutch gardening, which even then was a thing of the past. Here is the account of a typical formal garden, near Utrecht: "The large divisions of the garden are made by tall and thick hedges of beech, hornbeam, and oak, variously shaped, having been tied to frames and thus trained, with the aid of the shears, to the desired form. The smaller divisions are made by hedges of yew and box, which in thickness and density resemble walls of brick. Grottoes and fountains are some of the principal ornaments. The grottoes are adorned with masses of calcareous stuff, corals and shells, some of them apparently from the East Indies, others natives of our own seas. The principal grotto is large, and studded with thousands of crystals and shells. We were told that its construction was the labour of twelve years. The fountains are of various devices, and though old, some of them were still capable of being put in action. Frogs and lizards placed at the edgings of the walks, and spouting water to the risk of passengers, were not quite so agreeable; and other figures were still in worse taste.

"There is a long berceau walk of beech, with numerous windows or openings in the leafy side wall, and many statues and busts, chiefly of Italian marble, some of them of exquisite workmanship. Several large urns and vases certainly do honour to the sculptor. The subjects of the bas-relief ornaments are the histories of Saul and David, and of Esther and Ahasuerus."

I saw no old Dutch garden in Holland which seemed to me so attractive as that at Levens in Westmorland.

It is important at Haarlem to take a drive over the dunes—the billowy, grassy sand hills which stretch between the city and the sea. If it is in April one can begin the drive by passing among every variety of tulip and hyacinth, through air made sweet and heavy by these flowers. Just outside Haarlem the road passes the tiniest deer park that ever I saw—with a great house, great trees, a lawn and a handful of deer all packed as close as they can be. Now and then one sees a stork's nest high on a pole before a house.

On leaving the green and luxuriant flat country a climbing pave road winds in and out among the pines on the edge of the dunes; past little villas, belonging chiefly to Amsterdam business men, each surrounded by a naked garden with the merest suggestion of a boundary. For the Dutch do not like walls or hedges. This level open land having no natural secrecy, it seems as if its inhabitants had decided there should be no artificial secrecy either. When they sit in their gardens they like to be seen. An Englishman's first care when he plans a country estate is not to be overlooked; a Dutchman would cut down every tree that intervened between his garden chair and the high road.

Fun has often been made of the names which the Dutch merchants give to their country houses, but they seem to me often to be chosen with more thought than those of similar villas in our country. Here are a few specimens: Buiten Gedachten (Beyond Expectation), Ons Genoegen (Our Contentment), Lust en Rust (Pleasure and Rest), Niet Zoo Quaalyk (Not so Bad), Myn Genegenhied is Voldaan (My Desire is Satisfied), Mijn Lust en Leven (My Pleasure and Life), Vriendschap en Gezelschap (Friendship and Sociability), Vreugde bij Vrede (Joy with Peace), Groot Genoeg (Large Enough), Buiten Zorg (Without Care). These names at any rate convey sentiments which we may take to express their owners' true feelings in their owners' own language; and as such I prefer them to the "Chatsworths" and "Belle-vues," "Cedars" and "Towers," with which the suburbs of London teem. In a small inland street in Brighton the other day I noticed a "Wave Crest".

The dunes extend for miles: an empty wilderness of sand with the grey North Sea beyond. From the high points one sees inland not only Haarlem, just below, but the domes and spires of Amsterdam beyond.

One may return to Haarlem by way of Bloemendaal, a green valley with shady walks and a good hotel; or extend the drive to Haarlem's watering-place Zaandvoort, which otherwise can be gained by steam-tram, and where, says the author of Through Noord-Holland, "the billowing is strong and strengthening". The same author tells us also that "the ponnies and asses have a separated standing-place, whilst severe stipulations warrant the bathers for trouble of the animals and their driver".

Of this book I ought perhaps to say more, for I am greatly indebted to it. Most of the larger towns of Holland have guides, and for the most part they are written in good English, albeit of Dutch extraction; but Through Noord-Holland is an agreeable exception in that it covers all the ground between Amsterdam and the Helder, and is constructed in a peculiar sport of Babel. In Dutch it is I have no doubt an ordinary guide-book; in English it is something far more precious. The following extract from the preface to the second edition ought to be quoted before I borrow further from its pages:—

Being completed with the necessary alterations and corrections I send it into the world for the second time. As it will be published besides in Dutch also in French and English, the aim of the edition will surely be favoured, and our poor misappreciated country that so often is regarded with contempt by our countrymen as well as by foreigners will soon be an attraction for tourists. For were not it those large extensive quiet heatheries those rustling green woods and those quiet low meadows which inspired our great painters to bring their fascinating landscapes on the cloth? Had not that bloomy sky and that sunny mysterious light, those soft green meadows with their multi-coloured flowers, through which the river is streaming as a silver band, had not all this a quieting influence to the agitated mind of many of us, did not it give the quiet rest and did not it whisper to you; here ... here is it good? And for this our country we want to be a reliable guide by the directions of which we can savely start.

With Zaandvoort we may associate Dirck van Santvoort who painted the portrait of the curious girl—No. 2133 at the Ryks Museum—reproduced opposite page 236. Of the painter very little is known. He belongs to the great period, flourishing in the middle of the seventeenth century—and that is all. But he had a very cunning hand and an interesting mind, as the few pictures to his name attest. In the same room at the Ryks Museum where the portrait hangs is a large group of ladies and gentlemen, all wearing some of the lace which he dearly loved to paint. And in one of the recesses of the Gallery of Honour is a quaint little lady from his delicate brush—No. 2131—well worth study.

