Holland ... Translated ... by M. Saltire

Front matter

HOLLAND. BY SIGNOR EDMONDO DE AMICIS, Translated from the Italian BY MAURICE SALTIRE. VOL. I. ILoniion : REMINGTON AND CO., New Bond Street, W. 1883. [Ail Rights Reserved.] CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE I. Holland I II. Zealand ... ... ... ... ... ... 17 III. Rotterdam ... ... ... ... ... 39 IV. Rotterdam (continued) ... ... ... ... 53 V. Rotterdam (continued) ... ... ... ... 68 VI. Rotterdam and its Museum (continued) ... ... 92 VII. Delft 106 VIII. Delft (continued) 128 IX. Journey to the Hague ... ... ... ... 142 X. The Hague 150 XI. The Hague Museum and Picture Gallery ... ... 167 XII. Scheveningen and the Dunes ... ... ... 183 XIII. A Romantic Visit. — A Dutch Winter 203 XIV. The Dutch Character 218 XV. Dutch Literature ... ... ... ... ... HOLLAND.

Chapter I. Holland

A person examining a map of Holland for the first time would probably be surprised that a country of a formation so singular could exist upon the face of the earth. It is difficult, at first sight, to say whether land or water predominates, whether Holland belongs to the continent or to the ocean. Its indented, jagged shores, deep gulfs, and great rivers that, no longer looking like rivers, seem, as it were, to be carrying new seas into the sea ; its very sea which, assuming the character of a river, penetrates far inland, breaking the country up into islands ; its lakes, endless marshes, and canals, crossing and recrossing each other in every direction : it would almost seem as if a land so deeply furrowed, fit only to be inhabited by seals and beavers, might at any moment be expected to melt away and disappear, and that its inhabitants could never lay them down to rest with their minds at ease.

Such were the thoughts that occurred to me when I first beheld a map of Holland ; and awakened a desire to obtain a fuller acquaintance -with the history of this singular country. VOL. I. B HOLLAND. Holland was called by Napoleon a confluence of French rivers — the Rhine, tbe Scheldt and the Moselle — and as such, he annexed it to the Empire. It has been variously described by different writers, one calling it a kind of transition between land and sea, another a huge crust of earth floating upon the waters. Other writers speak of it as a sequel to the old continent, European China, the boundary line where land ends and the ocean begins, an overgrown raft of sand and mud, and according to Philip II. it is the border-land of hell. But upon one point they are all unanimous and express their opinion in similar terms, viz., that Holland is the fruit of man's victory over the ocean ; it subsists because the Dutch keep it in repair.

Were the Dutch to leave it to itself it would altogether disappear. In order to realize the correctness of this asser tion, it will be requisite to recall to mind Holland as it was when the first Germanic tribes, roaming over Europe in search of a home, pitched their tents on the shores of the Scheldt and the Rhine. The country was scarcely habitable. A region of vast stormy lakes, boundless tracts of marshes bogs and brushwood ; huge forests of oak, pine, and elm trees, overrun by herds of wild horses where, according to tradition, one might have travelled for miles, passing from tree to tree without ever setting foot on the ground. The deep-cut bays allowed the northerly gales to penetrate with unabated fury into the very heart of the country. Some provinces, at best but muddy plains, inaccessible alike to the farmer and the sailor, annually disappeared beneath the ocean waves.

The beds of the great rivers not HOLLAND. being steep enough to carry them down to the sea, the waters meandered aimlessly about, as if undecided which way to go, wasting away in great stagnant pools upon the sandy shore. It was a dismal country, a prey to biting winds, lashed by unceasing, pitiless rain, shrouded in perpetual mist, the only sounds that struck the ear being the moan of the waves, the howling of the wild beasts and the cry ofthe sea birds. The first tribes enterprising enough to fix upon it for their future home, had to raise mounds of earth to protect them from the overflow of the rivers and the inroads ofthe ocean ; they were compelled to live upon those heights like shipwrecked mariners on desert islets, coming down at low tide to obtain their food by hunting and fishing, and to pick up the eggs the sea-birds laid in the sand.

