 | The philosophy of art |  |
II.
This race, thus endowed, has received various imprints,
according to the various conditions of its
abiding-place. Sow a number of seeds of the same
vegetable species in different soils, under various
temperatures, and let them germinate, grow, bear
fruit and reproduce themselves indefinitely, each on
its own soil, and each will adapt itself to its soil,
producing several varieties of the same species so
much the more distinct as the contrast is greater
between the diverse climates. Such is the experience
of the Germanic race in the Netherlands. Ten centuries
of habitation have done their work; the end
of the middle ages shows us that, in addition to its
innate character, there is an acquired character.
It becomes necessary, therefore, to study the soil
and the sky; in default of travel take the next best
thing, a map. Excepting the mountainous district
to the south-east, the Netherlands consist of a watery
plain, formed out of the deposits of three large rivers
—the Rhine, the Meuse and the Scheldt, besides several
ponds and marshes. The country is an outflow of
mighty waters, which, as they reach it, become sluggish
and remain stagnant for want of a fall. Dig
hole anywhere and water comes. Examine the landscapes
of Van der Neer and you will obtain some idea
of the vast sluggish streams which, on approaching
the sea, become a league wide, and lie asleep, wallowing
in their beds like some huge, flat, slimy fish,
turbid and feebly glimmering with scaly reflections.
The plain is oftentimes below their level, and is only
protected by levées of earth. You feel as if some of
them were going to give way; a mist is constantly
rising from their surfaces, and at night a dense fog
envelopes all things in a bluish humidity. Follow
them down to the sea, and here a second and more
violent inundation, arising from the daily tides, completes
the work of the first. The northern ocean is
hostile to man. Look at the "Estacade" of Ruysdael,
and imagine the frequent tempests casting up ruddy
waves and monstrous foaming billows on the low, flat
band of earth already half submerged by the enlargement
of the rivers. A belt of islands, some of them
the coast, this choking up of inland currents and the
assaults of the sea—Walcheren, North and South
Beveland, Tholen, Schouwen, Voorn, Beierland, Texel,
Vlieland and others. Sometimes the ocean runs up
and forms inner seas like that of Harlem, or deep
gulfs like the Zuyder Zee. If Belgium is an alluvial
expanse, formed by the rivers, Holland is simply a
deposit of mud surrounded by water. Add to all
this an unpropitious soil and a rigorous climate,
and you are tempted to conclude that the country
was not made for man but for storks and
beavers.
When the first Germanic tribes came to encamp
here it was still worse. In the time of Cæsar and
Strabo there was nothing but a swampy forest;
travellers narrate that one could pass from tree to
tree over all Holland without touching the ground.
The uprooted oaks falling into the streams formed
rafts, as nowadays on the Mississippi, and barred
the way to the Roman flotillas. The Waal, the
Meuse and the Scheldt annually overflowed their
banks, the water covering the flat country around to
submerged the island of Batavia, while in Holland
the line of the coast changed constantly. Rain fell
incessantly, and the fog was as impenetrable as in
Russian America; daylight lasted only three or four
hours. A solid coating of ice annually covered the
Rhine. Civilization, meanwhile, as the soil became
cleared, tempered the climate; the rude Holland of
that day possessed the climate of Norway. Flanders,
four centuries after the invasion, was still called "the
interminable and merciless forest." In 1197 the
country about Waes, now a garden, remained untilled,
the monks on it being besieged by wolves. In the fourteenth
century droves of wild horses roamed through
the forests of Holland. The sea encroached on the
land. Ghent was a seaport in the ninth century,
Thorout, St. Omer and Bruges in the twelfth century,
Damme in the thirteenth, and Ecloo in the fourteenth.
On looking at the Holland of old maps we no
longer recognize it.[1] Still, at the present day its
inhabitants are obliged to guard the soil against the
sea is below the level of the water at high tide, the
polders or low spots thus reclaimed displaying vast
argillaceous flats, with a slimy soil tinged with purple
reflections, between dykes, which, even in our days,
sometimes break away. The danger in Holland is
still greater, life there seeming to be very precarious.
