Chapter 11

In the Binnenhof the venerable Van Olden Barneveldt was beheaded. He was the second founder of the republic, the most illustrious victim of the long struggle between the patrician burghers and the Stadtholders, between the republican and monarchical principles, which so terribly afflicted Holland. The scaffold was erected in front of the building where sat the States General. Opposite was the tower from which, they say, Maurice of Orange, unseen, assisted at the execution of his enemy. In the prison between the two squares was tortured Cornelius de Witt, who was unjustly accused of plotting against the life of the Prince of Orange. The furious populace dragged Cornelius and John de Witt, the Grand Pensionary, into the Plaats all wounded and bleeding, and there they were spit upon, kicked, and slaughtered with pike and pistol, and afterward their corpses were mutilated and defiled. In the same square Adelaide de Poelgeest, the mistress of Albert, Count of Holland, was stabbed on the 22d of September in the year 1392, and the stone on which she expired is still shown.

These sad memories and those heavy low doors, that irregular group of dark buildings, which at night, when the moon lights up the stagnant pool, have the appearance of an enormous inaccessible castle standing in the midst of the joyous and cultured city,--arouse a feeling of awful sadness. At night the courtyard is lighted only by an occasional lamp; the few people who pass through it quicken their pace as if they are afraid. There is no sound of steps to be heard, no lighted windows to be seen; one enters it with a vague restlessness, and leaves it almost with pleasure.

With the exception of the Binnenhof, the Hague has no important monuments ancient or modern. There are several mediocre statues of the Princes of Orange, a vast, naked cathedral, and a royal palace of modest proportions. On many of the public buildings storks are carved, the stork being the heraldic animal of the city. Many of these birds walk about freely in the fish-market--they are kept at the expense of the municipality, like the bears of Berne and the eagles of Geneva.

The greatest ornament of the Hague is its forest, which is one of the wonders of Holland and one of the most magnificent parks in the world.

It is composed of alders, oaks, and the largest beech trees to be found in Europe. It is more than a French league in circumference, and is situated to the east of the city, only a few steps from the last houses. It is a really delightful oasis in the midst of the depressing Dutch plains. When one has entered the wood and passed beyond the fringe of pavilions, little Swiss cottages, and summer houses dotted about among the first trees, one seems to have lost one's self in a lonely interminable forest. The trees are as thick as a canebrake, the avenues are lost in the dusk; there are lakes and canals almost hidden by the verdure of the banks; rustic bridges, the crossways of unfrequented bridle-paths, shady recesses; and over all a cool, refreshing shade in which one seems to breathe the air of virginal nature and to be far removed from the turmoil of the world.

They say that this wood, like that of the town of Haarlem, is the remnant of an immense forest which in olden times covered almost the whole of the coast of Holland, and the Dutch respect it as a monument of their national history. Indeed, in the history of Holland there are many references to it, proving that at all times it was preserved with a most jealous care. Even the Spanish generals respected this national worship and shielded the sacred wood from the hands of the soldiers. On more than one occasion of serious financial distress, when the government was disposed to decree the destruction of the forest for the purpose of selling the wood, the citizens exorcised the danger by a voluntary offering. This beloved forest is connected with a thousand memories--records of terrible hurricanes, of the amours of princes, of celebrated fetes, of romantic adventures. Some of the trees bear the names of kings and emperors, others of German electors; one beech tree is said to have been planted by the grand pensionary and poet Jacob Catz, three others by the Countess of Holland, Jacqueline of Bavaria, and they still point out the place where she used to rest after her walks. Voltaire also left a record of some sort of gallant adventure which he had with the daughter of a hair-dresser.

In the centre of the forest, where the underbrush seems determined to conquer everything and springs up, piling itself into heaps, climbing the trees, creeping across the paths, extending over the water, restraining one's steps and hiding the view on every side, as if it wished to conceal the shrine of some forgotten sylvan divinity,--at this spot is hidden a small royal palace, called the House-in-the-Wood, a sort of _Casa del Labrador_ of the Villa Aranjuez. It was erected in 1647 by Princess Amalia of Solms, in honor of her husband, Frederick Henry, the Stadtholder.

When I went to visit this palace, while my eyes were busy searching for the visitors' door, I saw a lady with a noble and benevolent face come out and get into her carriage. I took her for some English traveller who had brought her visit to a close. As the carriage passed near me, I raised my hat; the lady bowed her head and disappeared.

A moment later one of the ladies in waiting at the palace told me that this "traveller" was no one less than Her Majesty the Queen of Holland.