Haarlem's great church, which is dedicated to St. Bavo, is one of the finest in Holland. All that is needed to make it perfect is an infusion of that warmth and colour which once it possessed but of which so few traces have been allowed to remain. The Dutch Protestants, as I remarked at Utrecht, have shown singular efficiency in denuding religion of its external graces and charm. There is no church so beautiful but they would reduce it to bleak and arid cheerlessness. Place even the cathedral of Chartres in a Dutch market-place, and it would be a whitewashed desert in a week, while little shops and houses would be built against its sacred walls. There is hardly a great church in Holland but has some secular domicile clinging like a barnacle to its sides.

The attitude of the Dutch to their churches is in fact very much that of Quakers to their meeting-houses—even to the retention of hats. But whereas it is reasonable for a Quaker, having made for himself as plain a rectangular building as he can, to attach no sanctity to it, there is an incongruity when the same attitude is maintained amid beautiful Gothic arches. The result is that Dutch churches are more than chilling. In the simplest English village church one receives some impression of the friendliness of religion; but in Holland—of course I speak as a stranger and a foreigner—religion seems to be a cold if not a repellent thing.

One result is that on looking back over one's travels through Holland it is almost impossible to disentangle in the memory one whitewashed church from another. They have a common monotony of internal aridity: one distinguishes them, if at all, by some accidental possession—Gouda, for example, by its stained glass; Haarlem by its organ, and the swinging ships; Delft by the tomb of William the Silent; Utrecht by the startling absence of an entrance fee.

At Haarlem, as it happens, one is peculiarly able to study cause and effect in this matter of Protestant bleakness, since there stands before the door of this wonderful church, once a Roman Catholic temple, drenched, I doubt not, in mystery and colour, a certain significant statue.

To Erasmus of Rotterdam is generally given the parentage of the Reformation. Whatever his motives, Erasmus stands as the forerunner of Luther. But Erasmus had his forerunner too, the discoverer of printing. For had not a means of rapidly multiplying and cheapening books been devised, the people, who were after all the back-bone of the Reformation, would never have had the opportunity of themselves reading the Bible—either the Vulgate or Erasmus's New Testament—and thus seeing for themselves how wide was the gulf fixed between Christ and the Christians. It was the discovery of this discrepancy which prepared them to stand by the reformers, and, by supporting them and urging them on, assist them to victory.

Stimulated by the desire to be level with Rome for his own early fetters, and desiring also an antagonist worthy of his satirical powers, Erasmus (or so I think) hit independently upon the need for a revised Bible. But Luther to a large extent was the outcome of his times and of popular feeling. A spokesman was needed, and Luther stepped forward. The inventor of printing made the way possible; Erasmus showed the way; Luther took it.

Now the honour of inventing printing lies between two claimants, Laurens Janszoon Coster, of Haarlem (the original of this statue) and Gutenburg of Mayence. The Dutch like to think that Coster was the man, and that his secret was sold to Gutenburg by his servant Faust. Be that as it may—and the weight of evidence is in favour of Gutenburg—it is interesting as one stands by the statue of Coster under the shadow of Haarlem's great church to think that this was perhaps the true parent of that great upheaval, the true pavior of the way.

Whatever Coster's claim to priority may be, he certainly was a printer, and it is only fitting that Haarlem should possess so fine a library of early books and MSS. as it does.

Another monument to Coster is to be seen in the Hout, a wood of which Haarlem is very proud. It has a fine avenue called the Spanjaards Laan, and is a very pleasant shady place in summer, hardly inferior to the Bosch at The Hague. "The delightful walks of the Hout," says the author of Through Noord-Holland, "and the caressing song of the nightingale and other birds, do not only invite the Haarlemmers to it, but the citizens of the neighbouring towns as well."

On the border of the wood is a pavilion which holds the collections of Colonial curiosities. In front of the pavilion (I quote again from Through Noord-Holland, which is invaluable), "stands a casting of Laskson and his sons to a knot, which has been manufactured in the last centuries before Christ. The original has been digged up at Rome in 1500." Shade of Lessing!

The cannon-ball embedded in the wall of the church, which the sacristan shows with so much interest, recalls Haarlem's great siege in 1572—a siege notable in the history of warfare for the courage and endurance of the townspeople against terrible odds. The story is worth telling in full, but I have not space and Motley is very accessible. But I sketch, with his assistance, its salient features.

The attack began in mid-winter, when Haarlem Mere, a great lake in the east which has since been drained and poldered, was frozen over. For some time a dense fog covered it, enabling loads of provisions and arms to be safely conveyed into the city.

Don Frederic, the son of the Duke of Alva, who commanded the Spanish, began with a success that augured well, a force of 4,000 men which marched from Leyden under De la Marck being completely routed. Among the captives taken by the Spaniards, says Motley, was "a gallant officer, Baptist Van Trier, for whom De la Marck in vain offered two thousand crowns and nineteen Spanish prisoners. The proposition was refused with contempt. Van Trier was hanged upon the gallows by one leg until he was dead, in return for which barbarity the nineteen Spaniards were immediately gibbeted by De la Marck. With this interchange of cruelties the siege may be said to have opened.

"Don Frederic had stationed himself in a position opposite to the gate of the Cross, which was not very strong, but fortified by a ravelin. Intending to make a very short siege of it, he established his batteries immediately, and on the 18th, 19th, and 20th December directed a furious cannonade against the Cross-gate, the St. John's gate, and the curtain between the two. Six hundred and eighty shots were discharged on the first, and nearly as many on each of the two succeeding days. The walls were much shattered, but men, women, and children worked night and day within the city, repairing the breaches as fast as made. They brought bags of sand, blocks of stone, cart-loads of earth from every quarter, and they stripped the churches of all their statues, which they threw by heaps into the gaps. They sought thus a more practical advantage from those sculptured saints than they could have gained by only imploring their interposition The fact, however, excited horror among the besiegers. Men who were daily butchering their fellow-beings, and hanging their prisoners in cold blood, affected to shudder at the enormity of the offence thus exercised against graven images.

