The canals are lined with big buildings, business and residence, mostly from four to six stories high, with the narrow, peaked and picturesque architecture made familiar to us by the pictures. All kinds of color are used and ornamented fronts are common. Imagine a street such as I describe and you have this one that is under our hotel window and which is the universal street scene of Amsterdam. Some one called this the Venice of the North, but to my mind it is prettier than Venice, although it lacks some of the oriental architecture and smell.
Last night we went to the Rembrandt theatre to see “The Mikado,” in Dutch. Of course we could follow the music of the old-time friend, and the language made the play funnier than ever. The Dutch are not near so strong on music as are their German or French neighbors. They utilize compositions of other nations, and American airs are very common. The window of a large fine music store is playing up “Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?” A few Americans were at the big garden Krasnapolsky, listening to a really fine orchestra with an Austrian leader. We sent up a request for the American national air and it came promptly: “Whistling Rufus.” The Europeans think the cake-walk is something like a national dance in our country, and whenever they try to please us they turn loose one of our rag-time melodies. They do not mind chucking the “Georgia Campmeeting” or “Rings on My Fingers and Bells on My Toes,” into a program of Wagner and Tschudi and other composers whom we are taught at home to consider sacred.
The most entertaining feature of the Amsterdam landscape that I have seen is a Dutch lady in a hobble skirt. The fashion is here all right, and it would make an American hobble appear tame and common. In the first place, the Dutch lady is not of the proper architecture, and in the second place, she still wears a lot more underskirts, or whatever they are, than are considered necessary in Paris or Hutchinson. But she does not expand the hobble. The shopping street of Amsterdam is filled with fashionably dressed Dutch ladies who look like tops, and who are worth coming a long ways to see. Far be it from me to criticize the freaks of female fashion. I never know what they are until after they are past due. But if the Dutch hobble ever reaches the American side of the Atlantic it will be time for the mere men to organize.
The greatest art gallery in Europe is here, The Rijks Museum. I went to see it—once. I do not get the proper thrills from seeing a thousand pictures in thirty minutes. They make me tired. But Rembrandt’s Night Watch, or nearly anything a good Dutch artist has painted, is a real pleasure. The Dutch are recognizing their own modern art, and in that way they are going to distance the Italians. The Dutch artists are good at portraying people and common things, such as cats and dogs and ships. They are not strong in allegory or imaginative work, and you do not have to be educated up to enjoy them. And they run a little fun into their work occasionally, which would shock a Dago artist out of his temperament.
Wages are higher in Holland than elsewhere in Europe. A street car conductor gets a dollar a day. Ordinary labor is paid sixty to eighty cents a day. Farm laborer about $15 per month, but boards himself. A good all-around hired girl is a dollar a week. Mechanics receive from one dollar to two dollars a day. The necessaries of life are not so high as with us. Vegetables are cheaper. Tobacco is much less. Meats are about as high. Clothing is cheaper, but our people wouldn’t wear it. Beer is two cents a glass and lemonade is five cents. The ordinary workingman lives on soup, vegetables, and very little meat; gets a new suit of clothes about once in five years, and takes his family to a garden for amusement, where they get all they want for ten cents. The Dutch citizen on foot is plain, honest, a little rude, but of good heart and very accommodating. I have not met the citizens in carriages and on horseback, who make up a very small part of the procession in Holland.