FOOTNOTE:
[6] December, 1903.— It was an immense satisfaction to me to learn, on my return to America, that in the matter of the proposed change in the name of the Protestant Episcopal Church, the laity had saved the day and decisively defeated the clerical delegates who represented the pro-Catholic sentiment, and wished to call their denomination the American Catholic Church, and thus make it appear that there was closer sympathy between Episcopacy and Romanism than between Episcopacy and Protestantism. In one diocese in particular, in which I have always felt a peculiar interest, although the Bishop in his opening address made a strong plea for the change, and although he carried the clergy with him, he and they were overwhelmingly defeated by the lay delegates. Would it not be a singular situation if the clergy, the official leaders of the people in spiritual things, should come to stand as a class for all that is reactionary or bigoted or trivial, while the people themselves represented the real spirit of Christ? There may be such a tendency on the part of the clergy in other dioceses, but I can hardly believe that it is true of those in Virginia.
CHAPTER XXIII.
Paris and Memories of the Huguenots.
The Hague, October 21, 1902.
The English Channel is one of the oldest ferries in the world. For two thousand years and more, men have been crossing it in all sorts of craft, but they have never yet found a way to do it comfortably when the water is rough, as it generally is. Our experience made us doubt whether the modern steamers that ply between New Haven and Dieppe are a whit more comfortable than the galleys of Julius Cæsar. Our boat was mercilessly buffeted by the winds. She rolled and plunged in every direction. It seemed to us that her propeller was out of the water half the time. If seasickness really is good for people, this Channel should be called a health resort. All the members of our party were violently sick except myself. We felt sure we had discovered one of the reasons why the shore to which we looked so wistfully is called "the pleasant land of France." Any land would seem pleasant after that dreadful Channel. At last we reached it, pale and wretched. As we entered the mouth of the river at Dieppe the huge crucifix overhanging the harbor reminded us that we were now in a Roman Catholic country. And a "pleasant land" it is in many respects. Our railroad journey to Paris through the fair and fertile Valley of the Seine made that quite evident.
The External Beauty of the French Capital.
We secured quiet and comfortable quarters close to the lovely Madeleine Church and only two blocks from the Place de la Concorde, the finest square in Europe, with the Seine on one side, the Tuileries Gardens on another, the Champs Élysées leading from it in one direction, and the Rue de Rivoli in the other. London, as we have seen, is a dingy congeries of dingy towns built mostly of dingy bricks. Paris is sunny and bright, the streets are wide and clean, and the houses are uniformly handsome, being built of a light stone that gives the whole city an air of elegance. No doubt it is the most beautiful city in the world, it has a glitter and sparkle unmatched elsewhere,—but, gay as it seems, it has more suicides than any other city.
What we did not like about Paris.
We submitted to it, but could not enjoy the French custom of taking our morning rolls and coffee in bed. There are many other French customs constantly in evidence in Paris, but not to be described here, to which I trust our English and American people will never become accustomed. Modesty is not prominent among the virtues of the French, though of course there must be many good people among them. Vice flaunts itself more in Paris than in any city I have ever seen. There is a certain brazen shamelessness even in French art that one does not see in New York or London. But the collection in the Louvre is one of the richest aggregations of antiquarian and artistic objects in the world, and surely no museum was ever so splendidly housed. The Moabite Stone, the oldest extant Hebrew inscription, was one of the things that we made a point of seeing. As we passed to another part of the great building, we had the pleasure of seeing the celebrated DeWet and the other Boer generals who were visiting Paris at that time.
In the rear of the Louvre stands the church of St. Germain l'Auxerrois. It was from the bell-tower of this church that the signal was given for the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. On the other side of the Rue de Rivoli, and in plain view of this fateful tower, stands the pure white marble statue of Admiral Coligni, the most illustrious victim of that fearful massacre. What France needs to-day is the influence of that Huguenot element which she slaughtered and expelled at that time.
The Huguenot Name and the Huguenot Character.
Several names which are now among the most illustrious in the history of the world were originally used as terms of reproach. When Abram left his home in Chaldea and crossed the great boundary stream between the East and the West and settled in Palestine, the Canaanites dubbed him "the Hebrew," that is, the man who crossed over the Euphrates—intruder, interloper. But for ages "Hebrew" has been the honored designation of one of the most gifted and enterprising of the races of mankind. It is not unlikely that the name "Christian" was first applied in a contemptuous sense to the disciples of our Lord at Antioch. It is well known that the name of "Methodist," which is now the honored designation of a large, active and devoted body of the people of God, was at first given to the followers of Wesley in a spirit of ridicule and derision. In like manner, the name "Huguenot," according to its most probable derivation from a French word meaning a kind of hobgoblin of darkness, a night-wanderer, was given to the Protestants of that country, because there were times in their early history when, for fear of persecution, they dared not meet except under cover of darkness. But this term of reproach has gathered about itself all the glory that belongs to genius and skill in the useful arts, to industry, thrift and purity in the home, to patriotic valor on the field of battle, and to unpurchasable and unconquerable devotion to principle, and is now a name that is venerated by every clear-headed and sound-hearted and well-informed and unprejudiced person in the world. It is a name which will wear forever the red halo of martyrdom. By the Massacre of St. Bartholomew alone thirty-five thousand names were added to the church's crimson roll of martyrs, with that of the great Admiral Coligni leading the list. By the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and the refusal of Louis XIV. to tolerate any exercise of the Protestant religion in France, while at the same time punishing inexorably all who attempted to escape from France, nearly half a million Huguenots were driven into exile, sacrificing their homes, their property and their country rather than renounce their religion; and Sismondi estimates that some four hundred thousand others perished in prison, on the scaffold, at the galleys, and in their attempts to escape.
Palissy, the Potter.
On our visit to the celebrated Porcelain Works at Sevres, a few miles below Paris on the Seine, our interest centered less in any of the works of art shown inside than in the fine bronze figure in front of the building which represents Bernard Palissy, natural philosopher, chemist, geologist, artist, political economist, Christian hero and author, of whom Lamartine himself said, "This potter was one of the greatest writers of the French tongue. Montaigne does not excel him in freedom, Rousseau in vigor, La Fontaine in grace, Bossuet in lyric energy." He was the inventor of enamelled pottery. For fifteen years he pursued his search for the secret of his art, scorned as a visionary, suspected of being a counterfeiter, reproached by his wife for the scanty living he provided for his family, sitting by his fire for six successive days and nights without changing his clothes, and, in his last desperate experiment, when fuel began to run short and still the enamel did not melt, rushing into the house, breaking up his furniture and hurling that into the furnace to keep up the heat—his long and furious search being rewarded at last by the appearance of the beautiful white glaze which has made him famous. His transcendant merits as an artist were then fully recognized, and the Duke of Montmorency and Catherine de Medici became his patrons, the latter appointing him to decorate the gardens of the palace of the Tuileries. But in the meantime he had founded the Reformed Church at Saintes, and had revolutionized the morals of the community. He was seized, dragged from his home, and hurried off by night to be punished as a heretic. And the most brilliant genius of France would certainly have been burnt, as hundreds of others were, but for the accidental circumstance that the Duke of Montmorency was in urgent need of enamelled tiles for his castle floor, and Palissy was the only man in the world capable of executing them.
Few scenes in history can match that in the Bastile when this aged and gifted man lay chained to the floor, and Henry III., standing over him, and referring to the forty-five years of faithful and splendid service which Palissy had rendered, said, "I am now compelled to leave you to your enemies, and to-morrow you will be burnt unless you become a Roman Catholic." Then the fearless answer: "Sire, you have often said you pity me. I now pity you. 'Compelled!' It is not spoken like a king. These girls, my companions, and I, who have a portion in the kingdom of heaven, will teach you royal language. I cannot be compelled to do wrong. Neither you nor the Guises will know how to compel a potter to bow the knee to images."
Other Huguenot Heroes and Heroines.
French Protestantism is rich also in memories of heroic women. There is the record, for example, of Charlotte de Laval, sitting by her husband, Admiral Coligni, on the balcony of their castle, and asking, "Husband, why do you not openly avow your faith, as your brother Andelot has done?" "Sound your own soul," was his reply; "are you prepared to be chased into exile with your children, and to see your husband hunted to the death? I will give you three weeks to consider, and then I will take your advice." She looked at him a moment through her tears, and said, "Husband, the three weeks are ended; do your duty, and leave us to God." The world knows well the sequel.
Surely no right-minded person can refuse to honor such sacrifices for principle, such loyalty to conscience, such devotion to Christ. The Huguenots could have remained peaceful and prosperous in their own country had they but been willing to conform to the Romish religion.
The views I am expressing are not determined merely by my Protestant birth and training. In proof of this, let me quote to you the words of the Duke of Saint Simon, himself a Roman Catholic and a courtier of Louis XIV.: "The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes ... as well as the various proscriptions that followed, were the fruits of that horrible conspiracy which depopulated a fourth part of the kingdom, ruined its trade, weakened it throughout, surrendered it for so long a time to open and avowed pillage by the dragoons, and authorized the torments and sufferings by means of which they procured the death of so many persons of both sexes and by thousands together.... A plot that caused our manufactures to pass over into the hands of foreigners, made their states to flourish and grow populous at the expense of our own, and enabled them to build new cities. A plot that presented to the nations the spectacle of so vast a multitude of people, who had committed no crime, proscribed, denuded, fleeing, wandering, seeking an asylum afar from their country. A plot that consigned the noble, the wealthy, the aged, those highly esteemed for their piety, their learning, their virtue, those accustomed to a life of ease, frail, delicate, to hard labor in the galleys, under the driver's lash, and for no reason save that of their religion."
Such are the blistering words of this eminent Roman Catholic nobleman in regard to the policy of the church of which he was a member. If a fair-minded member of that communion can thus condemn these horrible iniquities and thus extol the persecuted Huguenots as the best people in France, surely no Protestant should ever hesitate about recognizing clearly the world's debt to this pure and heroic people. And no well-informed Protestant ever does. The Rev. Dr. Croly, of the Church of England, late rector of St. Stephens, in London, expresses the opinion of all who know the facts when he says: "The Protestant Church of France was for half a century unquestionably one of the most illustrious churches in Europe. It held the gospel in singular purity. Its preachers were apostolic. Its people the purest, most intellectual and most illustrious of France."
France's Loss the World's Gain.
Now that is the church which was all but stamped out of existence by the fierce persecutions of the papacy two hundred years ago. And it is the remnant of that glorious church which now calls on all Christians to help it to give once more the pure gospel to priest-ridden, infidel France, and to deliver the nation from that fearful succession of bloody revolutions and Panama scandals and Dreyfus outrages and shameless immoralities which have so largely constituted the history of that unhappy land since it butchered and banished the only class of its people who would have effectually kept its conscience true, its morality pure, and its institutions stable and sound.
Do we owe the Huguenots anything? Yes, the whole world is indebted to them. What France lost the other nations gained. The emigration of the Huguenots gave a death-blow to several great branches of French industry. The population of Nantes was reduced from eighty thousand to forty thousand, a blow to its prosperity from which it has not recovered to this day. Of twelve thousand artisans engaged in the manufacture of silk at Lyons, nine thousand went to Switzerland. The most skilled artisans, the wealthiest merchants, the bravest sailors and soldiers, the most eminent scholars and scientists went by thousands to Germany, Holland, England, enriching those lands in money and morals beyond computation.
The cause of civil and religious liberty is deeply indebted to the Huguenots. It was Oliver Cromwell, "the greatest prince that ever ruled England," who raised Britain to her present position of power and gave her the dominion of the seas. But it was William of Orange who completed Cromwell's work after the temporary reaction in favor of Rome and the Stuarts. It was the battle of the Boyne which finally decided that Great Britain and America were to be Protestant countries and not Romish. And do you know who it was that won the day for William on the banks of the Boyne? It was the three regiments of Huguenot infantry and the squadron of Huguenot cavalry hurled upon the Papists at the critical moment by the Huguenot, Marshal Schomberg. That is a part of your debt to the Huguenots for the civil and religious liberty which you enjoy to-day.
In the Franco-German War of 1870, many of the officers of the victorious army of invasion were descendants of the Huguenots whom Louis XIV. expatriated.
"Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience he stands waiting, with exactness grinds he all."
