A Wanderer in Holland Part 18

On the day that I was in Zutphen it was the quietest town I had found in all Holland--not excepting Monnickendam between the arrival of the steam-trams. The clean bright streets were empty and still: another ma.s.sacre almost might just have occurred. I had Zutphen to myself. I could not even find the koster to show me the church; and it was in trying door after door as I walked round it that I came upon the only sign of life in the place. For one handle at last yielding I found myself instantly in a small chapel filled with many young women engaged in a scripture cla.s.s. The sudden irruption of an embarra.s.sed and I imagine somewhat grotesque foreigner seems to have been exactly what every member of this little congregation was most desiring, and I never heard a merrier or more spontaneous burst of laughter. I stood not upon the order of my going.

The church is vast and very quiet and restful, with a large plain window of green gla.s.s that increases its cool freshness; while the young leaves of a chestnut close to another window add to this effect. The koster coming at last, I was shown the ancient chained library in the chapter house, and he enlarged upon the beauties of a metal font. Wandering out again into this city of silence I found in the square by the church an exhibition of wax works which was to be opened at four o'clock. Making a note to return to it at that hour, I sought the river, where the timber is floated down from the German forests, and lost myself among peat barges and other craft, and walked some miles in and about Zutphen, and a little way down a trickling stream whence the view of the city is very beautiful; and by-and-by found myself by the church and the wax works again, in a town that since my absence had quite filled with bustling people--four o'clock having struck and the Princess of the Day Dream having (I suppose) been kissed. The change was astonis.h.i.+ng.

Wax works always make me uncomfortable, and these were no exception; but the good folk of Zutphen found them absorbing. The murderers stood alone, staring with that fixity which only a wax a.s.sa.s.sin can compa.s.s; but for the most part the figures were arranged in groups with dramatic intent. Here was a confessional; there a farewell between lovers; here a wounded Boer meeting his death at the bayonet of an English dastard; there a Queen Eleanor sucking poison from her husband's arm. A series of illuminated scenes of rapine and disaster might be studied through magnifying gla.s.ses. The presence of a wax bust of Zola was due, I imagine, less to his ill.u.s.trious career than to the untoward circ.u.mstances of his death. The usual Sleeping Beauty heaved her breast punctually in the centre of the tent.

In one point only did the exhibition differ from the wax works of the French and Italian fairs--it was undeviatingly decent. There were no jokes, and no physiological models. But the Dutch, I should conjecture, are not morbid. They have their coa.r.s.e fun, laugh, and get back to business again. Judged by that new short-cut to a nation's moral tone, the picture postcard, the Dutch are quite sound. There is a shop in the high-spirited Nes Straat at Amsterdam where a certain pictorial ebullience has play, but I saw none other of the countless be-postcarded windows in all Holland that should cause a serious blush on any cheek; while the Nes Straat specimens were fundamentally sound, Rabelaisian rather than Armand-Sylvestrian, not vicious but merely vulgar.

Chapter XVIII

Arnheim to Bergen-op-Zoom

Arnheim the Joyous--A wood walk--Tesselschade Visscher and the Chambers of Rhetoric--Epigrams--Poet friends--The nightingale--An Arnheim adventure--Ten years at one book--Dutch and Latin--Dutch and French--A French story--Dutch and English--_The English Schole-Master_--Master and scholar--A nervous catechism--Avoiding the birch--A riot of courtesy--A bill of lading--Dutch proverbs--The Rhine and its mouths--Nymwegen--Lady Mary Wortley Montagu again--Painted shutters--The Valkhof--Hertogenbosch--Brothers at Bommel--The hero of Breda--Two beautiful tombs--Bergen-op-Zoom--Messrs. Grimston and Red-head--Tholen--The Dutch feminine countenance.

At Arnheim we come to a totally new Holland. The Maliebaan and the park at Utrecht, with their s.p.a.cious residences, had prepared us a little for Arnheim's wooded retirement; but not completely. Rotterdam is given to s.h.i.+pping; The Hague makes laws and fas.h.i.+ons; Leyden and Utrecht teach; Amsterdam makes money. It is at Arnheim that the retired merchant and the returned colonist set up their home. It is the richest residential city in the country. Arnheim the Joyous was its old name. Arnheim the Comfortable it might now be styled.

