Art in the Netherlands/Chapter I

The men who inhabit the Netherlands belong, for the most part, to that race which invaded the Roman empire in the fifth century, and which then, for the first time, claimed its place in broad sunshine alongside of Latin nations. In certain countries, in Gaul, Spain and Italy, it simply brought chiefs and a supplement to the primitive population. In other countries, as in England and the Netherlands, it drove out, destroyed and replaced the ancient inhabitants, its blood, pure, or almost pure, still flowing in the veins of the men now occupying the same soil. Throughout the middle ages the Netherlands were called Low Germany. The Belgic and Dutch languages are dialects of the German, and, except in the Walloon district, where a corrupt French is spoken, they form the popular idiom of the whole country.

Let us consider the common characteristics of the Germanic race, and the differences by which it is opposed to the Latin race. Physically, we have a whiter and softer skin, generally speaking, blue eyes, often of a porcelain or pale hue, paler as you approach the north, and sometimes glassy in Holland; hair of a flaxy blonde, and, with children, almost white; the ancient Romans early wondered at it, and stated that infants in Germany had the hair of old men. The complexion is of a charming rose, infinitely delicate among young girls, and lively and tinged with vermilion among young men, and sometimes even among the aged; ordinarily, however, among the laboring classes and in advanced life I have found it wan, turnip-hued, and in Holland cheese-colored, and mouldy cheese at that. The body is generally large, but thick-set or burly, heavy and inelegant. In a similar manner the features are apt to be irregular, especially in Holland, where they are flabby, with projecting cheekbones and strongly-marked jaws. They lack, in short, sculptural nobleness and delicacy. You will rarely find the features regular like the numerous pretty faces of Toulouse and Bordeaux, or like the spirited and handsome heads which abound in the vicinity of Rome and Florence. You will much oftener find exaggerated features, incoherent combinations of form and tones, curious fleshy protuberances, so many natural caricatures. Taking them for works of art, living forms testify to a clumsy and fantastic hand through their more incorrect and weaker drawing.

Observe now this body in action, and you will find its animal faculties and necessities of a grosser kind than among the Latins; matter and mass seem to predominate over motion and spirit; it is voracious and even carnivorous. Compare the appetite of an Englishman, or even a Hollander, with that of a Frenchman or an Italian; those among you who have visited the country can call to mind the public dinner tables and the quantities of food, especially meat, tranquilly swallowed several times a day by a citizen of London, Rotterdam or Antwerp. In English novels people are always lunching - the most sentimental heroine, at the end of the third volume, having consumed an infinite number of buttered muffins, cups of tea, bits of chicken, and sandwiches. The climate contributes to this; in the foods of the north, people could not sustain themselves, like a peasant of the Latin race, on a bowl of soup or a piece of bread flavored with garlic, or on a plate of macaroni. For the same reason the German is fond of potent beverages. Tacitus had already remarked it, and Ludovico Guiccardini, an eye-witness in the sixteenth century, whom I shall repeatedly quote, says, in speaking of the Belgians and Hollanders: "Almost all are addicted to drunkenness, which vice, with them, is a passion. They fill themselves with liquor every evening, and even at day-break." At the present time, in America and in Europe, in most of the German countries, intemperance is the national bane; half of the suicides and mental maladies flow from it. Even among the reflective and those in good circumstances the fondness for liquor is very great: in Germany and in England it is not regarded as disreputable for a well-educated man to rise from the table partially intoxicated; now and then he becomes completely drunk. With us, on the contrary, it is a reproach, in Italy a disgrace, and in Spain, during the last century, the name of drunkard was an insult which a duel could not wholly wipe out, provoking, as it often did, the dagger. There is nothing of this sort in German countries: hence the great number and frequency of breweries and the innumerable shops for the retailing of ardent spirits and different kinds of beer, all bearing witness to the public taste. Enter, in Amsterdam, one of these little shops, garnished with polished casks, where glass after glass is swallowed of white, yellow, green and brown brandy, strengthened with pepper and pimento. Place yourself at nine o'clock in the evening in a Brussels brewery, near a dark wooden table around which the hawkers of crabs, salted rolls and hard-boiled eggs circulate; observe the people quietly seated there, each one intent on himself, sometimes in couples, but generally silent, smoking, eating, and drinking bumpers of beer which they now and then warm up with a glass of spirits; you can understand sympathetically the strong sensation of heat and animal plenitude which they feel in their speechless solitude, in proportion as superabundant solid and liquid nourishment renews in them the living substance, and as the whole body partakes in the gratification of the satisfied stomach.