Cæsar is the first writer who mentions these people. The other Latin historians speak with compassionate respect of the intrepid barbarians who lived on " floating land," exposed to the vagaries of an inclement climate and the wrath of the mysterious North Sea ; and the imagination loves to dwell on the weather-beaten Roman soldiers, pacing up and down the walls of the Empire's most advanced strongholds, sadly yet curiously watching the tribes roaming over those dreary wastes, as if accursed of heaven. A region so desolate blossoming forth into one of the most fertile, wealthy, and prosperous countries in the world, it is easy to understand why Holland came to be called the fruit of man's victory over the ocean. It, however, is a victory which daily, nay hourly, has to be won over again. But to explain this fact, to show that, in spite of the colossal amount of toil expended by its inhabi- HOLLAND. tants to fortify it against the assaults of the ele ments, the existence of Holland still involves a ceaseless and eminently perilous struggle, it will be necessary briefly to survey a few of the chief vicissitudes of its physical existence, going back to the time when it had but just been rendered habitable by the hand of man.

There is a tradition of a great inundation in Friesland as early as the sixth century. From that time every bay, every island, I may even say every town in Holland speaks of some disaster. It has been reckoned that for the last thirteen centuries there has been one great flood every seven years, besides the smaller ones, and the country being all one vast plain these floods were literally deluges. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, the sea washed away a part of the fertile peninsula situated near the mouth of the Ems and destroyed over thirty villages. In the course of the same century, a series of mari time inundations opened an immense channel into the very centre of North Holland and iotmed the Gulf of Zuyderzee, at the cost of nearly eighty thousand lives. In 1421, a violent storm caused the Meuse to overflow, burying seventy-two villages and a hundred thousand inhabitants under its waters in one night.

In 1532 the sea broke down the dykes in Zealand, destroyed hundreds of villages and laid an exten sive tract of land for ever under water. In 1570, a gale again brought on another flood in Zealand, and in the province of Utrecht, Amsterdam was invaded by the waters and twenty thousand people were drowned in Friesland. In the seventeenth century there were several great floods, two awful ones at the beginning and end HOLLAND. of the eighteenth, another in 1825 that ruined North Holland, Friesland, Over-Yssel and Guelder land, and another in 1855, when the Rhine over flowed Guelderland and the province of Utrecht and laid the greater part of North Brabant under water. Besides these signal disasters countless others, that in any other country would have been regarded as unparalleled catastrophes, but which in Holland were thought to be scarcely worth mentioning, took place at different times ; such as for instance, the overflowing of the great lake of Haarlem, which itself owes its existence to an inroad of the sea upon the mainland ; prosperous cities upon the shores of the Zuyderzee, swallowed up by the waters, the Zealand Islands one after another flooded by the sea and then once more restored to dry land, villages along the coast from Helder to the very mouth of the Meuse every now and then flooded and laid waste, and all these inundations invariably accompanied by great loss of human and animal life.

The enemy that the Dutch had to wrest their lands from was threefold : namely, the sea, the rivers, and the lakes. They drained the lakes, drove back the rivers, and imprisoned the sea. They turned the air to account in order to drain their lakes, they encircled the lakes and marshes with a belt of dykes, which, in their turn, were circumscribed within a circle of canals, and a host of windmills, acting upon as many suction pumps, poured the water out of the lakes and marshes back into the canals, which disgorged it into the rivers and the sea. Thus, large expanses of land, hitherto buried under water, were reclaimed, and transformed as if by magic into fertile fields, dotted with populous villages, and traversed HOLLAND. by roads and canals. In the seventeenth century, in less than forty years, twenty-six lakes were drained.

At the commencement of the present centuiy, in North Holland alone, some 148,000 acres of land were wrested from the waters ; and in South Holland, previous to the year 1844, 1,750,000 acres. Altogether, between the years 1500 and 1848, 13,550,000 acres of land have been rescued in North and South Holland. When the windmills were replaced by steam mills, the enterprise of draining the lake of Haarlem, nearly twenty-eight miles in circumference, and whose terrific storms constantly threatened the cities of Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Leyden with instantane ous destruction, was achieved in three months' time. At the present moment the colossal scheme of draining the Zuyderzee, which covers an area of 435 square miles, is being debated. The rivers, another of Holland's inward foes, cost her no less trouble and sacrifice to subdue.

