No More Learning

Half a dozen later stories
published together were also very popular,
especially (Gli Amici di Collegio (College
Friends), Fortezza,' and 'La Casa Paterna'
(The Paternal Home). He has written
EDMONDO DE Amicis
some graceful verse as well.
But De Amicis soon craved the stimulus of novel environments,
of differing personalities; and he set out upon the travels which he
has so delightfully recounted. This ardent Italian longed for the
repose of “a gray sky," a critic tells us. He went first to Holland,
* and experienced a joyous satisfaction in the careful art of that trim
little land. Later, a visit to North Africa in the suite of the Italian
ambassador prompted a brilliant volume, Morocco,' which glitters
and flashes like a Damascus blade. ” Among his other well-known
books, descriptive of other trips, are Holland and Its People,'
(Spain, London, Paris,' and 'Constantinople,' which, translated
into many languages, have been widely read.
That unfortunate though not uncommon traveler who finds ennui
everywhere must envy De Amicis his inexhaustible enthusiasm, his
power of epicurean enjoyment in the color and glory of every land.

(


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His is a curiously optimistic nature. Always perceiving the beautiful
and picturesque in art and nature, he treats other aspects hopefully,
and ignores them when he may. He catches what is characteristic
in every nation as inevitably as he catches the physiognomy of a
land with its skies and its waters, its flowers and its atmosphere.
His is a realism transfigured by poetic imagination, which divines
essential things and places them in high relief.
Very early in life De Amicis announced his love and admiration
of Manzoni, of whom he called himself a disciple. But his is a very
different mind. This Italian, born at Onéglia of Genoese parents,
has inherited the emotional nature of his country. He sees every-
thing with feeling, penetrating below the surface with sympathetic
insight. Italy gives him his sensuous zest in life. But from France,
through his love of her vigor and grace, his cordial admiration of
her literature, he has gained a refining and strengthening influence.
She has taught him that direct diction, that choice simplicity, which
forsakes the stilted Italian of literary tradition for a style far
simpler, stronger, and more natural.
All selections used by permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons
THE LIGHT
From Constantinople
A
Nd first of all, the light! One of my dearest delights at Con-
stantinople was to see the sun rise and set, standing upon
the bridge of the Sultana Validé. At dawn, in autumn, the
Golden Horn is almost always covered by a light fog, behind
which the city is seen vaguely, like those gauze curtains that
descend upon the stage to conceal the preparations for a scenic
spectacle. Scutari is quite hidden; nothing is to be seen but the
dark uncertain outline of her hills. The bridge and the shores
are deserted, Constantinople sleeps; the solitude and silence render
the spectacle more solemn. The sky begins to grow golden
behind the hills of Scutari. Upon that luminous strip are drawn,
one by one, black and clear, the tops of the cypress trees in the
vast cemetery, like an army of giants ranged upon the heights;
and from one cape of the Golden Horn to the other there shines
a tremulous light, faint as the first murmur of the awakening
city. Then behind the cypresses of the Asiatic shore comes forth
an eye of fire, and suddenly the white tops of the four minarets
of Saint Sophia are tinted with deep rose. In a few minutes,