"After three days' cannonade, the assault was ordered, Don Frederic only intending a rapid massacre, to crown his achievements at Zutphen and Naarden. The place, he thought, would fall in a week, and after another week of sacking, killing, and ravishing, he might sweep on to 'pastures new' until Holland was overwhelmed. Romero advanced to the breach, followed by a numerous storming party, but met with a resistance which astonished the Spaniards. The church bells rang the alarm throughout the city, and the whole population swarmed to the walls. The besiegers were encountered not only with sword and musket, but with every implement which the burghers' hands could find. Heavy stones, boiling oil, live coals, were hurled upon the heads of the soldiers; hoops, smeared with pitch and set on fire, were dexterously thrown upon their necks. Even Spanish courage and Spanish ferocity were obliged to shrink before the steady determination of a whole population animated by a single spirit. Romero lost an eye in the conflict, many officers were killed and wounded, and three or four hundred soldiers left dead in the breach, while only three or four of the townsmen lost their lives. The signal of recall was reluctantly given, and the Spaniards abandoned the assault.

"Don Frederic was now aware that Haarlem would not fall at his feet at the first sound of his trumpet. It was obvious that a siege must precede the massacre. He gave orders, therefore, that the ravelin should be undermined, and doubted not that, with a few days' delay, the place would be in his hands."

The Prince of Orange then made, from Sassenheim, another attempt to relieve the town, sending 2,000 men. But a fog falling, they lost their way and fell into the enemy's hands. "De Koning," says Motley, "second in command, was among the prisoners. The Spaniards cut off his head and threw it over the walls into the city, with this inscription: 'This is the head of Captain De Koning, who is on his way with reinforcements for the good city of Haarlem'. The citizens retorted with a practical jest, which was still more barbarous. They cut off the heads of eleven prisoners and put them into a barrel, which they threw into the Spanish camp. A label upon the barrel contained these words: 'Deliver these ten heads to Duke Alva in payment of his tenpenny tax, with one additional head for interest'."

Day after day the attack continued and was repulsed. Meanwhile, unknown to the Spaniards, the besieged burghers were silently and swiftly building inside the ravelin a solid half-moon shaped battlement. On the 31st of December, the last day of 1572, the great assault was made. "The attack was unexpected, but the forty or fifty sentinels defended the walls while they sounded the alarm. The tocsin bells tolled, and the citizens, whose sleep was not apt to be heavy during that perilous winter, soon manned the ramparts again. The daylight came upon them while the fierce struggle was still at its height. The besieged, as before, defended themselves with musket and rapier, with melted pitch, with firebrands, with clubs and stones. Meantime, after morning prayers in the Spanish camp, the trumpet for a general assault was sounded. A tremendous onset was made upon the gate of the Cross, and the ravelin was carried at last. The Spaniards poured into this fort, so long the object of their attack, expecting instantly to sweep into the city with sword and fire. As they mounted its wall they became for the first time aware of the new and stronger fortification which had been secretly constructed on the inner side. The reason why the ravelin had been at last conceded was revealed. The half moon, whose existence they had not suspected, rose before them bristling with cannon, A sharp fire was instantly opened upon the besiegers, while at the same instant the ravelin, which the citizens had undermined, blew up with a severe explosion, carrying into the air all the soldiers who had just entered it so triumphantly. This was the turning point. The retreat was sounded, and the Spaniards fled to their camp, leaving at least three hundred dead beneath the walls. Thus was a second assault, made by an overwhelming force and led by the most accomplished generals of Spain, signally and gloriously repelled by the plain burghers of Haarlem."

Cold and famine now began to assist the Spaniards, and the townsfolk were reduced to every privation. The Spaniards also suffered and Don Frederic wished to raise the siege. He suggested this step to his father, but Alva was made of sterner stuff. He sent from Nymwegen a grim message: "'Tell Don Frederic,' said Alva, 'that if he be not decided to continue the siege till the town be taken, I shall no longer consider him my son, whatever my opinion may formerly have been. Should he fall in the siege, I will myself take the field to maintain it; and when we have both perished, the Duchess, my wife, shall come from Spain to do the same.' Such language was unequivocal, and hostilities were resumed as fiercely as before. The besieged welcomed them with rapture, and, as usual, made daily the most desperate sallies. In one outbreak the Haarlemers, under cover of a thick fog, marched up to the enemy's chief battery, and attempted to spike the guns before his face. They were all slain at the cannon's mouth, whither patriotism, not vainglory, had led them, and lay dead around the battery, with their hammers and spikes in their hands. The same spirit was daily manifested. As the spring advanced, the kine went daily out of the gates to their peaceful pasture, notwithstanding all the turmoil within and around; nor was it possible for the Spaniards to capture a single one of these creatures, without paying at least a dozen soldiers as its price. 'These citizens,' wrote Don Frederic, 'do as much as the best soldiers in the world could do.'"

The whole story is too dreadful to be told; but events proved the implacable old soldier to be right. Month after month passed, assault after assault was repulsed by the wretched but indomitable burghers; but time was all on the side of the enemy. On July 12th, after the frustration again and again of hopes of relief from the Prince of Orange, whose plans were doomed to failure on every occasion, the city surrendered on the promise of complete forgiveness by Don Frederic.