The King of England himself is of Huguenot blood, George I. having married Dorothea, granddaughter of the Marquis d'Olbreuse, who was one of the Huguenot refugees to Brandenburg after the Revocation. Time would fail me to tell of all the scholars, scientists and noblemen of England who have sprung from the same great stock, such as Grote, the historian of Greece, Sydney Smith, the Martineaus, Garrick the actor, and a great number of gifted clergymen of the Church of England.
Many of the French churches established in London and other parts of England by the exiles have contributed for centuries to the vigorous religious life of Britain. For three hundred and fifty years the Presbyterian Huguenots and the Episcopal Englishmen have worshipped in different portions of Canterbury Cathedral, and to this day the Huguenot Church at Canterbury continues to conduct its worship in the cathedral in French, singing the psalms to the old Huguenot tunes. But for the most part, the exiles have become merged with the English, and their names have been Anglicised. In every way Britain has been enriched and blessed by the infusion of Huguenot blood and genius.
Huguenot Strain in America.
What America owes to Huguenot immigration you know. Had the Huguenots given us only Hugh Swinton Legare, John Jay, Francis Marion, and Commodore Maury, "the pathfinder of the seas," we should have owed them an everlasting debt of gratitude. But when we remember what they have been in Virginia itself—the Maurys, Maryes, Michauxs, Flournoys, Dupuys, Fontaines, Moncures, Fauntleroys, Latanes, Mauzys, Lacys, Venables, Dabneys, and many others—we cannot fail to see that we are under great and lasting obligation to that heroic race, whose banishment, while it resulted in the moral ruin of France, resulted in the moral enrichment of America. And we should count it a privilege to do what we can to retrieve the religious ruin of misguided France by giving her once more the pure Huguenot gospel. From a statement published by the Rev. J. E. Knatz, B. D., Delegate of the Huguenot Churches of France to America, I take the following facts:
The Huguenot Revival in France.
The population of France is composed of six hundred thousand Protestants and nearly thirty-nine million Catholics. The former are mostly descendants of the Huguenots. In spite of centuries of persecution, which reduced them to a mere handful, they have not only kept their ground, but made important advance. They are the strongest bulwark of republican institutions. In the Dreyfus trial, they were foremost in forming a better public opinion, fighting the hardest for the triumph of truth and justice. Lately a Catholic paper had to admit, reluctantly, that for the last twenty-five years the war waged against intemperance, immorality and other social evils, had been the work of the Protestants.
Outside of France the Huguenots carry on a great missionary work in the French colonies, which are many and extensive. The religious reorganization of Madagascar alone cost them two hundred thousand dollars.
In France they have to care for the spiritual welfare of an ever-increasing number of non-Protestant communities. The movement toward Protestantism is making great progress in the rural districts, the population of which, all Catholics, had been hitherto indifferent or bigoted. New Huguenot churches are springing up on all sides, often in places where Protestant worship had been abolished for over two hundred years.
The tears and blood our fathers shed, the torments they suffered on scaffolds and stakes, are bringing forth fruit after many years, and "the harvest is truly plenteous." In two departments of Central France alone, forty-five villages have, within a single year, besought our societies for regular Protestant services. To this church extension work alone the French Protestants contribute one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars annually.
Congregations of two hundred members (not one of whom was brought up in the evangelical faith), Sunday-schools of fifty children (none of whom a year before had ever heard of the Bible), are common results of our work.
Other missionary enterprises have to devise means of attracting audiences. With us there is no such difficulty, crowds gather wherever we are able to send ministers.
Where in the whole world could be found so promising a mission field—one ready to yield such rich returns? Where could be found people so eager to listen to the preaching of the gospel, and to have their children taught its lessons?
As well as a most promising, France is a most important mission field. The conversion, within the next few years, of some thousands of French people, would be of incalculable value to the religious and moral welfare of the world, for France exerts a mighty influence throughout the world. Moreover, the outlay would be comparatively small.
There are men willing to bring the Bread of Life to the hungering crowds for a mere pittance, prompted, not by any worldly motive, but by the Spirit of God.
The salary of a minister is only four hundred dollars. This amount will send one more to some of the many localities from which urgent appeals have come; it will open a new district to the permanent influence of the gospel.
No movement of such size and promise has been witnessed in France since the time of the Reformation. It is the old light, the eternal light from above, dawning again on France, illuminating the approach of a new century and bringing hope for the future.
Let the Christians of America help the Huguenot Church of France in this great work of hers.
At the American Church in Paris, whose pastor, the Rev. Dr. Thurber, showed us many courtesies, we had the pleasure, a few days ago, of hearing a very striking address by the Rev. Merle D'Aubigné, son of the well-known historian of the Reformation, which abounded with equally awakening facts as to the present religious condition of France.
Paris is not only one of the most brilliant, but one of the most interesting cities in the world, from almost every point of view, and we revelled in its museums and monuments; but its memories of the Huguenots had more interest for us than anything else, and we have thought it best to devote our space to that subject rather than to the Louvre, the tomb of Napoleon, Notre Dame, Versailles, Fontainebleau, and the scores of other fascinating places and subjects that appeal to one's interest in this ancient, gay, and terrible city.
We had a rainy day at Brussels and a cold one on the battlefield of Waterloo, but were not deterred from seeing them by these conditions of the weather. Then, with a comfortable feeling, almost like the feeling one has on coming home after journeying in strange lands, we crossed from Roman Catholic France and Belgium into Protestant Holland.
CHAPTER XXIV.
The Making of Holland.
The Hague, October 22, 1902.
There is an endless variety of interest in the different countries of the Old World. Each has its own fascination for travellers. But, after all, the strangest, quaintest, cleanest and most picturesque country in Europe is Holland—little, wet, flat, energetic, heroic Holland. By calling it picturesque I do not mean that nature has made it so. There are no bold cliffs overlooking the sea, no heathery hills reflecting themselves in placid lakes, no soaring mountains, forest-clad or snow-capped, no waterfalls foaming and thundering among the rocks. It is not what nature has done, but what man has done, that makes Holland so picturesque. There is no country on the globe for which nature has done so little and man has done so much. By an energy and industry unsurpassed in the annals of the world, the Dutchman has wrested his land from the ocean itself, walling out its wild waves with huge dykes, and has converted this swamp into a blooming paradise, studded all over with prosperous farms and opulent cities.
A Land below Sea Level.
As the two most common names of this country themselves suggest, Holland meaning Hollow Land, and Netherlands meaning Lowlands, the greater part of it is from twenty to thirty feet below the level of the ocean; that is to say, the sea actually rolls some ten yards higher than the ground on which the people live. Hence the common remark, in which, however, there is some exaggeration, that the frog, croaking among the bulrushes, looks down upon the swallow on the housetops, and that the ships float high above the chimneys of the houses.
Water as an Enemy.
Of course, then, there is the ever-present danger that the ocean will break in and again overspread all this fair territory where its waters once rolled, and only by the most remarkable ingenuity, the most incessant vigilance, and the most untiring industry can it be prevented from doing so. Water is the immemorial enemy of the Dutch. They are trained at college to fight against water, as in other lands soldiers are trained to fight against the human foes of their country. They are compelled to wage a perpetual battle for their very existence, for, as some one has expressed it, as soon as they cease to pump they begin to drown. It costs the Dutch people about six million dollars a year to keep their country above water, or, to speak more accurately, to keep the water above it. If one wishes to appreciate the imminence of this danger, he has only to stand for a few minutes at the foot of one of the great dykes on the coast, at high tide, and listen to the waves dashing against the outer side of the barrier, twenty feet above his head.
Dykes as Protectors.
Of course, the explanation of all this lies in the fact that Holland is of alluvial formation. Like Lower Egypt and some other regions at the mouths of great rivers, it is a delta land, the soil of which has been carried down from the interior by the Rhine and deposited here, little by little, in the course of the ages; so that Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have laid claim to the country on the whimsical plea that it was land robbed from other countries which were his by right of conquest. Moreover this particular delta lies farther below sea level than any other, Holland, as a whole, being the lowest country in the world. These vast and costly embankments are therefore absolutely necessary to shut the ocean out and keep it out. The Dutch proverb says, "God made the sea, we made the shore."
But that is not all. In many places the dykes are no less necessary to prevent the country from being overflowed by the rivers, the beds of which have been gradually raised by alluvial deposits, so that now the surface of the water is considerably above the level of the surrounding country, as is the case in our own land with the Mississippi river at New Orleans.
How Dykes are made.
These huge ramparts, by which the sea has been made to obey the command of Canute, sometimes rise to a height of not less than thirty-six feet, and rest upon massive foundations a hundred and fifty feet wide. They are made of earth, sand and mud thoroughly consolidated so as to be impervious to water, and the surface is covered with interwoven willow twigs, the interstices being filled with clay, and the whole thus bound into a solid mass. Many of the dykes are planted with trees, the roots of which help to bind the materials of the structure more firmly together. Others are protected by bulwarks of masonry or by stakes driven along the sides, the surface being covered with turf.
Sand Dunes.
In addition to the directly aggressive action of the water, the sea has made trouble for the Hollanders in another way. Along the coast, low sand hills, from thirty to a hundred and fifty feet high, have been thrown up by the action of the wind and the waves, and, as these dunes, if left to themselves, are continually changing their shape, shifting their position, and scattering their loose sand over the fertile land adjacent, the people, in order to prevent this, sow them annually with reed-grass and other plants which will sprout in such poor soil, and the roots, spreading and intertwining in every direction, gradually consolidate the sand, form a substratum of vegetable soil, and convert the arid sand dunes into stable and productive agricultural regions.
Canals.
Having thus made his land by walling out the sea and the rivers, and by anchoring those portions of it which were too much disposed to travel about, the Dutchman's next task was to provide drains for removing the superfluous water from the cultivated land, fences for enclosing the portion belonging to each individual farmer and separating it from that of his neighbor, and highways for communication and traffic between the different parts of the country. By means of canals he made the conquered water serve all three of these purposes. The whole country is a network of canals, which stretch their shining lengths in every direction, and which are of all sizes, from the main thoroughfares, sixty feet wide and six feet deep, along which glide the great barges laden with merchandise and drawn by sedate horses, down to the ditches of five or six feet which mark the boundaries of separate farms or divide the fields of each farmer from one another, canals being used in this way as uniformly as hedges and fences are in other lands.
Windmills.
Remembering, as already stated, that not only the surface of the water, but the beds of the larger canals are often considerably above the level of the surrounding country, it will be seen that the problem of drainage was not an easy one. The Dutch solved it by making the wind work for them. On every hand are seen windmills, larger and stronger here than in any other country, swinging their huge arms, and pumping up the superfluous water from the low lying ground to the canals, which carry it to the sea. These mills are used also for grinding grain, cutting tobacco, sawing timber, manufacturing paper, and many other things for which we use water mills or steam mills.
Polders.
Of late, however, windmills have been to a large extent superseded by steam engines for purposes of drainage, especially in the making of polders, as they call the marshes or lakes, the beds of which have been reclaimed by draining. In this process, which is still actively carried on by speculators, the morass or lake to be drained is first enclosed with a dyke to prevent the entrance of any water from without. Then the water within is removed by means of peculiarly constructed water-wheels, driven by steam engines. Sometimes the lake is so deep that the water cannot be lifted directly to the main canal, and thus be carried off, and when this is the case a series of dykes and canals at different levels has to be made, and the water transferred successively from one to another. The land thus reclaimed is wonderfully fertile, since in wet seasons superfluous water can always be quickly removed, and in dry seasons thorough irrigation can be effected still more easily and quickly.
If these polders could be looked down upon from a balloon, they would have a very artificial appearance, something like gigantic checker-boards, as they have been mapped out with mathematical precision, divided into rectangular plots by straight canals and straight rows of trees, and furnished with houses all built on exactly the same pattern.
The most stupendous work of this kind ever projected is the proposed construction of an embankment which would convert the Zuider Zee into a vast lagoon, with an area of 1,400 square miles, two-thirds of which could be made into a polder. It is estimated that the work would cost $75,000,000.
It is evident, therefore, that this little nation, which has accomplished such wonders in making its own land and in keeping it from being swallowed up by the sea after it was made, and which has in the past done such great things for liberty and learning, for manufactures and commerce, is still capable of great enterprises.
Entering Holland.