I felt my blood flow faster. The word _queen_, independently of the person to whom it referred, has always had this effect on me, although I cannot explain the reason of it. Perhaps because it reminds me of certain bright, confused visions of my youth. The romantic imagination of a boy of fifteen is sometimes content to tread the ground, and sometimes it climbs with eager audacity to a giddy height. It dreams of supernatural beauty, of intoxicating perfumes, of consuming love, and imagines that all these are comprised in the mysterious and inaccessible creatures that fortune has placed at the summit of the social scale. And among the thousand strange, foolish, and impossible fancies that enter his mind he dreams of scaling towering walls in the dark with youthful agility, of passing formidable gates and deep ditches, of opening mysterious doors, threading interminable corridors amidst people overcome with sleep, of stepping silently through immense saloons, of ascending aerial staircases, mounting the stones of a tower at the risk of his life, reaching an immense height over the tall trees of moonlit gardens, and at last of arriving, fainting and bleeding, beneath a balcony, and hearing a superhuman voice speak in accents of deep pity, of answering with equal tenderness, of bursting into tears and invoking God, of leaning his forehead on the marble and covering with desperate kisses a foot flashing with gems, of abandoning his face in the perfumed silks, and of feeling his reason flee and life desert him in an embrace more than human.

In this palace, called the House-in-the-Wood, besides other remarkable things, is an octagonal room, the walls of which from floor to ceiling are covered with paintings by the most celebrated artists of the school of Rubens, among which is a huge allegorical painting by Jordaens which represents the apotheosis of Frederick Henry. There is a room filled with valuable presents from the Emperor of Japan, the Viceroy of Egypt, and the East India Company; and an elegant little room decorated with designs in chiaroscuro, which even when closely examined are taken for bas-reliefs. These are the work of Jacob de Wit, a painter who at the beginning of the last century won great fame in this art of delusion. The other rooms are small, and handsome without display; they are full of the treasures of a refined taste, as becomes the great and modest house of Orange.

The custom of allowing strangers to enter the palace the moment after the queen came out seemed strange to me, but it did not surprise me when I learned of other customs and other popular traits, and in a word the character of the royal family of Holland.

In Holland the sovereign is considered as a stadtholder rather than as a king. He has in him, as a certain Spanish republican said of the Duke of Aosta, the least quantity possible in a king. The sentiment of the Dutch nation toward their royal family is not so much a feeling of devotion to the family of the monarch as affection for the house of Orange, which has shared its triumphs and taken part in its misfortunes--which has lived its life for three centuries. At bottom, the country is republican, and its monarchy is a sort of crowned presidency void of regal pomp. The king makes speeches at the banquets and at the public festivals as the ministers do with us, and he enjoys the fame of an orator because his speeches are extemporary: his voice is very powerful, and his eloquence has a martial ring, which arouses great enthusiasm among the people. The crown prince, William of Orange, studied at the University of Leyden, passed the public examinations, and took his degree as a lawyer; Prince Alexander, the second son, is now studying at the same university. He is a member of the Students' Club, and invites his professors and fellow-students to dinner. At the Hague, Prince William enters the cafes, converses with his neighbors, and walks about the streets with his young gentlemen friends. In the wood the queen will seat herself on a bench beside any poor old woman, nor can one say she does this, like other princes, to acquire popularity; for that the house of Orange can neither gain nor lose, since there is not in the nation (although it is republican by nature and tradition) the least sign of a faction that desires a republic or even pronounces its name. On the other hand, the people, who love and venerate their king, who at the festivals celebrated in his honor will remove the horses and themselves draw his carriage, who insist on every one wearing an orange-colored cockade in homage to the name of Orange,--in ordinary times do not occupy themselves at all about his affairs and family. At the Hague I had some trouble to learn what grade the crown prince holds in the army. One of the first librarians in the town, to whom I put my question, was astonished at my curiosity, which to him seemed childish, and he told me that probably I could not have found a hundred people in the Hague who would have been able to answer my question.

The seat of the court is at the Hague, but the king passes a large part of the summer in one of his castles in Gelderland, and every year spends some days in Amsterdam. The people say there is a law which obliges the king to spend ten days during the year at Amsterdam, and the municipality of that town are obliged to pay his expenses during those ten days. After midnight of the tenth day even a match that he may strike to light his cigar is at his own expense.

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On returning from the royal villa at the Hague I found the wood enlivened by the Sunday promenade--music, carriages, a crowd of ladies, restaurants full of people, and swarms of children everywhere.

