Art in the Netherlands/Chapter II

by Hippolyte Taine

II

This race, thus endowed, has received various imprints, according to the various conditions of its abiding-place. Sow a number of seeds of the same vegetable species in different soils, under various temperatures, and let them germinate, grow, bear fruit and reproduce themselves indefinitely, each on its own soil, and each will adapt itself to its soil, producing several varieties of the same species so much the more distinct as the contrast is greater between the diverse climates. Such is the experience of the Germanic race in the Netherlands. Ten centuries of habitation have done their work; the end of the middle ages shows us that, in addition to its innate character, there is an acquired character.

It becomes necessary, therefore, to study the soil and the sky; in default of travel take the next best thing, a map. Excepting the mountainous district to the south-east, the Netherlands consist of a watery plain, formed out of the deposits of three large rivers the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt, besides several smaller streams. Add to this numerous inlets, ponds and marshes. The country is an outflow of mighty waters, which, as they reach it, become sluggish and remain stagnant for want of a fall. Dig a hole anywhere and water comes. Examine the landscapes of Van der Neer and you will obtain some idea of the vast sluggish streams which, on approaching the sea, become a league wide, and lie asleep, wallowing in their beds like some huge, flat, slimy fish, turbid and feebly glimmering with scaly reflections. The plain is oftentimes below their level, and is only protected by levees of earth. You feel as if some of them were going to give way; a mist is constantly rising from their surfaces, and at night a dense fog envelopes all things in a bluish humidity. Follow them down to the sea, and here a second and more violent inundation, arising from the daily tides, completes the work of the first. The northern ocean is hostile to man. Look at the "Estacade" of Ruysdael, and imagine the frequent tempests casting up ruddy waves and monstrous foaming billows on the low, flat band of earth already half submerged by the enlargement of the rivers. A belt of islands, some of them equal to the half of a department, indicates, along the coast, this choking up of inland currents and the assaults of the sea Walcheren, North and South Beveland, Tholen, Schouwen, Voorn, Beierland, Texel, Vlieland and others. Sometimes the ocean runs up and forms inner seas like that of Harlem, or deep gulfs like the Zuyder Zee. If Belgium is an alluvial expanse, formed by the rivers, Holland is simply a deposit of mud surrounded by water. Add to all this an unpropitious soil and a rigorous climate, and you are tempted to conclude that the country was not made for man but for storks and beavers.

When the first Germanic tribes came to encamp here it was still worse. In the time of Cæsar and Strabo there was nothing but a swampy forest; travellers narrate that one could pass from tree to tree over all Holland without touching the ground. The uprooted oaks falling into the streams formed rafts, as nowadays on the Mississippi, and barred the way to the Roman flotillas. The Waal, the Meuse and the Scheldt annually overflowed their banks, the water covering the flat country around to a great distance. Autumnal tempests every year submerged the island of Batavia, while in Holland the line of the coast changed constantly. Rain fell incessantly, and the fog was as impenetrable as in Russian America; daylight lasted only three or four hours. A solid coating of ice annually covered the Rhine. Civilization, meanwhile, as the soil became cleared, tempered the climate; the rude Holland of that day possessed the climate of Norway. Flanders, four centuries after the invasion, was still called "the interminable and merciless forest." In 1197 the country about Waes, now a garden, remained untilled, the monks on it being besieged by wolves. In the fourteenth century droves of wild horses roamed through the forests of Holland. The sea encroached on the land. Ghent was a seaport in the ninth century, Thorout, St. OMer and Bruges in the twelfth century, Damme in the thirteenth, and Ecloo in the fourteenth. On looking at the Holland of old maps we no longer recognize it.^[1] Still, at the present day its inhabitants are obliged to guard the soil against the rivers and the sea. In Belgium the margin of the sea is below the level of the water at high tide, the polders or low spots thus reclaimed displaying vast argillaceous flats, with a slimy soil tinged with purple reflections, between dykes, which, even in our days, sometimes break away. The danger in Holland is still greater, life there seeming to be very precarious. For thirteen centuries a great inundation has taken place, on an average, every seven years, besides smaller ones; one hundred thousand persons were drowned in 1230, eighty thousand in 1287, twenty thousand in 1470, thirty thousand in 1570, and twelve thousand in 1717. Similar disasters occurred in 1770, in 1808, and still later in 1825. Dollart Bay, about seven miles wide by twenty deep, and the Zuyder Zee, forty-four leagues square, are invasions of the sea in the thirteenth century. In order to protect Friesland it was necessary to drive three rows of piles a distance of twenty-two leagues, each pile costing seven florins. To protect the coast of Harlem they had to build a dyke of Norway granite five miles long by forty feet in height, and which is buried two hundred feet beneath the waves. Amsterdam, which has two hundred and sixty thousand inhabitants, is entirely built on piles, frequently thirty feet long. The foundations of every town and village in Friesland are artificial constructions. It is estimated that seven and a half billions of francs have been expended on protective works between the Scheldt and the Dollart. Life has to be purchased in Holland. And when from Harlem or Amsterdam you see the enormous yellow surf beating against that narrow strip of mud, and enclosing it as far as the eye can reach, it is evident that man, in casting this sop to the monster, obtains safety at a low rate.^[2]

