AT three o’clock I left these pleasant people to visit the Ryks Museum and the next morning ran over to Haarlem, a half-hour away, to look at the Frans Hals in the Stadhuis. Haarlem was the city, I remember with pleasure, that once suffered the amazing tulip craze that swept over Holland in the sixteenth century—the city in which single rare tulips, like single rare carnations to-day, commanded enormous sums of money. Rare species, because of the value of the subsequent bulb sale, sold for hundreds of thousands of gulden. I had heard of the long line of colored tulip beds that lay between here and Haarlem and The Hague and I was prepared to judge for myself whether they were beautiful—as beautiful as the picture post-cards sold everywhere indicated. I found this so, but even more than the tulip beds I found the country round about from Amsterdam to Haarlem, The Hague and Rotterdam delightful. I traveled by foot and by train, passing by some thirty miles of vari-colored flower-beds in blocks of red, white, blue, purple, pink, and yellow, that lie between the several cities. I stood in the old Groote Kerk of St. Bavo in Haarlem, the Groote Kerk of St. James in The Hague—both as bare of ornament as an anchorite’s cell—I wandered among the art treasures of the Ryks Museum in Amsterdam and the Mauritshuis and the Mesdag Museum in The Hague; I walked in the forests of moss-tinted trees at Haarlem and again at The Hague; my impression was that compact little Holland had all the charm of a great private estate, beautifully kept and intimately delightful.
But the canals of Holland—what an airy impression of romance, of pure poetry, they left on my mind! There are certain visions or memories to which the heart of every individual instinctively responds. The canals of Holland are one such to me. I can see them now, in the early morning, when the sun was just touching them with the faintest pearls, pinks, lavenders, blues, their level surfaces as smooth as glass, their banks rising no whit above the level of the water, but lying even with it like a black or emerald frame, their long straight lines broken at one point or another by a low brown or red or drab cottage or windmill! I can see them again at evening, the twilight hour, when in that poetically suffused mood of nature, which obtains then, they lie, liquid masses of silver, a shred of tinted cloud reflected in their surface, the level green grass turning black about them, a homing bird, a mass of trees in the distance, or humble cottage, its windows faintly gold from within, lending those last touches of artistry which make the perfection of nature. As in London and Venice the sails of their boats were colored a soft brown, and now and again one appeared in the fading light, a healthy Hollander smoking his pipe at the tiller, a cool wind fanning his brow. The world may hold more charming pictures but I have not encountered them.
And across the level spaces of lush grass that seemingly stretch unbroken for miles—bordered on this side or that with a little patch of filigree trees; ribboned and segmented by straight silvery threads of water; ornamented in the foreground by a cow or two, perhaps, or a boatman steering his motor-power canal boat; remotely ended by the seeming outlines of a distant city, as delicately penciled as a line by Vierge—stand the windmills. I have seen ten, twelve, fifteen, marching serenely across the fields in a row, of an afternoon, like great, heavy, fat Dutchmen, their sails going in slow, patient motions, their great sides rounding out like solid Dutch ribs,—naïve, delicious things. There were times when their outlines took on classic significance. Combined with the utterly level land, the canals and the artistically martialed trees, they constitute the very atmosphere of Holland.
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Haarlem, when I reached it, pleased me almost as much as Amsterdam, though it had no canals to speak of—by comparison. It was so clean and fresh and altogether lovely. It reminded me of Spotless Town—the city of advertising fame—and I was quite ready to encounter the mayor, the butcher, the doctor and other worthies of that ultra-respectable city. Coming over from Amsterdam, I saw a little Dutch girl in wooden shoes come down to a low gate which opened directly upon a canal and dip up a pitcher of water. That was enough to key up my mood to the most romantic pitch. I ventured forth right gaily in a warm spring sun and spent the better portion of an utterly delightful day idling about its streets and museums.
Haarlem, to me, aside from the tulip craze, was where Frans Hals lived and where in 1610, when he was thirty years of age, he married and where six years later he was brought before the Burgomaster for ill-treating his wife, and ordered to abstain from “dronken schnappe.” Poor Frans Hals! The day I was there a line of motor-cars stood outside the Stadhuis waiting while their owners contemplated the wonders of the ten Regents pictures inside which are the pride of Haarlem. When I left London Sir Scorp was holding his recently discovered portrait by Hals at forty thousand pounds or more. I fancy to-day any of the numerous portraits by Hals in his best manner would bring two hundred thousand dollars and very likely much more. Yet at seventy-two Hals’s goods and chattels—three mattresses, one chair, one table, three bolsters, and five pictures—were sold to satisfy a baker’s bill, and from then on, until he died fourteen years later, at eighty-six, his “rent and firing” were paid for by the municipality. Fate probably saved a very great artist from endless misery by letting his first wife die. As it was he appears to have had his share of wretchedness.
The business of being really great is one of the most pathetic things in the world. When I was in London a close friend of Herbert Spencer told me the story of his last days, and how, save for herself, there was scarcely any one to cheer him in his loneliness. It was not that he lacked living means—he had that—but living as he did, aloft in the eternal snows of speculation, there was no one to share his thoughts,—no one. It was the fate of that gigantic mind to be lonely. What a pity the pleasures of the bottle or a drug might not eventually have allured him. Old Omar knew the proper antidote for these speculative miseries.
And Rembrandt van Ryn—there was another. It is probably true that from 1606, when he was born, until 1634, when he married at twenty-eight, he was gay enough. He had the delicious pleasure of discovering that he was an artist. Then he married Saskia van Uylenborch—the fair Saskia whom he painted sitting so gaily on his knee—and for eight years he was probably supremely happy. Saskia had forty thousand gulden to contribute to this ménage. Rembrandt’s skill and fame were just attaining their most significant proportions, when she died. Then, being an artist, his affairs went from bad to worse; and you have the spectacle of this other seer, Holland’s metaphysician, color-genius, life-interpreter, descending to an entanglement with a rather dull housekeeper, losing his money, having all his possessions sold to pay his debts and living out his last days in absolute loneliness at the Keizerskroon Inn in Amsterdam—quite neglected; for the local taste for art had changed, and the public was a little sick of Hals and Rembrandt.
As I sat in the Kroon restaurant, in Haarlem, opposite the Groote Kerk, watching some pigeons fly about the belfry, looking at Lieven de Key’s meat market, the prototype of Dutch quaintness, and meditating on the pictures of these great masters that I had just seen in the Stadhuis, the insignificance of the individual as compared with the business of life came to me with overwhelming force. We are such minute, dusty insects at best, great or small. The old age of most people is so trivial and insignificant. We become mere shells—“granthers,” “Goody Two-Shoes,” “lean and slippered pantaloons.” The spirit of life works in masses—not individuals. It prefers a school or species to a single specimen. A great man or woman is an accident. A great work of art of almost any kind is almost always fortuitous—like this meat market over the way. Life, for instance, I speculated sitting here, cared no more for Frans Hals or Rembrandt or Lieven de Key than I cared for the meanest butcher or baker of their day. If they chanced to find a means of subsistence—well and good; if not, well and good also. “Vanity, vanity, saith the preacher, all is vanity.” Even so.
From Haarlem I went on to The Hague, about fifty minutes away; from The Hague, late that evening, to Rotterdam; from Rotterdam to Dordrecht, and so into Belgium, where I was amused to see everything change again—the people, language, signs,—all. Belgium appeared to be French, with only the faintest suggestion of Holland about it—but it was different enough from France also to be interesting on its own account.
After a quick trip across Belgium with short but delightful stops at Bruges, that exquisite shell of a once great city, at Ghent and at Brussels, the little Paris, I arrived once more at the French capital.