A Wanderer in Holland Part 11

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 m.u.f.fled in Italian Cutworke. At a third the Sconce clad in Cambrick.

The absence of any lively traffic on the ca.n.a.ls, 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 ca.n.a.ls, 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 princ.i.p.al 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 impa.s.sable 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Sat.u.r.day--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 s.h.i.+pping. 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 cla.s.sic 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 s.p.a.ce.

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 a.s.sistance 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 ca.n.a.l-arcs within arcs, and its northern sh.o.r.e 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.

The New Church, where the monarchs of Holland are crowned, has a very large new stained-gla.s.s window representing the coronation of Queen Wilhemina--one of the most satisfying new windows that I know, but quite lacking in any religious suggestion. That poet who considered a church the best retreat, because it is good to contemplate G.o.d through stained gla.s.s, would have fared badly in Holland.

The New Church is new only by comparison with the Old. It was built in 1410, rebuilt in 1452 and 1645. Amsterdam's Old Church, on the other side of Warmoes Straat, dates from 1300. The visitor to the New Church is handed a brief historical leaflet in exchange for his twenty-five cents, and is left to his own devices; but the Old Church has a koster who takes a pride in showing his lions and who deprecates gifts of money. An elderly, clean-shaved man with a humorous mouth, he might be taken for Holland's leading comedian. Instead, he displays ecclesiastical treasures, of which in 1904 there were fewer than usual, two of the three fine old windows representing the life of the Virgin being under repair behind a screen. The tombs and monuments are not interesting--admirals of the second rank and such small fry.

It is in the Old Church that most of the weddings of Amsterdam are celebrated. Thursday is the day, for then the fees are practically nothing; on other days to be married is an expense. The koster deplores the modern materialism which leads so many young men to be satisfied with the civil function; but the little enclosure, like a small arena, in which the church blesses unions, had to me a hardly less business-like appearance than a registry office. The comedian overflows with details. For the covering of the floor, he explains, there are five distinct carpets, ranging in price from five guelders to twenty-five for the hire, according to the means or ostentation of the party. Thursdays are no holiday for the church officials, one couple being hardly united before the horses of the next are pawing the paving stones at the door.

I saw on one Thursday three bridal parties in as many minutes. The happy bride sat on the back seat of the brougham, immediately before her being two mirrors in the shape of a heart supporting a bouquet of white flowers. Contemplating this simple imagery she rattles to the ecclesiastical arena and the sanct.i.ties of the five, ten, fifteen, twenty or twenty-five guelder carpet. After, a banquet and jokes.

This is the second banquet, for when the precise preliminaries of a Dutch engagement are settled a betrothal feast is held. Friends are bidden to the wedding by the receipt of a box of sweets and a bottle of wine known as "Bride's tears". For the wedding day itself there is a particular brand of wine which contains little grains of gold. The Dutch also have special cake and wine for the celebration of births.

The position of the Dutch wife is now very much that of the wife in England; but in Holland's great days she ruled. Something of her quality is to be seen in the stories of Barneveldt's widow and Grotius's wife, and the heroism and address of the widow Kenau Ha.s.selaer during the siege of Haarlem. Davies has an interesting page or two on this subject: "To be master of his own house is an idea which seems never to have occurred to the mind of a genuine Dutchman; nor did he often commence any undertaking, whether public or private, without first consulting the partner of his cares; and it is even said, that some of the statesmen most distinguished for their influence in the affairs of their own country and Europe in general, were accustomed to receive instructions at home to which they ventured not to go counter. But the dominion of these lordly dames, all despotic though it were, was ever exerted for the benefit of those who obeyed. It was the earnest and undaunted spirit of their women, which encouraged the Dutch to dare, and their calm fort.i.tude to endure, the toils, privations, and sufferings of the first years of the war of independence against Spain; it was their activity and thrift in the management of their private incomes, that supplied them with the means of defraying an amount of national expenditure wholly unexampled in history; and to their influence is to be ascribed above all, the decorum of manners, and the purity of morals, for which the society of Holland has at all times been remarkable. But though they preserved their virtue and modesty uncontaminated amid the general corruption, they were no longer able to maintain their sway. The habit which the Dutch youth had acquired, among other foreign customs, of seeking amus.e.m.e.nt abroad, rendered them less dependent for happiness on the comforts of a married life; while, accustomed to the more dazzling allurements of the women of France and Italy, they were apt to overlook or despise the quiet and un.o.btrusive beauties of those of their own country. Whether they did not better consult their own dignity in emanc.i.p.ating themselves from this subjection may be a question; but the fact, that the decline of the republic and of the female s.e.x went hand in hand, is indubitable."