Imagine, now, on this quagmire, the ancient Germanic tribes, so many fishers and hunters roaming about in hide boats and clad in seal-skin tunics, and estimate if you can the effort those barbarians were forced to make in order to create a habitable soil and transform themselves into a civilized people. Men of another stamp would not have succeeded; the milieu was too unfavorable. In analogous conditions the inferior races of Canada and Russian America have remained savage; other well-endowed races, the Celts of Ireland and the Highland Scotch, attained only to a chivalric standard of society and poetic legends. Here there had to be good, sound heads, a capacity to subject sensation to thought, to patiently endure ennui and fatigue, to accept privation and labor in view of a remote end, in short a Germanic race, meaning by this men organized to co-operate together, to toil, to struggle, to begin over and over again and ameliorate unceasingly, to dike streams, to oppose tides, to drain the soil, to turn wind, water, flats, and argillaceous mud to account, to build canals, ships and mills, to make brick, raise cattle, and organize various manufacturing and commercial enterprises. The difficulty being very great the mind was absorbed in overcoming it, and, turned wholly in this direction, was diverted from other things. To subsist, to obtain shelter, food and raiment, to protect themselves against cold and damp, to accumulate stores and lay up wealth left the settlers no time to think of other matters; the mind got to be wholly positive and practical. It is impossible in such a country to indulge in revery, to philosophize German fashion, to stray off amidst chimeras of the fancy and through the world of metaphysical systems.^[3] One is immediately brought back to the earth. The necessity of action is too universal, too urgent, too constant; if people think at all, it is to act. Under this steady pressure the character forms; that which was habit becomes instinct; the form acquired by the parent is found hereditary in the child; laborer, artisan, trader, factor, householder, man of common sense and nothing more, he is by birth and without effort what his ancestors got to be through necessity and constraint.^[4]

