A Wanderer in Holland

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canal's influence on the national character-The florin and the franc-Lady Mary Wortley Montagu-The old and the poor-Holland's health-Funeral customs-The chemists' shops-Erasmus of Rotterdam-Latinised names-Peter de Hooch-True

at the Hook at five A.M. I am sorry for this, because after a rough passage it was very pleasant to glide in the early morning steadily up the Maas and gradually acquire a sense of Dutch quietude and greyness. No longer, however, can this be done, as the Batavier boats reach Rotterdam at night; and on

nd. No one who looks steadily out of the windows between the Hook and Rotterdam has much to learn thereafter. Only changing skies and atmospheric effects can provide him with novelty, for most of Holland is like that. He has the formula. Nor is it

ore of districts; cows range our meadows as they range the meadows of the Dutch. We go to Holland to see the towns, the pictures and the people. We go also beca

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cture in th

and is one of the most delightful countries to move Page 3about in: everything that happens in it is of interest. I have never quite lost the sense of excitement in crossing a canal in the train and getting a momentary glimpse of its receding straightness, perhaps broken by a

you to The Hague. It is not even particularly Dutch: it is cosmopolitan. The Dutch are quieter than this, and cleaner. And yet Rotterdam is unique-its church of St. Lawrence has a grey and sombre tower which has no equal in the country; there is a windmill on the Cool Singe

ing at home we must make our tortuous way to the Pool; Rotterdam has the Pool in her midst. Great ships pass up and down all day. The

or than is poetry. As a matter of fact it is the reader of such an inventory as we find in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" that is the poet: Whitman is only the machinery.

in the rigging or ou

ng motion of the hulls, the

mers in motion, the pilo

e passage, the quick trem

ations, the fallin

twilight, the ladled cups, the

nd dimmer, the grey walls of the

eam-tug closely flank'd on each side by th

s from the foundry chimneys burnin

wild red and yellow light over the tops of th

e no one nationality but all. Whitman was not otherwise very strong upon Holland. He writes in "Sa

dy to start in the

arseilles, Lisbon, Naples, Hamburg, B

ague; because The Hague has no harbour except for small craft and barges. Page 5Shall we as

st in the canals is the absence of men. A woman is always there; her husband only rarely. The only visible captain is the fussy, shrewish little dog which, suspicious

glish suburban villas have not a greater variety of fantastic names than the canal craft of Holland; nor, with all our monopoly of the word "hom

ls is spotless. Every bulwark has a washing tray that can be fixed or detached in a moment. "It's a fine day, l

in the same direction, as the vanes of St. Sepulchre's in Holborn cannot do. How they ever get disentangled again and proc

however distant. From any one canal you can reach in time every other. The canal is really much more the high road of the country than the road itself. The barge is the Pickford van of H

d spectacle (to us) of masts in the streets and sails in the fields. A

ot swim in it, they do not race on it, they do not row for pleasur

ter

herons fishing in the rushes; through little villages with dazzling milk-cans being scoured on the banks, and the good-wives washing, and saturnine smokers in black velvet slippers passing the time of day; through big towns, by rows of sombre houses seen through a delicate screen of leaves; under low bridges crowded with children; th

indmills and cows, quaint buildings, and quainter costumes, but it is a country of

rom Belgium, where the unit is a franc. It is too much to say that a sovereign in Holland is worth only twelve shillings: the case is not quite so extreme as that; but a sovereign in Belgium is, for all practical purposes, worth twenty-five shillings, and the contrast after reaching Dutch soil is

illings. We know that in theory that is so; but we know also that it is so only as long as the sovereign remains unchanged. Change it and it is worth next to nothing-half a sovereign

ognise it at all. When I put the matter to the landlord, he explained that the duty made it impossible for him to charge less than f. 1.50 (or half a crown) a bottle; but I am told that his excuse was too fanciful. None the less, half a crown was the charge, and apparently no one objects to pay it. The Dutch,

nes, and before the meanest artificers' doors seats of various coloured marbles, and so neatly kept that, I will assure you, I walked all over the town yesterday, incognita, in my slippers, without receiving one spot of dirt; and you may see the Dutch maid

so near it. Here is neither dirt nor beggary to be seen. One is not shocked with those loathsome cripples, so common in London, nor teased with the importunities of idle fellows and wenches, that choose to be nasty and lazy. The c

Dutch towns to be however in the main still accurate. But what she says of the Dutch servants is true everywhere to this minute. There are none more fresh and capable; none