No boy or girl who has read Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates can ever think of Holland with indifference. No man or woman who has read Motley's stirring history of the heroic little republic in the Rhine delta can ever enter the Netherlands without a feeling of the liveliest interest. No lover of liberty who recalls the sufferings and services of the Dutch Calvinists in the cause of freedom, and the glorious victory they achieved against tremendous odds, can set foot on that sacred soil without a thrill of reverent gratitude.
The Scenery and the Scenes.
Such were some of the memories with which our hearts were warmed as our train from Brussels began to cross the bridges over the broad estuaries that make in from the sea through the low, flat country, in the neighborhood of Dordrecht and Rotterdam, and to run through an unmistakably Dutch landscape, with bright green fields divided into rectangular sections by hundreds of shining canals, and occupied by innumerable herds of black and white Holstein cattle, not a few of them actually wearing jackets, apparently made of burlaps or bagging, to protect them from the dampness; with level roads running along the tops of the dykes several yards above the surrounding country, and sedate looking horses drawing old-fashioned wagons, and brisk looking dogs drawing clattering milk carts, with their cargo of burnished cans; with innumerable rows of willow trees, the twigs of which the people use to make the covering of the dykes, and the wood of which they use to make their heavy, pointed shoes, or sabots; with picturesque houses roofed with red tiles, and broad-built peasants working in the fields, wearing those same wooden sabots, and clean looking market women trudging into the towns in their exceedingly picturesque head-dress of gold helmets covered with lace caps; with stiff, symmetrical gardens, and trees clipped into fantastic shapes; with quaint old church steeples and gilded weather-cocks; and ever and anon a weather-beaten windmill swinging its great arms between us and the low horizon. This was Holland, beyond a doubt.
Rotterdam.
An interesting indication of the important part played by the dykes in the development of Holland is the number of towns which have been named from the dyke or dam originally built on a site, such as Rotterdam, Schiedam, Amsterdam, and so on. The first important place we passed was Rotterdam, the most active seaport of Holland, with a population of three hundred and twenty thousand, and from the high railway bridge on which we crossed the Maas we had a good view of the boompjes, as they call the magnificent quays, which, with their graceful fringe of trees and their tangled forest of shipping, line the banks of the river for a mile and a half. We caught a glimpse also of the bronze statue of Erasmus, the Dutch scholar, who, as some say, "laid the egg which Luther hatched." On a former visit to Rotterdam I had seen the birthplace of this illustrious man, bearing on its front the inscription, "Haec est parva domus, magnus qua natus Erasmus" (this is the little house in which great Erasmus was born.)
The Hague.
Leaving Rotterdam, we pass on our left Delftshaven, from which a party of the Pilgrim Fathers sailed to America in 1620; then Schiedam, noted for its "schnapps," of which there are more than two hundred distilleries; then Delft, where William the Silent, the immortal founder of Dutch independence, was assassinated by a Jesuit whom the Roman Catholic persecutors of the Netherlands had hired to rid them of their great foeman, but which, I fear, is better known to some of my readers as the place where a certain blue-glazed earthenware used to be made in imitation of Chinese porcelain; and then, fifteen miles from Rotterdam, The Hague, one of the handsomest towns in Holland, with the Royal Palace, and in a lovely park outside the city the royal villa, called The House in the Wood, and two miles away on the sea the fashionable watering-place of Scheveningen, and in the city itself scrupulously clean and bright houses on every hand, where its two hundred thousand people live, and, above all, the picture gallery, with its two world-renowned paintings by Rembrandt and Potter, to say nothing of others scarcely inferior, if at all so, such as Vermeer's "View of Delft," with its red and blue roofs partly lit up with yellow sunlight, a simple view which "is perhaps unmatched by any other landscape in the world for the truthfulness of its atmospheric and light effects and for the vigor and brilliance of its coloring." Paul Potter's "Young Bull" is a marvellous picture, but the one which demands and repays the longest study is Rembrandt's "School of Anatomy," which shows us the celebrated Nicolaas Tulp, in black coat, lace collar and broad-brimmed soft hat, explaining the anatomy of the arm of a corpse to a body of surgeons, who listen to the lecture with the most life-like expressions, and which has been happily characterized as the truest and most life-like representation of the "working of intellect" ever produced.
A Presbyterian Government.
As we had reminded ourselves when visiting the royal residences that the young and beloved Queen Wilhelmina is the only Presbyterian Queen in the world, so we reminded ourselves when visiting the Chambers of the States General that Holland is the only country in the world which has the good fortune to have a Presbyterian preacher for its Prime Minister. Of course, other countries have Presbyterian laymen for prime ministers, Mr. Balfour of Great Britain, for example, but Holland is the only one that has placed the helm of the state in the hands of a preacher. His name is the Rev. Dr. Abraham Kuyper, and he is one of the ablest and most versatile men in the world. His recent book on The Holy Spirit is the greatest monograph on that subject that has appeared since the work of John Owen. He has rendered a great service to the cause of vital religion in checking the rationalistic views of such men as Professor Kuenen, and strongly reasserting the evangelical doctrines to which Holland has been so deeply indebted in the past for the heroic character of her people, and the glorious position she holds in the history of human freedom. Though the Chambers were not in session when we visited the Binnenhof, we took special pleasure in having even the chair of Dr. Kuyper pointed out to us.
Unpresbyterian Church Buildings.
By the way, the cathedrals and other great churches of Holland erected before the Reformation strikingly illustrate how unfit such structures are for Christian worship, according to the simple New Testament model, especially for preaching the gospel. They are adapted only to the spectacular ceremonies of the Roman Catholics and other ritualists. Therefore, any Protestant community which has had the misfortune to inherit a cathedral from the unreformed period has an elephant on its hands. The Dutch people, being mostly Presbyterians, have had this experience, and, finding themselves unable to make the most effective use of these great buildings erected for Romish rites, have allowed them to assume a very unattractive, dreary and barn-like appearance on the inside.
The question may shock our æsthetic friends, but, notwithstanding the incalculable loss to art, would it not have been better for the world if the Protestant countries at the time of the Reformation had macadamized all their cathedrals? And if any one hesitates to answer in the affirmative, let him consider carefully the connection between the modes of worship, and the character of the worshipper, and let him explain to himself clearly why it is that the countries which have adopted the Protestant model, with its steady appeal to the reason, and its earnest insistence upon intelligent apprehension of the truth, are the cleanest, safest, thriftiest and strongest countries in the world, while those which have adopted the Romish model, with its constant appeal to the æsthetic sensibilities, and its millinery, music, processions, incense, and "vain repetitions," are precisely the countries which have suffered the greatest material and moral deterioration, and which were not long ago contemptuously characterized by Lord Salisbury, the late Premier of Great Britain, as "decaying nations."
CHAPTER XXV.
Leyden's University, Haarlem's Flowers, and Amsterdam's Commerce.
Utrecht, October 25, 1902.
We gave only one day to Leyden, ten miles from The Hague, but it was one of the most interesting days we have had in Europe. Taking a guide at the railway station, we traversed the quaint streets and crossed and recrossed the multitudinous canals, and climbed to the top of the great fortified circular mound of earth in the centre of the city, called the Burg, the foundations of which date from the tenth century, and from the top of which we had a unique view of the heroic old town and the peaceful homes of its fifty-four thousand people.
The Great Siege.
But one does not go far in Leyden without being reminded of the terrible siege to which it was subjected by the Spaniards in 1574. One such reminder is the bronze statue of the gallant Mayor Van der Werf, who defended the city in that siege and would listen to no suggestion of surrender. Another is an inscription on the front of the Stadhuis, which, translated, reads: "When the black famine had brought to the death nearly six thousand persons, then God the Lord repented and gave us bread again as much as we could wish"; and which in the original Dutch is an ingenious chronogram, the capital letters as Roman numerals giving the date, and the one hundred and thirty-one letters used in the original indicating the number of days during which the siege lasted. But, after a short and partial relief, the siege was continued in the form of a blockade for many dreadful months. William of Orange finally cut the dykes and flooded the country, and relieved the famished city by ships.
A STRANGER IN LEYDEN.
A Unique Reward of Valor.
The story of Leyden which made the deepest impression upon me as a boy was that of William's offering to reward the citizens for this gallant defence either by exempting them from taxes for a certain number of years or by the establishment of a university in their city. To their everlasting honor they chose the latter, even in that time of distress and poverty, and the University was founded in 1575. Of course we wished to see the University which had such a history as that, to say nothing of the fact that we had heard of Leyden jars ever since we began the study of electricity at college, and that we knew something of a few of the men whose genius has at different periods since made the faculty one of the most illustrious in Europe, such as "the learned Scaliger," the famous physician Boerhaave, Arminius and Gomar, champions, respectively, of the two theological schools known as Arminians or Remonstrants and Calvinists, which in 1618 brought their differences to debate in the famous Synod of Dort; and, as is always the case when an opportunity for thorough discussion on the basis of Scripture is given, the result was a victory for the Calvinists. We remembered also with pleasure that Oliver Goldsmith, author of the immortal Vicar of Wakefield, was for a time a student at the University of Leyden; and we recalled with less pleasure that in our own day the faculty of the institution had furnished one of the boldest advocates of the destructive criticism of the Old Testament, Professor Abraham Kuenen.
Plain College Buildings Abroad.
It was a satisfaction to see it, though there is little to see; this University, like most of those on the continent, having very indifferent buildings and appointments. The men who sometimes "kick" in American colleges and seminaries because the class-rooms and dormitories do not suit them, to say nothing of their board, would get a superabundance of that sort of exercise if they had to attend the average Dutch or German university. In fact, it has been intimated at times that there are men in American colleges and seminaries who belong to that class of people of whom it was suggested that they would grumble even after getting to heaven on the ground that their haloes didn't fit. Fortunately, however, these are very few, the great majority of our American students being not spoiled and fussy children, but manly, sensible, hard working, plain living, high thinking men.
John Robinson and the Pilgrim Fathers.
Before leaving Leyden we made a point of visiting the house in which the Rev. John Robinson lived. He was the leader of the first Puritans who were banished from England, and who, like the adherents of every other persecuted faith, found toleration and liberty in Calvinistic Holland. A bronze tablet affixed to the wall of the church on the opposite side of the street contains a bas-relief of the Mayflower, and states that it was at Mr. Robinson's prompting that the Pilgrim Fathers went forth to settle New England in 1620.
Horse Flesh as Food.
As we passed with our guide through what looked like an open-air beef market, he surprised us not a little by telling us that what the people were buying there was not beef, but horse flesh, which is much cheaper, adding that the worn-out dray horses and car horses of the English cities were regularly bought and shipped to Holland to be sold to the poor instead of beef. No doubt the people of Leyden became accustomed to much worse fare than that when, during the great siege of 1574, the Spaniards were trying to starve them into resubmission to Roman Catholicism. But those conditions no longer exist, and the idea of eating horse flesh as a regular thing is not one which commends itself to our feelings.
Haarlem.
This place, seventeen miles from Leyden, also had experience of the tender mercies of the papal soldiery when, in 1573, after a gallant defence of seven months, it fell into the hands of the Spaniards, and the entire garrison, the Protestant ministers of the gospel, and two thousand of the townspeople were executed. Haarlem is now, and has been for two hundred and fifty years, famous for its horticulture. It supplies bulbs to every part of the world, and in the spring the nurseries around the city are ablaze with the brilliant blooms of the tulips, hyacinths, crocuses and lilies, whole fields of them in every variety of color, like vast natural flags of the brightest hues, lying on the flat surface of the country, and the whole atmosphere is impregnated with their delicious fragrance.
A Flower Boom.
Two centuries and a half ago, at the time of the "Tulip Mania," there was as wild speculation in bulbs as there has ever been in our day in stocks. Enormous prices were paid for the rarer bulbs. For instance, a single bulb of the species called "Semper Augustus" was sold for five thousand two hundred dollars. This statement will not seem incredible to any of my readers who have had bitter experience with the fictitious values created by the "booms" which cursed and crippled so many of our Southern communities a few years ago. The tulip craze in Holland had the same history: the mania subsided, the prices fell, many of the speculators were ruined, and before long a "Semper Augustus" could be bought for twenty dollars. Even that will seem to most people a pretty high price for a single tulip bulb.
A Small Country.