It is the least Dutch of Dutch towns: the Rhine brings a bosky beauty to it, German in character and untamed by Dutch restraining hands. The Dutch Switzerland the country hereabout is called. Arnheim recalls Richmond too, for it has a Richmond Hill--a terrace-road above a s.h.a.ggy precipice overlooking the river.

I walked in the early morning to Klarenbeck, up and down in a vast wood, and at a point of vantage called the Steenen Tafel looked down on the Rhine valley. Nothing could be less like the Holland of the earlier days of my wanderings--nothing, that is, that was around me, but with the farther bank of the river the flatness instantly begins and continues as far as one can see in the north.

It was a very beautiful morning in May, and as I rested now and then among the resinous pines I was conscious of being traitorous to England in wandering here at all. No one ought to be out of England in April and May. At one point I met a squirrel--just such a nimble short-tempered squirrel as those which scold and hide in the top branches of the fir trees near my own home in Kent--and my sense of guilt increased; but when, on my way back, in a garden near Arnheim I heard a nightingale, the treachery was complete.

And this reminds me that the best poem of the most charming figure in Dutch literature--Tesselschade Visscher--is about the nightingale. The story of this poetess and her friends belongs more properly to Amsterdam, or to Alkmaar, but it may as well be told here while the Arnheim nightingale--the only nightingale that I heard in Holland--is plaining and exulting.

Tesselschade was the daughter of the poet and rhetorician Roemer Visscher. She was born on 25th March, 1594, and earned her curious name from the circ.u.mstance that on the same day her father was wrecked off Texel. In honour of his rescue he named his daughter Tesselschade, or Texel wreck, thereby, I think, eternally impairing his right to be considered a true poet. As a matter of fact he was rather an epigrammatist than a poet, his ambition being to be known as the Dutch Martial. Here is a taste of his Martial manner:--

Jan sorrows--sorrows far too much: 'tis true A sad affliction hath distressed his life;-- Mourns he that death hath ta'en his children two?

O no! he mourns that death hath left his wife.

I have said that Visscher was a rhetorician. The word perhaps needs a little explanation, for it means more than would appear. In those days rhetoric was a living cult in the Netherlands: Dutchmen and Flemings played at rhetoric with some of the enthusiasm that we keep for cricket and sport. Every town of any importance had its Chamber of Rhetoric. "These Chambers," says Longfellow in his _Poets and Poetry of Europe_, "were to Holland, in the fifteenth century, what the Guilds of the Meistersingers were to Germany, and were numerous throughout the Netherlands. Brussels could boast of five; Antwerp of four; Louvain of three; and Ghent, Bruges, Malines, Middelburg, Gouda, Haarlem, and Amsterdam of at least one. Each Chamber had its coat of arms and its standard, and the directors bore the t.i.tle of Princes and Deans. At times they gave public representations of poetic dialogues and stage-plays, called _Spelen van Sinne_, or Moralities. Like the Meistersingers, they gave singular t.i.tles to their songs and metres. A verse was called a _Regel_; a strophe, a _Clause_; and a burden or refrain, a _Stockregel_. If a half-verse closed as a strophe, it was a _Steert_, or tail. _Tafel-spelen_, and _Spelen van Sinne_, were the t.i.tles of the dramatic exhibitions; and the rhymed invitation to these was called a _Charte_, or _Uitroep_ (outcry). _Ketendichten_ (chain-poems) are short poems in which the last word of each line rhymes with the first of the line following; _Scaekberd_ (checkerbourd), a poem of sixty-four lines, so rhymed, that in every direction it forms a strophe of eight lines; and _Dobbel-steert_ (double-tail), a poem in which a double rhyme closes each line. [5]

"The example of Flanders was speedily followed by Zeeland and Holland. In 1430, there was a Chamber at Middelburg; in 1433, at Vlaardingen; in 1434, at Nieuwkerk; and in 1437, at Gouda. Even insignificant Dutch villages had their Chambers. Among others, one was founded in the Lier, in the year 1480. In the remaining provinces they met with less encouragement. They existed, however, at Utrecht, Amersfoort, Leeuwarden, and Ha.s.selt. The purity of the language was completely undermined by the rhyming self-called Rhetoricians, and their abandoned courses brought poetry itself into disrepute. All distinction of genders was nearly abandoned; the original abundance of words ran waste; and that which was left became completely overwhelmed by a torrent of barbarous terms."

