CHAPTER XLIX
ON THE WAY TO HOLLAND
I came near finding myself in serious straights financially on leaving Berlin; for, owing to an oversight, and the fact that I was lost in pleasant entertainment up to quite the parting hour, on examining my cash in hand I found I had only fifteen marks all told. This was Saturday night and my train was leaving in just thirty minutes. My taxi fare would be two marks. I had my ticket, but excess baggage!—I saw that looming up largely. It could mean anything in Europe—ten, twenty, thirty marks. “Good Heavens!” I thought. “Who is there to cash a letter of credit for me on Saturday night?” I thought of porters, taxis, train hands at Amsterdam. “If I get there at all,” I sighed, “I get there without a cent.” For a minute I thought seriously of delaying my departure and seeking the aid of Herr A. However, I hurried on to the depot where I first had my trunk weighed and found that I should have to pay ten marks excess baggage. That was not so bad. My taxi chauffeur demanded two. My Packträger took one more, my parcel-room clerk, one mark in fees, leaving me exactly one mark and my letter of credit. “Good Heavens!” I sighed. “I can see the expectant customs officers at the border! Without money I shall have to open every one of my bags. I can see the conductor expecting four or five marks and getting nothing. I can see—oh, Lord!”
Still I did not propose to turn back, I did not have time. The clerk at the Amsterdam hotel would have to loan me money on my letter of credit. So I bustled ruminatively into the train. It was a long, dusty affair, coming from St. Petersburg and bound for Holland, Paris, and the boats for England. It was crowded with passengers but, thank Heaven, all of them safely bestowed in separate compartments or “drawing-rooms” after the European fashion. I drew my blinds, undressed swiftly and got into bed. Let all conductors rage, I thought. Porters be damned. Frontier inspectors could go to blazes. I am going to sleep, my one mark in my coat pocket.
I was just dozing off when the conductor called to ask if I did not want to surrender the keys to my baggage in order to avoid being waked in the morning at the frontier. This service merited a tip which, of course, I was in no position to give. “Let me explain to you,” I said. “This is the way it is. I got on this train with just one mark.” I tried to make it clear how it all happened, in my halting German.
He was a fine, tall, military, solid-chested fellow. He looked at me with grave, inquisitive eyes. “I will come in a little later,” he grunted. Instead, he shook me rudely at five-thirty A. M., at some small place in Holland, and told me that I would have to go out and open my trunk. Short shrift for the man who cannot or will not tip!
Still I was not so downcast. For one thing we were in Holland, actually and truly,—quaint little Holland with its five million population crowded into cities so close together that you could get from one to another in a half-hour or a little over. To me, it was first and foremost the land of Frans Hals and Rembrandt van Ryn and that whole noble company of Dutch painters. All my life I had been more or less fascinated by those smooth surfaces, the spirited atmosphere, those radiant simplicities of the Dutch interiors, the village inns, windmills, canal scenes, housewives, fishwives, old topers, cattle, and nature scenes which are the basis and substance of Dutch art. I will admit, for argument’s sake, that the Dutch costume with its snowy neck and head-piece and cuffs, the Dutch windmill, with its huge wind-bellied sails, the Dutch landscape so flat and grassy and the Dutch temperament, broad-faced and phlegmatic, have had much to do with my art attraction, but over and beyond those there has always been so much more than this—an indefinable something which, for want of a better phrase, I can only call the wonder of the Dutch soul, the most perfect expression of commonplace beauty that the world has yet seen. So easily life runs off into the mystical, the metaphysical, the emotional, the immoral, the passionate and the suggestive, that for those delicate flaws of perfection in which life is revealed static, quiescent, undisturbed, innocently gay, naïvely beautiful, how can we be grateful enough! For those lovely, idyllic minds that were content to paint the receipt of a letter, an evening school, dancing peasants, a gust of wind, skaters, wild ducks, milk-time, a market, playing at draughts, the fruiterer, a woman darning stockings, a woman scouring, the drunken roysterers, a cow stall, cat and kittens, the grocer’s shop, the chemist’s shop, the blacksmith’s shop, feeding-time, and the like, my heart has only reverence. And it is not (again) this choice of subject alone, nor the favorable atmosphere of Holland in which these were found, so much as it is that delicate refinement of soul, of perception, of feeling—the miracle of temperament—through which these things were seen. Life seen through a temperament! that is the miracle of art.
Yet the worst illusion that can be entertained concerning art is that it is apt to appear at any time in any country, through a given personality or a group of individuals without any deep relation to much deeper mystical and metaphysical things. Some little suggestion of the artistry of life may present itself now and then through a personality, but art in the truest sense is the substance of an age, the significance of a country—a nationality. Even more than that, it is a time-spirit (the Zeitgeist of the Germans) that appears of occasion to glorify a land, to make great a nation. You would think that somewhere in the sightless substance of things—the chemistry back of the material evidence of life—there was a lovely, roseate milling of superior principle at times. Strange and lovely things come to the fore—the restoration in England, the Renaissance in Italy, Florence’s golden period, Holland’s classic art—all done in a century. “And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,” and there was that which we know as art.
I think it was years before those two towering figures—Rembrandt and Frans Hals (and of the two, Frans Hals is to me the greater)—appeared in my consciousness and emphasized the distinction of Holland for me, showing me that the loveliness of Dutch art,—the naïveté of Wouverman, the poetic realism of Nicolaes Maes, the ultimate artistry of Vermeer, de Hoogh, Ruysdael and all that sweet company of simple painters of simple things,—had finally come to mean to me all that I can really hope for in art—those last final reflections of halcyon days which are the best that life has to show.
Sometimes when I think of the homely splendors of Dutch art, which in its delicate commonplaceness has nothing to do with the more universal significance of both Hals and Rembrandt, I get a little wild artistically. Those smooth persuasive surfaces—pure enamel—and symphonies of blue light which are Vermeer; those genial household intimacies and candle-light romances which are Dou; those alleluiahs of light and water which are Vandervelde, Backhysen, Van Goyen; those merry-makings, perambulations, doorway chats, poultry intimacies, small trade affections and exchanges which are Terburg and Van Ostade! Truly, words fail me. I do not know how to suggest the poetry, the realism, the mood, the artistic craftsmanship that go with these things. They suggest a time, a country, an age, a mood, which is at once a philosophy, a system, a spirit of life. What more can art be? What more can it suggest? How, in that fortune of chance, which combines it with color-sense, temperament, craft, can it be exceeded? And all of this is what Dutch art—those seemingly minor phases, after Hals and Rembrandt—means to me.
But I was in Holland now, and not concerned so much for the moment with Dutch art as with my trunks. Still I felt here, at the frontier, that already I was in an entirely different world. Gone was that fever of the blood which is Germany. Gone the heavy, involute, enduring, Teutonic architecture. The upstanding German,—kaiserlich, self-opinionated, drastic, aggressive—was no longer about me. The men who were unlocking trunks and bags here exemplified a softer, milder, less military type. This mystery of national temperaments—was I never to get done with it? As I looked about me against a pleasant rising Sunday sun I could see and feel that not only the people but the landscape and the architecture had changed. The architecture was obviously so different, low, modest, one-story cottages standing out on a smooth, green level land, so smooth and so green and so level that anything projected against the skyline—it mattered not how modest—thereby became significant. And I saw my first Holland windmill turning its scarecrow arms in the distance. It was like coming out of a Russian steam bath into the cool marble precincts of the plunge, to be thus projected from Germany into Holland. If you will believe me I was glad that I had no money in order that I might be driven out to see all this.