We did not stop at Haarlem, as it was not the right season for the gorgeous display of flowers above referred to, that is, the latter part of April and the beginning of May, but pushed on to Amsterdam, which is only ten miles away. If the reader has taken account of the distances between these populous cities as they have been successively mentioned, and has observed how short they are, he will have received a very strong impression of the smallness of the country.
Amsterdam.
Amsterdam, the largest city in Holland, with a population of more than half a million, is built upon nearly a hundred islands, separated from one another by a network of canals and connected by means of some three hundred bridges, and is, therefore, sometimes spoken of as "a vulgar Venice," but, with its prodigious vitality, its crowded streets, its busy waters, and its financial eminence, it must be far more like the Venice which was Queen of the Adriatic some centuries ago than the stagnant and melancholy town which bears that name to-day.
Odoriferous Canals.
The water in the canals is about three feet deep, and below this is a layer of mud of the same thickness. It is said that, in order to prevent malarial exhalations, the water is constantly renewed from an arm of the North Sea Canal and the mud removed by dredging. I hope this process is effective, but there were unmistakable exhalations from the canals when we were there. Whether they were malarial or not I cannot say, but certainly they were unfragrant to a degree. Still, the evil smells of Amsterdam are not to be named in number and vigor with those of Venice.
A City Built on Stakes.
As in Venice, so here, all the houses are built on piles which are driven fifteen or twenty feet through the loose sand near the surface into the firmer layers below. Hence the jest of Erasmus, that he knew a city whose inhabitants dwelt on the tops of trees like rooks. They are not so secure on their perch, however, as the rooks. For, although the preparations underground are often more costly than the buildings afterwards erected above, yet, such is the difficulty of securing a firm foundation, and such the ravages of the wood worm among the fir-tree piles after they are driven into the sand and built upon, that many of the brick houses which were once erect are now considerably out of the perpendicular, and lean backwards or forwards or sideways, according as the piles have given way at one place or another. In 1822 thirty-four hundred tons of grain were stored in a grain magazine originally built for the East India Company, and, the piles being unable to sustain the weight, the building literally sank down into the mud.
The Business of Amsterdam.
Besides its importance as a mart for the tobacco, sugar, rice, spices, and other produce of the Dutch colonies in the East Indies, West Indies and South America (which, by the way, have a population of thirty-five million, that is, seven times as many as the little mother country), Amsterdam has a number of important industrial establishments, such as ship-yards, sugar and camphor refineries, cobalt-blue and candle factories, machine shops, breweries, and especially diamond-polishing mills, of which last there are no less than seventy, employing in all about ten thousand men. We visited one of these mills and watched the process for a few minutes.
The Jewish Quarter.
The art of polishing diamonds was introduced here in the sixteenth century by Portuguese Jews, who, driven from their former homes by papal persecution, found in Protestant Holland an asylum, and, like the oppressed adherents of other creeds, secured the full religious toleration which they craved. They have ever since constituted an important part of the population of Amsterdam, and now number about thirty-five thousand. One of the interesting episodes of our visit was a drive through the poorer Jewish Quarter, with its swarms of untidy men, women and children. In this quarter and of this stock Spinoza, the philosopher, was born; and in this quarter, though not of this stock, Rembrandt, the painter, lived for fifteen years, in a house marked by a tablet, which those who are specially interested in art always wish to see.
Home of President Kruger.
Utrecht, twenty-two miles from Amsterdam, is an attractive city of one hundred thousand inhabitants. It interested us chiefly as the centre of the Jansenists, the redoubtable Roman Catholic adversaries of the Jesuits, and as the peaceful home of ex-President Kruger since his withdrawal from the stormy experiences of his life in South Africa. This venerable man, so remarkable on account of his public career, is of special interest to any one connected with Union Seminary in Virginia, because it was under the ministry of a former student of our Seminary, the late Dr. Daniel Lindley, who went as a missionary to South Africa more than sixty years ago, that Mr. Kruger was brought into the church. He lives in great comfort on the famous Malieban, which, with its triple row of lime trees, is one of the loveliest residential districts in Europe.
Queer Customs in Holland.
It seems odd that in a country where there is so much water, there should be so little that is fit to drink, and that in a country where land is so valuable the people should use any part of it for fuel, and yet, not only does one constantly see dog-carts containing barrels of fresh water and loads of peat passing hither and thither in the towns, but at cellar doors in the side streets sign-boards are seen announcing "water and fire to sell," and at these places the poorer classes buy the boiling water or red-hot turf that they need to make their tea or coffee. Foot-warmers are very generally used by the Dutch women, and in some of the churches we saw immense numbers of these little fireboxes.
The Comfort of a Hot Water Bottle.
This reminds me to say, for the benefit of any of my readers who may be planning a trip to Europe, that two things are more conducive to comfort and health than a good hot-water bottle when one is travelling in Northern or Central Europe, for these lands are much colder than ours in spring, summer and autumn, and arrangements for heating the hotels either do not exist or are utterly ineffective. American tourists who do not observe this precaution are likely to need physic, and, by the way, the universal sign for drug stores in Holland is not the mortar and pestle, but "the gaper," that is, a painted Turk's head showing his tongue.
Domestic Store-rooms in the Top Stories.
In Amsterdam and other Dutch cities many of the houses, which are made of brick with light colored painting and have a very substantial and neat appearance, are narrow and high, standing with ornamented gable ends to the street, and have beams projecting from the gables with fixtures for hoisting goods to the top stories, which are used for store-rooms. These are not business houses, but dwelling houses of people well to do, and the windows and woodwork from top to bottom are scrupulously clean and bright.
The Original "Spotless Town."
Broeck, in the north of Holland, is said to be the original Spotless Town. We did not visit this place, but it is thus described by a writer in Public Opinion who has done so:
"The palings of the fences of Broeck are sky-blue. The streets are paved with shining bricks of many colors. The houses are rose-colored, black, gray, purple, light blue or pale green. The doors are painted and gilded. For hours you may not see a soul in the streets or at the windows. The streets and houses, bridges, windows and barns show a neatness and a brilliancy that are absolutely painful.
"At every step a new effect is disclosed, a new scene is beheld, as if painted upon the drop-curtain of a stage. Everything is minute, compact, painted, spotless and clean. In the houses of Broeck for cleaning purposes you will find big brooms, little brooms, tooth-brushes, aqua fortis, whiting for the window panes, rouge for the forks and spoons, coal dust for the copper, emery for the iron utensils, brick powder for the floors, and even small splinters of wood with which to pick out the tiny bits of straw in the cracks between the bricks. Here are some of the rules of this wonderful town:
"Citizens must leave their shoes at the door when entering a house.
"Before or after sunset no one is allowed to smoke excepting with a pipe having a cover, so that the ashes will not be scattered upon the street.
"Any one crossing the village on horseback must get out of the saddle and lead the horse.
"A cuspidor shall be kept by the front door of each house.
"It is forbidden to cross the village in a carriage, or to drive animals through the streets."
Thus, it appears that "Spotless Town" is not merely an ideal existing in the imagination of the man who writes the very clever verses placarded in our street-cars and elsewhere in praise of the cleansing properties of Sapolio, but a reality; and there are numerous places in Holland which in point of cleanliness would put to shame any of our American towns.
A Pardonable Mania.
Some one has said that the Dutch love of cleanliness amounts almost to a monomania, and that the washing, scrubbing and polishing to which every house is subjected once every week is rather subversive of comfort. And it would appear from the regulations above cited that the matter is sometimes pushed to extremes. But my experience as a traveller in some parts of my own country, as well as in some parts of other lands, has made me very tolerant of such a mania as that, and, when amid the filth of Venice or Naples, for instance, my mind has reverted to these clean Dutch towns, it has caused me to sigh—"O si sic omnes!"
Mr. Edward Bok on the "Mother of America."
I cannot resist the temptation to append to these letters about little, quaint, clean, energetic, heroic, learned, unpretentious Holland some extracts from an article of Mr. Edward Bok's which I have read since my return to America. He refers to the fact that twenty thousand more American travellers are said to have visited the Netherlands during the past summer than in any previous year, and to the fact that there is a rapidly increasing demand for books on the history of the Dutch people, as shown by the reports of the librarians in American towns, and he regards these as specimens of a group of facts which, taken together, indicate clearly that the reading world of America is beginning to appreciate the real extent of the strong Dutch influences which underlie American institutions and have shaped American life. He says that for years we have written in our histories and taught in our schools that this nation is a transplanted England; that the institutions which have made this country distinctively great were derived from England. But he denies that England is entitled to this honor, and declares that the true mother land of America is not England, but Holland:
"Take, for instance, what may be truly designated as the four vital institutions upon which America not only rests, but which have caused it to be regarded as the most distinctive nation in the world. I mean our public-school system of free education; our freedom of religious worship; our freedom of the press; and our freedom of suffrage as represented by the secret ballot. Not one of these came from England, since not one of them existed there when they were established in America; in fact, only one of them existed in England earlier than fifty years after they existed in America, and the other three did not exist in England until nearly one hundred years after their establishment in America. Each and all of these four institutions came to America directly from Holland. Take the two documents upon which the whole fabric of the establishment and maintenance of America rests—the Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution of the United States—and one, the Declaration, is based almost entirely upon the Declaration of Independence of the United Republic of the Netherlands; while all through the Constitution its salient points are based upon, and some literally copied from, the Dutch Constitution. So strong is this Netherland influence upon our American form of government that the Senate of the United States, as a body, derives most of the peculiarities of its organization from the Netherlands States General, a similar body, and its predecessor by nearly a century of years, while even in the American flag we find the colors and the five-pointed star chosen from the Dutch.
"The common modern practice of the State allowing a prisoner the free services of a lawyer for his defence, and the office of a district attorney for each county, are so familiar to us that we regard them as American inventions. Both institutions have been credited to England, whereas, as a matter of fact, it is impossible to find in England even to-day any official corresponding to our district attorney. Both of these institutions existed in Holland three centuries before they were brought to America.
"The equal distribution of property among the children of a person dying intestate—that is, without a will—was brought to America direct from Holland by the Puritans. It never existed in England.
"The record of all deeds and mortgages in a public office, a custom which affects every man and woman who owns or buys property, came to America direct from Holland. It never came from England, since it does not exist there even at the present day.
"The township system, by which each town has local self-government, with its natural sequence of local self-government in county and State, came from Holland.
"The practice of making prisoners work, and turning prisons into workhouses, and, in fact, our whole modern American management of free prisons which has caused the admiration of the entire world, was brought from Holland to America by William Penn.
"Group these astonishing facts together, if you will, and see their tremendous import: The Federal Constitution; the Declaration of Independence; the whole organization of the Senate; our State Constitutions; our freedom of religion; our free schools; our free press; our written ballot; our town, county and State systems of self-government; the system of recording deeds and mortgages; the giving of every criminal a just chance for his life; a public prosecutor of crime in every county; our free prison workhouse system—to say nothing of kindred important and vital elements in our national life. When each and all of these can be traced directly to one nation, or to the influence of that nation, and that nation not England, is it any wonder, asks one enlightened historian, that some modern scholars, who, looking beneath the mere surface resemblance of language, seek an explanation of the manifest difference between the people of England and the people of the United States assumed by them to be of the same blood, and influenced by the same (?) institutions?
"Nor is it strange that so strong a Dutch influence should have entered into the establishment and making of America, when one considers the immense debt which the world owes to Holland. For it may be said without fear of contradiction that in nearly every art which uplifts and adorns human life, in nearly every aspect of human endeavor, Holland has not only added to the moral resources of mankind and contributed more to the fabric of civilization, but has also actually led the way. It was the first nation to master the soil and teach agriculture to the world. It has taught the world the art of gardening. It taught commerce and merchandise to the entire world when it ranked as the only great commercial nation on the globe. It taught the broadest lines of finance to the world by the establishment, in 1609, of its great Bank of Amsterdam, with one hundred and eighty millions of dollars deposits, preceding the establishment of the Bank of England by nearly one hundred years. The founding of its great University of Leyden, in 1575, marked an epoch in the world's history of education, and made the Netherlands the centre of learning of Europe. Here was founded international law through Grotius, one of Holland's greatest sons. Here Boerhaave, a Dutchman, revolutionized medicine by his wonderful discoveries until Holland's medical school became the seat of authority for all Europe. From this centre, too, came that great lesson in the publishing of books in the shape of the famous Elzevir books. It was the first nation to place the reader and the spelling-book in the hands of the child, irrespective of station or means. As musicians, for nearly two hundred years the Netherlands stood supreme, and furnished all the courts of Europe with vocal and instrumental music. It was the Dutch who founded, in Naples, the first musical conservatory in the world, and another in Venice, and it was to their influence and example that the renowned school of Rome owed its existence.