Wagenaer, in his "Description of Amsterdam," gives a copy of a painter's bill for work done for a rhetorician's performance at the play-house in the town of Alkmaar, of which the following is a translation:--

"Imprimis, made for the Clerks a h.e.l.l; Item, the Pavilion of Satan; Item, two pairs of Devil's-breeches; Item, a s.h.i.+eld for the Christian Knight; Item, have painted the Devils whenever they played; Item, some Arrows and other small matters.

Sum total; worth in all xii. guilders.

"Jaques Mol.

"Paid, October viii., 95 [1495]."

Among the Dutch pictures at the Louvre is an anonymous work representing the Committee of a Chamber of Rhetoric.

Roemer Visscher, the father of the poetess, was a leading rhetorician at Amsterdam, and the president of the Eglantine Chamber of the Brother's Blossoming in Love (as he and his fellow-rhetoricians called themselves). None the less, he was a sensible and clever man, and he brought up his three daughters very wisely. He did not make them blue stockings, but saw that they acquired comely and useful arts and crafts, and he rendered them unique by teaching them to swim in the ca.n.a.l that ran through his garden. He also was enabled to ensure for them the company of the best poetical intellects of the time--Vondel and Brederoo, Spiegel, Hooft and Huyghens.

Of these the greatest was Joost van den Vondel, a neighbour of Visscher's in Amsterdam, the author of "Lucifer," a poem from which it has been suggested that Milton borrowed. Like Izaak Walton Vondel combined haberdashery with literature. Spiegel was a wealthy patron of the arts, and a president, with Visscher, of the Eglantine Chamber with the painfully sentimental name. Constantin Huyghens wrote light verse with intricate metres, and an occasional epigram. Here is one:--

_On Peter's Poetry_.

When Peter condescends to write, His verse deserves to see the _light_.

If any further you inquire, I mean--the candle or the fire.

Also a practical statesman, it was to Huyghens that Holland owes the beautiful old road from The Hague to Scheveningen in which Jacob Cats built his house.

Among these friends Anna and Tesselschade grew into cultured women of quick and sympathetic intellect. Both wrote poetry, but Tesselschade's is superior to her sister's. Among Anna's early work were some additions to a new edition of her father's _Zinne-Poppen_, one of her poems running thus in the translation by Mr, Edmund Gosse in the very pleasant essay on Tesselschade in his _Studies in the Literature of Northern Europe_:--

A wife that sings and pipes all day, And never puts her lute away, No service to her hand finds she; Fie, fie! for this is vanity!

But is it not a heavenly sight To see a woman take delight With song or string her husband dear, When daily work is done, to cheer?

Misuse may turn the sweetest sweet To loathsome wormwood, I repeat; Yea, wholesome medicine, full of grace, May prove a poison--out of place.

They who on thoughts eternal rest, With earthly pleasures may be blest; Since they know well these shadows gay, Like wind and smoke, will pa.s.s away.

Tesselschade, who was much loved by her poet friends, disappointed them all by marrying a dull sailor of Alkmaar named Albert Krombalgh. Settling down at Alkmaar, she continued her intercourse with her old companions, and some new ones, by letter. Among her new friends were Barlaeus, or Van Baerle, the first Latinist of the day, and Jacob Cats. When her married life was cut short some few years later, Barlaeus proposed to the young widow; but it was in vain, as she informed him by quoting from Cats these lines:--

When a valved sh.e.l.l of ocean Breaks one side or loses one, Though you seek with all devotion You can ne'er the loss atone, Never make again the edges Bite together, tooth for tooth, And, just so, old love alleges Nought is like the heart's first troth.

These are Tesselschade's lines upon the nightingale in Mr. Gosse's happy translation:--

THE WILD SONGSTER.

Praise thou the nightingale, Who with her joyous tale Doth make thy heart rejoice, Whether a singing plume she be, or viewless winged voice;

Whose warblings, sweet and clear, Ravish the listening ear With joy, as upward float The throbbing liquid trills of her enchanted throat;

Whose accents pure and ripe Sound like an organ pipe, That holdeth divers songs, And with one tongue alone sings like a score of tongues.

The rise and fall again In clear and lovely strain Of her sweet voice and shrill, Outclamours with its songs the singing springing rill.

A creature whose great praise Her rarity displays, Seeing she only lives A month in all the year to which her song she gives.

But this thing sets the crown Upon her high renown, That such a little bird as she Can harbour such a strength of clamorous harmony.