Doubtless the labourers that one sees are working at a low rate, but they are probably living comfortably at a lower, and are not to be pitied except by those who still cherish the illusion that riches mean happi

le in the streets. In England, as one walks about, one sees too often the shadow of Death on this face and tha

ing the interesting tidings. It is for this purpose that the aanspreker flourishes in his importance and pomp. Draped heavily in black, from house to house he moves, wherever the slightest ties of personal or business acquaintanceship exist, and announces his news. A lady of Hilversum tells me that she was once formally the recipient of the message

from house to house and wept on the completion of their sad message. He wore a wide-awake hat with a very large brim and a long-tailed coat

of Page 11life. Assuming a more jocund air, he tri

prescribe. But in Holland the chemists are often young women, who preside over shops in which one cannot repose any confidence. One likes a chemist's shop at least to look as if it contained reasonable remedies. These do not. Either our shops contain too

dt Gherardts of Rotterdam is a not dishonourable cacophany-and that was the reformer's true name; but the fashion of the time led scholars to adopt a Hellenised, or Latinised, style. Erasmus Desiderius, his new name, means Beloved and long desired. Grotius, Barlaeus, Voss

, but the influence of Rembrandt is concealed from the superficial observer. De Hooch, whose pictures are very scarce, worked chiefly at Delft and Haarlem, and it was at Haarlem that he died in 1681. If one

g by De Hooch in Holland. But in no other work of his that I know is his simple charm so apparent as in "The Store Cupboard". This is surely the Christmas supplement carried out to its highest power-and by its inventor. The thousands of domestic scenes which have proceeded from this one c

andt and Gerard Dou got their concentrated effects of illumination; but how this omnipresent radiance streamed from De Hooch's palette

ore Cu

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ture in the

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anything rather than art-a mercantile centre, a hive of bees, a shipping port of intense activity. And yet perhaps the quietest little Albert Cuyp in Holland is here, "De Ou

ll sombre canvas with a suggestion of Velasquez in it; Hobbema's "Boomrijk Landschap," one of the few paintings of this artist that Holland possesses. The English, I might remark, always appreciative judges of Dutch art, have been particularly assiduous in the purs

upon it. The most notable head is that by Karel Fabritius; Hendrick Pot's "Het Lokstertje" is interesting for its large free manner and signs of the influence of Hals; and Emmanuel de Witte's Amsterdam Page 14fishmarket is curiously mo

ture by any of his contemporaries stood with its face to the wall one would know what to expect. From Israels, a fisherman's wife; from Mesdag, a grey stretch of sea; from Bosboom, a superb church interior; from Mauve, a peasant with sheep or a peasant with a cow; from Weissenbruch, a stream and a willow; from Breitner, an Amsterdam street; from James Maris a masterly scene of boats and

it of

van

in the Boymans

ion. They are well housed, but fewer distractions are provided for them than in Regent's Park. I found myself fascinated by the herons, Page 15who were continually soaring out over the neighbouring hous

n the fabric and then carefully perform his toilet, looking round and down all the time to see that every one else was busy. Whenever his eye lighted upon a toddling child or a perambulator it visibly brightened. "My true work!" he seemed to s

Dutch have a proverb, "Where the stork abides no mother dies in childbed". Still more

or I chanced to be in the ourang-outang's house when his keeper came in. Entering the enclosure, he romped with him in a score of diverting ways. They embraced each other, fed each other, teased each ot

for special notice another type of Rotterdam resident: "One of the most remarkable men of this [the merchant] class is Mr. Van Hoboken of Rhoon and Pendrecht, who lives on one of the havens. This individual began life as a merchant's porter, and has in process of time attained the highest rank among the Dutch mercantile aristocracy. He is at present the principal owner of twenty large ships in the East India trade, each, I was informed, worth about fourteen thousand pounds, besides a large landed estate, a

laid six inches of sand on its roads, to do honour to this kindly royalty. The band played the tender national anthem, which is always so unlike what one expects it to be, as her train steamed away, and then all the grave bearded gentlemen in uniform

iterature do not count, was permitted to coarsen his delicate genius in the hunt for brea

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that lead

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s of spi

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ommend it as a city to linger in. Better than Rotterdam's large hotels are, I think, the smaller, humbler and more Dutch inns of the less commercial towns. This indeed is the case all over Holland: the plain Dutch inn of the neighbouring

rs Crabeth. The windows are interesting rather than beautiful. They lack the richness and mystery which one likes to find in old stained glass, and the church itself is bare and cold and unfriendly. Hemmed in by all this coloured glass, so able and so direct, one sighs for a momentary glimpse of

urrounding country should not be neglected from the carriage windows

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