Some of them, such as the Rhine, that lost themselves in the sands before reaching the sea, had to he rendered navigable and protected from the tide by formidable dykes erected at their mouth ; others, such as the Meuse, had to be flanked with dykes quite as powerful as those erected to withstand the violence of the ocean ; the courses of some were altered, others had their erratic waters brought into one channel ; the course of their tributaries had to be regulated, and their waters distributed in strict proportion over the whole extent of the country so as to maintain the equilibrium of the great liquid mass, the slightest deviation of which is sufficient to anni hilate whole provinces ; the result obtained was that the rivers which formerly squandered their HOLLAND. devastating waters over the entire face of the country, were compelled to submit to a rigorous discipline, and to work the will of their master — man.

But the most terrible struggle of all was the one fought by the Dutch against the ocean. The greater part of Holland is lower than the level of the sea, therefore, wherever the coast was left unsheltered by the dunes, it had to be protected by dykes. Were those huge barriers of wood, earth, and granite not standing there, bearing irrefutable evidence to the courage and perseverance of the Dutch people, it would be well-nigh impossible to credit that the hand of man could accomplish so colossal a task, even admitting it to be the work of many ages. In Zealand alone the dykes are 250 miles long. The town of Eelder, at the northern extremity of North Holland, is protected by a dyke 6£ miles long, built of blocks of Nor wegian granite, and projecting nearly 200 feet into the sea. The eastern coast of the island of Walcheren is protected by a dyke, of which it is said that the cost of building and keeping it in repair would be equivalent to the value of the same dyke in solid brass.

The whole of Friesland, fifty five miles in length, is protected by three rows of enormous wooden piles, fortified by blocks of Nor wegian and German granite. Amsterdam, all the towns on the Zuyderzee coast and all the islands — the remnants of vanished lands — that encircle Friesland and North Holland like a crown, each and all of them are protected by dykes. From the mouth of the Ems to the mouth of the Scheldt, Holland is an i mpregnable fortress, its windmills are the towers, its sluices the gates, its islands the outposts, and, true to its character HOLLAND. of a fortress, it shows its enemy the sea nothing but the spires of its belfries and the summits of its house-tops. Holland is a fortress, and the Dutch people lead the life of a garrison in a besieged stronghold — ever on the alert.

A host of engineers dependent upon the Home Office, are scattered all over the country ; organized like an army, they are ever on the look-out for the enemy ; they see after the lakes and rivers, keep the dykes in repair, super intend and conduct the defensive operations. The costs of the war are, divided, a part falls to the State, the remainder to the provinces ; every land owner, in addition to the general rates, has to pay a special tax for the dykes, levied proportionately to the extent of his landed property and its vicinity to the water. A moment's careless ness may occasion an inundation ; it is a state of unceasing peril ; the sentinels are ever at their posts on the ramparts ; at the very first onslaught of the sea they utter their war cry, and Holland replies by supplying men, implements, and money.

Even when there are no great battles to be fought, a silent and painful struggle is ever being carried on. In the drained lakes innumerable mills are obliged to toil unceasingly at sucking up and pouring back into the canals the rain water and other refuse. Every day the sluices in the gulfs and rivers shut their gigantic flood-gates upon the high tide which endeavours to dash its billows into the country's very core. Unceasing labour is required to keep the dykes in repair, to fortify the dunes by planting trees and bushes upon them, to build new dykes, straight as giant lances cast into the sea to break the force of the waves in HOLLAND. places where the dunes are not high enough to withstand their violence alone. And the sea is ever knocking at the rivers' gates, ever battering their barriers and muttering its everlasting threats, uplifting its waves as if to show them the disputed lands, heaping up sandbanks at the entrance of the harbours to wreak its vengeance upon its enemy by ruining their trade ; gnawing, corroding, scooping out the coast, and, uuable to annihilate the ramparts upon which its billows break in angry foam, it proclaims its wrath and power to rebellious man by casting vessels full of dead bodies at his feet.