For thirteen centuries a great inundation has taken
place, on an average, every seven years, besides
smaller ones; one hundred thousand persons were
drowned in 1230, eighty thousand in 1287, twenty
thousand in 1470, thirty thousand in 1570, and twelve
thousand in 1717. Similar disasters occurred in 1776,
in 1808, and still later in 1825. Dollart Bay, about
seven miles wide by twenty deep, and the Zuyder
Zee, forty-four leagues square, are invasions of the
sea in the thirteenth century. In order to protect
Friesland it was necessary to drive three rows of
piles a distance of twenty-two leagues, each pile costing
seven florins. To protect the coast of Harlem
they had to build a dyke of Norway granite five
miles long by forty feet in height, and which is
buried two hundred feet beneath the waves. Amsterdam,
inhabitants, is entirely built on piles, frequently
thirty feet long. The foundations of every town and
village in Friesland are artificial constructions. It
is estimated that seven and a half billions of francs
have been expended on protective works between the
Scheldt and the Dollart. Life has to be purchased
in Holland. And when from Harlem or Amsterdam
you see the enormous yellow surf beating against
that narrow strip of mud, and enclosing it as far as
the eye can reach, it is evident that man, in casting
this sop to the monster, obtains safety at a low rate.[2]
Imagine, now, on this quagmire, the ancient Germanic
tribes, so many fishers and hunters roaming
about in hide boats and clad in seal-skin tunics, and
estimate if you can the effort those barbarians were
forced to make in order to create a habitable soil
and transform themselves into a civilized people.
Men of another stamp would not have succeeded;
the milieu was too unfavorable. In analogous conditions
the inferior races of Canada and Russian
races, the Celts of Ireland and the Highland Scotch,
attained only to a chivalric standard of society and
poetic legends. Here there had to be good, sound
heads, a capacity to subject sensation to thought, to
patiently endure ennui and fatigue, to accept privation
and labor in view of a remote end, in short a
Germanic race, meaning by this men organized to
co-operate together, to toil, to struggle, to begin
over and over again and ameliorate unceasingly, to
dike streams, to oppose tides, to drain the soil, to
turn wind, water, flats, and argillaceous mud to
account, to build canals, ships and mills, to make
brick, raise cattle, and organize various manufacturing
and commercial enterprises. The difficulty
being very great the mind was absorbed in overcoming
it, and, turned wholly in this direction,
was diverted from other things. To subsist, to
obtain shelter, food and raiment, to protect themselves
against cold and damp, to accumulate stores
and lay up wealth left the settlers no time to think
of other matters; the mind got to be wholly positive
and practical. It is impossible in such a country to
to stray off amidst chimeras of the fancy and
through the world of metaphysical systems.[3] One
is immediately brought back to the earth. The
necessity of action is too universal, too urgent, too
constant; if people think at all, it is to act. Under
this steady pressure the character forms; that which
was habit becomes instinct; the form acquired by
the parent is found hereditary in the child; laborer,
artisan, trader, factor, householder, man of common
sense and nothing more, he is by birth and without
effort what his ancestors got to be through necessity
and constraint.[4]
This positive spirit, moreover, is found to be tranquillized.
Compared with other nations of the same
stock and with a genius no less practical, the denizen
of the Netherlands appears better balanced and more
capable of being content. We do not see in him the
violent passions, the militant disposition, the overstrained
will, the bull-dog instincts, the sombre and
the secular establishment of political strife have implanted
in the English; nor that restless and exaggerated
desire for action which a dry atmosphere,
sudden changes from heat to cold, a surplus electricity,
have implanted in the Americans of the
United States. He lives in a moist and equable
climate, one which relaxes the nerves and developes
the lymphatic temperament, which moderates the
insurrections, explosions and impetuosity of the spirit,
soothing the asperities of passion and diverting the
character to the side of sensuality and good humor.