This positive spirit, moreover, is found to be tranquillized. Compared with other nations of the same stock and with a genius no less practical, the denizen of the Netherlands appears better balanced and more capable of being content. We do not see in him the violent passions, the militant disposition, the overstrained will, the bull-dog instincts, the sombre and grandiose pride which three permanent conquests and the secular establishment of political strife have implanted in the English; nor that restless and exaggerated desire for action which a dry atmosphere, sudden changes from heat to cold, a surplus electricity, have implanted in the Americans of the United States. He lives in a moist and equable climate, one which relaxes the nerves and developes the lymphatic temperament, which moderates the insurrections, explosions and impetuosity of the spirit, soothing the asperities of passion and diverting the character to the side of sensuality and good humor. You have already observed this effect of climate in our comparisons of the genius and the art of the Venetians with those of the Florentines. Here, moreover, events come to the aid of climate, history laboring in the same direction as physiology. The natives of these countries have not undergone, like their neighbors over the channel, two or three invasions, the overrunning of an entire people, Saxons, Danes and Normans installed on their premises; they have not garnered a heritage of hatred which oppression, resistance, rancor, prolonged struggle, warfare at first open and violent, and afterwards subdued and legal transmit from one generation to another. From the earliest times down we find them engaged, as in the age of Pliny, in making salt, "combined together, according to ancient usage, in bringing under cultivation marshy grounds,"^[5] free in their guilds, asserting their independence, claiming their rights and immemorial privileges, devoted to whaling, trade and manufacturing, calling their towns ports, in brief, as Guiccardini describes them in the sixteenth century, " very desirous of gain and watchful of profit, but without anything feverish or irrational in their desire to provide for themselves. They are by nature cool and self-possessed. They delight in wealth and other worldly things prudently and as occasion offers, and are not easily disturbed, which is at once apparent both in their discourse and in their physiognomies. They are not prone to anger or to pride, but live together on good terms, and are especially of a gay and lively humor." According to him they entertain no vast and overweening ambition; many of them retire from business early, amusing themselves with building, and taking life easily and pleasantly. All circumstances, moral and physical, their geographical and political state, the past and the present, combine to one end, namely, the development of one faculty and one tendency at the expense of the rest, shrewd management and temperate emotions, a practical understanding and limited desires; they comprehend the amelioration of outward things, and, this accomplished, they crave no more.

Consider, in effect, their work; its perfection and lacunœ indicate at once the limits and the power of their intellect. The profound philosophy which is so natural in Germany, and the elevated poetry which flourishes in England, they lack. They fail to overlook material things and positive interests in order to yield to pure speculation, to follow the temerities of logic, to attenuate the delicacy of analysis, and bury themselves in the depths of abstraction. They ignore that spiritual turmoil, those eruptions of suppressed feeling which give to style a tragic accent, and that vagabond fancy, those exquisite and sublime reveries which outside of life's vulgarities reveal a new universe. They can boast of no great philosopher; their Spinoza is a Jew, a pupil of Descartes and the rabbis, an isolated recluse of a different genius and a different race. None of their books have become European like those of Burns and Camoens, who, nevertheless, were born out of nations equally small. One only of their authors has been read by every man of his epoch, Erasmus, a refined writer but who wrote in Latin, and who, in education, taste, style and ideas belongs to the erudites and humanists of Italy. The old Dutch poets, as for example, Jacob Cats, are grave, sensible, somewhat tedious moralists, who laud home enjoyments and the life of the family. The Flemish poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries tell their auditors that they do not recount chivalric fables - but veritable histories, their poesy ending in practical maxims and contemporary events. In vain do their belle-lettre academies cultivate and make poetry prominent, there being no talent to produce out of such resources any great or beautiful performance. Chroniclers arise like Châtelain, and pamphleteers like Marnix de Sainte-Aldegonde, but their unctuous narratives are inflated; their overcharged eloquence, coarse and crude, recalls, without equalling it, the rude color and vigorous grossness of their national art. They have scarcely any literature at the present day. Their only novelist, Conscience, seems to us, although a tolerable observer, dull and unrefined. If we visit their country and read their journals, those at least not got up in Paris, we seem to have fallen upon the provinces, and even lower. Polemical discussions are gross, the flowers of rhetoric stale, humor rudely indulged, and wit pointless; a coarse joviality and a coarse anger supply the material; their very caricatures seem to us stupid. If we attempt to ascertain their contributions to the great edifice of modern thought we find that patiently and methodically, like honest and faithful workmen, they have hewn out a few blocks. They can point to a learned school of philologists at Leyden, to jurisprudential authorities like Grotius, to naturalists and physicians like Leeuvenhoeck, Swammerdam and Boerhaave, to physicists like Huyghens, and to cosmographers like Ortelius and Mercator, in short, to a contingent of specialist and useful men, but to no creative intellect disclosing to the world grand original ideas or enshrining original conceptions in beautiful forms capable of universal ascendancy. They have left to neighboring nations the part filled by the contemplative Mary at the feet of Jesus, choosing for themselves that of Martha; in the seventeenth century they provided pulpits for the Protestant erudites exiled from France, a country for free thought persecuted throughout Europe, and editors for all books of science and polemics; at a later period they furnished printers for the whole of our eighteenth century philosophy, and finally booksellers, brokers and counterfeiters for the entire literature of modern times. All this is of service to them for they are versed in languages, and read and are instructed, instruction being an acquisition and something which it is good to lay up like other things. But there they stop, and neither their ancient nor their modern works show any need of or faculty for contemplating the abstract beyond the apparent world and the imaginary world outside of reality.