One point more of their exterior remains to be shown which especially strikes people of southern climes, and that is the sluggishness and torpidity of their impressions and movements. An umbrella-dealer of Amsterdam, a Toulousian, almost threw himself into my arms on hearing me speak French, and for a quarter of an hour I had to listen to the story of his griefs. To a temperament as lively as his, the people of this country were intolerable "stiff, frigid, with no sensibility or sentiment, dull and insipid, perfect turnips, sir, perfect turnips!" And, truly, his cackling and expansiveness formed a contrast. It seems, on addressing them, as if they did not quite comprehend you, or that they required time to set their expressional machinery agoing; the keeper of a gallery, a household servant, stands gaping at you a minute before answering. In coffeehouses and in public conveyances the phlegm and passivity of their features are remarkable; they do not feel as we do the necessity of moving about and talking they remain stationary for hours, absorbed with their own ideas or with their pipes. At evening parties in Amsterdam, ladies, bedecked like shrines, and motionless on their chairs, seem to be statues. In Belgium, in Germany and in England, the faces of the peasantry seem to us inanimate, devitalized or benumbed. A friend, returning from Berlin, remarked to me, "those people all have dead eyes." Even the young girls look simple and drowsy. Many a time have I paused before a shop-window to contemplate some rosy, placid and candid face, a mediæval madonna making up the fashions. It is the very reverse of this in our land and in Italy, where the grisette's eyes seem to be gossiping with the chairs for lack of something better, and where a thought, the moment it is born, translates itself into gesture. In Germanic lands the channels of sensation and expression seem to be obstructed; delicacy, impulsiveness, and readiness of action appear impossible; a southerner has to exclaim at their awkwardness and lack of adroitness, and this was the deliberate opinion of our French in the wars of the Revolution and the Empire. In this respect the toilette and deportment afford us the best indications, especially if we take the middle and lower classes of society. Compare the grisettes of Rome, Bologna, Paris and Toulouse with the huge mechanical dolls to be seen at Hampton Court on Sundays, starched and stiff in their blue scarfs, staring silks and gilded belts, and other details of a pompous extravagance. I remember at this moment two fêtes - one at Amsterdam to which the rich peasant women of Friesland flocked, their heads decked with a fluted cap and a hat like a cabriolet rearing itself convulsively, whilst on the temples and brow were two gold plates, a gold pediment and gold corkscrews surrounding a wan and distorted countenance; the other at Fribourg, in Brisgan, where, planted on their solid feet, the village women stood vaguely staring at us and exhibiting themselves in their national costume so many black, red, purple and green skirts, with stiff folds like those of gothic statues, a swollen corsage front and rear, massive sleeves puffed out like legs of mutton, forms girded close under the armpits, dull, yellow hair twisted into a knot and drawn towards the top of the head, chignons in a net of gold and silver embroidery, and above this a man's hat, like an orange-colored pipe, the heteroclite crown of a body seemingly hewn out with a cleaver, and vaguely suggesting a painted sign-post. In brief, the human animal of this race is more passive and more gross than the other. One is tempted to regard him as inferior on comparing him with the Italian or southern Frenchman, so temperate, so quick intellectually, who is naturally apt in expression, in chatting and in pantomine, possessing taste and attaining to elegance, and who, without effort, like the Provençals of the twelfth, and the Florentines of the fourteenth century, become cultivated, civilized and accomplished at the first effort.