"The starting of all these masterful influences would alone make a nation great. But these were only a part of Holland's wonderful contributions to the world's enlightenment. It went on and introduced to the world the manufacture of woollen cloth that marked an epoch in history, and followed this up by developing the manufacture of silk, linen, tapestry and lace until it made its city of Flanders the manufacturing centre of the world. It devised and presented through the Van Eyck brothers the wonderful discovery of oil painting, and revolutionized the world of art, and gave, in the person of one of these brothers, Jan Van Eyck, the originator of the painted portrait. Then came the invention of wood-engraving by a Dutchman, followed quickly by the printing of books from blocks; the substitution of movable type for the solid block of wood, and we have the printing-press—the invention of which Germany may never concede to Holland, and yet the germ of which lay in the block books to which Holland lays unquestioned claim. But Holland need never squabble over a single invention. A nation that, in addition to what has been cited above, has likewise invented the telescope, the microscope, the thermometer, the method of measuring degrees of latitude and longitude, the pendulum clock, thereby putting before the world the beginning of anything which we can call accuracy in time, and discovered the capillary circulation of the blood, need not stop to split straws.
There is a wonderful charm in reading the history of a people who have done so much toward the enlightenment of the world, and not alone in one field of thought or activity, but in every field of human endeavor. The people of no nation make so bold and strong an impression on the mind as one after another of their achievements pass before one, and especially when it is considered that all these contributions to humankind were done with one hand while the other was busy in saving every foot of land from the rushing waters. But the people always remained cool, balanced and solid. That same patient but deep, perfervid spirit which built the dykes and saved the land with one hand, and opened those same dykes, built by the very life-blood of the people, with the other, and flooded the land against encroaching enemies—that same spirit built up a nation unrivalled in history as a financial, commercial, maritime, art, learning, medical and political centre, from which have radiated the strongest influences for the upbuilding of great empires—not only in the new Western world of America, but also in the far East of the Indies, and in the strong colonial establishment of South Africa. Her glory may be of the past, but he is indeed a rash prophet who would predict the future of any nation, however small, on the face of the globe of to-day. Of some things the American traveller is to-day constantly convinced: that there is less intellectual veneer in Holland than in any other country in Europe; that there is more solid and abiding culture of the very highest kind, and that the modern Dutch family represents a repose of mind, a simplicity of living, and a contented happiness with life in general that we, as a nation, might well envy."
CHAPTER XXVI.
Up the Rhine and Over the Alps.
The Cologne Cathedral is the finest Gothic structure in the world. We had a perfect view of the majestic exterior from the windows of our hotel, but, of course, devoted most of our time to the still more impressive interior. It is no part of my purpose to descant upon these things which are described in all the books of travel. The city possesses other objects of interest besides its matchless cathedral, and some of them we visited, in spite of the weather. It was cold and wet, and we did not prolong our stay. But no conditions of weather could have deterred us from taking the steamer for our trip up the Rhine, rather than the railroad. It was late in the season. The summer tourists had long since returned to their homes in England and America. We had the boat pretty much to ourselves. We could hardly have fallen upon a worse day for the first half of our trip. It was not only cold, but foggy, and we could get only tantalizing glimpses of the shores now and then when the mist thinned a little. So it continued nearly all the way to Coblentz, where we landed and spent the night. We comforted ourselves, however, with the reflection that the finest scenery was farther up, and with the hope that we should have a better day for that part of the trip. And we had. The mist was rolling away rapidly when we rose next morning, and it soon disappeared, leaving us a fine autumn day. After listening to the exhilarating music of a military band which was serenading a young general near our hotel and after taking a look at the noble statue of William I., and at the massive fortifications of Ehrenbreitstein, the German Gibraltar, on the other side of the river, we took the boat in better spirits, addressed ourselves with more zest than before to the volume of Legends of the Rhine, and thus began a delightful and memorable day.
The chief advantage of making this celebrated trip at this season is that one thus gets the opportunity to see the vintage of the Rhine Valley as it can be seen at no other season.
"Purple and red, to left, to right,
For miles the gorgeous vintage blazed."
Though, as a matter of fact, I believe that most of the Rhine grapes that we saw were white. The steep slopes of the hills among which the great river winds are covered with vineyards, the vines in rows as regular as ranks of Indian corn, and laden with millions of luscious bunches. The vintagers, men, women and children, in picturesque costumes and with huge baskets on their backs, were busy everywhere stripping the fruit from the yellow vines. The soil is kept in place by stone terraces. Above the line of the vineyards jut out the huge rocks of the mountains, their gray bastions alternating with forests robed in green, brown, red and yellow, and standing out boldly against the pure blue sky.
It is only by strong self-restraint that I can pass without special notice such a rock as Rhinestein, such a town as Bingen, and such a monument as that to "Germania" on the Niederwald, but it must be done.
November 15, 1902.
Wiesbaden and the German Woods.
Wiesbaden, the most charming of German watering-places, is a clean and handsome city, with broad and well paved streets, many attractive shops and pleasant residences, excellent hotels, extensive and lovely parks, a sumptuous opera house, a less costly but very spacious music hall (where, by the way, we had the pleasure of hearing Frau Shuman-Heink sing), and a few large and costly churches, but with no adequate arrangements, so far as I could see, for the churching of its large population. The place owes its importance primarily to the Boiling Salt Springs, which here gush from the earth, and which have made this the great resort for rheumatics and the victims of various other ailments. It is also the home of one of the most celebrated oculists in Europe, whose patients come to him from every part of the world. The chief attraction for those who are fond of outdoor life is the glorious forests which stretch from Wiesbaden back through the valleys and over the Taunus Mountains. One of our young people has just been writing to the folks at home about an eighteen-mile walk through these woods, guided only by the blazed trees, and speaks with pardonable enthusiasm of "the blue-gray trunks outlined against the terra cotta carpet of fallen leaves, the sunlight glancing through the trees, and the gently waving branches against the azure sky. There is no undergrowth as in our forests at home, but there are here and there gray rocks, large and small, covered with fresh green moss, or with gray, pink and yellow lichen. There were rustic benches all along, but the forest was quite deserted except for an occasional woodman with a fire and piles of neatly chopped wood, or some little boys drawing carts filled with bundles of sticks for winter use."
November 20, 1902.
Worms, Heidelberg and Strasburg.
We spent three weeks at wholesome Wiesbaden, counting a day that we gave to Mayence, on the other side of the Rhine, for the purpose of seeing the memorials of Gutenberg, the inventor of printing. Then we took the train for Worms. The chief "lion" here is, of course, the magnificent Luther monument, a thing which no visitor to this part of the world should fail to see. Recrossing the Rhine, we ran up to Heidelberg, and devoted a day to the fine old castle and the famous university—a stinging cold day it was, too. Nor did winter relax his grip at Strasburg, for there we had snow. One of the youngsters celebrated his birthday there by watching the noon performances of the world-renowned clock in the old Cathedral, our whole party going with him, the adults watching the wonderful mechanism with scarcely less interest than the children. The striking of that clock and the movements of its various figures and fixtures at twelve o'clock every day invariably draws a large crowd of people. We saw the storks' nests on the chimneys, too, but of course the storks themselves were down in the warm sunshine of Africa at that season.
November 23, 1902.
Switzerland in Winter-time.
Switzerland caps the climax of scenic interest in Europe—lakes, waterfalls, mountains, glaciers—language and pictures are alike unavailing to convey an adequate impression of this sublime scenery. My first views of it were in midsummer. On the 31st of July, 1896, at the top of the Wengern Alp, seven thousand feet above the sea, reached by rail all the way, my travelling companions and I had coasted on sleds over the snow like boys, wearing our heavy overcoats the while. Above us rose the Jungfrau, six thousand feet higher, piercing the clouds. As we watched, the clouds parted, and the white Jungfrau, wearing the dazzling Silberhorn on her bosom, burst upon our view. Never shall we see anything more beautiful till our eyes rest upon the pinnacles of the celestial city. We were standing at the time on the Eiger Glacier, an immense mass of pale green ice covered with a snowy crust. Longfellow somewhere (in "Hyperion," I think) likens the shape of one of the glaciers to a glove, lying with the palm downwards. "It is a gauntlet of ice, which centuries ago Winter, the king of these mountains, threw down in defiance to the Sun, and year by year the Sun strives in vain to lift it from the ground on the point of his glittering spear." Aye, in vain. Winter is king. But the Sun now and then wrenches somewhat from his grasp. And even while we gazed speechless at the unearthly splendor of the Jungfrau and the Silberhorn we heard an avalanche fall with a crash like the end of the world. That night we sat before a roaring fire and wrote home about it.
THE LION OF LUCERNE.
That was my experience in midsummer. Now we were to see not only the great mountain tops, but the whole country, in the undisputed grasp of Winter. When we reached Lucerne, not only the high Alps, but all the mountains and hills, far as the eye could reach, were covered with snow. When we visited Thorwaldsen's celebrated Lion of Lucerne we found workmen with scaffolding and ladders against the cliff, carefully boxing it in with boards to prevent it from being injured by the freezing of water trickling down upon it during the winter now at hand. But we were in time, just in time, to see it, and we all agreed that few monuments in Europe are so impressive. The great figure, twenty-eight feet in length, I believe, carved in the living rock, represents the king of beasts lying slain, pierced by an arrow, with broken spear and shield beneath, and over that shield, which bears the lilies of France, the huge paws are thrown, as if guarding it still in death. It commemorates the devotion of the Swiss guard who, in 1792, were appointed to keep the palace at Versailles, and receiving no orders to retire, preferred to die at their post rather than betray their trust. The glacier gardens near by, with their ingenious and realistic illustration of the action of the falling water in grinding the boulders in the glacier pots, interested us greatly. We paid some attention to the shops also, and the old cathedral, and the quaint old bridges. But we did not tarry long at Lucerne. It was too cold. We took the steamer down the lake, though, cold as it was, for we had no idea of missing entirely the magnificent scenery which gives this body of water easy preëminence among the Swiss lakes. We spent the night, bitter cold, at Fluelen, then took the fastest train we could get for Milan, only to meet there another disappointment in the matter of the weather.
November 26, 1902.
Italy Gives us Little Relief.
We had seen the ice floating in great blocks down the Neckar at Heidelberg, and had felt the stinging winds on the hills above the old castle; we had stamped our feet on the stone floors of the cathedral at Strasburg to renew the circulation in our benumbed extremities while waiting for the crowing of the rooster and the marching of the puppets, and the striking of the bells on the famous clock; we had seen vast fields of snow covering the Alps in every direction as we passed through Switzerland, and had shivered in the searching cold as we steamed down Lake Lucerne, unable to tear ourselves from the glorious beauty that lay open to our view on every hand from the steamer's decks; we had caught the wintry glitter of gigantic icicles against the cliffs on either side as our train climbed the wild St. Gothard pass—and, in short, we had had a surfeit of cold weather, and for days and weeks we had been sighing for Sunny Italy. Imagine our disappointment, then, when we emerged from the Alps and entered the land of balmy climate and blue skies (as most of us had always ignorantly thought it to be even in winter) to find the whole world still white around us, to run along the side of Lake Lugano and Lake Como in a whirling snow-storm, and to arrive at Milan in a fog so thick that it looked like it could be cut into blocks, so opaque that at times we could not see the mighty Cathedral from our hotel, though but little more than a block away, and so persistent that it did not lift during the whole of our stay. Add to these conditions the slush in the streets and the penetrating quality of the damp, cold air, and our desire to push on at once to the farther south in search of more genial skies will not seem unnatural. And we might have done so, notwithstanding the attraction of the Cathedral and of Leonardo's picture of the "Last Supper" (which, however, we expected to see on our return to Northern Italy in the spring), had it not been for our anxiety to get a sight of the Iron Crown of Lombardy at Monza, a few miles north of Milan. And see it we did, in spite of the weather, as I shall tell you more fully in a later letter. We ate our Thanksgiving dinner at Milan, visited again and again the white marble Cathedral, whose delicate stone lace work was touched into marvellous and weird beauty by the snow clinging to its pinnacles and projections and statues, saw Leonardo's picture, and the other principal sights, and then took the train for Venice.
