A Wanderer in Holland

by E. V. Lucas

The Market Place, Nymwegen

Some versions of “Lohengrin” set the story at Nymwegen; Page 277but the Lohengrin monument is at Kleef, a few miles above the confluence of the Rhine and the Waal, the river on which Nymwegen stands.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who was at Nymwegen in 1716, drew an odd comparison between that town and the English town of Nottingham. If Edinburgh is the modern Athens there is no reason why Nottingham should not be the English Nymwegen. Lady Mary writes to her friend Sarah Chiswell: “If you were with me in this town, you would be ready to expect to receive visits from your Nottingham friends. No two places were ever more resembling; one has but to give the Maese the name of the Trent, and there is no distinguishing the prospects—the houses, like those of Nottingham, built one above another, and are intermixed in the same manner with trees and gardens. The tower they call Julius Cæsar’s has the same situation with Nottingham Castle; and I cannot help fancying I see from it the Trent-field, Adboulton, &c., places so well known to us. ’Tis true, the fortifications make a considerable difference....”

Nymwegen reminded me of nothing but itself. It is in reality two towns: a spacious residential town near the station, with green squares, and statues, and modern houses (one of them so modern as to be employing a vacuum cleaner, which throbbed and panted in the garden as I passed); and the old mediæval Nymwegen, gathered about one of the most charming market places in all Holland—a scene for comic opera. The Dutch way of chequering the shutters in blue and yellow (as at Middelburg) or in red and black, or red and white, is here practised to perfection. The very beautiful weigh-house has red and black shutters; the gateway which leads to the church has them too.

Never have I seen a church so hemmed in by surrounding Page 278buildings. The little houses beset it as the pigmies beset Antæus. After some difficulty I found my way in, and wandered for a while among its white immensities. It is practically a church within a church, the region of services being isolated in the midst, in the unlovely Dutch way, within hideous wooden walls. It is very well worth while to climb the tower and see the great waterways of this country beneath you. The prospect is mingled wood and polder: to the east and south-east, shaggy hills; to the west, the moors of Brabant; to the north, Arnheim’s dark heights.

Nymwegen has many lions, chief of which perhaps is the Valkhof, in the grounds above the river—the remains of a palace of the Carlovingians. It is of immense age, being at once the oldest building in Holland and the richest in historic memories. For here lived Charlemagne and Charles the Bald, Charles the Bold and Maximilian of Austria. The palace might still be standing were it not for the destructiveness of the French at the end of the eighteenth century. A picture by Jan van Goyen in the stadhuis gives an idea of the Valkhof in his day, before vandalism had set in.

As some evidence of the town’s pride in her association with these great names the curfew, which is tolled every evening at eight o’clock, but which I did not hear, is called Charlemagne’s Prayer. The façade of the stadhuis is further evidence, for it carries the statues of some of the ancient monarchs who made Nymwegen their home.

Within the stadhuis is another of the beautiful justice halls which Holland possesses in such profusion, the most interesting of which we saw at Kampen. Kampen’s oak seats are not, however, more beautiful than those of Nymwegen; and Kampen has no such clock as stands here, distilling Page 279information, tick by tick, of days, and years, and sun, and moon, and stars. The stadhuis has also treasures of tapestry and Spanish leather, and a museum containing a very fine collection of antiquities, including one of the famous wooden petticoats of Nymwegen—a painted barrel worn as a penance by peccant dames.

From Nymwegen the train took me to Hertzogenbosch, or Bois le Duc, the capital of Brabant. It is from Brabant, we were told by a proverb which I quoted in my first chapter on Friesland, that one should take a sheep. Great flocks of sheep may be seen on the Brabant moors, exactly as in Mauve’s pictures. They are kept not for food, for the Dutch dislike mutton, but for wool.

Bois le Duc has the richest example of mediæval architecture in Holland—the cathedral of St. John, a wonderful fantasy in stone, rich not only without, but, contrary to all Dutch precedent, within too; for we are at last again among a people who for the most part retain the religion of Rome. The glass of the cathedral is poor, but there is a delicate green pattern on the vaulting which is very charming. The koster is proudest of the pulpit, and of a figure of the Virgin “which is carried in procession through the town every evening between July 7th and 16th”.