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EDMONDO DE AMICIS
from hill to hill, from mosque to mosque, down to the end of the
Golden Horn, all the minarets, one after the other, turn rose
color; all the domes, one by one, are silvered, the flush descends
from terrace to terrace, the tremulous light spreads, the great
veil melts, and all Stamboul appears, rosy and resplendent upon
her heights, blue and violet along the shores, fresh and young, as
if just risen from the waters.
As the sun rises, the delicacy of the first tints vanishes in an
immense illumination, and everything remains bathed in white
light until toward evening. Then the divine spectacle begins
again. The air is so limpid that from Galata one can see clearly
every distant tree, as far as Kadi-Kioi. The whole of the
immense profile of Stamboul stands out against the sky with such
a clearness of line and rigor of color, that every minaret, obelisk,
and cypress-tree can be counted, one by one, from Seraglio Point
to the cemetery of Eyub. The Golden Horn and the Bosphorus
assume a wonderful ultramarine color; the heavens, the color of
amethyst in the East, are afire behind Stamboul, tinting the hori-
zon with infinite lights of rose and carbuncle, that make one
think of the first day of the creation; Stamboul darkens, Galata
becomes golden, and Scutari, struck by the last rays of the set-
ting sun, with every pane of glass giving back the glow, looks
like a city on fire.
And this is the moment to contemplate Constantinople. There
is one rapid succession of the softest tints, pallid gold, rose and
lilac, which quiver and float over the sides of the hills and the
water, every moment giving and taking away the prize of beauty
from each part of the city, and revealing a thousand modest
graces of the landscape that have not dared to show themselves
in the full light. Great melancholy suburbs are lost in the
shadow of the valleys; little purple cities smile upon the heights;
villages faint as if about to die; others die at once like extin-
guished flames; others, that seemed already dead, revive, and
glow, and quiver yet a moment longer under the last ray of the
sun. Then there is nothing left but two resplendent points upon
the Asiatic shore,- the summit of Mount Bulgurlu, and the
extremity of the cape that guards the entrance to the Propontis;
they are at first two golden crowns, then two purple caps, then
two rubies; then all Constantinople is in shadow, and ten thou-
sand voices from ten thousand minarets announce the close of
the day.


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457
RESEMBLANCES
From Constantinople
How many
N the first days, fresh as I was from the perusal of Oriental
literature, I saw everywhere the famous personages of history
and legend, and the figures that recalled them resembled
sometimes so faithfully those that were fixed in my imagination,
that I was constrained to stop and look at them.
times have I seized my friend by the arm, and pointing to a
person passing by, have exclaimed: "It is he, cospetto! do you
not recognize him ? ” In the square of the Sultana Validé, I fre-
quently saw the gigantic Turk who threw down millstones from
the walls of Nicæa on the heads of the soldiers of Baglione; I
saw in front of a mosque Umm Djemil, that old fury that sowed
brambles and nettles before Mahomet's house; I met in the book
bazaar, with a volume under his arm, Djem aleddin, the learned
man of Broussa, who knew the whole of the Arab dictionary by
heart; I passed quite close to the side of Ayesha, the favorite
wife of the Prophet, and she fixed upon my face her eyes, brill-
iant and humid, like the reflection of stars in a well; I have
recognized, in the At-Meidan, the famous beauty of that poor
Greek woman killed by a cannon ball at the base of the serpent-
ine column; I have been face to face, in the Fanar, with Kara-
Abderrahman, the handsome young Turk of the time of Orkhan;
I have seen Coswa, the she-camel of the Prophet; I have en-
countered Kara-bulut, Selim's black steed; I have met the poor
poet Fignahi, condemned to go about Stamboul tied to an ass
for having pierced with an insolent distich the Grand Vizier of
Ibrahim; I have been in the same café with Soliman the Big,
the monstrous admiral, whom four robust slaves hardly succeeded
in lifting from the divan; Ali, the Grand Vizier, who could not
find in all Arabia a horse that could carry him; Mahmoud Pasha,
the ferocious Hercules that strangled the son of Soliman; and the
stupid Ahmed Second, who continually repeated « Koso! Koso! »
(Very well, very well) crouching before the door of the copyists'
bazaar, in the square of Bajazet. All the personages of the
Thousand and One Nights, the Aladdins, the Zobeides, the
Sindbads, the Gulnares, the old Jewish merchants, possessors of
enchanted carpets and wonderful lamps, passed before me like a
procession of phantoms.