CHAPTER XXVII.
Venice, Bologna, Florence and Pisa.
December 8, 1902.
Though still cool, the weather was milder in Venice, so we remained a week or so, yielding ourselves to the pensive charm of that—
"White phantom city, whose untrodden streets
Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting
Shadows of palaces and strips of sky."
The Queen of the Adriatic.
Of the palaces that we visited, the one in which the poet Browning lived, and in which his son now lives, is the best preserved, and illustrates better than any other the almost regal state in which the wealthy Venetians lived in the day of their commercial supremacy. One of these old palaces on the Grand Canal is now used as a bank. Some are used as warehouses, and others are put to still meaner uses. The Doge's Palace is, of course, the largest and finest, but it is more like a public building than a residence. Next to this stands the chief architectural glory of Venice, the gorgeous Cathedral of St. Mark, with its unequalled profusion of costly materials, and its ominously uneven stone floor, suggesting the painful possibility that it, too, may some day share the fate of the great Campanile, which till last summer lifted its head three hundred and seventy-five feet in the air from the pavement of the square in front. We found the ruins of this graceful structure, up the winding incline of which Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have ridden his horse to the belfry, lying in a heap on the square surrounded by a temporary unpainted board fence. Workmen within were making preparations for the erection of the new bell tower which is to take the place of the old one. On the first Sunday after our arrival we heard the Rev. Dr. Robertson, at the Presbyterian Church, make felicitous use of the fate of the old Campanile in a sermon on the text, "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." Nowhere are foundations of more importance than in Venice. The whole city is built upon piles. The Rialto Bridge, a great marble arch of a single span, rests upon twelve thousand of these piles, which are driven deep into the mud.
The interior of the Church of the Jesuits made more impression upon us than any other Venetian church except St. Marks. It looks at first view like it was lined throughout with chintz, through which runs a green pattern; but on closer inspection you find that it is all white marble—the pulpit and its heavy curtains, the altar steps, the walls from floor to ceiling, are all of white marble, and the green pattern is nothing less than verd antique.
Some of our young people, who had already wearied of the miles of picture galleries in Europe, manifested but little interest in the rich collection of art at Venice, but I think that all brought away an indelible impression of Titian's splendid "Assumption of the Virgin." They felt a much keener interest in the marvellous skill of the Venetian glass-makers at Murano. But their special delight was the gondolas. They soon had their favorites among the gondoliers, and, with Marco and Pedro propelling them, threaded the innumerable canals in every direction, visited the outlying islands, drifted hither and thither on the broad lagoons, and enjoyed the distant views of this strangely beautiful city, sometimes looming through the mist, at other times standing out sharp and clear against the red sky of a flaming sunset.
DOGE'S PALACE, VENICE.
The Greatest of the Venetians.
Nothing in all the strange history of Venice interested us so much as the career of Fra Paolo Sarpi, "the greatest of the Venetians," as Dr. Alexander Robertson well calls him in his striking biography of that illustrious thinker and man of action. An ecclesiastic whom Gibbon calls "the incomparable historian of the Council of Trent"; a mathematician of whom Galileo said, "No man in Europe surpasses Master Paolo Sarpi in his knowledge of the science of mathematics"; an anatomist whom Acquapendente, the famous surgeon of Padua, calls "the oracle of this century"; a metaphysician who, as Lord Macaulay says, anticipated "Locke on the Human Understanding"; and a statesman who saved Venice from the domination of the papacy—it is no wonder that Dr. Bedell, chaplain of the English Ambassador to Venice, should have said that he was "holden for a miracle in all manner of knowledge, divine and human." "As a statesman, the great Republic of Venice committed all its interests to his guidance, and he made its history, while he lived, an unbroken series of triumphs; in an age when the papacy lifted high its head, and rode roughshod over the rights of kings and peoples, he forced Pope Paul V., one of the haughtiest of Rome's Pontiffs, to his knees, and so shattered in his hands the weapon of interdict and excommunication that never again has it served the interest of a wearer of the tiara. Constitutional government everywhere owes something to Fra Paolo; and modern Italian history is the outcome and embodiment of the principles he laid down in his voluminous State papers. He was stronger than the papacy, for, in spite of the hatred, persecution and protest of Pope and Curia, he lived and died within the pale of the church, enjoying the esteem and affection of its clergy, performing all his priestly duties, and receiving, as the Senate wrote in its circular announcing his death to the courts of Europe, 'Li santissimi sagramenti con ogni maggior pieta.' And he was stronger than the Republic, for immediately after his death it began to succumb to papal domination, and to totter to its fall."
We visited the Servite Monastery, where he lived, the bridge where he was set upon and stabbed by the Pope's hired assassins, and where his statue now stands, and the grave in the island cemetery of Venice where his body rests at last after all the strange adventures and removals made necessary by the ghoulish malice of his foes.
December 10, 1902.
Bologna, the Fat.
The business activity of Bologna is in sharp contrast with the stagnation and decay of Venice. It is a brisk and handsome city, with well-paved streets, flanked by arcades like those along the Rue de Rivoli in Paris. Bologna has an unequalled number of these colonnades. They are so continuous, indeed, and afford such perfect protection from the sun in summer and the rain in winter, that it is more nearly possible to dispense with umbrellas here than in any other city in the world. The greatest of these covered ways is the portico which winds up the mountain just outside the city, by an easy gradation, to the costly church of the Madonna di S. Lucca, which, as its name indicates, possesses an image of the Virgin said to have been the work of Saint Luke. There are no fewer than six hundred and thirty-five arches in this colonnade, and they command lovely views on either side, as one ascends; but the view from the church, at the top of the mountain, caps the climax, combining, as it does, Alps, Appennines, Adriatic, plains and cities. It is from the arches of this long colonnade up the mountain that one gets the best impression of Bologna's towers. They are very numerous, and many of them are out of the perpendicular. In fact, there are more leaning towers here than in any other city in the world. But, unlike "Pisa's leaning miracle," these are not beautiful. They are imposing only in the grouping of a distant view, being nothing but quadrangular masses of ugly brown brick, with no ornaments, no windows, and indeed no known uses, the object for which they were erected being now an insoluble mystery.
Bologna has important manufactures of silk goods, velvet, crape, chemicals, paper, musical instruments, soap and sausages. We made full trial of the last two mentioned commodities, and found them excellent. But Bologna, while vital and modern, is not lacking in the matter of antiquity and literary and historical interest. It boasts the oldest university in the world, founded in 425 A. D. In the thirteenth century it had ten thousand students, and it still has over a thousand. In front of the University stands a statue of Galvani, holding a tablet on which he is exhibiting the famous frog legs. But it is said that "his wife was the real discoverer of galvanism, having laid some frogs, which she was preparing for soup, beside a charged electrical machine; and it was she who observed the convulsion in the frogs which she touched with the scalpel, and communicated the discovery to her husband, who repeated the experiment at the University."
December 15, 1902.
The Flower of Fair Cities.
Florence! "City of fair flowers, and flower of fair cities!" Second only to Rome itself in variety and wealth of historical, artistic and literary interest, home of Dante and Boccacio, Machiavelli and the Medici, Galileo and Amerigo Vespucci, Savonarola and Fra Angelico, Cimabue, Giotto, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, Michelangelo and Benvenuto Cellini—what can one do in a letter like this but merely name them and pass on, hoping for a time of larger leisure to say at least a word concerning the most illustrious of them?
In the Uffizi Gallery, which is "a complete exemplification of the progress and development of art," there is an octagonal room, called the Tribune, which contains perhaps the richest aggregation of masterpieces in the world. Sculpture is represented by the Venus de Medici, the Young Apollo, The Wrestlers, The Grinder, and The Dancing Faun; and painting by no less remarkable pictures. In addition to these, the things that stand out in one's memory in connection with Florence are Cellini's "Perseus," Ghiberti's "Doors," Michael Angelo's "David" and his "Lorenzo de Medici," Brunelleschi's "Dome," and last, but not least, Giotto's "Tower," "the model and mirror of perfect architecture," of which John Ruskin says: "The characteristics of Power and Beauty occur more or less in different buildings—some in one and some in another. But all together, all in their highest possible relative degrees, they exist, as far as I know, only in one building in the world—the Campanile of Giotto at Florence." For the proper appreciation of almost any other great production of art some education in art is necessary, but any one can see the transcendant beauty of Giotto's "Tower." Untutored as we are in these matters, we never wearied of looking at it.
In the freshness of its undimmed splendor, there is nothing in Florence to compare with the Medici Chapel. It is still unfinished, but has cost up to the present time three million five hundred thousand dollars. It is probably the most magnificent mausoleum in the world. "The walls are covered with costly marbles, inlaid with precious stones—a gorgeous mosaic of the richest material."
The Reformer before the Reformation.
But, after all, the thing that lays deepest hold of us in Florence is the story of Savonarola, Harbinger of the Reformation and Martyr for the Truth. That little cell in the Monastery of San Marco, where he once lived, and where his manuscript sermons, his annotated books and his wooden crucifix are still shown; those fearful dungeons in the Palazzo Vecchio, where the greatest man of his age endured his forty days' imprisonment, and lay during the intervals of torture, and spent his last hours on earth; and the bustling Piazza Della Signoria, which witnessed the triumphant tragedy of May 23, 1498—Florence has nothing else so impressive as these. We visit them with subdued hearts and reverent spirits. "On the 22nd of May, 1498, it was announced to Savonarola and his friends, Domenico and Maruffi, that they were to be executed by five the next morning; our heroic preacher was thoroughly resigned to his share of the doom, saying to Domenico, 'Knowest thou not it is not permitted to a man to choose the mode of his own death?' The three friends partook of the sacrament of the Holy Supper, administered by Savonarola. He said, 'We shall soon be there, where we can sing with David, "Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!"' They were then taken to the tribunal, where they were divested of all their priestly decorations, during which the bishop took Savonarola by the hand, saying, 'Thus I exclude thee from the church militant and triumphant.' 'From the church militant thou mayest,' exclaimed Savonarola, 'but from the church triumphant thou canst not; that does not belong to thee.'... The last that was beheld of him was his hand uplifted as if to bless the people; the last that was heard of him, 'My Saviour, though innocent, willingly died for my sins, and should I not willingly give up this poor body out of love to him?' The cinders of the bodies of the martyred friars were carted away, and thrown into the river Arno." But—
"The Avon to the Severn runs,
The Severn to the sea;
And Wycliffe's dust shall spread abroad,
Wide as the waters be."
What the principles of Wycliffe have done for England, the principles of Savonarola may yet do for Italy. At any rate, his work for Italy is not done yet.
December 19, 1902.
Pisa's Four Monuments.
The four chief objects of interest at Pisa are all in a group at the northern end of the town, and a wonderfully effective group it is: the cloistered cemetery, or Camp Santo, with its fifty-five shiploads of earth from the Holy Land; the Baptistery, with its remarkable echo; the Cathedral, with the pendent lamp in the nave which suggested to Galileo the idea of the pendulum; and that wonder of the world, the white marble Tower, which leans thirteen feet out of the perpendicular. We all tried in vain to stand with heels and back to the inside of the north wall on the ground floor—it cannot be done; one falls forward at once. From the top there is a magnificent view of the city and the surrounding plain, of the mountains on the east and the sea on the west, of the city of Leghorn and the island of Elba.
From the windows of our hotel at Pisa we saw for the first time the red gold of ripe oranges shining amid their dark green leaves in the gardens, and rejoiced to think that at last we had reached a somewhat milder climate, and were now leaving rigorous winter behind us.
The journey from Pisa to Rome is a long one, and the schedule was such that we did not arrive till late at night. From the car windows we had some impressive views of the Mediterranean by moonlight, and of the solemn campagna, and, thus prepared, we crossed the Tiber at midnight, and passed through the breach in the walls which has been made for the railway, feeling, perhaps even more deeply than is usual, the thrill with which all travellers except those who are utterly devoid of imagination first enter the Eternal City.
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Some Little Adventures by the Way.
December 21, 1902.