We must not confine ourselves to this first glance which presents only one phase of things; there is another associated with it, as light accompanies dark. This finesse, and this precocity, natural to the Latin families, leads to many bad results. It is the source of their craving for agreeable sensations; they are exacting in their comforts; they demand many and varied pleasures, whether coarse or refined, an entertaining conversation, the amenities of politeness, the satisfactions of vanity, the sensualities of love, the delights of novelty and of accident, the harmonious symmetries of form and of phrase; they readily develope into rhetoricians, dilettanti, epicureans, voluptuaries, libertines, gallants and worldlings. It is indeed through these vices that their civilization becomes corrupt or ends; you encounter them in the decline of ancient Greece and Rome, in Provençe of the twelfth, in Italy of the sixteenth, in Spain of the seventeenth, and in France of the eighteenth centuries. Their more quickly cultivated temperament bears them more speedily on to subtleties. Coveting keen emotions, they cannot be happy with moderate ones: they are like people who, accustomed to eating oranges, throw away carrots and turnips; and yet it is carrots and turnips, and other equally insipid vegetables, which make up our ordinary diet. It is in Italy that a noble lady exclaims, on partaking of a delicious ice-cream, "What a pity there is no sin in it!" In France a noble lord remarks, speaking of a diplomatic roué, "Who wouldn't admire him, he is so wicked!" In other directions their vivacity of impression and promptness of action render them improvisators; they are so quickly and so deeply excited by a crisis as to forget duty and reason, resorting to daggers in Italy and Spain, and to pistols in France; showing by this that they are only moderately capable of biding their time, of self-subordination, and of maintaining order. Success in life depends on knowing how to be patient, how to endure drudgery, how to unmake and remake, how to recommence and continue without allowing the tide of anger or the flight of the imagination to arrest or divert the daily effort. In fine, if we compare their faculties with the world as it runs, it is too mechanical, too rude, and too monotonous for them, and they too lively, too delicate, and too brilliant for it. Always after the lapse of centuries this discord shows itself in their civilization; they demand too much of things, and, through their misconduct, fail even to reach that which things might confer on them.

Suppress, now, these fortunate endowments, and, on the dark side, these mischievous tendencies, imagine on the slow and substantial body of the German a well-organized brain, a sound mind, and trace the effects. With less lively impressions a man thus fashioned will be more collected and more thoughtful; less solicitous of agreeable emotions, he can, without weariness, do disagreeable things. His senses being blunter, he prefers depth to form, and truth within to show without. As he is less impulsive he is less subject to impatience and to unreasonable outbursts; he has an idea of sequence, and can persist in enterprises the issue of which is of long achievement. Finally, with him the understanding is the better master, because outward temptations are weaker and inward explosions rarer; reason governs better where there is less inward rebellion and less outward attack. Consider, in effect, the Germanic people of the present day and throughout history. They are, primarily, the great laborers of the world; in matters of intellect none equal them; in erudition, in philosophy, in the most crabbed linguistic studies, in voluminous editions, dictionaries and other compilations, in researches of the laboratory, in all science, in short, whatever stern and hard, but necessary and preparatory work there is to be done, that is their province; patiently, and with most commendable self-sacrifice they hew out every stone that enters into the edifice of modern times. In material matters the English, Americans and Dutch perform the same service. I should like to show you an English spinner or cloth-dresser at work; he is a perfect automaton, occupied day in and day out without a moment's relaxation, and the tenth hour as well as the first. If he is in a workshop with French workmen, these form a striking contrast; they are unable to adapt themselves to the same mechanical regularity; they are sooner tired and inattentive, and thus produce less at the end of the day; instead of eighteen hundred spools, they only turn out twelve hundred. The farther south you go the less the capacity. A Provençal or Italian must gossip, sing and dance; he is a willing lounger, and lives as he can, and in this way easily contents himself with a threadbare coat. Indolence there seems natural and honorable. A noble life, the laziness of the man who, to save his honor, lives on expedients, and sometimes fasts, has been the curse of Spain and Italy for the last two hundred years. On the other hand, in the same epoch, the Fleming, the Hollander, the Englishman and the German have gloried in providing themselves with all useful things; the instinctive repugnance which leads an ordinary man to shun trouble, the puerile vanity which leads the cultivated man to distinguish himself from the artizan, disappear alongside of their good sense and reason.

