Dutch culture

“ In short, one-third of the crowd seemed to have stepped bodily from a collection of Dutch paintings.
Everywhere could be seen tall women, and stumpy men, lively faced girls, and youths whose expression never changed from sunrise to sunset.
There seemed to be at least one specimen from every known town in Holland. There were Utrecht water bearers, Gouda cheese makers, Delft pottery-men, Schiedam distillers, Amsterdam diamond-cutters, Rotterdam merchants, dried up herring-packers, and two sleepy-eyed shepherds from Texel. Every man of them had his pipe and tobacco-pouch. ”

“ Human enterprise has reclaimed and guards it, and has converted the whole into one of the most productive regions in Europe. Not only has it turned an expanse of foggy, unwholesome fens into a vast model farm, but it has built prosperous cities, and filled them with the products of art and civilization. The Dutch race has stretched its hands everywhere, and the earth is full of evidences of its courage and foresight. ”

“ The truth simply is that one goes to Dutch art for the celebration of fact without mystery or magic. In other words, Dutch painting is painting without poetry; and it is this absence of poetry which makes the romantic Frenchmen appear to be such exotics when one finds them in Holland, and why it is so pleasant in Holland now and then to taste their quality, as one may at the Stedelijk Museum and in the Mesdag Collection at The Hague. ”

“ He, too, with his vividly-coloured existence, with this picturesque and sensuous world of Dutch art and Dutch reality all around that would fain have made him the prisoner of its colours, its genial warmth, its struggle for life, its selfish and crafty love, was but a transient perturbation of the one absolute mind; of which, indeed, all finite things whatever, time itself, the most durable achievements of nature and man, and all that seems most like independent energy, are no more than petty accidents or affections. ”

“ Seeing how closely nature and landscape-painting are bound up with the very existence of Dutch art, it can be no matter for surprise that, at a time of a decline such as that into which official painting in general had fallen in our country, there were painters at the beginning of the eighteenth century who had succeeded in keeping their art untouched by foreign influences and who, refusing to deny their kind or the traditions of the great centuries, looked at nature through their own eyes, through their own masters. ”

“ Here in Java the Dutch have been longer settled than the English in India; they more often remain in the island, and the effect of course is more marked from generation to generation. The Dutchman is a placid, easy-going creature, even in his native Holland, except when roused by some great crisis, like a Spanish invasion, and then he fights with a courage which has given him a proud name in history. But ordinarily he is of a calm and even temper, and likes to sit quietly and survey his broad acres, and smoke his pipe in blissful content with himself and all the world beside. ”

“ No one need go to Holland to know the country, and if you do find yourself there you may follow out your study of its social history without going farther than its picture galleries. You may rely with absolute confidence on the realism of Dutch art, and, strange to say, the most capable artists have been as faithful as their less gifted fellows. ”

“ The Dutch, like the English, do not possess the genius of outdoor refreshment. The cafés and beer-houses are mostly under cover, and in all but the larger establishments you sit close, and are not over-burthened with light; but the Dutch enjoy themselves, and cling to old customs and old costumes with a conservatism which is part and parcel of the national character. They have had to fight the ocean for every inch of Holland, and they are a brave and a grand people who have triumphed over difficulties which might have caused Hercules to throw up the sponge. ”

“ From a few existing fragments—two incantations from the 8th century, a version of the Psalms from the 9th century, and several charters—a supposed Old Dutch language has been recognized; but Dutch literature actually commences in the 13th century, as Middle Dutch, the creation of the first national movement in Brabant, Flanders, Holland and Zealand.
From the wreck of Frankish anarchy no genuine folk-tales of Dutch antiquity have come down to us, and scarcely any echoes of German myth. On the other hand, the sagas of Charlemagne and Arthur appear immediately in Middle Dutch forms. ”

“ After this glance at the nature and cause of decline of Dutch art in the eighteenth century, we may return with a better appreciation of what is ahead of us in our study—the establishment in Holland in the seventeenth century of a new art, the product of a new nation ”

“ The ordinary story is that on settling down to a period of independence and comparative peace and prosperity after the cessation of the Spanish war, the Dutch people called for good art, and good art came. But that is too simple. That a poet, a statesman or a novelist should be produced in response to a national desire is not inconceivable; for poets, statesmen and novelists find their material in the air, as we say, in the ideas of the moment. They are for the most part products of their time. But the great Dutch painters of the seventeenth century were expressing no real idea. ”

“ Practically everything that we recognize to-day as characteristic of the modern spirit in politics, religion, science, society, industry, commerce, and art has its prototype amid that sturdy people; being either the cause or the product of their struggle for independence and their self-development. Nor, in paying honor to the Dutch, need we attempt to suggest that they were the inventors of these characteristics. Most of the latter were, so to say, in the air. ”

“ The Dutch are a hard-working lot. They get up earlier than the people of any other country I have seen in Europe. And as the entire family works, from the grandmother to the dog, they accumulate wealth as a nation and as individuals. The ordinary dwelling is part of the store, the shop, the barn or the windmill, so that the women-folks can do their part of the labor and not lose much time going back and forth. Whenever the women are not attending to the farm or the shop they are scrubbing. The smell of good strong soap is one of the real Dutch landmarks as much as a windmill or a canal. ”