Then for the first time I saw the fair sex of Holland. Beauty is a rare flower in Holland, as in all other countries; notwithstanding, in a walk of a hundred steps in the wood at the Hague I saw many more beautiful women than I had seen in all the pictures in the Dutch galleries. These ladies do not possess the statuesque beauty of the Romans, the splendid color of the English, nor the vivacity of the Andalusians; but there is about them a refinement, a delightful innocence and grace, a tranquil beauty, a pleasing countenance; they have, as a French writer has rightly said, the attraction of the valerian flower which ornaments their gardens. They are plump, and tall rather than short, they have regular features, and smooth brilliant complexions of a beautiful white and delicate pink--colors which seem to have been suffused by the breath of an angel; they have high cheek-bones; their eyes are light blue, sometimes very light, and sometimes of a glassy appearance, which gives them a vague, wandering look. It is said that their teeth are not good, but this I could not confirm, as they seldom laugh. They walk more heavily than the French and not so stiffly as the English; they dress in the Parisian mode, and the ladies at the Hague display better taste than those at Amsterdam, although they do not dress so richly: they all display their masses of fair hair with considerable pride.

I was astonished to see girls who appeared to be fully grown, who in our country would have had the airs and attire of women, still dressed like children, with short skirts and white pantalettes. In Holland, where life is easy and impatience an unknown experience, the girls are in no hurry to leave off the ways and appearance of childhood, and, on the other hand, they seem naturally to enter at a comparatively late age that period of life when, as Alessandro Manzoni says in his ever-admirable way, it seems as though a mysterious power enters the soul, which soothes, adorns, and invigorates all its inclinations and thoughts. Here a girl very rarely marries before her twentieth year. I need not speak of the children of the Deccan, who, it is said, are married at eight years of age, but in Holland the Italian and Spanish girls, who marry at fourteen or fifteen, are regarded as unaccountable persons. There, girls of fifteen years are going to school with their hair down their backs, and nobody thinks of looking at them. I heard a young man of the Hague spoken of with horror by his friends because he was enamoured of a maiden of this age, for to their minds she was considered as an infant.

Another thing one notices instantly in every Dutch city, excepting Amsterdam, is the absence of that lower stratum of society known as the demi-monde. There is nothing in dress or manner to indicate the existence of such a class. "Beware," said some freethinking Dutchmen to me; "you are in a Protestant country, and there is a great deal of hypocrisy." This may be true, but the sore that can be hidden cannot be very large. Equivocal society does not exist among the Hollanders; there is no shadow of it in their life nor any hint of it in their literature; the very language rebels against translating any of those numberless expressions which constitute the dubious, flashy, easy speech of that class of society in the countries where it is found. On the other hand, neither fathers nor mothers close their eyes to the conduct of their unmarried sons, even if they be grown men; family discipline makes no exception of long beards; and this strict discipline is aided by their phlegmatic nature, their habits of economy, and their respect for public opinion.

It would be a presumption more ridiculous than impertinent to speak of the character and life of Dutch women with an air of experience, when I have been only a few months in Holland; so I must content myself with letting my Dutch friends speak for themselves.

Many writers have treated Dutch women discourteously. One calls them apathetic housekeepers; another, who shall be nameless, carried impertinence so far as to say that, like the men, they are in the habit of choosing their lovers from among the servant class, and that their aspirations are necessarily low. But these are judgments dictated by the rage of some rejected suitors. Daniel Stern (Comtesse d'Agoult), who as a woman speaks with particular authority on this subject, says the women of Holland are noble, loyal, active, and chaste. A few authors venture to doubt their much-talked-of calmness in affection. "They are still waters," wrote Esquiros, and all know what is said of still waters. Heine said they were frozen volcanoes, and that when they thaw--But, of all the opinions I have read, the most remarkable seems to me that of Saint Evremont--namely, that Dutch women are not lively enough to disturb the repose of the men, that some of them are certainly amiable, and that prudence or the coldness of their nature stands them in stead of virtue.