While this great struggle is being fought, Hol land is gradually undergoing a transformation. A map of the country, as it was eight centuries ago, is at first sight unrecognizable. The sea and human toil have co-operated in bringing about this altera tion. The sea in some places pushes back the coast, snatches scraps of land away from the con tinent, restores them to it and again retakes them ; joins islands to the continent by strips of sand, as it did with Zealand ; cuts off bits of the main land and moulds them into new islands, as happened to Wiehringen ; recedes from some pro vinces, turning what were formerly seaports into inland cities, as was the case with Leeu warden; transforms vast level tracts, such as Biesbosch, into an archipelago of a hundred islands ; separates whole towns from the conti nent, as it did with Dordrecht; forms new gulfs two miles broad, as the Gulf of Dollars ; divides two provinces by a new sea, as it did with North Holland and Friesland.

By the action of the floods the soil is raised in some parts, sunk in others ; barren lands are fertilized by the mud HOLLAND. deposited by the overflow of the rivers; fertile lands are metamorphosed into sandy deserts. Simultaneously with the transformations wrought by the sea, human labour is ever achieving other no less remarkable changes. Islands are joined to tbe continent, as the island of Ameland bears evidence ; whole provinces are transformed into islands, as will be the case with North Holland when the new Amsterdam canal, which is to separate that province from South Holland, is completed. Lakes large as provinces, such as the lake of Beermster, are made to vanish; dry land is transformed into lakes, by having the lower layers of peat it contains extracted, and lakes in their turn are metamorphosed into meadows.

Thus the country is altered, improved, its out ward appearance transformed, according to the freaks of the waters and the requirements of man. Journeying across Holland with the latest map of that country in hand, the traveller is able to foresee for a certainty that in a few years hence that same map will no longer be of any use what ever; for, as he goes along, he notices here a creek gradually disappearing, there a tract of land on the point of breaking off from the continent, or a broad canal just opened to carry life to the heart of some hitherto uninhabited wilderness. Holland, however, was not content with merely repulsing the assaults of the waters — she mastered them. Water was her bane ; she turned it into a defensive weapon. If a foreign army invades her territory, she opens her flood-gates and lets loose the sea and rivers, as she did with the Romans, the Spaniards, and with Louis XIV.'s army ; her fleet defends her cities.

Water was her ruin ; she turned it into a source of wealth. An intricate HOLLAND. network of canals overspreads the whole of the country, doing duty as highroads, and serving to irrigate the fields and meadows. Communications between the towns and the sea are carried on by means of canals. Canals run between each town and its neighbouring cities, bind the towns to the villages, the villages to each other, and to the homesteads scattered over the country; farms, meadows, and orchards, are all provided with smaller canals, which do duty as walls and ditches ; every house is a miniature harbour. Vessels, barges, boats, and rafts, sail down to the villages, round the houses, cross and re-cross each other in every direction, as carts and carriages do in other places. In this department, too, Holland has achieved colossal successes, as for instance the William Canal in North Brabant, fifty miles long and some twenty broad which, traversing the whole of North Holland, joins Amsterdam to the North Sea; the new canal that, passing through the dunes, will connect Amsterdam with the sea, and will be the broadest in Europe ; and another, not less broad, that will open a shorter route from the town of Rotterdam to the sea.

The canals are Holland's veins, and water is her blood. But besides the canals, in the draining of the lakes, and other defensive operations, Holland is strewn in every direction with the traces of Herculean labour. The soil, which in other places is a free gift of nature, is here the result of toil. Holland drew the greater part of her wealth from trade ; but, before applying her self to commerce, she had to render the soil fruitful. But soil she had none ; she had to make up for this deficiency by creating it by dint of labour HOLLAND. and perseverance. Sand banks, interspersed with great bogs ; dunes, that the wind drifted and scattered over the country at will ; broad expanses of slimy mud, that seemed doomed to everlasting sterility, were all she had. The very first neces saries of trade, iron and coal, were lacking.