The Don, however, was only a subordinate; the Duke of Alva had other views. He quickly arrived on the scene, and as quickly his presence made itself felt. "The garrison, during the siege, had been reduced from four thousand to eighteen hundred. Of these the Germans, six hundred in number, were, by Alva's order, dismissed, on a pledge to serve no more against the King. All the rest of the garrison were immediately butchered, with at least as many citizens.... Five executioners, with their attendants, were kept constantly at work; and when at last they were exhausted with fatigue, or perhaps sickened with horror, three hundred wretches were tied two and two, back to back, and drowned in the Haarlem Lake. At last, after twenty-three hundred human creatures had been murdered in cold blood, within a city where so many thousands had previously perished by violent or by lingering deaths; the blasphemous farce of a pardon was enacted. Fifty-seven of the most prominent burghers of the place were, however, excepted from the act of amnesty, and taken into custody as security for the future good conduct of the other citizens. Of these hostages some were soon executed, some died in prison, and all would have been eventually sacrificed, had not the naval defeat of Bossu soon afterwards enabled the Prince of Orange to rescue the remaining prisoners. Ten thousand two hundred and fifty-six shots had been discharged against the walk during the siege. Twelve thousand of the besieging army had died of wounds or disease during the seven months and two days between the investment and the surrender. In the earlier part of August, after the executions had been satisfactorily accomplished, Don Frederic made his triumphal entry, and the first chapter in the invasion of Holland was closed. Such was the memorable siege of Haarlem, an event in which we are called upon to wonder equally at human capacity to inflict and to endure misery.

"Philip was lying dangerously ill at the wood of Segovia, when the happy tidings of the reduction of Haarlem, with its accompanying butchery, arrived. The account of all this misery, minutely detailed to him by Alva, acted like magic. The blood of twenty-three hundred of his fellow-creatures—coldly murdered by his orders, in a single city—proved for the sanguinary monarch the elixir of life: he drank and was refreshed. 'The principal medicine which has cured his Majesty,' wrote Secretary Cayas from Madrid to Alva, 'is the joy caused to him by the good news which you have communicated of the surrender of Haarlem.'"

I know nothing of the women of Haarlem to-day, but in the sixteenth century they were among the bravest and most efficient in the world, and it was largely their efforts and example which enabled the city to hold out so long. Motley describes them as a corps of three hundred fighting women, "all females of respectable character, armed with sword, musket, and dagger. Their chief, Kenau Hasselaer, was a widow of distinguished family, and unblemished reputation, about forty-seven years of age, who, at the head of her amazons, participated in many of the most fiercely contested actions of the siege, both within and without the walls. When such a spirit animated the maids and matrons of the city, it might be expected that the men would hardly surrender the place without a struggle."

Haarlem still preserves the pretty custom of hanging lace by the doors of houses which the stork is expected to visit or has just visited. Its origin was the humanity of the Spanish general, during this great siege, in receiving a deputation of matrons from the town and promising protection from his soldiery of all women in childbed. Every house was to go unharmed upon which a piece of lace signifying a confinement was displayed. This was a promise with which the Duke of Alva seems not to have interfered.

The author of Through Noord-Holland thus eloquently describes the effect of Haarlem's great organ—for long the finest in the world: "Vibrating rolls the tone through the church-building, followed by sweet melodies, running through each register of it; now one hears the sound of trumpets or soft whistling tunes then again piano music or melancholical hautboy tunes chiming as well is deceivingly imitated." Free recitals are given on Tuesdays and Thursdays from one to two. On other days the organist can be persuaded to play for a fee. Charles Lamb's friend Fell paid a ducat to the organist and half a crown to the blower, and heard as much as he wanted. He found the vox humana "the voice of a psalm-singing clerk". Other travellers have been more fortunate. Ireland tells us that when Handel played this organ the organist took him either for an angel or a devil.

Among Haarlem's architectural attractions is the very interesting Meat Market, hard by the great church, one of the most agreeable pieces of floridity between the Middelburg stadhuis and the Leeuwarden chancellerie. There is also the fine Amsterdam Gate, on the road to Amsterdam.

In the Teyler Museum, on the Spaarne, is a poor collection of modern oil paintings, some good modern water colours and a very fine collection of drawings by the masters, including several Rembrandts. In this room one may well plan to spend much time. One of the best Israels that I saw in Holland is a little water-colour interior that is hung here. I asked one of the attendants if they had anything by Matthew Maris, but he denied his existence. James he knew, and William; but there was no Matthew. "But he is your most distinguished artist," I said. It was great heresy and not to be tolerated. To the ordinary Dutchman art begins with Rembrandt and ends with Israels. This perhaps is why Matthew Maris has taken refuge in St. John's Wood.

And now we come to Haarlem's chief glory—which is not Coster the printer, and not the church of Bavo the Saint, and not the tulip gardens, and not the florid and beautiful Meat Market; but the painter Frans Hals, whose masterpieces hang in the Town Hall.

I have called Hals the glory of Haarlem, yet he was only an adopted son, having been born in Antwerp about 1580. But his parents were true Haarlemers, and Frans was a resident there before he reached man's estate.

The painter's first marriage was not happy; he was even publicly reprimanded for cruelty to his wife. In spite of the birth of his eldest child just thirty-four weeks earlier than the proprieties require, his second marriage seems to have been fortunate enough. Some think that we see Mynheer and Myvrouw Hals in the picture—No. 1084 in the Ryks Museum—which is reproduced on the opposite page. If this jovial and roguish pair are really the painter and his wife, they were a merry couple. Children they had in abundance; seven sons, five of whom were painters, and three daughters. Abundance indeed was Hals' special characteristic; you see it in all his work—vigorous, careless abundance and power. He lived to be eighty-five or so. Mrs. Hals, after a married life of fifty years, continued to flourish, with the assistance of some relief from the town, for a considerable period.