To return to Amsterdam's sights, the church which I remember with most pleasure is the English Reformed Church, which many visitors never succeed in finding at all, but to which I was taken by a Dutch lady who knew my tastes. You seek the Spui, where the electric trams start for Haarlem, and enter a very small doorway on the north side. It seems to lead to a private house, but instead you find yourself in a very beautiful little enclosure of old and quaint buildings, exquisitely kept, each with a screen of pollarded chestnuts before it; in the midst of which is a toy white church with a gay little spire that might have wandered out of a fairy tale. The enclosure is called The Begijnenhof, or Court of the Begijnen, a little sisterhood named after St. Begga, daughter of Pipinus, Duke of Brabant,--a saint who lived at the end of the seventh century and whose day in the Roman Catholic Calendar is December 17.

The church was originally the church of these nuns, but when the old religion was overthrown in Amsterdam, in 1578, it was taken from them, although they were allowed--as happily they still are--to retain possession of the court around it.

In 1607 the church pa.s.sed into the possession of a settlement of Scotch weavers who had been invited to Amsterdam by the merchants, and who had made it a condition of acceptance that they should have a conventicle of their own. It is now a resort of English church-going visitors on Sunday.

Most of Holland's churches--as of England's--once belonged to Rome, and it is impossible to forget their ancient owners.h.i.+p; but I remember no other case where the new religion is practised, as in the Begijnenhof, in the heart of the enemy's camp. In the very midst of the homes of the quiet sweet Begijnen sisters are the voices of the usurping Reformers heard in prayer and praise.

One little concession, however, was made by the appropriators of the chapel. Until as recently as 1865 a special part of the building the original Roman consecration of which had not been nullified was retained by the sisterhood in which to bury their dead. The ceremony was very impressive. Twelve of the nuns carried their dead companion three times round the court before entering the church. But all that is over, and now they must seek burial elsewhere, without their borders.

One may leave the Begijnenhof by the other pa.s.sage into Kalverstraat, and walking up that busy street towards the Dam, turn down the St. Lucien Steeg, on the left, to another of Amsterdam's homes of ancient peace--the munic.i.p.al orphanage, which was once the Convent of St. Lucien. The Dutch are exceedingly kind to their poor, and the orphanages and almshouses (Oudemannen and Oudevrouwen houses as they are called) are very numerous. The Munic.i.p.al Orphanage of Amsterdam is among the most interesting; and it is to this refuge that the girls and boys belong whom one sees so often in the streets of the city in curious parti-coloured costume--red and black vertically divided. The Amsterdamsche burgerweesmeisjes, as the girls are called, make in procession a very pretty and impressive sight--with their white tippets and caps above their dresses of black and red.

This reminds me that one of the most agreeable performances that I saw in any of the Dutch music halls (which are not good, and which are rendered very tedious to English people by reason of the interminable interval called the Pause in the middle of the evening), was a series of folk songs and dances by eight girls known as the Orange Blossoms, dressed in different traditional costumes of the north and south--Friesland, Marken, and Zeeland. They were quite charming. They sang and danced very prettily, as housewives, as fisher girls, but particularly as Amsterdamsche burgerweesmeisjes.

In the music halls both at Amsterdam and Rotterdam I listened to comic singers inexorably endowed with too many songs apiece; but I saw also some of those amazing feats of acrobatic skill and exhibitions of clean strength which alone should cause people to encourage these places of entertainment, where the standard of excellence in such displays is now so high. I did not go to the theatre in Holland. My Dutch was too elementary for that. My predecessor Ireland, however, did so, and saw an amusing piece of literalness introduced into _Hamlet_. In the impa.s.sioned scene, he tells us, between the prince and his mother, "when the hero starts at the imagined appearance of his father, his wig, by means of a concealed spring, jumped from 'the seat of his distracted brain,' and left poor Hamlet as bare as a Dutch willow in winter."

The Oude Kerk has very beautiful bells, but Amsterdam is no place in which to hear such sweet sounds. The little towns for bells. Near the church is the New Market, with the very charming old weigh-house with little extinguisher spires called the St. Anthonysveeg. Here the fish market is held; and the fish market of a city like Amsterdam should certainly be visited. The Old Market is on the western side of the Dam, under the western church. "It is said," remarks the author of _Through Noord-Holland_, "that Rembrandt has been buried in this church, though his grave has never been found."