On the contrary they have always excelled and they still excel in the arts called useful. "First among transalpine people," says Guiccardini, "they invented woolen fabrics." Up to 1404 they alone were capable of weaving and manufacturing them. England supplied them with the raw material, the English doing no more than raise and shear the sheep. At the end of the sixteenth century, an unique thing in Europe, "almost everybody, even the peasantry, could read and write; a great many even acquired the principles of grammar." We find, accordingly, belle-lettre academies, that is to say associations for oratory and dramatic representations, even in the small towns. This indicates the degree of perfection to which they brought their civilization. "They have," says Guiccardini, "a special and happy talent for the ready invention of all sorts of machines, ingenious and suitable for facilitating, shortening and dispatching everything they do, even in the matter of cooking." They, indeed, with the Italians, are the first in Europe to attain to prosperity, wealth, security, liberty, comfort, and all other benefits which seem to us the paraphernalia of modern times. In the thirteenth century Bruges was equal to Venice; in the sixteenth century Antwerp was the industrial and commercial capital of the North. Guiccardini never wearies in praising it, and he only saw it when it was in full decline, reconquered by the Duke of Parma after the terrible siege of 1585. In the seventeenth century Holland, remaining free, occupies for a century the place which England now holds in the world of to-day. It is in vain for Flanders to fall back into Spanish hands, to be ravaged by the wars of Louis XIV., to be surrendered to Austria, to serve as a battle-ground for the wars of the Revolution; she never descends to the level of Spain or Italy; the partial prosperity she maintains throughout the miseries of repeated invasion and under a bungling despotism shows the energy of her inspiring good sense and the fecundity of her assiduous labor.

Of all the countries of Europe at the present day Belgium is the one which with an equal area supports the most inhabitants; she feeds twice as many as France; the most populous of our departments, that of the North, is a portion which Louis XIV detached from her. Towards Lille and Douai you already see spread out in an indefinable circle, extending up to the horizon, this great kitchen garden, a deep and fertile soil diapered with pale grain sheaves, poppy-fields, and the large-leaved beet, and richly stimulated by a low, warm sky swimming with vapor. Between Brussels and Malines begins the broad prairie, here and there striped with rows of poplars, intersected with water-courses and fences, where cattle browse throughout the year, an inexhaustible storehouse of hay, milk, cheese and meat. In the environs of Ghent and Bruges, the land of Waes, "the classic soil of agriculture," is nourished by fertilizers gathered in all countries, and by barnyard manure brought from Zealand. Holland, in like manner, is simply a pasturage, a natural tillage, which, instead of exhausting the soil, renews it, providing its cultivators with the amplest crops, and affording to the consumer the most strengthening aliments. In Holland, at Buicksloot, there are millionaire cow-herds, the Netherlands ever seeming to the stranger to be a land of feasting and good cheer. If you turn from agricultural to industrial results, you will everywhere encounter the same art of utilizing and making the best of things. Obstacles with them are transformed into aids. The soil was flat and soaked with water; they took advantage of it to cover it with canals and railroads, no place in Europe presenting so many channels of communication and of transport. They were in want of fuel; they dug down into the bowels of the earth, the coal-pits of Belgium being as rich as those of England. The rivers annoyed them with their inundations and inland pools deprived them of a portion of their territory; they drained the pools, diked the streams, and profited by the rich alluvions and the slow deposits of vegetable mould with which the surplus or stagnant waters overspread their land. Their canals freeze up; they take skates and travel in winter five leagues an hour. The sea threatened them; after forcing it back, they avail themselves of it to traffic with all nations. The winds sweep unimpeded across their flat country and over the turbulent ocean; they make them swell the sails of their vessels and move the wings of their windmills. In Holland you will observe at every turn of the road one of these enormous structures, a hundred feet high, furnished with machinery and pumps, busy in emptying the overflow of water, sawing ship-timber and manufacturing oil. From the steamer, in front of Amsterdam, you see, stretching off as far as the eye can reach, an infinite spider's web, a light, indistinct and complex fringe of masts and arms of windmills encircling the horizon with their innumerable fibres. The impression you carry away is that of a country transformed from end to end by the hand and the art of man, and sometimes entirely created until it becomes a comfortable and productive territory.