This same reason and this same good sense establish and maintain amongst them diverse descriptions of social engagements, and first, the conjugal bond. You are aware that among the Latin families this is not over respected; in Italy, Spain and France adultery is always the principal subject of the play and the romance; at all events, literature in these lands always incarnates passion in the hero, and is prodigal of sympathy for him by granting him all privileges. In England, on the contrary, the novel is a picture of loyal affection and the laudation of wedlock; in Germany, gallantry is not honorable, even among students. In Latin countries it is excused or accepted, and even sometimes approved of. The matrimonial yoke, and the monotony of the household, there seem galling. Sensational allurements penetrate too deeply; the caprices of the imagination there are too brusque; the mind creates for itself visions of transports and of ecstatic delight, or at least a romance of exciting and varied sensuality, and at the first opportunity the suppressed flood bursts forth, carrying with it every barrier of duty and of law. Consider Spain, Italy and France in the sixteenth century; read the tales of Bandello, the comedies of Lope de Vega, the narratives of Brantôme, and listen for a moment to the comment of Guiccardini, a contemporary, on the social habits of the Netherlands. "They hold adultery in horror … Their women are extremely circumspect, and are consequently allowed much freedom. They go out alone to make visits, and even journeys without evil report; they are able to take care of themselves. Moreover they are housekeepers, and love their households." Only very lately, again, a wealthy and noble Hollander named to me several young ladies belonging to his family who had no desire to see the Great Exposition, and who remained at home whilst their husbands and brothers visited Paris. A disposition so calm and so sedentary diffuses much happiness throughout domestic life; in the repose of curiosity and of desire the ascendancy of pure ideas is much greater; the constant presence of the same person not being wearisome, the memory of plighted faith, the sentiment of duty and of self-respect easily prevails against temptations which elsewhere triumph because they are elsewhere more powerful. I can say as much of other descriptions of association, and especially of the free assemblage. This, practically, is a very difficult thing. To make the machine work regularly, without obstruction, those who compose it must have calm nerves and be governed by the end in view. One is expected to be patient in a 'meeting,' to allow himself to be contradicted and even vilified, await his turn for speaking, reply with moderation, and submit twenty times in succession to the same argument enlivened with figures and documentary facts. It will not answer to fling aside the newspaper the moment its political interest flags, nor take up politics for the pleasure of discussion and speech-making, nor excite insurrections against officials the moment they become distasteful, which is the fashion in Spain and elsewhere. You yourselves have some knowledge of a country where the government has been overthrown because in active and because the nation felt ennui. Among Germanic populations, people meet together not to talk but to act; politics is a matter to be wisely managed, they bring to bear on it the spirit of business; speech is simply a means, while the effect, however remote, is the end in view. They subordinate themselves to this end, and are full of deference for the persons who represent it. How unique! Here the governed respect the governing; if the latter prove objectionable they are resisted, but legally and patiently; if institutions prove defective, they are gradually reformed without being disrupted. Germanic countries are the patrimony of free parliamentary rule. You see it established today in Sweden, in Norway, in England, in Belgium, in Holland, in Prussia, and even in Austria; the colonists engaged in clearing Australia and the West of America, plant it in their soil, and, however rude the new-comers may be, it prospers at once, and is maintained without difficulty. We find it at the outset in Belgium and Holland; the old cities of the Netherlands were republics, and so maintained themselves throughout the middle ages in spite of their feudal suzerains. Free communities arose, and maintained themselves without effort, at once, the small as well as the great, and in the great whole. In the sixteenth century we find in each city, and even in small towns, companies of arquebusiers and rhetoricians, of which more than two hundred have been enumerated. In Belgium to-day there still flourish an infinity of similar corporations, societies of archers, of musicians, of pigeon fanciers, and for singing birds. In Holland volunteer associations of private individuals minister to every requirement of public charity. To act in a body, no one person oppressing another, is a wholly Germanic talent, and one which gives them such an empire over matter; through patience and reflection they conform to the laws of physical and human nature, and instead of opposing them profit by them.

