Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 128.djvu/172

162 its squares, its shady avenues, its lofty watch-tower, its tree-embosomed palace, its shrub-embosomed cottages — each and every particular of the scene, animate or inanimate, is stamped with the same character. "Take life easy," seems the lesson they all alike inculcate; and the lesson is a popular one, soon learnt and steadily practised on every hand.

But appearances, however real for what regards the surface of which they are part, may yet he very deceptive, if reasoned from unconditionally to what exists beneath them; and a town that numbers more than twenty-two thousand inhabitants, itself the capital of the colony that yearly exports to the average value of a million sterling, cannot he wholly peopled by dreamy lotus-eaters, delicious lotus-eaters only; nor can the sole occupation of the dwellers in city or field be lotus-eating, either physical or moral.

The solid and underlying fact of Paramaribo is that amid this atmosphere, and on this segment of the great Guiana delta, have planted themselves and taken root, no longer exotic but indigenous, the same Dutch industry, Dutch perseverance; and Dutch good sense, that of old turned the sandy swamps of the Batavian delta into a flower-garden, and erected the Venice of the north on the storm-swept shores of the Zuider-Zee. Surinam, rightly understood, is only Holland under another sky; Paramaribo is Amsterdam by other waters; the colouring and toning of the picture may indeed be equatorial creole, but the lines and grouping are those of the Netherlands school and no other.

This it is that gives to Paramaribo its two-fold character, at once European and tropical, Dutch and creole; a blending of opposites, a dual uniformity, an aspect that when first beheld leaves on the mind an impression bordering on unreality, as if place and people were imaged in a hot picturesque dream. Yet Paramaribo is no dream, nor its inhabitants dream shapes; very much the contrary. In fact no capital town throughout the West Indies, no offspring of European stem, French, English, Danish, or even Spanish, so genuinely, so truthfully represents the colony to which it belongs as Dutch Paramaribo. Contrary examples are easily adduced. Thus, for instance, Jamaica is pre-eminently the land of English country gentlemen, of magistrates, landlords, farmers; in tone, ways, and life, it is an English country district; while Demerara is in no small measure an English, or rather, I should say, a Scotch manufacturing district; Barbadoes an English parish (Little Pedlington its satirists, of whom I beg to state that I am not one, would call it), magnified into an island. But neither Jamaica, nor Demerara, nor Barbadoes, possesses a correct epitome of itself in Kingston, Georgetown, or even Bridgetown; each of these three seaports has a character of its own, distinct from, and in some respects opposed to, the colony at large. This is due to many causes; and most of all to the "mixed multitude" of trade, the camp-followers of enterprise, who, under whatever banner they congregate, acknowledge in heart and life no flag but that of individual self-interest. These are they who muster strongest in the generality of colonial towns, especially seaports; and tinge, if they do not absolutely colour, the places of their resort. And thus from the merest port of call along these shores, where the condottieri element is at its maximum, to Georgetown, where it is decidedly at its minimum, a something of a restless, makeshift, egoistic, "cheap-jack" admixture obscures, or at least jars with the public-spirited nationality, unsettles the population, debases the buildings, ungroups the unity, and deforms the beauty of place and site.

With Paramaribo it is otherwise. The broad straight streets, flanked with spacious and lofty houses, shaded by carefully-planted avenues, adorned with public buildings that Scheveningen or the Hague need not blush to own, and trim almost as the waysides of Brock; the governor's residence, a miniature palace for elegance of style and stately appearance; the spacious masonic lodge, "Concordia," where a grand orient himself — I speak as a profane, and if the term be incorrect apologize — might hold his assembly; the seemly synagogues, Dutch the one, Portuguese the other, the decorous if somewhat heavy-built churches, Reformed and Lutheran, the lighter-constructed but more spacious establishments, Moravian and Catholic, the lofty town-hall with its loftier tower, that from a hundred and twenty feet of height looks down over fort and river, the court-house hard by, the noble military hospital, with its wide verandahs, open staircases, and cool halls, the strong-built fort and barracks, the theatre, the club-house, the many other buildings of public use and ornament, all these are Dutch in appearance and character; all expressive of the eleven provinces, though chiefly of Zealand and the steady purpose of her sons. The well-planned and carefully-kept canals that intersect 