You have already observed this effect of climate in
our comparisons of the genius and the art of the
Venetians with those of the Florentines. Here,
moreover, events come to the aid of climate, history
laboring in the same direction as physiology. The
natives of these countries have not undergone, like
their neighbors over the channel, two or three invasions,
the overrunning of an entire people, Saxons,
Danes and Normans installed on their premises;
they have not garnered a heritage of hatred which
oppression, resistance, rancor, prolonged struggle,
subdued and legal—transmit from one generation to
another. From the earliest times down we find them
engaged; as in the age of Pliny, in making salt,
"combined together, according to ancient usage, in
bringing under cultivation marshy grounds,"[5] free in
their guilds, asserting their independence, claiming
their rights and immemorial privileges, devoted to
whaling, trade and manufacturing, calling their towns
ports, in brief, as Guiccardini describes them in the
sixteenth century, "very desirous of gain and watchful
of profit, but without anything feverish or irrational
in their desire to provide for themselves.
They are by nature cool and self-possessed. They
delight in wealth and other wordly things prudently
and as occasion offers, and are not easily disturbed,
which is at once apparent both in their discourse and
in their physiognomies. They are not prone to anger
or to pride, but live together on good terms, and are
especially of a gay and lively humor." According to
him they entertain no vast and overweening ambition;
themselves with building, and taking life easily
and pleasantly. All circumstances, moral and physical,
their geographical and political state, the past
and the present, combine to one end, namely, the
development of one faculty and one tendency at the
expense of the rest, shrewd management and temperate
emotions, a practical understanding and limited
desires; they comprehend the amelioration of
outward things, and, this accomplished, they crave
no more.
Consider, in effect, their work; its perfection and
lacunœ indicate at once the limits and the power of
their intellect. The profound philosophy which is so
natural in Germany, and the elevated poetry which
flourishes in England, they lack. They fail to overlook
material things and positive interests in order
to yield to pure speculation, to follow the temerities
of logic, to attenuate the delicacy of analysis, and
bury themselves in the depths of abstraction. They
ignore that spiritual turmoil, those eruptions of
suppressed feeling which give to style a tragic
accent, and that vagabond fancy, those exquisite
ties reveal a new universe. They can boast of no
great philosopher; their Spinoza is a Jew, a pupil
of Descartes and the rabbis, an isolated recluse of a
different genius and a different race. None of their
books have become European like those of Burns
and Camoens, who, nevertheless, were born out of
nations equally small. One only of their authors
has been read by every man of his epoch, Erasmus,
a refined writer but who wrote in Latin, and who,
in education, taste, style and ideas belongs to the
erudites and humanists of Italy. The old Dutch
poets, as for example, Jacob Cats, are grave, sensible,
somewhat tedious moralists, who laud home enjoyments
and the life of the family. The Flemish
poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries tell
their auditors that they do not recount chivalric
fables—but veritable histories, their poesy ending in
practical maxims and contemporary events. In vain
do their belle-lettre academies cultivate and make
poetry prominent, there being no talent to produce
out of such resources any great or beautiful performance.
Chroniclers arise like Châtelain, and pam
unctuous narratives are inflated; their overcharged
eloquence, coarse and crude, recalls, without equalling
it, the rude color and vigorous grossness of their
national art. They have scarcely any literature at
the present day. Their only novelist, Conscience,
seems to us, although a tolerable observer, dull and
unrefined. If we visit their country and read their
journals, those at least not got up in Paris, we seem
to have fallen upon the provinces, and even lower.
Polemical discussions are gross, the flowers of rhetoric
stale, humor rudely indulged, and wit pointless;
a coarse joviality and a coarse anger supply the
material; their very caricatures seem to us stupid.
