Windmills and Wooden Shoes

by Blair Jaekel

But, being the tourist center that it is, it has naturally developed the old familiar nuisance to be found in all cities of its ilk in Europe: the piratical parasite who stands in ambush behind the hotel porter as you start out in the morning and tags along halfway to your destination, shouting an incessant “Do you vont a guite, sir? Do you vont a guite?” You will find him in almost every part of the town, but his particular lair is in the lee of the picture galleries. Either by instinct or by abnormal powers of observation he knows that the average tourist whose time is limited will make a bee line for the nearest picture gallery before he has even had an opportunity to unpack his grip. So here near the galleries the guide awaits the coming of his prey. If you succumb to his prattle, all is lost, save the hope that he may soon run out of things to show you. But an excellent entertainment for a party of, say, four or five is to club together and hire a guide, let him take you whither he will, and, during the process, keep him under a rapid fire of questions so foolish and insipid that it will tax his ingenuity even to answer them incorrectly—as, you may remember, Mark Twain and his friend overwhelmed their guide in Genoa. This is the only way to obtain value received with—more often, without—respect to the guide, for his sense of humor is proverbially null and void and affords a vulnerable target.

And a wonder it is to me that some of these “old master” centers do not consider us Americans the most appreciative of art of any people in the world. They must think that we are picture and cathedral crazy—and I have no doubt they do, and snicker up their sleeves in lieu of a less ill-mannered outburst. Granted that in itself it is an education to see the famous pictures—I admit that there are other things in the world just as wonderful as old paintings, many of which are of notoriously poor draughtsmanship but have become famous merely from the fact that the paint still retains its luster after three hundred and some years. We pay too little attention to the life of the cities and the traits of their peoples as they are found to-day.

But I digress. This is not a lecture on the marvels or fallacies of art.

The site of The Hague was originally a hunting-park owned and operated by the Counts of Holland who used to come over frequently from Haarlem to hunt their deer. From this fact it derived its Dutch nomenclature, ’S Graven Hage, meaning “the Count’s inclosure.” The allurements of the place must have been to the detriment of official business in Haarlem, for they felled most of the trees with which it was overgrown and transferred thither the seat of government about the middle of the thirteenth century. Beginning with Maurice of Nassau in 1593, it became the official residence of the stadtholder of the Republic.

Having been thus honored as the capital of Dutch statesmanship in the early days, the main historical curiosity in The Hague is the Binnenhof, a group of ancient buildings where the stadtholders lived and worked and had their being and tried to dissolve frequent plots for their own extermination. Here William II, Count of Holland and afterward elected Emperor of Germany, built a castle in 1250, which, forty years later, was enlarged and fitted up for a permanent residence by his son, Floris V. At the east of the Binnenhof stands the old gabled and turreted Hall of the Knights, erected at the time of Floris and recently restored and put into use for legislative purposes.

But those days, however glorious from the point of view of national advancement, were also the days of plot and intrigue, and there is scarce an historical building in Holland but might tell its tale of a tragedy. On the 13th of May, 1619, the seventy-two year old prime minister of the nation at the time, Jan van Oldenbarnevelt, was put to death on a scaffold erected in the Binnenhof “for having conspired to dismember the States of the Netherlands, and greatly troubled God’s church,” according to Maurice of Orange, whose displeasure he had incurred. The learned Grotius, scholar and statesman and the then senator from Rotterdam, who was arrested at the same time as Oldenbarnevelt for alleged conspiracy with him, was sentenced to prison for life in the castle of Loevenstein, near Gorinchem. Happily, however, with the help of his wife, he effected means of escape ere he had been confined a full year.

Hard by the Binnenhof stands the old Gevangenpoort, now containing a morbidly interesting collection of guillotine blocks that have seen their grewsome service, neck twisters, back breakers, and other such unhappy instruments of torture, which recall, all too vividly, perhaps, the days when they were wont to be put into actual and frequent use in that same tower. In the tower, too, they will show you some of the dark, musty old dungeons, used for the former incarceration of political prisoners. Their names, written in blood by many of the victims, can still be traced upon the walls. Here also is where, in 1672, Cornelius De Witt, falsely accused of plotting against the life of William III, and his brother John, who had unwisely hastened to the tower to intercede in his behalf, were put to their horrible deaths by the gullible mob of citizens, who, believing in the guilt of Cornelius, had assembled in the neighborhood to make a demonstration against him. The remains of the brothers De Witt rest in the Nieuwe Kerk.

The Willem’splein, a large square a hundred yards or less to the east of the Binnenhof, is the center of gravity of The Hague’s traffic and street railway service. From here you may take an electric car to almost any part of the city, and to the suburbs as well. In the center of the plein stands the bronze statue of William the Silent, done by Royer and erected in 1848, with the Prince’s motto, “Tranquil Amid Raging Billows,” inscribed in Latin on the pedestal.

Facing the square on the west side stand the Colonial Offices and the Ministry of Justice, while just off the northwest corner is the Mauritshuis—the Louvre, the Corcoran Gallery, the Kaiser Friedrich’s Museum of The Hague. Built in the early half of the seventeenth century as a residence for the Dutch West India Company’s Governor of Brazil, it now shelters what is probably the most notable collection of paintings gathered under one roof in Holland, the gifts to the nation of the different stadtholders.

The reputed gems of this collection are Rembrandt’s rather morbid of subject, but admirably executed, “School of Anatomy,” and a large animal painting by Paul Potter, known as “The Bull,” in which Potter presents a collection of farm animals. Their owner, standing nearby, appears to be nearly as large as the bull, which is the central figure, and the bull, in turn, is just a shade smaller than the tree under which the owner stands. Taken individually, the animals are painted in a most marvelous manner, but with regard to composition I should think the accomplished Potter would rather have been known by his smaller animal pictures and his landscapes; eight of the best of the latter now hang in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. “The Bull” was carried off to the Louvre by the French at the time of the flight of the Dutch stadtholder in 1795, where it was awarded fourth place in point of value. Originally purchased in 1749 for something like $300, Napoleon restored it to the Dutch nation at a handsome profit for about $25,000.