Conditions Unfavorable to Letter-writing Abroad.
The margin of leisure left to a traveller in Europe for the writing of letters is, after all, a very narrow one, as those of my readers who have been abroad will readily remember. One generally moves from place to place in such rapid succession that the feeling of being settled, which is essential to the most satisfactory writing, is almost unknown. Then, when one does stop for a few days in a historic city, each day is so full of interest, and the golden opportunity to see its sights seems so fleeting, that one hesitates to take any part of such time for writing, to say nothing of the weariness and drowsiness of an evening that follows a day of sightseeing.
Add to this the amount of time required of one who acts as general director of the tour, and has to take account of all manner of business details, and the number of questions to be answered when there are three or four young people in the party who have read just enough general history to make their minds bristle with interrogations at every interesting place, and who have to be read to daily en masse on the spot in order to improve the psychological moment of excited curiosity; add also the physician's injunction to take abundance of exercise in the open air, in order to the full recovery of health and the laying up of strength for future work, and his earnest counsel not to linger much at a writing desk or a study table—and it will be seen that if the continuity of this series of letters suffers an occasional break, it is but the natural result of the conditions of tourist life.
An American Baby in Europe.
It may interest some of my younger readers to know that the member of our party who receives the most attention is a little blue-eyed girl, just two years old to-day, who is the most extraordinary traveller of her age that I ever saw or ever heard of, accepting all the irregularities, inconveniences and discomforts of this migratory mode of life with the serene indifference of a veteran. We naturally supposed that, being so young, she would give us more or less trouble on so long a journey, and this proved to be true on the cold and rough sea voyage, but, from the day that we landed on this side of the ocean, she has been a delight to our whole party, a maker of friends wherever we have gone, and an immensely interesting object to the populace of the cities through which we have passed. At Leyden, in Holland, as we passed along the streets, we were followed all over town by an admiring throng of Dutch children, just out of school, to whom our baby's bright red coat and cap were no less interesting than their wooden shoes were to us; and so we found out how the elephants and monkeys and musicians and other people who make up the street parade of a circus may be supposed to feel when they pass through a town followed by the motley gang of school boys, ragamuffins, and general miscellanies of humanity.
Something New in Venice.
At Wiesbaden, in Germany, we bought one of those odd little German baby carts with two wheels and two handles, like plow handles, between which the person who pushes it walks, the baby really riding backwards, instead of forwards, as in our American baby carriages. You will see from this description that German baby carriages are like the German language—all turned the wrong way, though it must be said for this arrangement that the baby is not so likely to be lonesome as when riding face forward, since she always has some one to look at. Well, at Venice, which is almost a dead town now, so far as business is concerned, and which has perhaps as large a leisure class—that is, street loafers—as any city of equal size on this terraqueous planet, a lady of our party essayed to take the baby out for an airing in her German cart. It would appear that it was the first time since the foundation of that pile-driven city in the sea that a pair of wheels was ever seen on her streets. At any rate, from the moment that the lady and the baby and the cart emerged from the hotel door they were attended by an ever-increasing throng of unwashed Venetians, whose interest could not have been keener had Santos Dumont's air-ship or a Japanese jinriksha suddenly appeared in their gondola-ridden town, and who commented in shrill Italian on this wheeled apparition. The lady is not easily beaten when she decides to do anything, but, after standing that for half a block or so, she made a hasty retreat to the hotel, and wheels disappeared, probably forever, from the streets of Venice.
Gondolas and Gondoliers.
Although Venice, with its population of one hundred and sixty-three thousand, is seven miles in circumference, and is divided by one hundred and forty-six canals into one hundred and seventeen islands, yet these are so joined together by means of four hundred bridges that it is possible to walk all over the city. But the bridges are built in steps, and cannot be used by wheeled vehicles. There are no horses or carriages of any kind. The funereal-looking gondola, always painted black, is the only conveyance upon these streets of water, and does duty for cab, omnibus, wagon, cart, wheelbarrow and hearse. It is used for pleasure riding, shopping, church-going, theatre-going, visiting, carrying prisoners to jail, carrying the dead to the cemetery—in short, for everything.
In propelling this black but graceful and easy-going boat, the gondolier does not sit. He stands, on a sort of deck platform towards the stern, and to balance his weight there is affixed to the prow a heavy piece of shining steel, which rears itself at the front almost like a figure-head, only this is always of the same pattern, simply a broad, upright blade of steel, notched deeply on the front edge. The gondolier does not pull the oar, he pushes it—there is only one oar—and he does not change it from side to side, as in paddling a canoe, but makes all the strokes on one side, a thing that looks very easy, but is in fact extremely difficult. The dexterity of these men with their long single oar is wonderful. They glide in and out among scores of gondolas on the crowded canals without collision or jerking, and they turn a corner within an inch.
Baggage Smashing in Europe.
These remarks upon the skill of the gondoliers, and the ease and safety of the gondolas, remind me, by contrast, of the destructive bungling of a porter in Cologne, who undertook to cart a load of trunks and handbags and shawl-straps down from our hotel to the Rhine steamer, and who, in turning a corner on a down grade, made the turn too short, and hurled the whole lot of our belongings into the muddy street with such violence that many of them were defaced, some permanently damaged, and one valise broken to pieces and utterly ruined.
That German baby carriage had an exciting adventure also on the night of our arrival in Rome. As usual, it was made the apex of the pyramid of trunks and grip-sacks which constitute our sign manual, so to speak, on the top of every omnibus that takes us from the station to the hotel; but in this instance it was carelessly left untied, so that as we went steeply down one of the seven hills of Rome, the cart tumbled from its high perch to the stone-paved street, snapping off one of the handles, and suffering sundry other shattering experiences. A few days after we had the pleasure of paying a fraudulent cabinetmaker more for repairing it than it cost in the first instance. The Italian workmen and shopkeepers uniformly charge you more than their work and goods are worth. I think I have had more counterfeit money passed on me in the short time I have been in Italy than I have had in all the rest of my life before, and the very first swindle of this kind to which I was subjected was in a church, when the sacristan gave me a counterfeit two-franc piece in change as I paid the admission fees to see certain paintings and sculptures behind the high altar.
However, I am wandering from my subject; I may conclude my eulogy on the baby above mentioned by saying that, young as she is, she sits through the seventy or eighty minutes of the customary tedious European dinner almost as circumspectly as a graven image might, but reminding us of one of Raphael's cherubs in her blue-eyed combination of sweetness, archness and dignity.
Next time we will resume our account of matters of more general interest.
CHAPTER XXIX.
Relics in General, and the Iron Crown of Lombardy in Particular.
Rome, December 23, 1902.
I had heard of relics before. Years ago I had read Mark Twain's account of the large piece of the true cross which he had seen in a church in the Azores; and of another piece which he had seen in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, besides some nails of the true cross and a part of the crown of thorns; and of the marble chest in the Cathedral of San Lorenzo at Genoa, which he was told contained the ashes of St. John, and was wound about with the chain that had confined St. John when he was in prison; and of the interesting collection shown him in the Cathedral of Milan, including two of St. Paul's fingers and one of St. Peter's, a bone of Judas Iscariot (black, not white), and also bones of all the other disciples (presumably of the normal color), a handkerchief in which the Saviour had left the impression of his face, part of the crown of thorns, a fragment of the purple robe worn by Christ, a picture of the Virgin and Child painted by St. Luke, and a nail from the cross—adding in another place that he thought he had seen in all not less than a keg of these nails.
But I had hardly taken Mark Twain seriously in these statements, not knowing at the time that his Innocents Abroad was, notwithstanding its broad humor, really one of the best guide-books to Europe that was ever written.
The Palladium of Venice.
I had read repeatedly the story of the bringing of St. Mark's bones from Alexandria, in Egypt, to their present resting-place in St. Mark's Cathedral at Venice—a story which is related as follows in that same lively volume:
"St. Mark died at Alexandria, in Egypt. He was martyred, I think. However, that has nothing to do with my legend. About the founding of the city of Venice—say four hundred and fifty years after Christ—(for Venice is much younger than any other Italian city), a priest dreamed that an angel told him that until the remains of St. Mark were brought to Venice, the city could never rise to high distinction among the nations; that the body must be captured, brought to the city, and a magnificent church built over it; and that if ever the Venetians allowed the Saint to be removed from his new resting-place, in that day Venice would perish from off the face of the earth. The priest proclaimed his dream, and forthwith Venice set about procuring the corpse of St. Mark. One expedition after another tried and failed, but the project was never abandoned during four hundred years. At last it was secured by stratagem, in the year eight hundred and something. The commander of the Venetian expedition disguised himself, stole the bones, separated them, and packed them in vessels filled with lard. The religion of Mahomet causes its devotees to abhor anything in the nature of pork, and so when the Christian was stopped at the gate of the city, they only glanced once into the precious baskets, then turned up their noses at the unholy lard, and let him go. The bones were buried in the vaults of the grand cathedral, which had been waiting long years to receive them, and thus the safety and the greatness of Venice were secured. And to this day there be those in Venice who believe that if those holy ashes were stolen away, the ancient city would vanish like a dream, and its foundation be buried forever in the unremembering sea."
The Gift of Leo XIII. to London.
More recently I had read of what has been well called the burlesque enacted at Arundel Castle no longer ago than in July, 1902, in which the Duke of Norfolk, Cardinal Vaughan, and many lesser ornaments and dignitaries of the Romish Church, took part.
"Pope Leo XIII., in order to show his 'good-will to England,' sent from Rome the remains of St. Edmund to garnish the new Roman Catholic cathedral at Westminster. It was an appropriate gift, for such buildings are usually garnished with 'dead men's bones and all uncleanness.' But as the cathedral is not yet finished, as a further token of good-will, the relics were committed to the care of no less a personage than the Earl Marshal of England. They arrived at Arundel on the evening of July 25th, and were placed for the night in Fitzalen Chapel. The next morning the whole castle was astir betimes, for the great event of the day, the transference of the bones to the castle chapel, was to take place. This was accomplished in a solemn and befitting manner. A procession was formed, and, to the measured tread of the Earl Marshal of England, Cardinal Vaughan, several archbishops and bishops, and a mixed company of priests and acolytes and a numerous train of household servants and dependents, carrying banners, crosses, crucifixes, censers, lamps, candles, torches, and other ecclesiastical stage paraphernalia, the remains of St. Edmund were borne to their resting-place. All went off well, and at last the curtain fell on the finished play, to the satisfaction of every one. Unfortunately, however, the Pope and all concerned had to reckon with English common-sense and with English love of truth, and it was not very long before it was proved to the world that the bones, like most relics of the kind, were counterfeit—whoever else's bones they were, they were not those of St. Edmund." [7]
The Blood of St. Januarius.
I had read with cordial approval Mark Twain's animadversions upon the fraud which is regularly practiced on the people of Naples by the priests in the Cathedral:
"In this city of Naples they believe in and support one of the wretchedest of all religious impostures one can find in Italy—the miraculous liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius. Twice a year the priests assemble all the people at the Cathedral, and get out this phial of clotted blood, and let them see it slowly dissolve and become liquid; and every day for eight days this dismal farce is repeated, while the priests go among the crowd and collect money for the exhibition. The first day the blood liquefies in forty-seven minutes—the church is full then, and time must be allowed the collectors to get around; after a while it liquefies a little quicker and a little quicker every day, as the houses grow smaller, till on the eighth day, with only a few dozen present to see the miracle, it liquefies in four minutes. [8]
"And here, also, they used to have a grand procession of priests, citizens, soldiers, sailors, and the high dignitaries of the city government, once a year, to shave the head of a made-up Madonna—a stuffed and painted image, like the milliner's dummy—whose hair miraculously grew and restored itself every twelve months. They still kept up this shaving procession as late as four or five years ago. It was a source of great profit to the church that possessed the remarkable effigy, and the public barbering of her was always carried out with the greatest éclat and display—the more the better, because the more excitement there was about it the larger the crowds it drew and the heavier the revenues it produced—but at last the day came when the Pope and his servants were unpopular in Naples, and the city government stopped the Madonna's annual show.
"There we have two specimens of these Neapolitans—two of the silliest possible frauds, which half the population religiously and faithfully believed, and the other half either believed or else said nothing about, and thus lent themselves to the support of the imposture."
The House of the Virgin at Loretto.
