THE GOSSIPS LEAN IN THE DOORWAYS
And there is no real change in fifteen years. Its old trees still nod over the sleepy canals in the same sleepy way they have done, no doubt, for a century. The rooks—the same rooks, they never die—still swoop in and out of the weather-stained arches high up in the great tower of the Groote Kerk, the old twelfth-century church, the tallest in all Holland; the big-waisted Dutch luggers with rudders painted arsenic green—what would painters do without this green?—doze under the trees, their mooring lines tied to the trunks; the girls and boys, with arms locked, a dozen together, clatter over the cobbles, singing as they walk; the steamboats land and hurry on—"Fop Smit's boats" the signs read—it is pretty close, but I am not part owner in the line; the gossips lean in the doorways or under the windows banked with geraniums and nasturtiums; the cumbersome state carriages with the big ungainly horses with untrimmed manes and tails—there are only five of these carriages in all Dordrecht—wait in front of the great houses eighty feet wide and four stories high, some dating as far back as 1512, and still occupied by descendants of the same families; the old women in ivory black, with dabs of Chinese white for sabots and caps, push the same carts loaded with Hooker's green vegetables from door to door; the town crier rings his bell; the watchman calls the hour.
Over all bends the ever-changing sky, one hour close-drawn, gray-lined with slanting slashes of blinding rain, the next piled high with great domes of silver-white clouds inlaid with turquoise blue or hemmed in by low-lying ranges of purple peaks capped with gold.
I confess that an acute sense of disappointment came over me when I first saw these gray canals, rain-varnished streets, and rows of green trees. I recognized at a glance that it was not my Holland; not the Holland of my dreams; not the Holland of Mesdag nor Poggenbeck nor Kever. It was a fresher, sweeter, more wholesome land, and with a more breathable air. These Dutch painters had taught me to look for dull, dirty skies, soggy wharves, and dismal perspectives of endless dikes. They had shown me countless windmills, scattered along stretches of wind-swept moors backed by lowering skies, cold gray streets, quaint, leanover houses, and smudgy, grimy interiors. They had enveloped all this in the stifling, murky atmosphere of a western city slowly strangling in clouds of coal smoke.
These Dutch artists were, perhaps, not alone in this falsification. It is one of the peculiarities of modern art that many of its masters cater to the taste of a public who want something that is not in preference to something that is. Ziem, for instance, had, up to the time of my enlightenment, taught me to love an equally untrue and impossible Venice—a Venice all red and yellow and deep ultra-marine blue—a Venice of unbuildable palaces and blazing red walls.
I do not care to say so aloud, where I can be heard over the way, but if you will please come inside my quarters, and shut the door and putty up the keyhole, and draw down the blinds, I will whisper in your ear that my own private opinion is that even Turner himself would have been an infinitely greater artist had he built his pictures on Venice instead of building them on Turner. I will also be courageous enough to assert that the beauty and dignity of Venetian architecture—an architecture which has delighted many appreciative souls for centuries—finds no place in his canvases, either in detail or in mass. The details may be unimportant, for the soft vapor of the lagoons ofttimes conceals them, but the correct outline of the mass—that is, for instance, the true proportion of the dome of the Salute, that incomparable, incandescent pearl, or the vertical line of the Campanile compared to the roofs of the connecting palaces—should never be ignored, for they are as much a part of Venice, the part that makes for beauty, as the shimmering light of the morning or the glory of its sunsets. So it is that when most of us for the first time reach the water-gates of Venice, the most beautiful of all cities by the sea, we feel a certain shock and must begin to fall in love with a new sweetheart.
So with many painters of the Holland school—not the old Dutch school of landscape painters, but the more modern group of men who paint their native skies with zinc-white toned with London fog, or mummy dust and bitumen. It is all very artistic and full of "tone," but it is not Holland.
There is Clays, for instance. Of all modern painters Clays has charmed and wooed us best with certain phases of Holland life, particularly the burly brown boats lying at anchor, their red and white sails reflected in the water. I love these boats of Clays. They are superbly drawn, strong in color, and admirably painted; the water treatment, too, is beyond criticism. But where are they in Holland? I know Holland from the Zuyder Zee to Rotterdam, but I have never yet seen one of Clays's boats in the original wood.