If, now, from action we turn to speculation, that is to say to the mode of conceiving and figuring the world, we shall find the same imprint of this thoughtful and slightly sensualistic genius. The Latins show a decided taste for the external and decorative aspect of things, for a pompous display feeding the senses and vanity, for logical order, outward symmetry and pleasing arrangement, in short, for form. The Germanic people, on the contrary, have rather inclined to the inward order of things, to truth itself, in fact, to the fundamental. Their instinct leads them to avoid being seduced by appearances, to remove mystery, to seize the hidden, even when repugnant and sorrowful, and not to eliminate or withhold any detail, even when vulgar and unsightly. Among the many products of this instinct there are two which place it in full light through the strongly marked contrast in each of form and substance, and these are literature and religion. The literatures of Latin populations are classic and nearly or remotely allied to Greek poesy, Roman eloquence, the Italian renaissance, and the age of Louis XIV.; they refine and ennoble, they embellish and prune, they systematize and give proportion. Their latest masterpiece is the drama of Racine, who is the painter of princely ways, court proprieties, social paragons, and cultivated natures; the master of an oratorical style, skilful composition and literary elegance. The Germanic literatures, on the contrary, are romantic; their primitive source is the Edda and the ancient sagas of the north; their greatest masterpiece is the drama of Shakespeare, that is to say the crude and complete representation of actual life, with all its atrocious, ignoble and common-place details, its sublime and brutal instincts, the entire outgrowth of human character displayed before us, now in a familiar style bordering on the trivial, and now poetic even to lyricism, always independent of rule, incoherent, excessive, but of an incomparable force, and filling our souls with the warm and palpitating passion of which it is the outcry. In a similar manner take religion, and view it at the critical moment when the people of Europe had to choose their faith, that is to say in the sixteenth century; those who have studied original documents know what this at that time meant; what secret preferences kept some in the ancient faith and led others to take the new one. All Latin populations, up to the last, remained Catholic; they were not willing to renounce their intellectual habits; they remained faithful to tradition; they continued subject to authority; they were affected through sensuous externalities the pomp of worship, the imposing system of the Catholic hierarchy, the majestic conception of Catholic unity and Catholic perpetuity; they attached absolute importance to the rites, outward works and visible acts through which piety is manifested. Almost all the Germanic nations, on the contrary, became Protestants. If Belgium, which inclined to the Reformation, escaped, it was owing to force through the successes of Farnese, the destruction and flight of so many Protestant families, and to a special moral crisis which you will find in the history of Rubens. All other Germanic peoples subordinated outward to inward worship. They made salvation to consist of a renewal of the heart and of religious sentiment; they made the formal authority of the Church yield to personal convictions; through this predominance of the fundamental form became accessory, worship, daily life and rites being modified in the same degree. We shall soon see that in the arts the same opposition of instincts produced an analogous contrast of taste and style. Meanwhile let it suffice for us to seize the cardinal points which distinguish the two races. If the latter, compared with the former, presents a less sculpturesque form, grosser appetites and a more torpid temperament, it furnishes through tranquillity of nerve and coolness of blood a stronger hold on pure reason; its mind, less diverted from the right road by delight in sensuous attractions, the impetuosities of impulse and the illusions of external beauty, is better able to accommodate itself now to comprehend things and now to direct them.