One day, in a group of young men at the Hague, I quoted this opinion of Saint Evremont, and bluntly demanded: "Is it true?" They smiled, looked at each other, and one answered, "It is:" another, "I think so;" and a third, "It may be." In short, they all admitted its truth. On another occasion I collected evidence proving that matters stand just as they were at the time of the French writer. A group of people were discussing an odd character. "Yet," said one, "that little man who seems so quiet in his manner is a great ladies' man." "Does he disturb the repose of families?" I asked. They all began to laugh, and one answered: "What! Disturb the repose of families in Holland? It would be one of the twelve labors of Hercules."--"We Hollanders," a friend once said to me, "do not take the ladies by storm; we cannot do so, because we have no school of this art. Nothing is so false in Holland as the famous definition, matrimony is like a besieged fortress; those who are outside wish to enter, while those who are inside wish they were out. Here those who are inside are very happy, and those who are outside do not think of entering." Another said to me, "The Dutch woman does not marry the man; she espouses matrimony." This, which is true of the Hague, an elegant city to which there comes a great influx of French civilization, is even truer of the other towns, where the ancient customs have been more strictly adhered to. Yet gallant travellers write that the Hollanders are a sleepy people, and that their domestic happiness is "_un bonheur un peu gros_." The woman who seldom goes out, who dances little and laughs less, who occupies herself only with her children, her husband, and her flowers, who reads her books on theology, and surveys the street with the looking-glass, so that she need not show herself at the window, how much more poetical is she than--But pardon me, Andalusia! I was about to say something rather hard on you.

Hitherto, some readers may think that I have been pretending to know the Dutch language. I hasten to say that I do not know it, and to excuse my ignorance. A people like the Dutch, serious and taciturn, richer in hidden qualities than in brilliant showy ones--a people who are, if I may so express myself, self-contained rather than superficial, who do much and talk little, who do not pass for more than they are worth--may be studied without a knowledge of their language. On the other hand, the French language is generally known in Holland. In the large cities there is scarcely an educated person who does not speak French correctly, scarcely a shopman who cannot make himself understood in good or bad French, and there is scarcely a boy who is not acquainted with ten or twenty words which suffice to help a stranger out of a dilemma. This diffusion of a language so different from that of the country is the more to be admired when one reflects that it is not the only foreign language generally spoken in Holland. English and German are almost as widely known as French. The study of these three languages is obligatory in the secondary schools. Cultured people, like those who in Italy think it a necessity to know French, in Holland generally read English, German, and French with equal facility. The Dutch have an especial talent for learning languages, and an incredible courage in speaking them. We Italians before we attempt to speak a foreign language require to know enough about it to avoid making great mistakes; we blush when we do make them; we avoid the opportunities of speaking until we are sure of speaking well enough to be complimented, and in this way we continue to lengthen the period of our philological novitiate. In Holland one often meets people who speak French with great effort, with a vocabulary of perhaps a hundred words and twenty sentences; but notwithstanding they talk, hold long conversations, and do not seem to be at all worried about what one may think of their blunders and their audacity. Waiters, porters, and boys, when asked if they know French, answer with the greatest assurance, "_Oui_" or "_Un peu_," and they try in a thousand ways to make themselves understood, laughing themselves sometimes at the eccentric contortion of their speech, and ending every answer with "_S'il vous plait_" or a "_Pardon, monsieur_;" which are often said so prettily and yet are so out of place that they make one laugh even against one's will. It is considered such a common thing to know French that when any one is obliged to answer that he doesn't speak French, he hesitates, ashamed, and if he is interrogated in the street he will pretend to be busy and hurry on.

As for the Dutch language, it is a mystery to those who do not know German, and even when one knows German and can read Dutch books with a little study, one cannot understand Dutch when it is spoken. If I were asked to say what impression it makes on those who do not understand it, I should say that it seems like German spoken by people with a hair in their throats. This effect is produced by the frequent repetition of a guttural aspirate which is like the sound of the Spanish _jota_. Even the Dutch themselves do not consider their language euphonious. I was often asked, playfully, "What impression does it make on you?" as if they understood that the impression could not be altogether agreeable. Yet some one has written a book proving that Adam and Eve spoke Dutch in the Garden of Eden. But, although the Dutch speak so many foreign languages, they hold to their own, and grow indignant when any ignorant stranger shows that he believes Dutch to be a German dialect, this being, in truth, a theory held by many who only know the language by name. It is almost superfluous to repeat the history of the language.

The first inhabitants of the country spoke Teutonic in its different dialects. These dialects were blended and formed the ancient speech of the Netherlands, which in the Middle Ages, like the other European languages, passed through the different Germanic, Norman, and French phases, and ended in the present Dutch language, in which there is still a foundation of the primitive idiom and the evidence of a slight Latin influence. Certainly, there is a striking similarity between Dutch and German, and, above all, there are a number of root-words common to the two; but there is, however, a great difference in the grammar, that of the Dutch being much simpler in construction, and the pronunciation also is very different. This very likeness is the reason that the Dutch generally do not speak German so well as they speak English or French; perhaps the difficulty may be caused by the ambiguity of words, or because it costs them so little effort to understand the language and to speak it for their own use that they stop there, as we often do with French, which we speak at ten years of age and have forgotten at forty.

Now it is time to go and visit the art gallery, which is the greatest ornament of the Hague.