And here is another:—
Smoke Is the Food of Lovers.
When Cupid open’d Shop, the Trade he chose
Was just the very one you might suppose.
Love keep a shop?—his trade, Oh! quickly name!
A Dealer in tobacco—Fie for shame! Page 88
No less than true, and set aside all joke,
From oldest time he ever dealt in Smoke;
Than Smoke, no other thing he sold, or made;
Smoke all the substance of his stock in trade;
His Capital all Smoke, Smoke all his store,
’Twas nothing else; but Lovers ask no more—
And thousands enter daily at his door!
Hence it was ever, and it e’er will be
The trade most suited to his faculty:—
Fed by the vapours of their heart’s desire,
No other food his Votaries require;
For, that they seek—The Favour of the Fair,
Is unsubstantial as the Smoke and air.
From these rhymes, with their home-spun philosophy, one might assume Cats to have been merely a witty peasant. But he was a man of the highest culture, a great jurist, twice ambassador to England, where Charles I. laid his sword on his shoulder and bade him rise Sir Jacob, a traveller and the friend of the best intellects. From an interesting article on Dutch poetry in an old Foreign Quarterly Review I take an account of the aphorist: “Vondel had for his contemporary a man, of whose popularity we can hardly give an idea, unless we say that to speak Dutch and to have learnt Cats by heart, are almost the same thing. Old Father Jacob Cats—(we beg to apologize for his unhappy name—and know not why, like the rest of his countrymen, he did not euphonize it into some well-sounding epithet, taken from Greece or Rome—Elouros, for example, or Felisius; Catsius was ventured upon by his contemporaries, but the honest grey-beard stuck to his paternities)—was a man of practical wisdom—great experience—much travel—considerable learning—and wonderful fluency. He had occupied high offices of state, and retired a patriarch amidst children and children’s children, to that agreeable retreat which we mentioned as not far from The Hague, where we have often dreamed his Page 89sober and serious—but withal cheerful and happy, spirit, might still preside. His moralities are sometimes prolix, and sometimes rather dull. He often sweeps the bloom away from the imaginative anticipations of youth—and in that does little service. He will have everything substantial, useful, permanent. He has no other notion of love than that it is meant to make good husbands and wives, and to produce painstaking and obedient children.
“His poetry is rhymed counsel—kind, wise, and good. He calculates all results, and has no mercy for thoughts, or feelings, or actions, which leave behind them weariness, regret or misery. His volumes are a storehouse of prudence and worldly wisdom. For every state of life he has fit lessons, so nicely dovetailed into rhyme, that the morality seems made expressly for the language, or the language for the morality. His thoughts—all running about among the duties of life—voluntarily move in harmonious numbers, as if to think and to rhyme were one solitary attribute. For the nurse who wants a song for her babe—the boy who is tormented by the dread of the birch—the youth whose beard begins to grow—the lover who desires a posey for his lady’s ring—for the husband—father—grandsire—for all there is a store—to encourage—to console—and to be grateful for. The titles of his works are indices to their contents. Among them are De Ouderdom, Old Age; Buyten Leven, Out-of-Doors Life; Hofgedachten, Garden Thoughts; Gedachten op Slapelooze Nachten, Thoughts of Sleepless Nights; Trouwring, Marriage Ring; Zelfstrijt, Self-struggle, etc. Never was a poet so essentially the poet of the people. He is always intelligible—always sensible—and, as was well said of him by Kruijff,
Smiling he teaches truth, and sporting wins to virtue.”
When President Kruger died last year the memoirs of him agreed in fixing upon the Bible as his only reading. But I am certain he knew Vader Cats by heart too. If ever a master had a faithful pupil, Vader Cats had one in Oom Paul. The vivid yet homely metaphors and allegories in which Oom Paul conveyed so many of his thoughts were drawn from the same source as the emblems of Vader Cats. Both had the Æsopian gift.
We have no one English writer with whom to compare Cats; but a syndicate formed of Fuller and Burton, Cobbett and Quarles might produce something akin.
Scheveningen is half squalid town, half monstrous pleasure resort. Upon its sea ramparts are a series of gigantic buildings, greatest of which is the Curhaus, where the best music in Holland is to be heard. Its pier and its promenade are not at the first glimpse unlike Brighton’s; but the vast buildings have no counterpart with us, except perhaps at Blackpool. What is, however, peculiar to Scheveningen is its expanse of sand covered with sentry-box wicker chairs. To stand on the pier on a fine day in the season and look down on these thousands of chairs and people is to receive an impression of insect-like activity that I think cannot be equalled. Immovable as they are, the chairs seem to add to the restlessness of the seething mass. What a visitor from Mars would make of it is a mystery; but he could hardly fail to connect chair and occupant. Here, he would say, is surely the abode of giant snails!
On a windy day the chairs must be of great use; but in heat they seem to me too vertical and too hard. One must, however, either sit in them or lie upon sand. There is not a pebble on the whole coast: indeed there is not a pebble in Holland. Life after lying upon sand can become to some of us a burden almost too difficult to bear; Page 91but the Dutch holiday-maker does not seem to find it so. As for the children, they are truly in Paradise. There can be no sand better to dig in than that of Scheveningen; and they dig in it all day. A favourite game seems to be to surround the parental sentry-boxes with a fosse. Every family has its castle, and every castle its moat.