Wood there was none, for before agriculture awoke to life, the forests had been destroyed by the winds and storms; stone and metal there were none. Nature, says a Dutch poet, had denied Holland all her gifts ; and the Dutch people had everything to do for themselves, with nature against them. The first thing they did was to fertilize the sand banks. In some places they formed the productive stratum of the soil by bringing earth from great distances ; they scattered silex from the dunes over the meadows that were too damp to be available for agricultural purposes, and mingled the soil in sandy places with the residue of peat that they got, with infinite toil, from under the water; they extracted clay from the bowels of the earth in order to fertilize the soil; they undertook to transform the dunes into arable land; and thus, by means of a thousand ingenious devices, obliged constantly to protect their labour from the threatening waters, they succeeded in raising Holland to a state of prosperity not inferior to that enjoyed by nature's more favoured children.

Holland, the damp and sandy country, looked upon by the ancients as scarcely habitable, now exports yearly four millions sterling worth of agricultural produce, owns about one million three hundred thousand head of cattle, and is ranked, proportionately to its extent, among the most populous countries in Europe. Evidently a country of so strange a physical HOLLAND. aspect must be inhabited by a nation differing widely from any other ; in point of fact, few people have been so deeply influenced by the nature of the country they inhabit as the Dutch. It is not surprising to find the inhabitants of this strange country differing in many respects from other nations. The Dutch cast of mind corres ponds perfectly to the physical constitution of Holland. The monuments of the great contest waged by this nation against the ocean are a sufficient indication that firmness and patience, combined with cool, persevering courage, are their chief characteristics.

The recollection of that glorious struggle, the consciousness of being indebted to himself alone for all his present prosperity, must necessarily have infused into tbe Dutchman's breast a highly-developed idea of his personal dignity and an unconquerable spirit of liberty and independence. The necessity of a con stant struggle in self-defence, of ceaseless labour and perpetual self-denial, ever bringing his intellect face to face with reality, must have given him an eminently sound and practical view of things in general. Common-sense is accordingly one of the most prominent features of the Dutch man's character, while economy is one of his chief virtues. Moderate in his pleasures, successful in his undertakings by dint of sheer perseverance and painstaking, systematic energy, he is well fitted to hold a post of honour in the more useful branches of art.

Even when acting heroically, there is an entire absence of ostentation aud self consciousness. Inclined rather to obey the dictates of reason thin those of blind heroism; a conserva tive rather than an innovator, be takes his share in the common toil of building the edifice of HOLLAND. modern thought, by supplying not one or two architects of genius, but many skilful workmen, a host of patient, useful mechanics. Thus by his prudence, his unemotional, plodding activity, and conservative principles, the Dutchman is ever gradually, yet surely, progressing; acquiring slowly, yet never relinquishing his hold upon anything he has once appropriated ; unwilling to give up any of his old habits and customs, jealously preserving, in spite of the neighbourhood of three powerful nations, his peculiarities from every taint of foreign influence, clinging to them through changes of government, foreign invasions, and political and religious wars ; and uninfluenced by the immense influx of foreigners who from time to time came to seek a shelter, and took up their abode in his native land.

And so it may with truth be said that of all the Northern nations, the Dutch, while ever pushing forward upon the highroad of civilization, has succeeded more than any other in pieserving the stamp of antiquity. Although the various provinces are bound together in so close a political union, and while their three-and-a-half million inhabitants have much in common, the Dutch nation is rich in the most striking contrasts. The difference between Zealand and Holland proper, between Holland and Friesland, Friesland and Guelderland, notwithstanding their vicinity to each other, and of the many historical ties that unite them, is no less striking than that which exists between the remotest provinces of Italy and France. Difference of language, habits, disposition; difference of race and religion are no less observable here than there.