If we attempt to ascertain their contributions to
the great edifice of modern thought we find that
patiently and methodically, like honest and faithful
workmen, they have hewn out a few blocks. They
can point to a learned school of philologists at
Leyden, to jurisprudential authorities like Grotius,
to naturalists and physicians like Leeuvenhoeck,
Swammerdam and Boerhaave, to physicists like
Huyghens, and to cosmographers like Ortelius and
and useful men, but to no creative intellect disclosing
to the world grand original ideas or enshrining
original conceptions in beautiful forms capable
of universal ascendancy. They have left to neighboring
nations the part filled by the contemplative
Mary at the feet of Jesus, choosing for themselves
that of Martha; in the seventeenth century they
provided pulpits for the Protestant erudites exiled
from France, a country for free thought persecuted
throughout Europe, and editors for all books of
science and polemics; at a later period they furnished
printers for the whole of our eighteenth
century philosophy, and finally booksellers, brokers
and counterfeiters for the entire literature of modern
times. All this is of service to them for they
are versed in languages, and read and are instructed,
instruction being an acquisition and something
which it is good to lay up like other things.
But there they stop, and neither their ancient nor
their modern works show any need of or faculty for
contemplating the abstract beyond the apparent
world and the imaginary world outside of reality. |
On the contrary they have always excelled and
they still excel in the arts called useful. "First
among transalpine people," says Guiccardini, "they
invented woolen fabrics." Up to 1404 they alone
were capable of weaving and manufacturing them.
England supplied them with the raw material, the
English doing no more than raise and shear the
sheep. At the end of the sixteenth century, an
unique thing in Europe, "almost everybody, even
the peasantry, could read and write; a great many
even acquired the principles of grammar." We
find, accordingly, belle-lettre academies, that is to
say associations for oratory and dramatic representations,
even in the small towns. This indicates the
degree of perfection to which they brought their
civilization. "They have," says Guiccardini, "a
special and happy talent for the ready invention of
all sorts of machines, ingenious and suitable for
facilitating, shortening and dispatching everything
they do, even in the matter of cooking." They,
indeed, with the Italians, are the first in Europe to
attain to prosperity, wealth, security, liberty, com
fort, and all other benefits which seem to us the
century Bruges was equal to Venice; in the sixteenth
century Antwerp was the industrial and commercial
capital of the North. Guiccardini never
wearies in praising it, and he only saw it when it
was in full decline, reconquered by the Duke of
Parma after the terrible siege of 1585. In the seventeenth
century Holland, remaining free, occupies
for a century the place which England now holds in
the world of to-day. It is in vain for Flanders to
fall back into Spanish hands, to be ravaged by the
wars of Louis XIV., to be surrendered to Austria, to
serve as a battle-ground for the wars of the Revolution;
she never descends to the level of Spain or
Italy; the partial prosperity she maintains throughout
the miseries of repeated invasion and under a
bungling despotism shows the energy of her inspiring
good sense and the fecundity of her assiduous labor.
Of all the countries of Europe at the present day,
Belgium is the one which with an equal area supports
the most inhabitants; she feeds twice as many
as France; the most populous of our departments,
detached from her. Towards Lille and Douai you
already see spread out in an indefinable circle, extending
up to the horizon, this great kitchen garden,
a deep and fertile soil diapered with pale grain
sheaves, poppy-fields, and the large-leaved beet, and
richly stimulated by a low, warm sky swimming with
vapor. Between Brussels and Malines begins the
broad prairie, here and there striped with rows of
poplars, intersected with water-courses and fences,
where cattle browse throughout the year, an inexhaustible
storehouse of hay, milk, cheese and meat.
In the environs of Ghent and Bruges, the land of
Waes, "the classic soil of agriculture," is nourished
by fertilizers gathered in all countries, and by barnyard
manure brought from Zealand. Holland, in like
manner, is simply a pasturage, a natural tillage,
which, instead of exhausting the soil, renews it, providing
its cultivators with the amplest crops, and
affording to the consumer the most strengthening
aliments. In Holland, at Buicksloot, there are millionaire
cow-herds, the Netherlands ever seeming
to the stranger to be a land of feasting and good
results, you will everywhere encounter the same art
of utilizing and making the best of things. Obstacles
with them are transformed into aids. The soil
was flat and soaked with water; they took advantage
of it to cover it with canals and railroads, no
place in Europe presenting so many channels of communication
and of transport. They were in want of
fuel; they dug down into the bowels of the earth,
the coal-pits of Belgium being as rich as those of
England. The rivers annoyed them with their inundations
and inland pools deprived them of a portion
of their territory; they drained the pools, diked the
streams, and profited by the rich alluvions and the
slow deposits of vegetable mould with which the
surplus or stagnant waters overspread their land.