In the Haarlem Museum may be seen a picture of Hals' studio, painted by Berck Heyde, in 1652, containing portraits of Hals himself, then about seventy, and several of his old pupils—Wouvermans, Dirck Hals, his brother, four of his sons, the artist himself and others. Hals taught also Van der Helst, whose work at times comes nearest to his own, Verspronk, Terburg and Adrian van Ostade.

To see the work of Hals at his best it is necessary to visit Holland, for we have but little here. The "Laughing Cavalier" in the Wallace Collection is perhaps his best picture in a public gallery in England. But the Haarlem Museum is a temple dedicated to his fame, and there you may revel in his lusty powers.

The room in which his great groups hang is perhaps in effect more filled with faces than any in the world. Entering the door one is immediately beneath the bold and laughing scrutiny of a host of genial masterful arquebusiers, who make merry on the walls for all time. Such a riot of vivid portraiture never was! Other men have painted single heads as well or better: but Hals stands alone in his gusto, his abundance, his surpassing brio. It is a thousand pities that neither Lamb nor Hazlitt ever made the journey to Haarlem, because only they among our writers on art could have brought a commensurate gusto to the praise of his brush.

I have reproduced one of the groups opposite page 150, but the result is no more than a memento of the original. It conveys, however, an impression of the skill in composition by which the group is made not only a collection of portraits but a picture too. If such groups there must be, this is the way to paint them. The Dutch in the seventeenth century had a perfect mania for these commemorative canvases, and there is not a stadhuis but has one or more. Rembrandt's "Night Watch" and Hals' Haarlem groups are the greatest; but one is always surprised by the general level of excellence maintained, and now and then a lesser man such as Van der Helst climbs very nigh the rose, as in his "De Schuttersmaaltyd" in the "Night Watch" room in the Ryks Museum. The Corporation pieces of Jan van Ravesteyn in the Municipal Museum at The Hague are also exceedingly vivid; while Jan de Bray's canvases at Haarlem, in direct competition with Hals', would be very good indeed in the absence of their rivals.

Among other painters who can be studied here is our Utrecht friend Jan van Scorel, who has a large "Adam and Eve" in the passage and a famous "Baptism of Christ"; Jan Verspronk of Haarlem, Hals' pupil, who has a very quiet and effective portrait (No. 210) and a fine rich group of the lady managers of an orphanage; and Cornelius Cornellessen, also of Haarlem, painter of an excellent Corporation Banquet. In the collection are also a very charming little Terburg (No. 194) and a fascinating unsigned portrait of William III. as a pale and wistful boy.

Haarlem was the mother or instructor of many painters. There is Dirck Hals, the brother of Frans, who was born there at the end of the sixteenth century, and painted richly coloured scenes of fashionable convivial life. He died at Haarlem ten years before Frans. A greater was Bartholomew van der Helst, who was Hals' most assimilative pupil. He was born at Haarlem about 1612, and is supposed to have studied also under Nicolas Elias. His finest large work is undoubtedly the "Banquet" to which I have just referred, but I always associate him with his portrait of Gerard Bicker, Landrichter of Muiden, that splendid tun of a man, No. 1140 in the Gallery of Honour at the Ryks Museum (see opposite page 86). One of his most beautiful paintings is a portrait of a woman in our National Gallery, on a screen in the large Netherlands room: a picture which shows the influence of Elias not a little, as any one can see who recalls Nos. 897 and 899 in the Ryks Museum—two very beautiful portraits of a man and his wife.

Haarlem and Oudenarde both claim the birth of Adrian Brouwer, a painter of Dutch topers. As to his life little is known. Tradition says that he drank and dissipated his earnings, while his work is evidence that he knew inn life with some particularity; but his epitaph calls him "a man of great mind who rejected every splendour of the world and who despised gain and riches". Brouwer, who was born about 1606, was put by his mother, a dressmaker at Haarlem, into the studio of Frans Hals. Hals bullied him, as he bullied his first wife. Escaping to Amsterdam, Brouwer became a famous painter, his pictures being acquired, among others, by Rembrandt in his wealthy days, and by Rubens. He died at Antwerp when only thirty-three. We have nothing of his in the National Gallery, but he is represented at the Wallace Collection.

At Haarlem was born also, in 1620, Nicolas Berchem, painter of charming scenes of broken arches and columns (which he certainly never saw in his own country), made human and domestic by the presence of people and cows, and suffused with gentle light. We have five of his pictures in the National Gallery. Berchem's real name was Van Haarlem. One day, however, when he was a pupil in Van Goyen's studio, his father pursued him for some fault. Van Goyen, who was a kindly creature, as became the father-in-law of Jan Steen, called out to his other pupils—"Berg hem" (Hide him!) and the phrase stuck, and became his best-known name. Nicolas married a termagant, but never allowed her to impair his cheerful disposition.

Haarlem was the birthplace also of Jacob van Ruisdael, greatest of Dutch landscape painters. He was born about 1620. His idea was to be a doctor, but Nicolas Berchem induced him to try painting, and we cannot be too thankful for the change. His landscapes have a deep and grave beauty: the clouds really seem to be floating across the sky; the water can almost be heard tumbling over the stones. Ruisdael did not find his typical scenery in his native land: he travelled in Germany and Italy, and possibly in Norway; but whenever he painted a strictly Dutch scene he excelled. He died at Haarlem in 1682; and one of his most exquisite pictures hangs in the Museum. I do not give any reproductions of Ruisdael because his work loses so much in the process. At the National Gallery and at the Wallace Collection he is well represented.