Let us go further; let us take a near view of man, and appreciate the most important object belonging to him - his habitation. There is no stone in this country - nothing but an adhesive clay, suitable for men and horses to mire their feet in. It occurred to the people, however, to bake it, and in this way brick and tile, which are the best of defences against humidity, came into their hands. You see well contrived buildings of an agreeable aspect, with red; brown and rosy walls covered with a bright stucco white façades varnished and sometimes decorated with sculptured flowers, animals, medallions and small columns. In the older cities the house often stands with its gable to the street, festooned with arcades, branchings and leafage, which terminate in a bird, an apple or a bust; it is not, as in our cities, a continuation of its neighbor an abstract compartment of vast barracks, but an object apart, endowed with a special and private character, at once interesting and picturesque. Nothing could be better kept and cleaner. At Douai the poorest have their domicile whitewashed once a year, outside and in, it being necessary to engage the whitewasher six months in advance. At Antwerp, in Ghent and in Bruges, and especially in the small towns, most of the façades seem to be newly painted or freshened the day before. Washing and sweeping are going on on all sides. When you reach Holland there is extra care even to exaggeration. You see domestics at five o'clock in the morning scrubbing the sidewalks. In the environs of Amsterdam the villages seem to be scenery from the Opera-Comique, so tidy and so well dusted are they. There are stables for cows, the flooring of which is cabinet work: you can enter them only in slippers or sabots placed at the entrance for that purpose; a spot of dirt would be scandalous, and still more so any odor; the cows' tails are held up by a small cord to prevent them from soiling themselves. Vehicles are prohibited from entering the village; the sidewalks of brick and blue porcelain are more irreproachable than a vestibule with us. In autumn children come and gather up the fallen leaves in the streets to deposit them in a pit. Everywhere, in the small rooms, seemingly the state-rooms of a ship, the order and arrangement are the same as on a ship. In Broeck, it is said, there is in each house a particular room which is entered only once a week in order to clean and rub the furniture, and then carefully closed; in a country so damp, dirt immediately becomes a deleterious mould; man, compelled to scrupulous cleanliness, contracts the habit, experiences its necessity, and at last falls under its tyranny. You would be pleased, however, to see the humblest shop of the smallest street in Amsterdam, with its brown casks, its immaculate counter, its scoured benches, everything in its place, the economy of small quarters, the intelligent and handy arrangement of all utensils. Guiccardini already remarks "that their houses and clothes are clean, handsome and well-arranged, that they have much furniture, utensils and domestic objects, kept in better order and with a finer lustre than in any other country." It is necessary to see the comfort of their apartments, especially the houses of the middle classes - carpets, waxed cloths for the floors, warm and heat-saving chimneys of iron and porcelain, triple curtains at the windows, clear, dark and highly polished windowpanes, vases of flowers and green plants, innumerable knick-knacks indicative of sedentary habits and which render home life pleasant, mirrors placed so as to reflect the people passing in the street together with its changing aspects; - every detail shows some inconvenience remedied, some want satisfied, some pleasant contrivance, some thoughtful provision, in short, the universal reign of a sagacious activity and the extreme of comfort.