Their canals freeze up; they take skates and travel
in winter five leagues an hour. The sea threatened
them; after forcing it back, they avail themselves of
it to traffic with all nations. The winds sweep unimpeded
across their flat country and over the turbulent
ocean; they make them swell the sails of their
vessels and move the wings of their windmills. In
one of these enormous structures, a hundred feet
high, furnished with machinery and pumps, busy in
emptying the overflow of water, sawing ship-timber
and manufacturing oil. From the steamer, in front
of Amsterdam, you see, stretching off as far as the
eye can reach, an infinite spider's web, a light, indistinct
and complex fringe of masts and arms of windmills
encircling the horizon with their innumerable
fibres. The impression you carry away is that of a
country transformed from end to end by the hand
and the art of man; and sometimes entirely created
until it becomes a comfortable and productive territory.
Let us go further; let us take a near view of man,
and appreciate the most important object belonging
to him—his habitation. There is no stone in this
country—nothing but an adhesive clay, suitable for
men and horses to mire their feet in. It occurred to
the people, however, to bake it, and in this way
brick and tile, which are the best of defences against
humidity, came into their hands. You see well contrived
buildings of an agreeable aspect, with red.
white façades varnished and sometimes decorated
with sculptured flowers, animals, medallions and
small columns. In the older cities the house often
stands with its gable to the street, festooned with
arcades, branchings and leafage, which terminate in
a bird, an apple or a bust; it is not, as in our
cities, a continuation of its neighbor—an abstract
compartment of vast barracks, but an object apart,
endowed with a special and private character, at
once interesting and picturesque. Nothing could
be better kept and cleaner. At Doar the poorest
have their domicile whitewashed once a year, outside
and in, it being necessary to engage the whitewasher
six months in advance. At Antwerp, in
Ghent and in Bruges, and especially in the small
towns, most of the façades seem to be newly painted
or freshened the day before. Washing and sweeping
are going on on all sides. When you reach
Holland there is extra care even to exaggeration.
You see domestics at five o'clock in the
morning scrubbing the sidewalks. In the environs
of Amsterdam the villages seem to be scenery
are they. There are stables for cows, the
flooring of which is cabinet work; you can enter
them only in slippers or sabots placed at the
entrance for that purpose; a spot of dirt would be
scandalous, and still more so any odor; the cows'
tails are held up by a small cord to prevent them
from soiling themselves. Vehicles are prohibited
from entering the village; the sidewalks of brick
and blue porcelain are more irreproachable than a
vestibule with us. In autumn children come and
gather up the fallen leaves in the streets to deposit
them in a pit. Everywhere, in the small rooms,
seemingly the state-rooms of a ship, the order and
arrangement are the same as on a ship. In Broeck,
it is said, there is in each house a particular room
which is entered only once a week in order to clean
and rub the furniture, and then carefully closed; in
a country so damp, dirt immediately becomes a
deleterious mould; man, compelled to scrupulous
cleanliness, contracts the habit, experiences its necessity,
and at last falls under its tyranny. You would
be pleased, however, to see the humblest shop of
casks, its immaculate counter, its scoured benches,
everything in its place, the economy of small quarters,
the intelligent and handy arrangement of all
utensils. Guiccardini already remarks "that their
houses and clothes are clean, handsome and well-arranged,
that they have much furniture, utensils
and domestic objects, kept in better order and with
a finer lustre than in any other country." It is
necessary to see the comfort of their apartments,
especially the houses of the middle classes—carpets,
waxed cloths for the floors, warm and heat-saving
chimneys of iron and porcelain, triple curtains at the
windows, clear, dark and highly polished windowpanes,
vases of flowers and green plants, innumerable
knick-knacks indicative of sedentary habits and
which render home life pleasant, mirrors placed so as
to reflect the people passing in the street together
with its changing aspects;—every detail shows some
inconvenience remedied, some want satisfied, some
pleasant contrivance, some thoughtful provision, in
short, the universal reign of a sagacious activity and
the extreme of comfort.