Walking up and down beneath the laughing confidence of these many bold faces in the great Hals' room at Haarlem I found myself repeating Longfellow's lines:—

He has singed the beard of the King of Spain, And carried away the Dean of Jaen And sold him in Algiers.

Surely the hero, Simon Danz, was something such a man as Hals painted. How does the ballad run?—

A DUTCH PICTURE.

Simon Danz has come home again, From cruising about with his buccaneers; He has singed the beard of the King of Spain, And carried away the Dean of Jaen And sold him in Algiers.

In his house by the Maese, with its roof of tiles And weathercocks flying aloft in air, There are silver tankards of antique styles, Plunder of convent and castle, and piles Of carpets rich and rare.

In his tulip garden there by the town Overlooking the sluggish stream, With his Moorish cap and dressing-gown The old sea-captain, hale and brown, Walks in a waking dream.

A smile in his gray mustachio lurks Whenever he thinks of the King of Spain. And the listed tulips look like Turks, And the silent gardener as he works Is changed to the Dean of Jaen.

The windmills on the outermost Verge of the landscape in the haze, To him are towers on the Spanish coast, With whisker'd sentinels at their post, Though this is the river Maese.

But when the winter rains begin, He sits and smokes by the blazing brands, And old sea-faring men come in, Goat-bearded, gray, and with double chin, And rings upon their hands.

They sit there in the shadow and shine Of the flickering fire of the winter night, Figures in colour and design Like those by Rembrandt of the Rhine, Half darkness and half light.

And they talk of their ventures lost or won, And their talk is ever and ever the same, While they drink the red wine of Tarragon, From the cellars of some Spanish Don, Or convent set on flame.

Restless at times, with heavy strides He paces his parlour to and fro; He is like a ship that at anchor rides, And swings with the rising and falling tides And tugs at her anchor-tow.

Voices mysterious far and near, Sound of the wind and sound of the sea, Are calling and whispering in his ear, "Simon Danz! Why stayest thou here? Come forth and follow me!"

So he thinks he shall take to the sea again, For one more cruise with his buccaneers; To singe the beard of the King of Spain, And capture another Dean of Jaen And sell him in Algiers.

One thought leads to another. It is impossible also to remain long in the great Hals' room of the Museum without meditating a little upon the difference between these arquebusiers and the Dutch of the present day. Passing among these people, once so mighty and ambitious, so great in government and colonisation, in seamanship and painting, and seeing them now so material and self-centred, so bound within their own small limits, so careless of literature and art, so intent upon the profits of the day and the pleasures of next Sunday, one has a vision of what perhaps may be our own lot. For the Dutch are very near us in kin, and once were nigh as great as we have been. Are we, in our day of decadence, to shrivel thus? "There but for the grace of God goes England"—is that a reasonable utterance?

One sees the difference concretely as one passes from these many Corporation and Regent pieces in the galleries of Holland to the living Dutchmen of the streets. I saw it particularly at Haarlem on a streaming wet day, after hurrying from the Museum to the Cafe Brinkmann through some inches of water. At a table opposite, sipping their coffee, were two men strikingly like two of Frans Hals' arquebusiers. Yet how unlike. For the air of masterful recklessness had gone, that good-humoured glint of power in the eye was no more. Hals had painted conquerors, or at any rate warriors for country; these coffee drinkers were meditating profit and loss. Where once was authority is now calculation.

I quote a little poem by Mr. Van Lennep of Zeist, near Utrecht, which shows that the Dutch, whatever their present condition, have not forgotten:—

The shell, when put to child-like ears, Yet murmurs of its bygone years, In echoes of the sea; The Dutch-born youngster likes the sound, And ponders o'er its mystic ground And wondrous memory.

Thus, in Dutch hearts, an echo dwells, Which, like the ever-mindful shells, Yet murmurs of the sea: That sea, of ours in times of yore, And, when De Ruyter went before, Our road to victory.



Chapter X

Amsterdam

The Venice of the North—The beauty of gravity—No place for George Dyer—The Keizersgracht—Kalverstraat and Warmoes Straat—The Ghetto—Pile-driving—Erasmus's sarcasm—The new Bourse—Learning the city—Tramway perplexities—The unnecessary guide—The Royal Palace—The New Church—Stained glass—The Old Church—The five carpets—Wedding customs—Dutch wives to-day and in the past—The Begijnenhof—The new religion and the old—The Burgerweesmeisjes—The Eight Orange Blossoms—Dutch music halls—A Dutch Hamlet—The fish market—Rembrandt's grave—A nation of shopkeepers—Max Havelaar—Mr. Drystubble's device—Lothario and Betsy—The English in Holland and the Dutch in England—Athleticism—A people on skates—The chaperon's perplexity—Love on the level.

Amsterdam is notable for two possessions above others: its old canals and its old pictures. Truly has it been called the Venice of the North; but very different is its sombre quietude from the sunny Italian city among the waters. There is a beauty of gaiety and a beauty of gravity; and Amsterdam in its older parts—on the Keizersgracht and the Heerengracht—has the beauty of gravity. In Venice the canal is of course also the street: gondolas and barcas are continually gliding hither and thither; but in the Keizersgracht and the Heerengracht the water is little used. One day, however, I watched a costermonger steering a boat-load of flowers under a bridge, and no words of mine can describe the loveliness of their reflection. I remember the incident particularly because flowers are not much carried in Holland, and it is very pleasant to have this impression of them—this note of happy gaiety in so dark a setting.