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BIRDS
From "Constantinople )
CON
ONSTANTINOPLE has one grace and gayety peculiar to itself,
that comes from an infinite number of birds of every kind,
for which the Turks nourish a warm sentiment and regard.
Mosques, groves, old walls, gardens, palaces, all resound with
song, the whistling and twittering of birds; everywhere wings
are fluttering, and life and harmony abound. The sparrows enter
the houses boldly, and eat out of women's and children's hands;
swallows nest over the café doors, and under the arches of the
bazaars; pigeons in innumerable swarms, maintained by legacies
from sultans and private individuals, form garlands of black and
white along the cornices of the cupolas and around the terraces
of the minarets; sea-gulls dart and play over the water; thousands
of turtle-doves coo amorously among the cypresses in the ceme-
teries; crows croak about the Castle of the Seven Towers hal-
cyons come and go in long files between the Black Sea and
the Sea of Marmora; and storks sit upon the cupolas of the
mausoleums. For the Turk, each one of these birds has a gentle
meaning, or a benignant virtue: turtle-doves are favorable to
lovers, swallows keep away fire from the roofs where they build
their nests, storks make yearly pilgrimages to Mecca, halcyons
carry the souls of the faithful to Paradise. Thus he protects and
feeds them, through a sentiment of gratitude and piety; and they
enliven the house, the sea, and the sepulchre. Every quarter of
Stamboul is full of the noise of them, bringing to the city a sense
of the pleasures of country life, and continually refreshing the
soul with a reminder of nature.
CORDOVA
From (Spain)
F
or a long distance the country offers no new aspect to the
feverish curiosity of the tourist. At Vilches there is a vast
plain, and beyond there the open country of Tolosa, where
Alphonso VIII. , King of Castile, gained the celebrated victory
«de las Navas” over the Mussulman army. The sky was very
clear, and in the distance one could see the mountains of the
Sierra de Segura. Suddenly, there comes one a sensation
over


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459
which seems to respond to a suppressed exclamation of surprise:
the first aloes with their thick leaves, the unexpected heralds of
tropical vegetation, rise on both sides of the road. Beyond, the
fields studded with flowers begin to appear. The first are studded,
those which follow almost covered, then come vast stretches of
ground entirely clothed with poppies, daisies, lilies, wild mush-
rooms, and ranunculuses, so that the country (as it presents itself
to view) looks like a succession of immense purple, gold, and
snowy-hued carpets. In the distance, among the trees, are in-
numerable blue, white, and yellow streaks, as far as the eye can
reach; and nearer, on the banks of the ditches, the elevations of
ground, the slopes, and even on the edge of the road are flowers
in beds, clumps, and clusters, one above the other, grouped in
the form of great bouquets, and trembling on their stalks, which
one can almost touch with his hand. Then there are fields white
with great blades of grain, flanked by plantations of roses, orange
groves, immense olive groves, and hillsides varied by a thousand
shades of green, surmounted by ancient Moorish towers, scattered
with many-colored houses; and between the one and the other
are white and slender bridges that cross rivulets hidden by the
trees.
On the horizon appear the snowy caps of the Sierra Nevada;
under that white streak lie the undulating blue ones of the nearer
mountains. The country becomes more varied and flourishing;
Arjonilla lies in a grove of olives, whose boundary one cannot
see; Pedro Abad, in the midst of a plain, covered with vineyards
and fruit-trees; Ventas di Alcolea, on the last hills of the Sierra
Nevada, peopled with villas and gardens. We are approaching
Cordova, the train Aies along, we see little stations half hidden
by trees and flowers, the wind carries the rose leaves into the
carriages, great butterflies fly near the windows, a delicious per-
fume permeates the air, the travelers sing; we pass through an
enchanted garden, the aloes, oranges, palms, and villas grow
,
more frequent; and at last we hear a cry—“Here is Cordova!
How many lovely pictures and grand recollections the sound
of that name awakens in one's mind! Cordova, — the ancient
pearl of the East, as the Arabian poets call it,- the city of
cities; Cordova of the thirty suburbs and three thousand mosques,
which inclosed within her walls the greatest temple of Islam!
Her fame extended throughout the East, and obscured the glory
of ancient Damascus. The faithful came from the most remote
(
-


