From the Log of the Velsa

by Arnold Bennett

The Teyler Museum at Haarlem also has a few intoxicating works, mixed up with a sinister assortment of mechanical models. And its aged attendant, who watched over his finger-nails as over adored children, had acquired the proper attitude, at once sardonic and benevolent, for a museum of the kind. He was peculiarly in charge of very fine sketches by Rembrandt, of which he managed to exaggerate the value.

Few national museums of art contain a higher percentage of masterpieces than the Mauritshuis at The Hague. And one’s first sight of Rembrandt’s “Lesson in Anatomy” therein would constitute a dramatic event in any yachting cruise. But my impression of the Mauritshuis was a melancholy one, owing to the hazard of my visit being on the great public holiday of the year, when it was filled with a simple populace, who stared coarsely around, and understood nothing—nothing. True, they gazed in a hypnotized semicircle at “The Lesson in Anatomy,” and I can hear amiable persons saying that the greatest art will conquer even the ignorant and the simple. I don’t believe it. I believe that if “The Lesson in Anatomy” had been painted by Carolus-Duran, in the manner of Carolus-Duran, the ignorant and the simple would have been hypnotized just the same. And I have known the ignorant and the simple to be overwhelmed with emotion by spurious trickery of the most absurd and offensive kind.

An hour or two in a public museum on a national holiday is a tragic experience, because it forces you to realize that in an artistic sense the majority and backbone of the world have not yet begun to be artistically civilized. Ages must elapse before such civilization can make any appreciable headway. And in the meantime the little hierarchy of art, by which alone art lives and develops, exists precariously in the midst of a vast, dangerous population—a few adventurous whites among indigenous hordes in a painful climate. The indigenous hordes may have splendid qualities, but they have not that one quality which more than any other vivifies. They are jockeyed into paying for the manifestations of art which they cannot enjoy, and this detail is not very agreeable either. A string of fishermen, in their best blue cloth, came into the Mauritshuis out of the rain, and mildly and politely scorned it. Their attitude was unmistakable. They were not intimidated. Well, I like that. I preferred that, for example, to the cant of ten thousand tourists.

Nor was I uplifted by a visit to the Mesdag Museum at The Hague. Mesdag was a second-rate painter with a first-rate reputation, and his taste, as illustrated here, was unworthy of him, even allowing for the fact that many of the pictures were forced upon him as gifts. One or two superb works—a Delacroix, a Dupre, a Rousseau—could not make up for the prevalence of Mesdag, Josef Israels, etc. And yet the place was full of good names. I departed from the museum in a hurry, and, having time to spare, drove to Scheveningen in search of joy. Scheveningen is famous, and is supposed to rival Ostend. It is washed by the same sea, but it does not rival Ostend. It is a yellow and a gloomy spot, with a sky full of kites. Dutchmen ought not to try to rival Ostend. As I left Scheveningen, my secret melancholy was profoundly established within me, and in that there is something final and splendid. Melancholy when it becomes uncompromisingly sardonic, is as bracing as a bath.

The remarkable thing about the two art museums at Amsterdam, a town of fine architecture, is that they should both—the Ryks and the municipal—be housed in such ugly, imposing buildings. Now, as in the age of Michelangelo, the best architects seldom get the best jobs, and the result is the permanent disfigurement of beautiful cities. Michelangelo often had to sit glum and idle while mediocre architects and artists more skilled than he in pleasing city councils and building-committees muddled away opportunities which he would have glorified; but he did obtain part of a job now and then, subject to it being “improved” by some duffer like Bernini, who of course contrived to leave a large fortune, whereas if Michelangelo had lived to-day he might never have got any job at all.

Incontestably, the exterior, together with much of the interior, of the Ryks depresses. Moreover, the showpiece of the museum, “The Night-Watch” of Rembrandt, is displayed with a too particular self-consciousness on the part of the curator, as though the functionary were saying to you: “Hats off! Speak low! You are in church, and Rembrandt is the god.” The truth is that “The Night-Watch” is neither very lovable nor very beautiful. It is an exhibition-picture, meant to hit the wondering centuries in the eye, and it does so. But how long it will continue to do so is a nice question.

Give me the modern side of the Ryks, where there is always plenty of room, despite its sickly Josef Israels. The modern side reëndowed me with youth. It is an unequal collection, and comprises some dreadful mistakes, but at any rate it is being made under the guidance of somebody who is not afraid of his epoch or of being in the wrong. Faced with such a collection, one realizes the shortcomings of London museums and the horror of that steely English official conservatism, at once timid and ruthless, which will never permit itself to discover a foreign artist until the rest of the world has begun to forget him. At the Ryks there are Van Goghs and Cézannes and Bonnards. They are not the best, but they are there. Also there are some of the most superb water-colors of the age, and good things by a dozen classic moderns who are still totally unrepresented in London. I looked at a celestial picture of women—the kind of thing that Guys would have done if he could—painted perhaps fifty years ago, and as modern as the latest Sargent water-color. It was boldly signed T. C. T. C.? T. C.? Who on earth could T. C. he? I summoned an attendant. Thomas Couture, of course! A great artist! He will appear in the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, about the middle of the twenty-first century.