An unprotected roadway runs on either side of the water, which makes the houses beside these canals no place for Charles Lamb's friend, George Dyer, to visit in. Accidents are not numerous, but a company exists in Amsterdam whose business it is to rescue such odd dippers as horses and carriages by means of elaborate machinery devised for the purpose. Only travellers born under a luckier star than I are privileged to witness such sport.

In the main Amsterdam is a city of trade, of hurrying business men, of ceaseless clanging tramcars and crowded streets; but on the Keizersgracht and the Heerengracht you are always certain to find the old essential Dutch gravity and peace. No tide moves the sullen waters of these canals, which are lined with trees that in spring form before the narrow, dark, discreet houses the most delicate green tracery imaginable; and in summer screen them altogether. These houses are for the most part black and brown, with white window frames, and they rise to a great height, culminating in that curious stepped gable (with a crane and pulley in it) which is, to many eyes, the symbol of the city. I know no houses that so keep their secrets. In every one, I doubt not, is furniture worthy of the exterior: old paintings of Dutch gentlemen and gentlewomen, a landscape or two, a girl with a lute and a few tavern scenes; old silver windmills; and plate upon plate of serene blue Delft. (You may see what I mean in the Suasso rooms at the Stedelijk Museum.) I have walked and idled in the Keizersgracht at all times of the day, but have never seen any real signs of life. Mats have been banged on its doorsteps by clean Dutch maidservants armed with wicker beaters; milk has been brought in huge cans of brass and copper shining like the sun; but of its life proper the gracht has given no sign. Its true life is houseridden, behind those spotless and very beautiful lace curtains, and there it remains.

One of the wittiest of the old writers on Holland (of whom I said something in the second chapter), Owen Feltham the moralist, describes in his Brief Character of the Low Countries an Amsterdam house of the middle of the seventeenth century. Thus:—

When you are entered the house, the first thing you encounter is a Looking-glasse. No question but a true Embleme of politick hospitality; for though it reflect yourself in your own figure, 'tis yet no longer than while you are there before it. When you are gone once, it flatters the next commer, without the least remembrance that you ere were there.

The next are the vessels of the house marshalled about the room like watchmen. All as neat as if you were in a Citizen's Wife's Cabinet; for unless it be themselves, they let none of God's creatures lose any thing of their native beauty.

Their houses, especially in their Cities, are the best eye-beauties of their Country. For cost and sight they far exceed our English, but they want their magnificence. Their lining is yet more rich than their outside; not in hangings, but pictures, which even the poorest are there furnisht with. Not a cobler but has his toyes for ornament. Were the knacks of all their houses set together, there would not be such another Bartholmew-Faire in Europe....

Their beds are no other than land-cabines, high enough to need a ladder or stairs. Up once, you are walled in with Wainscot, and that is good discretion to avoid the trouble of making your will every night; for once falling out else would break your neck perfectly. But if you die in it, this comfort you shall leave your friends, that you dy'd in clean linnen.

Whatsoever their estates be, their houses must be fair. Therefore from Amsterdam they have banisht seacoale, lest it soyl their buildings, of which the statelier sort are sometimes sententious, and in the front carry some conceit of the Owner. As to give you a taste in these.

Christus Adjutor Meus; Hoc abdicato Perenne Quero; Hic Medio tuitus Itur.

Every door seems studded with Diamonds. The nails and hinges hold a constant brightnesse, as if rust there was not a quality incident to Iron. Their houses they keep cleaner than their bodies; their bodies than their souls. Goe to one, you shall find the Andirons shut up in net-work. At a second, the Warming-pan muffled in Italian Cutworke. At a third the Sconce clad in Cambrick.

The absence of any lively traffic on the canals, as in Venice, has this compensation, that the surface is left untroubled the more minutely to mirror the houses and trees, and, at night, the tramcars on the bridges. The lights of these cars form the most vivid reflections that I can recollect. But the quiet reproduction of the stately black facades is the more beautiful thing. An added dignity and repose are noticeable. I said just now that one desired to learn the secret of the calm life of these ancient grachts. But the secret of the actual houses of fact is as nothing compared with the secret of those other houses, more sombre, more mysterious, more reserved, that one sees in the water. To penetrate their impressive doors were an achievement, a distinction, indeed! With such a purpose suicide would lose half its terrors.

For the greatest contrast to these black canals, you must seek the Kalverstraat and Warmoes Straat. Kalverstraat, running south from the Dam, is by day filled with shoppers and by night with gossipers. No street in the world can be more consistently busy. Damrak is of course always a scene of life, but Damrak is a thoroughfare—its population moving continually either to or from the station. But those who use the Kalverstraat may be said almost to live in it. To be there is an end in itself. Warmoes Straat, parallel with Damrak on the other side of the Bourse, behind the Bible Hotel, is famous for its gigantic restaurant—the hugest in Europe, I believe—the Krasnapolsky, a palace of bewildering mirrors, and for concert halls and other accessories of the gayer life. But this book is no place in which to enlarge upon the natural history of Warmoes Straat and its southern continuation, the Nes.

For the principal cafes, as distinguished from restaurants, you must seek the Rembrandt's Plein, in the midst of which stands the master's statue. The pavement of this plein on Sunday evening in summer is almost impassable for the tables and chairs that spread over it and the crowds overflowing from Kalverstraat.