Man, in effect, is that which his work indicates. Thus endowed and thus situated, he enjoys and knows how to enjoy. The bountiful soil furnishes him with abundant nutriment meat, fish, vegetables, beer and brandy; he eats and drinks copiously, while in Belgium the Germanic appetite, as it grows in fastidiousness without decreasing becomes gastronomic sensuality. Cooking there is scientific and perfect, even to the hotel tables; I believe that they are the best in Europe. There is a certain hotel in Mons to which visitors from the small neighboring towns come to dine every Saturday, especially to enjoy a delicate meal. They lack wine, but they import it from Germany and France, and boast the possession of the best vintages: we do not, in their opinion, treat our wines with the respect they deserve; it is necessary to be a Belgian to care for and relish them in a proper manner. There is no important hotel which is not supplied with a varied and select stock; its reputation and custom are made by the selection; in the railroad cars the conversation tends spontaneously to the merits of two rival cellars. A prudent merchant will have twelve thousand bottles in his sanded cellars, duly classified; it constitutes his library. The burgomaster of a petty Dutch town possesses a cask of genuine Johannisberger, made in the best year, and this cask adds to the consideration of its owner. A man there, who gives a dinner party, knows how to make his wines succeed each other in such a way as not to impair the taste and have as many as possible consumed. As to the pleasures of the ear and the eye, they understand them as well as those of the palate and the stomach. They instinctively love the music which we only appreciate through culture. In the sixteenth century they are first in this art; Guiccardini states that their vocalists and instrumentalists are esteemed in all the courts of Christendom; abroad, their professors found schools, and their compositions are standards of authority. Even nowadays the great musical endowment of being able to sing in parts is encountered even amongst the populace; the coal-miners organize choral societies; I have heard laborers in Brussels and Antwerp, and the ship caulkers and sailors of Amsterdam sing in chorus, and in true time, while at work and in the street on returning home at night. There is no large Belgian town in which a chime of bells, perched in the belfry, does not every quarter of an hour amuse the artizan in his shop and the trader at his counter with the peculiar harmonies of their sonorous metal. In like manner their city halls, their house-fronts, even their old drinking-cups are, through their complex ornamentation, their intricate lines and their original, and often fantastic design, agreeable to the eye. Add to this the free or well-composed tones of the bricks forming the walls, and the richness of the brown and red tints relieving on white displayed on the roofs and façades - assuredly the towns of the Netherlands are as picturesque of their kind as any in Italy. In all times they have delighted in kermesses and fêtes de Gayant, in corporation processions, and in the parade and glitter of costumes and materials. I shall show you the completely Italian pomp of the civic entries and other ceremonies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They are epicureans as well as gourmands in the matter of comfortable living; regularly, calmly, without heat or enthusiasm they glean up every pleasing harmony of savor, sound, color and form that arises out of their prosperity and abundance, like tulips on a heap of compost. All this produces good sense somewhat limited, and happiness somewhat gross. A Frenchman would soon yawn over it, but he would make a mistake, for this civilization, which seems to him unctuous and vulgar, possesses one sterling merit - it is healthy; the men living here have a gift we lack the most - wisdom, and a compensation we are equally undeserving of - contentment.

Notes

1. Michiels, "Histoire de la Peinture Flamande," Vol. I., p. 230; and Schayes' "Les Pays-Bas-avant et pendant la domination Romaine."
2. See Alphonse Esquires'. "La Néerlande et la Vie Néerlandaise." 2 vols.
3. Alfred Michiels' "Histoire de la Peinture," Vol. I., p. 238. This volume contains a number of general views all deserving of attention.
4. Prosper Lucas' " De l'Hérédité," and Darwin's "Origin of Species."
5. Moke's "Mœurs et Usages des Beiges," pp. 111, 113. A capitulary of the ninth century.