Napoleon's sarcasm upon the English--that they were a nation of shopkeepers--never seemed to me very shrewd: but in Holland one realises that if any nation is to be thus signally stigmatised it is not the English. As a matter of fact we are very indifferent shopkeepers. We lack several of the needful qualities: we lack foresight, the sense of order and organised industry, and the strength of mind to resist the temptations following upon a great coup. A nation of shopkeepers would not go back on the shop so completely as we do. No nation that is essentially sn.o.bbish can be accurately summed up as a nation of shopkeepers. The French for all their distracting gifts of art and mockery are better shopkeepers than we, largely because they are more sensibly contented. They take short views and live each day more fully. But the Dutch are better still; the Dutch are truly a nation of shopkeepers. [4]

If one would see the Amsterdam merchant as the satirist sees him, the _locus cla.s.sicus_ is Multatuli's famous novel _Max Havelaar_, where he stands delightfully nude in the person of Mr. Drystubble, head of the firm of Last and Co., Coffee-brokers, No. 37 Laurier Ca.n.a.l. _Max Havelaar_ was published in the early sixties to draw attention to certain scandals in Dutch colonial administration, and it has lived on, and will live, by reason of a curious blend of vivacity and intensity. Here is a little piece of Mr. Drystubble's mind:--

Business is slack on the Coffee Exchange. The Spring Auction will make it right again. Don't suppose, however, that we have nothing to do. At Busselinck and Waterman's trade is slacker still. It is a strange world this: one gets a deal of experience by frequenting the Exchange for twenty years. Only fancy that they have tried--I mean Busselinck and Waterman--to do me out of the custom of Ludwig Stern. As I do not know whether you are familiar with the Exchange, I will tell you that Stern is an eminent coffee-merchant in Hamburg, who always employed Last and Co. Quite accidentally I found that out--I mean that bungling business of Busselinck and Waterman. They had offered to reduce the brokerage by one-fourth per cent. They are low fellows--nothing else. And now look what I have done to stop them. Any one in my place would perhaps have written to Ludwig Stern, "that we too would diminish the brokerage, and that we hoped for consideration on account of the long services of Last and Co."

I have calculated that our firm, during the last fifty years, has gained four hundred thousand guilders by Stern. Our connexion dates from the beginning of the continental system, when we smuggled Colonial produce and such like things from Heligoland. No, I won't reduce the brokerage.

I went to the Polen coffee-house, ordered pen and paper, and wrote:--

"That because of the many honoured commissions received from North Germany, our business transactions had been extended"--(it is the simple truth)--"and that this necessitated an augmentation of our staff"--(it is the truth: no more than yesterday evening our bookkeeper was in the office after eleven o'clock to look for his spectacles);--"that, above all things, we were in want of respectable, educated young men to conduct the German correspondence. That, certainly, there were many young Germans in Amsterdam, who possessed the requisite qualifications, but that a respectable firm"--(it is the very truth),--"seeing the frivolity and immorality of young men, and the daily increasing number of adventurers, and with an eye to the necessity of making correctness of conduct go hand in hand with correctness in the execution of orders"--(it is the truth, I observe, and nothing but the truth),--"that such a firm--I mean Last and Co., coffee-brokers, 37 Laurier Ca.n.a.l--could not be anxious enough in engaging new hands."

All that is the simple truth, reader. Do you know that the young German who always stood at the Exchange, near the seventeenth pillar, has eloped with the daughter of Busselinck and Waterman? Our Mary, like her, will be thirteen years old in September.

"That I had the honour to hear from Mr. Saffeler"--(Saffeler travels for Stern)--"that the honoured head of the firm, Ludwig Stern, had a son, Mr. Ernest Stern, who wished for employment for some time in a Dutch house.

"That I, mindful of this"--(here I referred again to the immorality of _employes_, and also the history of that daughter of Busselinck and Waterman; it won't do any harm to tell it)--"that I, mindful of this, wished, with all my heart, to offer Mr. Ernest Stern the German correspondence of our firm."

From delicacy I avoided all allusion to honorarium or salary; yet I said:--

"That if Mr. Ernest Stern would like to stay with us, at 37 Laurier Ca.n.a.l, my wife would care for him as a mother, and have his linen mended in the house"--(that is the very truth, for Mary sews and knits very well),--and in conclusion I said, "that we were a religious family."

The last sentence may do good, for the Sterns are Lutherans. I posted that letter. You understand that old Mr. Stern could not very well give his custom to Busselinck and Waterman, if his son were in our office.

When _Max Havelaar_ gets to Java the narrative is less satisfactory, so tangential does it become, but there are enough pa.s.sages in the manner of that which I have quoted to keep one happy, and to show how entertaining a satirist of his own countrymen at home "Multatuli"

(whose real name was Edward Douwes Dekker) might have been had he been possessed by no grievance.

The book, which is very well worth reading, belongs to the literature of humanity and protest. Its author had to suffer much acrimonious attack, and was probably called a Little Hollander, but the fragment from an unpublished play which he placed as a motto to his book shows him to have lacked no satirical power to meet the enemy:--

_Officer_.--My Lord, this is the man who murdered Betsy.

_Judge_.--He must hang for it. How did he do it?