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EDMONDO DE AMICIS
even
&
I am
regions of Asia to banks of the Guadalquivir to prostrate them-
selves in the marvelous Mihrab of her mosque, in the light of the
thousand bronze lamps cast from the bells of the cathedrals of
Spain. Hither flocked artists, savants, poets from every part of
the Mahometan world to her flourishing schools, immense libra-
ries, and the magnificent courts of her caliphs.
. Riches and
beauty flowed in, attracted by the fame of her splendor. From
here they scattered, eager for knowledge, along the coasts of
Africa, through the schools of Tunis, Cairo, Bagdad, Cufa, and
to India and China, in order to gather inspiration and
records; and the poetry sung on the slopes of the Sierra Morena
flew from lyre to lyre, as far as the valleys of the Caucasus, to
excite the ardor for pilgrimages. The beautiful, powerful, and
wise Cordova, crowned with three thousand villages, proudly
raised her white minarets in the midst of orange groves, and
spread around the valley a voluptuous atmosphere of joy and
glory.
I leave the train, cross a garden, look around me.
alone. The travelers who were with me disappear here and
there; I still hear the noise of a carriage which is rolling off;
then all is quiet. It is midday, the sky is very clear, and the
air suffocating I see two white houses; it is the opening of a
street; I enter and go on. The street is narrow, the houses as
small as the little villas on the slopes of artificial gardens,
almost all one story in height, with windows a few feet from
the ground, the roofs so low that one could almost touch them
with a stick, and the walls very white. The street turns; I
look, see no one, and hear neither step nor voice. I say to
myself:-“This must be an abandoned street ! ” and try another
one, in which the houses are white, the windows closed, and
there is nothing but silence and solitude around me. “Why,
where am I? ” I ask myself. I go on; the street, which is so
narrow that a carriage could not pass, begins to wind; on the
right and left I see other deserted streets, white houses, and
closed windows. My step resounds as if in a corridor. The
whiteness of the walls is so vivid that even the reflection is
trying, and I am obliged to walk with my eyes half closed, for
it really seems as if I were making my way through the snow.
I reach a small square; everything is closed, and no one is to
be seen.
At this point a vague feeling of melancholy seizes
me, such as I have never experienced before; a mixture of


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pleasure and sadness, similar to that which comes to children
when, after a long run, they reach a lonely rural spot and
rejoice in their discovery, but with a certain trepidation lest
they should be too far from home. Above many roofs rise the
palm-trees of inner gardens. Oh, fantastic legends of Odalisk
and Caliph! On I go from street to street, and square to
square; I begin to meet some people, but they pass and disap-
pear like phantoms. All the streets resemble each other; the
houses have only three or four windows; and not a spot, scrawl,
or crack is to be seen on the walls, which are as smooth and
white as a sheet of paper. From time to time I hear a whisper
behind a blind, and see, almost at the same moment, a dark
head, with a flower in the hair, appear and disappear. I look
in at a door.
A patio! How shall I describe a patio ? It is not a court,
nor a garden, nor a room; but it is all three things combined.
Between the patio and the street there is a vestibule. On the
four sides of the patio rise slender columns, which support, up
to a level with the first floor, a species of gallery inclosed in
glass; above the gallery is stretched a canvas, which shades the
court. The vestibule is paved with marble, the door flanked
by columns, surmounted by bas-reliefs, and closed by a slender
iron gate of graceful design. At the end of the patio there is
a fountain; and all around are scattered chairs, work-tables,
pictures, and vases of flowers. I run to another door: there is
another patio, with its walls covered with ivy, and a number of
niches holding little statues, busts, and urns. I look in at a third
door: here is another patio, with its walls worked in mosaics, a
palm in the centre, and a mass of flowers all around. I stop at
a fourth door: after the patio there is another vestibule, after this
a second patio, in which one sees other statues, columns, and
fountains. All these rooms and gardens are so neat and clean
that one could pass his hand over the walls and on the ground
without leaving a trace; and they are fresh, odorous, and lighted
by an uncertain light, which increases their beauty and mysterious
appearance.
On I go at random from street to street. As I walk, my
curiosity increases and I quicken my pace, It seems impossible
that a whole city can be like this; I am afraid of stumbling
across some house or coming into some street that will remind
me of other cities, and disturb my beautiful dream. But no, the