“ To understand the Dutch people, we must not inquire of aliens in speech or temper, or of belated tradition. To get the truth one must see the Dutch homeland, go into the archives for the past, and let those long dead speak in their own defense. He must live among the Hollanders, and with their descendants, to know the real character of the people who laid the foundations of our four Middle States. Then the student, who, like the author, is not of Dutch blood or inheritance, can emancipate himself from old wives' fables, distorted views, and damaging traditions. ”

“ The jolly burghers who fèted the peace of Munster will live on in their every lineament till the colours and the canvas perish by age or accident. For, like truth, Dutch art is eternal, and must always win admiration although it may find few enthusiastic worshippers. ”

“ Maes painted old Dutch housewives, and Metsu young Dutch housewives, to the life; Vermeer and Terburg immortalised Dutch ladies at their spinets; Albert Cuyp toiled to suffuse Dutch meadows and Dutch cows with a golden glow; Jan Steen glorified the humblest Dutch family scenes; Gerard Dou spent whole weeks upon the fingers of a common Dutch hand. In short, art that so long had been at the service only of the Church and the proud, became suddenly, without losing any of its divinity, a fireside friend. That is what Holland did for painting. ”

“ It is now time to speak of the brilliant band of poets, dramatists and stylists, who cultivated the resources of their native tongue with such success as to make this great era truly the Golden Age of Dutch Literature properly so-called. The growth of a genuine national literature in the Netherlands, which had produced during the latter part of the 13th century a Maerlandt and a Melis Stoke, was for some considerable time checked and retarded by the influence of the Burgundian régime, where French, as the court language, was generally adopted by the upper classes. ”

“ Its trade, its wealth, and its prosperity, were gradually transferred to Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the towns of Holland and Zealand; and the growth of Dutch commerce attained its proud maturity in the establishment of the India Company in 1596, the effects of which we shall have hereafter more particularly to dwell on.
The exciting and romantic enterprises of the Portuguese and Spanish navigators in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries roused all the ardor of other nations for those distant adventures; and the people of the Netherlands were early influenced by the general spirit of Europe. ”

“ Here, as in Amsterdam, the houses are, many of them, built on piles, and the land is kept land by keeping the water in the canals, locks, and basins. It requires much money, good systems, and much energy to do this, but the Dutch have proved themselves equal to it. We hear here such names as the ‘Hoogstraat’ (one of the streets) , the ‘Schiedamsche dyke,’ etc., regular jaw-breakers. In fact, I think if Americans can understand or be understood in Holland, they need have no fears of not being able to travel in other parts of the globe, so far as ‘language’ is concerned. ”

“ And it was this art which was as a revelation to the French landscape-painters, whose works, exhibited in Brussels and Paris, in their turn gave the Dutchmen an understanding of their own being and a clearer insight, which, at first, perhaps, with a suggestion of borrowed riches, led them back at length into their own domain.
It is easy to overestimate an influence. For, although the art of painting, colour and the sense of a powerful movement can be taught and learned, it is not often that a foreign tradition leads to great display of strength. ”

“ They are all here as advertised, and they color the lives of the people as they do the landscape of the country. To the eye they are artistic and beautiful, but in practice they are common, plain necessities, and in these signs the Dutch have conquered. ”

“ A Genuine Dutchman EVER since the great poet, Willem Bilderdijk, more than a hundred years ago, finding the intellectual life of his country submerged in Teutonic sentimentality, turned the German doves out of the temple of the Dutch Muses, Holland has followed the intellectual example of France more than that of any other country. The Dutch have a passion for individualism which carries them in a direction exactly opposite to the moral and artistic tyranny of Prussian Kultur, and gives a totally different coloring to their respect for mental distinction. ”

“ There is a tremendous lot of the English character about the Dutch. Hoogstraat, Rotterdam, on Sunday night might be High Street, Islington, at the same time. The boys yell, the girls scream and rush about, and a dense black crowd surges and shoves up and down and sings and walks arm-in-arm a dozen wide, and generally comports itself with high spirits and low habits. A Dutch crowd is English in its rough unconcern for the delicate shades of etiquette. But individually the Dutch are kind, hospitable, and most courteous to strangers. ”

“ The great Dutchmen were the first painters to bend their genius exclusively to the honour of their own country, its worthies, its excesses, its domestic virtues, its trivial dailiness. Hals and Rembrandt lavished their power on Dutch arquebusiers and governors of hospitals, Dutch burgomasters and physicians; Ostade and Brouwer saw no indignity in painting Dutch sots as well as Dutch sots could be painted; De Hooch introduced miracles of sunlight into Dutch cottages ”

“ 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. ”

“ The scenery of Dutch history has episodes as stirring and instructive as those of any civilized people since history began; but it reached its dramatic and moral apogee when the independence of the United Netherlands was acknowledged by Spain. The Netherlands then reached their loftiest pinnacle of power and prosperity; their colonial possessions were vast and rich; their reputation as guardians of liberty and the rights of man was foremost in the world. ”

“ Of the white races in the Colony the French element has been completely absorbed in the Dutch. They and the German settlers are mainly pastoral people. The Dutch, who have retained in a debased form their own language, also engage largely in agriculture and viticulture. Of fine physique and hardy constitution, they are of strongly independent character; patriarchal in their family life; shrewd, slim and courageous; in religion Protestants of a somewhat austere type. Education is somewhat neglected by them, and the percentage of illiteracy among adults is high. ”