The municipal system has stamped the HOLLAND. nation with an indelible mark, for in no country was it so well adapted to existing circumstances as here. The country is divided, by the very nature of the hydraulic system, into several groups, animated by common interests. Compactness and readiness to aid each other in facing their common foe were the natural results of this system, which, however, was in no way detri mental to the independence of the local powers and institutions. The monarchy did not quench the old municipal spirit which, in bygone days, baffled all endeavours on the part of the powerful neighbouring States to annex Holland. The great rivers and deep gulfs are commercial highroads, that do duty both as ties between the various provinces, and as barriers, protecting old and dissimilar habits and customs, and preventing them from encroaching upon each other.

In this, to all appearance, so uniform country, everything except nature changes, so to speak, at each step and all of a sudden, as the very aspect of nature herself does, the very moment the traveller has crossed the frontier. But wonderful as is the history of Holland's physical development, that of her political growth is still more wonderful. At first, an in significant scrap of land, invaded by different tribes of the Germanic race, conquered by the Romans and the Franks, laid waste by the Danes and the Normans, torn for centuries by civil wars ; then occupied by a handful of fishermen and petty tradesmen who, successfully maintaining their liberty of conscience at the cost of eighty years' war against Philip II. 'a formidable armies, founded a republic destined to be the saving ark of liberty, the adopted home of science, Europe's Bank HOLLAND. and Exchange, the commercial focus of the world, a republic whose dominions include Java, Sumatra, Hindoustan, Ceylon, New Holland, Japan, Brazil, Guinea, the Cape of Good Hope, the East Indies, and New York, a republic which drove back the united armies of Charles II. and Louis XIV., standing upon an equal footing with the mightiest nations, and, at one time, belonging to the triumvirate that ruled the fate of Europe.

At the present day it is no longer the mighty Holland it was in the seventeenth century, but still is, England excepted, the greatest colonial power of Europe ; instead of greatness it now enjoys an era of tranquil prosperity. Its commerce failed, its agriculture rose ; it has lost the outward form rather than the substance of its republican constitution ; a princely and patriotic house, beloved of the people, calmly sways the sceptre, jealously guarding the nation's ancient and • modern prerogatives. Holland is a living example of wealth unaccompanied by ostentation, liberty by insolence, taxation by poverty and distress ; progressing sensibly, as of old, without sudden starts and violent perturbations, preserving in its traditions, its customs, its liberty, the impress of its noble origin.

In perhaps no other country in Europe is culture so widely spread, or the average of good morals so high as in Holland. Standing unnoticed and alone at the very extremity of the continenl, it enjoys the fruit of its labours in peace, and has the supreme consolation of knowing that no nation in the world has purchased at a higher price than itself religious liberty and political in dependence.

Chapter II. Zealand

Where is Zealand? Had such a question been put to me before I had made up my mind to take a trip to Holland, I should have been somewhat un decided how to reply. For the Netherlanders themselves Zealand is shrouded in a sort of mystery ; very few of them have ever been there, some have merely passed through on board a steamer ; so that it is but seldom spoken of, and then as a far-off country. From the first words I heard my travelling companions, mostly Bel gians and Dutchmen, exchange among them selves, 1 gathered that they too were about to see Zealand for the first time. We were there fore all equally eager, and before the steamer was off we had got into conversation and were mutually whetting each other's curiosity by asking questions that none of us could answer. At sunrise we got under weigh, and for a few minutes we were able to enjoy the sight of Antwerp Cathedral belfry, made of Malines lace, as Napoleon I., who was in love with it, used to say, and after stopping at Fort Lille and the village of Doel, we left Belgium behind us and entered the precincts of Zealand.

Although no one expects the scenery and general aspect of Nature to undergo a complete and sudden change, yet after crossing the frontier of an unknown country for the first time, one looks eagerly around as if expecting to find everything quite different vol. i. c HOLLAND. from what it was a minute ago. And, indeed, we all came on deck and leant over the bulwarks as if to watch for Zealand suddenly appearing before our gaze. Our curiosity was doomed to disappointment for some time, at any rate there was nothing to be seen except the flat green banks of the Scheldt, which just here is as broad as an arm of the sea, plentifully dotted with sand banks, where swarms of shrill-voiced gulls were every now and then alighting ; and overhead a cloudless sky, altogether looking anything but like a conventional Dutch prospect.