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EDMONDO DE AMICIS
dream lasts; for everything is small, lovely, and mysterious. At
every hundred steps I reach a deserted square, in which I stop
and hold my breath; from time to time there appears a cross-
road, and not a living soul is to be seen; everything is white,
the windows closed, and silence reigns on all sides. At each
door there is a new spectacle; there are arches, columns, flowers,
jets of water, and palms; a marvelous variety of design, tints,
light, and perfume; here the odor of roses, there of oranges,
farther on of pinks; and with this perfume a whiff of fresh air,
and with the air a subdued sound of women's voices, the rustling
of leaves, and the singing of birds. It is a sweet and varied
harmony, that without disturbing the silence of the streets,
soothes the ear like the echo of distant music. Ah! it is not a
dream! Madrid, Italy, Europe, are indeed far away!
Here one
lives another life, and breathes the air of a different world, for
I am in the East.
THE LAND OF PLUCK
From (Holland and Its People'
W*
HOEVER looks for the first time at a large map of Holland
wonders that a country so constituted can continue to
exist. At the first glance it is difficult to see whether
land or water predominates, or whether Holland belongs most to
the continent or to the sea. Those broken and compressed
coasts; those deep bays; those great rivers that, losing the aspect
of rivers, seem bringing new seas to the sea; that sea which,
changing itself into rivers, penetrates the land and breaks it into
archipelagoes; the lakes, the vast morasses, the canals crossing
and recrossing each other, all combine to give the idea of a
country that may at any moment disintegrate and disappear.
Seals and beavers would seem to be its rightful inhabitants; but
since there are men bold enough to live in it, they surely cannot
ever sleep in peace.
What sort of a country Holland is, has been told by many in
few words. Napoleon said it was an alluvion of French rivers, -
.
the Rhine, the Scheldt, and the Meuse, -- and with this pretext he
added it to the Empire. One writer has defined it as a sort of
transition between land and sea. Another, as an immense crust
of earth floating on the water. Others, an annex of the old


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463
continent, the China of Europe, . the end of the earth and the
beginning of the ocean, a measureless raft of mud and sand;
and Philip II. called it the country nearest to hell.
But they all agreed upon one point, and all expressed it in
the same words: Holland is a conquest made by man over the
sea; it is an artificial country: the Hollanders made it; it exists
because the Hollanders preserve it; it will vanish whenever the
Hollanders shall abandon it.
To comprehend this truth, we must imagine Holland as it was
when first inhabited by the first German tribes that wandered
away in search of a country.
It was almost uninhabitable. There were vast tempestuous
lakes, like seas, touching one another; morass beside morass; one
tract after another covered with brushwood; immense forests of
pines, oaks, and alders, traversed by herds of wild horses, and
so thick were these forests that tradition says one could travel
leagues passing from tree to tree without ever putting foot to the
ground. The deep bays and gulfs carried into the heart of the
country the fury of the northern tempests. Some provinces dis-
appeared once every year under the waters of the sea, and were
nothing but muddy tracts, neither land nor water, where it was
impossible either to walk or to sail. The large rivers, without
sufficient inclination to descend to the sea, wandered here and
there uncertain of their way, and slept in monstrous pools and
ponds among the sands of the coasts. It was a sinister place,
swept by furious winds, beaten by obstinate rains, veiled in a
perpetual fog, where nothing was heard but the roar of the sea
and the voices of wild beasts and birds of the ocean. The first
people who had the courage to plant their tents there, had to
raise with their own hands dikes of earth to keep out the rivers
and the sea, and lived within them like shipwrecked men upon
desolate islands, venturing forth at the subsidence of the waters
in quest of food in the shape of fish and game, and gathering the
eggs of marine birds upon the sand.
Cæsar, passing by, was the first to name this people. The
other Latin historians speak with compassion and respect of these
intrepid barbarians who lived upon a “floating land,” exposed to
”
the intemperance of a cruel sky and the fury of the mysterious
northern sea; and the imagination pictures the Roman soldiers,
who, from the heights of the uttermost citadels of the empire,
beaten by the waves, contemplated with wonder and pity those