But there is still to be mentioned a district of Amsterdam which from the evening of Friday until the evening of Saturday is more populous even than Kalverstraat. This is the Jews' quarter, which has, I should imagine, more parents and children to the square foot than any residential region in Europe. I struggled through it at sundown one fine Saturday—to say I walked through it would be too misleading—and the impression I gathered of seething vivacity is still with me. These people surely will inherit the earth.

Spinoza was a child of this Ghetto: his birthplace at 41 Waterloo Plein is still shown; and Rembrandt lived at No. 4 Jodenbree Straat for sixteen years.

A large number of the Amsterdam Jews are diamond cutters and polishers. You may see in certain cafes dealers in these stones turning over priceless little heaps of them with the long little finger-nail which they preserve as a scoop.

Amsterdam may be a city builded on the sand; but none the less will it endure. Indeed the sand saves it; for it is in the sand that the wooden piles on which every house rests find their footing, squelching through the black mud to this comparative solidity. Some of the piles are as long as 52 ft., and watching them being driven in, it is impossible to believe that stability can ever be attained, every blow of the monkey accounting for so very many inches. When one watches pile-driving in England it is difficult to see the effect of each blow; but during the five or fewer minutes that I spent one day on Damrak observing the preparation for the foundations of a new house, the pile must have gone in nearly a foot each time, and it was very near the end of its journey too. In course of years the black brackish mud petrifies not only the piles but the wooden girders that are laid upon them.

Pile-driving on an extensive scale can be a very picturesque sight. Breitner has painted several pile-driving scenes, one of which hangs in the Stedelijk Museum at Amsterdam.

Statistics are always impressive. I have seen somewhere the number of piles which support the new Bourse and the Central Station; but I cannot now find them. The Royal Palace stands on 13,659. Erasmus of Rotterdam made merry quite in the manner of an English humorist over Amsterdam's wooden foundations. He twitted the inhabitants with living on the tops of trees, like rooks. But as I lay awake from daybreak to a civilised hour for two mornings in the Hotel Weimar at Rotterdam—prevented from sleeping by the pile-driving for the hotel extension—I thought of the apologue of the pot and the kettle.

I referred just now to the new Bourse. When I was at Amsterdam in 1897, the water beside Damrak extended much farther towards the Dam than it does now. Where now is the new Bourse was then shipping. But the new Bourse looks stable enough to-day. As to its architectural charms, opinions differ. My own feeling is that it is not a style that will wear well. For a permanent public building something more classic is probably desirable; and at Amsterdam, that city of sombre colouring, I would have had darker hues than the red and yellow that have been employed. The site of the old Bourse is now an open space.

It is stated that the kindly custom of allowing the children of Amsterdam the run of the Bourse as a playground for a week every year is some compensation for the suppression of the Kermis, but another story makes the sanction a perpetual reward for an heroic deed against the Spaniards performed by a child in 1622.

My advice to any one visiting Amsterdam is first to study a map of the city—Baedeker gives a very useful one—and thus to begin with a general idea of the lie of the land and the water. With this knowledge, and the assistance of the trams, it should not appear a very bewildering place. The Dam is its heart: a fact the acquisition of which will help very sensibly. All roads in Amsterdam lead to the Dam, and all lead from it. The Dam gives the city its name—Amstel dam, the dam which stops the river Amstel on its course to the Zuyder Zee. It also gives English and American visitors opportunities for facetiousness which I tingle to recall. Every tram sooner or later reaches the Dam: that is another simplifying piece of information. The course of each tram may not be very easily acquired, but with a common destination like this you cannot be carried very far wrong.

One soon learns that the trams stop only at fixed points, and waits accordingly. The next lesson, which is not quite so simple, is that some of these points belong exclusively to trams going one way and some exclusively to trams going the other. If there is one thing calculated to reduce a perplexed foreigner in Amsterdam to rage and despair, it is, after a tiring day among pictures, to hail a half empty tram at a fixed point, with Tram-halte written on it, and be treated to a pitying smile from the driver as it rushes by. Upon such mortifications is education based; for one then looks again more narrowly at the sign and sees that underneath it is a little arrow pointing in the opposite direction to which one wished to go. One then walks on to the next point, at which the arrow will be pointing homewards, and waits there. Sometimes—O happy moment—a double arrow is found, facing both ways.

It is on the Dam that guides will come and pester you. The guide carries an umbrella and offers to show Amsterdam in such a way as to save you much money. He is quite useless, and the quickest means of getting free is to say that you have come to the city for no other purpose than to pay extravagantly for everything. So stupendous an idea checks even his importunity for a moment, and while he still reels you can escape. The guides outside the Ryks Museum who offer to point out the beauties of the pictures are less persistent. It would seem as if they were aware of the unsoundness of their case. There is no need to reply to these at all.

On the Dam also is the Royal Palace, which once was the stadhuis, but in 1808 (when Amsterdam was the third city of the French Empire) was offered to Louis Napoleon for a residence. Queen Wilhelmina occasionaly stays there, but The Hague holds her true home. The apartments are florid and not very interesting; but if the ascent of the tower is permitted one should certainly make it. It is interesting to have Amsterdam at one's feet. Only thus can its peculiar position and shape be understood: its old part an almost perfect semicircle, with canal-arcs within arcs, and its northern shore washed by the Y.

Also on the Dam is the New Church, which is to be seen more for the tomb of De Ruyter than for any architectural graces. The old sea dog, whose dark and determined features confront one in Bol's canvases again and again in Holland, reposes in full dress on a cannon amid symbols of his victories. Close by, in the Royal Palace, are some of the flags which he wrested from the English. Other admirals also lie there, the Dutch naval commander never having wanted for honour in his own country.