Man, in effect, is that which his work indicates.
Thus endowed and thus situated, he enjoys and knows
how to enjoy. The bountiful soil furnishes him with
abundant nutriment—meat, fish, vegetables, beer
and brandy; he eats and drinks copiously, while in
Belgium the Germanic appetite, as it grows in fastidiousness
without decreasing, becomes gastronomic
sensuality. Cooking there is scientific and perfect,
even to the hotel tables; I believe that they are the
best in Europe. There is a certain hotel in Mons to
which visitors from the small neighboring towns
come to dine every Saturday, especially to enjoy a
delicate meal. They lack wine, but they import it
from Germany and France, and boast the possession
of the best vintages: we do not, in their opinion,
treat our wines with the respect they deserve; it is
necessary to be a Belgian to care for and relish them
in a proper manner. There is no important hotel
which is not supplied with a varied and select stock;
its reputation and custom are made by the selection;
in the railroad cars the conversation tends spontaneously
to the merits of two rival cellars. A prudent
merchant will have twelve thousand bottles in his
library. The burgomaster of a petty Dutch town
possesses a cask of genuine Johannisberger, made in
the best year, and this cask adds to the consideration
of its owner. A man there, who gives a dinner party,
knows how to make his wines succeed each other in
such a way as not to impair the taste and have as
many as possible consumed. As to the pleasures of
the ear and the eye, they understand them as well
as those of the palate and the stomach. They instinctively
love the music which we only appreciate
through culture. In the sixteenth century they are
first in this art; Guiccardini states that their vocalists
and instrumentalists are esteemed in all the courts
of Christendom; abroad, their professors found
schools, and their compositions are standards of authority.
Even nowadays the great musical endowment
of being able to sing in parts is encountered
even amongst the populace; the coal-miners organize
choral societies; I have heard laborers in Brussels
and Antwerp, and the ship caulkers and sailors of
Amsterdam sing in chorus, and in true time, while at
work and in the street on returning home at night.
bells, perched in the belfry, does not every quarter
of an hour amuse the artizan in his shop and the
trader at his counter with the peculiar harmonies of
their sonorous metal. In like manner their city halls,
their house-fronts, even their old drinking-cups are,
through their complex ornamentation, their intricate
lines and their original and often fantastic design,
agreeable to the eye. Add to this the free or well-composed
tones of the bricks forming the walls, and
the richness of the brown and red tints relieving on
white displayed on the roofs and façades—assuredly
the towns of the Netherlands are as picturesque of
their kind as any in Italy. In all times they have
delighted in kermesses and fêtes de Gayant, in corporation
processions, and in the parade and glitter of
costumes and materials. I shall show you the completely
Italian pomp of the civic entries and other
ceremonies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
They are epicureans as well as gourmands in the
matter of comfortable living; regularly, calmly,
without heat ór enthusiasm they glean up every
pleasing harmony of savor, sound, color and form
like tulips on a heap of compost. All this produces
good sense somewhat limited, and happiness somewhat
gross. A Frenchman would soon yawn over
it, but he would make a mistake, for this civilization,
which seems to him unctuous and vulgar, possesses
one sterling merit—it is healthy; the men
living here have a gift we lack the most—wisdom
and a compensation we are equally undeserving
contentment.
Michiels, "Histoire de la Peinture Flamande." Vol. I., p. 230; and
Schayes' "Les Pays-Bas-avant et pendant la domination Romaine."
| The philosophy of art | |