I had read the story of the Casa Santa, or Holy House, the little stone building, thirteen and one-half feet high and twenty-eight feet long, in which the Virgin Mary had lived at Nazareth. In 336 the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, made a pilgrimage to Nazareth and built a church over the Holy House. This church fell into decay when the Saracens again got the upper hand in Palestine, and when the Christians lost Ptolemais the Holy House was carried by angels through the air from Nazareth to the coast of Dalmatia. This miraculous transportation took place in 1291. A few years later it was again removed by angels during the night, and set down in the Province of Ancona, near the eastern coast of Italy, on the ground of a widow named Laureta. Hence the name, Loretto, given to the town which sprang up around it for the accommodation of the thousands of pilgrims who flocked thither, and which is now a place of some six thousand inhabitants, whose principal business is begging and the sale of rosaries, medals and images. In a niche inside the Casa Santa is a small black image of the Virgin and Child, of cedar, attributed, of course, to St. Luke. We did not visit Loretto, but at Bologna we had the satisfaction of seeing a fac-simile of the Casa Santa, with its little window and fireplace, and the replica of St. Luke's handi-work in the niche above. A large number of women, some of them handsomely dressed, were saying their prayers and counting their beads before the altar that had been erected in front of these images and the Holy House, and a few were kneeling in the narrow space behind the altar, close to the fireplace of the house. As we passed, one of these women, in plainer garb, interrupted her devotions long enough to hold out her hand to us, begging for pennies, but without rising from her knees. There was nothing unusual about this, except that this beggar made her appeal to us while actually on her knees to the image of the Virgin, for nothing is more common in Italy than for visitors to a Roman Catholic church to pass through such "an avenue of palms" when leaving it.
The Wonder-working Bones of St. Anne in Canada.
I had even seen a few relics, not mere reproductions like that of the Casa Santa at Bologna, but the relics themselves. For instance, three summers ago, when in Quebec, I had made a special trip to the Church of St. Anne Beaupre, some twenty miles below the city, for the purpose of seeing the wonder-working relics of St. Anne, the alleged mother of the Virgin Mary—a bit of her finger bone and a bit of her wrist bone—which are devoutly kissed and adored by thousands of pilgrims to this magnificent church from all the French and Irish portions of Canada, and which are said to have wrought miraculous cures of all manner of maladies, cures which are attested by two immense stacks of canes, crutches, wooden legs, and the like, which rise from the floor almost to the roof on either side of the entrance. In the store in another part of the church I had got a clue to it all by seeing the poor pilgrims buying all sorts of cheap, tawdry, worthless little images and pictures, and especially little vials of oil of remarkable curative virtue because it had stood for a while before the image of St. Anne, and for which they paid probably five times as much as the oil had cost the priests who were selling it.
The Iron Crown of Lombardy.
These, then, are potent bones and images and oils, but by far the most interesting relic I had seen before reaching Rome itself was the Iron Crown of Lombardy, at Monza, a little town in Northern Italy. This is the place where the good King Humbert was assassinated on the 29th of July, 1900, and it is not without interest for other reasons. For instance, it has a cathedral built of black and white marble in horizontal stripes, and containing, besides the tomb of Queen Theodolinda and other interesting objects in the nave and its chapels, a great number of costly articles of gold and silver, set with precious stones, in the treasury, as well as various relics, such as some of the baskets carried by the apostles, a piece of the Virgin Mary's veil, and one of John the Baptist's teeth. But we should never have made a special trip to Monza in such weather as we were having at the time of our visit, last November, had it not been for our intense desire to see its chief treasure, the Iron Crown, the most sacred and most celebrated diadem in the world, a relic possessing real historical interest, not because of any probability whatever in the story of its origin, but because of the extraordinary uses and associations of it within the last thousand years.
A Winter Trip to Monza.
So, regardless of the wet, cold, foggy weather that we found in Milan, and the rivers of mud and slush that were then doing duty for streets, and the splotches of snow that lay here and there in the forlorn-looking olive orchards, we took the electric tram, which was comfortably heated, and ran out to Monza, a distance of some ten miles. When we stepped into the chilly cathedral and looked about us, we could not at first see anybody to show us around, though there were a good many poor people saying their prayers there. Evidently the custodians were not expecting tourists at such a season and in such weather. But presently, in an apartment to the left, we found a number of the priests warming their hands over a dish of twig coals covered with a light layer of white ashes, which they kindly stirred a little to make them give forth more heat as they saw us stretch our cold hands also towards the grateful warmth.
The Treasury of the Cathedral.
When we asked if we could see the Iron Crown, they said we could; but instead of going at once to the chapel in which it is kept, they got a great bag of keys, large keys, thirty-seven in number, as the observant statistician of our party ascertained, and led us into the treasury and unlocked a great number of doors (one of which had seven locks), and showed us the costly objects and precious relics above mentioned. We were only mildly interested in these—even in the apostolic baskets, the Virgin's veil, and John the Baptist's tooth—partly because we were so cold and partly because of our greater interest in the more famous relic which we had come especially to see.
The Chapel of the Great Relic.
At last one of the priests, attended by an acolyte, took up a censer, placed a little incense on the coals with a teaspoon, and, swinging it in his hand by the chain, led us back into the cathedral, turned to a chapel on the left, unlocked an iron gate in a tall railing which separated this chapel from the body of the building, closed the gate again when our party had come inside, and, while a dozen or so of the people who had been at their devotions crowded up to the railing and peered curiously through, he and his attendant began to kneel repeatedly before the altar and to swing the smoking censer on every side. Above the altar was a strong, square steel box, over which, in plain view, was suspended a fac-simile of the Iron Crown, made of cheaper materials, while the real crown was still concealed within the steel safe.
The Great Relic itself.
Handing the censer to his attendant, that it might be kept swinging without intermission, the priest produced another series of keys and proceeded to unlock a succession of small doors in the side of the metal safe, which proved to be a "nest" of caskets, one within another, the last of which was a glass case. Drawing this out, he brought into full view the venerated crown of the Lombard kings, and told us to step up on the stool by the altar so as to see it better. It is made of six plates of gold, joined end to end, richly chased, and set with splendid jewels. But one would see at a glance that neither the material, nor the workmanship, nor the gems, could account for the unique reverence with which it has been regarded for centuries, and an indication of which we had just seen in the service conducted by the priest. Among the regalia in the Tower of London, and at several other places in Europe, we had seen crowns which far surpassed this one in costliness and beauty, but none of which, nor all of which combined, had ever excited a thousandth part of the interest attaching to this old crown in Monza.
Why the Crown is so Sacred.
The explanation is this: within that ring of jointed plates of gold runs a thin band of iron, which priestly tradition says was made of one of the spikes that fastened the feet of our Lord Jesus Christ to the cross. It was this band of iron that we tiptoed to see, hardly noticing the bejewelled rim of gold around it. It was on account of this band of iron that the priest and his attendant swung their censer and performed their ceremony as we entered. It was this band of iron that gave to the crown its sacred place above the altar. It was for the safe keeping of this band of iron that the steel case, with its numerous locks, was made. It was from this band of iron that the diadem received its name, the Iron Crown of Lombardy.
How it was Used by Charlemagne and Napoleon.
And what were the historical uses of it, referred to above, which made it so much more interesting to us than the many other so-called nails of the true cross elsewhere? Well, this among others: on the last Christmas day of the eighth century, while Charlemagne was kneeling with uncovered head before the high altar of St. Peter's in Rome, the Pope approached him from behind, and, placing the Iron Crown of Lombardy on his head, hailed him as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
A thousand years later on the 26th of May, 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte, "watched by an apparently invincible army which adored him and a world which feared him," standing in the vast marble cathedral at Milan, with fifteen thousand of his soldiers around him, lifted this same Iron Crown of Lombardy into their view, and placed it upon his brow, saying, "God has given it to me, let him touch it who dares!"
High Reflections and Hard Cash.
That men who, like Charlemagne and Napoleon, had reached the highest pinnacle of human power, should seek to enhance their influence by crowning their heads with one of the nails which, as their followers believed, had pierced the Galilean's foot, is a richly suggestive fact. But we must keep our tempted thoughts to another and less edifying line at present.
When we had examined all the parts of the famous crown to our satisfaction, we stepped to the desk in the ante-room and paid our five francs (one dollar), the regular price for the exhibition of the Iron Crown, then left the cathedral, bought one or two post-card pictures of the crown, and took the tram through the dreary weather back to Milan, well pleased with the results of our first pilgrimage to the shrine of a real Roman Catholic relic in Italy.
Rome Caps the Climax.
But on our arrival at Rome, a month later, we found that, interesting as were the relics which we had seen or read of elsewhere, they were nothing to those in the Eternal City itself. In this, as in everything else except such little matters as cleanliness and morality and truthfulness and honesty, Rome outvies all her rivals. It is only fair to add, however, that, since the overthrow of the papal sovereignty and the establishment of a capable government, Rome has improved immensely in the matter of cleanliness, and even her immorality is not so flaunting as it was. This is attested by the Hon. Guiseppe Zanardelli, the present Premier of Italy, who says:
"The church appears better than it once was. I no longer see in Rome what I used often to see in my young days, ladies driving about its streets with their coachmen and footmen in the liveries of their respective cardinals. Has this improvement come about because the church is really growing better? Nothing of the kind. It is because the strong arm of the law checks the villainy of the priests." That is the testimony of the Prime Minister of Italy.
Do American Roman Catholics Believe in the Relics?
A few weeks after my return from Italy, while driving one afternoon with a friend of mine, a lawyer of high intelligence and wide information, our conversation turned to the subject of the recent death of Pope Leo XIII., and from that drifted to the alleged liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius, and from that to relics in general. I mentioned some of the facts above stated concerning the numerous pieces of the true cross and the miracle-working bones and oils to be seen in Roman Catholic churches in Europe. "But," he said, "surely the Roman Catholics in America do not believe in such mediæval superstitions." I happened to have in hand a couple of copies of a daily newspaper, published in one of our Southern towns, dated August 9, 1903, and August 17, 1903, respectively, containing extracts from the letters of a Roman Catholic bishop, the highest dignitary of his church in that State; and, for answer to my friend's remark, I cited the following passage from the bishop's letter of July 10th, written from Munich, concerning the abbey church of Scheyern:
"The chapel of the Holy Cross is specially sacred, as within is preserved a very large piece of the true cross upon which Christ was crucified, brought to Scheyern in 1156 by Count Conrad, the Crusader, who afterwards entered the monastery as lay-brother, and lies buried near the altar upon which the sacred relic is preserved."
Also the following passage from his letter of July 12th, written from Eichstadt:
"I remained the guest of Prince Ahrenberg for the night, and early in the morning, accompanied by some Benedictine students, I made a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Walburg. Above the altar is the large silver receptacle into which flows the miraculous oil from her sacred relics, which is known the world over."
What America Needs is Some Relics.
Writing from Vienna, July 20, 1903, concerning the imperial palaces, he says, "They are awfully big and grand, and cost a lot of good people's money," but adds that "the pride and glory of Vienna" is the Cathedral, and then exclaims: "How often have I wished we could have some such church in ——, so that our good people who cannot visit the achievements of Catholic life in Europe could form some idea of the greatness of the religion of their fathers!"
One hesitates to differ from so good an authority on such matters as this bishop, but really would he not agree, on reflection, that what this benighted and decaying country of ours needs to bring it up to a level with Italy and Austria and Spain is not a big church, but some relics? Would not some miraculous oil, or some wonder-working bones, or a piece of the true cross, or one of the nails, if placed on exhibition here attract far more attention than a big church, and enable "our good people who cannot visit the achievements of Catholic life in Europe" to form a much better "idea of the greatness of the religion of their fathers"? Does it not seem strange that so many hundreds of these relics should be kept in those enlightened and happy countries like Italy, where "the achievements of Catholic life" are so well known, and where Mother Church has for centuries had full sway, and that none of them should be brought to these benighted Protestant regions, where they could effect such a salutary change in the faith of the people? But, seriously, as I added to my friend in the conversation referred to, I have a better opinion of the intelligence of our good Roman Catholic people in America than to believe that they put the slightest credence in these childish superstitions. Whatever the bishop above quoted may believe, I am confident that the intelligent Roman Catholic people of our country have no more faith in many of these alleged relics than we have.