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Haarlem, when I reached it, pleased me almost as much as Amsterdam, though it had no canals to speak of—by comparison. It was so clean and fresh and altogether lovely. It reminded me of Spotless Town—the city of advertising fame—and I was quite ready to encounter the mayor, the butcher, the doctor and other worthies of that ultra-respectable city. Coming over from Amsterdam, I saw a little Dutch girl in wooden shoes come down to a low gate which opened directly upon a canal and dip up a pitcher of water. That was enough to key up my mood to the most romantic pitch. I ventured forth right gaily in a warm spring sun and spent the better portion of an utterly delightful day idling about its streets and museums.
Haarlem, to me, aside from the tulip craze, was where Frans Hals lived and where in 1610, when he was thirty years of age, he married and where six years later he was brought before the Burgomaster for ill-treating his wife, and ordered to abstain from “dronken schnappe.” Poor Frans Hals! The day I was there a line of motor-cars stood outside the Stadhuis waiting while their owners contemplated the wonders of the ten Regents pictures inside which are the pride of Haarlem. When I left London Sir Scorp was holding his recently discovered portrait by Hals at forty thousand pounds or more. I fancy to-day any of the numerous portraits by Hals in his best manner would bring two hundred thousand dollars and very likely much more. Yet at seventy-two Hals’s goods and chattels—three mattresses, one chair, one table, three bolsters, and five pictures—were sold to satisfy a baker’s bill, and from then on, until he died fourteen years later, at eighty-six, his “rent and firing” were paid for by the municipality. Fate probably saved a very great artist from endless misery by letting his first wife die. As it was he appears to have had his share of wretchedness.
The business of being really great is one of the most pathetic things in the world. When I was in London a close friend of Herbert Spencer told me the story of his last days, and how, save for herself, there was scarcely any one to cheer him in his loneliness. It was not that he lacked living means—he had that—but living as he did, aloft in the eternal snows of speculation, there was no one to share his thoughts,—no one. It was the fate of that gigantic mind to be lonely. What a pity the pleasures of the bottle or a drug might not eventually have allured him. Old Omar knew the proper antidote for these speculative miseries.
And Rembrandt van Ryn—there was another. It is probably true that from 1606, when he was born, until 1634, when he married at twenty-eight, he was gay enough. He had the delicious pleasure of discovering that he was an artist. Then he married Saskia van Uylenborch—the fair Saskia whom he painted sitting so gaily on his knee—and for eight years he was probably supremely happy. Saskia had forty thousand gulden to contribute to this ménage. Rembrandt’s skill and fame were just attaining their most significant proportions, when she died. Then, being an artist, his affairs went from bad to worse; and you have the spectacle of this other seer, Holland’s metaphysician, color-genius, life-interpreter, descending to an entanglement with a rather dull housekeeper, losing his money, having all his possessions sold to pay his debts and living out his last days in absolute loneliness at the Keizerskroon Inn in Amsterdam—quite neglected; for the local taste for art had changed, and the public was a little sick of Hals and Rembrandt.
As I sat in the Kroon restaurant, in Haarlem, opposite the Groote Kerk, watching some pigeons fly about the belfry, looking at Lieven de Key’s meat market, the prototype of Dutch quaintness, and meditating on the pictures of these great masters that I had just seen in the Stadhuis, the insignificance of the individual as compared with the business of life came to me with overwhelming force. We are such minute, dusty insects at best, great or small. The old age of most people is so trivial and insignificant. We become mere shells—“granthers,” “Goody Two-Shoes,” “lean and slippered pantaloons.” The spirit of life works in masses—not individuals. It prefers a school or species to a single specimen. A great man or woman is an accident. A great work of art of almost any kind is almost always fortuitous—like this meat market over the way. Life, for instance, I speculated sitting here, cared no more for Frans Hals or Rembrandt or Lieven de Key than I cared for the meanest butcher or baker of their day. If they chanced to find a means of subsistence—well and good; if not, well and good also. “Vanity, vanity, saith the preacher, all is vanity.” Even so.
From Haarlem I went on to The Hague, about fifty minutes away; from The Hague, late that evening, to Rotterdam; from Rotterdam to Dordrecht, and so into Belgium, where I was amused to see everything change again—the people, language, signs,—all. Belgium appeared to be French, with only the faintest suggestion of Holland about it—but it was different enough from France also to be interesting on its own account.
After a quick trip across Belgium with short but delightful stops at Bruges, that exquisite shell of a once great city, at Ghent and at Brussels, the little Paris, I arrived once more at the French capital.