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EDMONDO DE AMICIS
wandering tribes upon their desolate land, like a race accursed of
heaven.
Now, if we remember that such a region has become one of ,
the most fertile, wealthiest, and best regulated of the countries
of the world, we shall understand the justice of the saying that
Holland is a conquest made by man. But, it must be added, the
conquest goes on forever.
To explain this fact - to show how the existence of Holland,
in spite of the great defensive works constructed by the inhabit-
ants, demands an incessant and most perilous struggle - it will
be enough to touch here and there upon a few of the principal
vicissitudes of her physical history, from the time when her
inhabitants had already reduced her to a habitable country.
Tradition speaks of a great inundation in Friesland in the
sixth century. From that time every gulf, every island, and it
may be said every city, in Holland has its catastrophe to record.
In thirteen centuries, it is recorded that one great inundation,
beside smaller ones, has occurred every seven years; and the
country being all plain, these inundations were veritable floods.
Towards the end of the thirteenth century, the sea destroyed a
part of a fertile peninsula near the mouth of the Ems, and swal-
lowed up more than thirty villages. In the course of the same
century, a series of inundations opened an immense chasm in
northern Holland, and formed the Zuyder Zee, causing the death
of more than eighty thousand persons. In 1421 a tempest swelled
the Meuse, so that in one night the waters overwhelmed seventy-
two villages and one hundred thousand inhabitants. In 1532 the
sea burst the dikes of Zealand, destroying hundreds of villages,
and covering forever a large tract of country. In 1570 a storm
caused another inundation in Zealand and in the province of
Utrecht; Amsterdam was invaded by the waters, and in Fries-
land twenty thousand people were drowned. Other great inunda-
tions took place in the seventeenth century; two terrible ones at
the beginning and the end of the eighteenth; one in 1825 that
desolated North Holland, Friesland, Over-Yssel, and Gueldres;
and another great one of the Rhine, in 1855, which invaded
Gueldres and the province of Utrecht, and covered a great part
of North Brabant. Beside these great catastrophes, there hap-
pened in different centuries innumerable smaller ones, which
would have been famous in any other country, but which in
Holland are scarcely remembered: like the rising of the lake of


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465
Haarlem, itself the result of an inundation of the sea; flourishing
cities of the gulf of Zuyder Zee vanished under the waters; the
islands of Zealand covered again and again by the sea, and again
emerging; villages of the coast, from Helder to the mouths of
the Meuse, from time to time inundated and destroyed; and in
all these inundations immense loss of life of men and animals
It is plain that miracles of courage, constancy, and industry must
have been accomplished by the Hollanders, first in creating and
afterwards in preserving such a country. The enemy from which
they had to wrest it was triple: the sea, the lakes, the rivers.
They drained the lakes, drove back the sea, and imprisoned the
rivers.
To drain the lakes the Hollanders pressed the air into their
service. The lakes, the marshes, were surrounded by dikes, the
dikes by canals; and an army of windmills, putting in motion
force-pumps, turned the water into the canals, which carried it
off to the rivers and the sea. Thus vast tracts of land buried
under the water saw the sun, and were transformed, as if by
magic, into fertile fields, covered with villages, and intersected by
canals and roads. In the seventeenth century, in less than forty
years, twenty-six lakes were drained. At the beginning of the
present century, in North Holland alone, more than six thousand
hectares (or fifteen thousand acres) were thus redeemed from the
waters; in South Holland, before 1844, twenty-nine thousand
hectares; in the whole of Holland, from 1500 to 1858, three hun-
dred and fifty-five thousand hectares. Substituting steam-mills
for windmills, in thirty-nine months was completed the great
undertaking of the draining of the lake of Haarlem, which meas-
ured forty-four kilometres in circumference, and forever threatened
with its tempests the cities of Haarlem, Amsterdam, and Leyden.
And they are now meditating the prodigious work of drying up
the Zuyder Zee, which embraces an area of more than seven
hundred square kilometres.
The rivers, another eternal enemy, cost no less of labor and
sacrifice. Some, like the Rhine, which lost itself in the sands
before reaching the sea, had to be channeled and defended at
their mouths, against the tides, by formidable cataracts; others,
like the Meuse, bordered by dikes as powerful as those that
were raised against the ocean; others, turned from their course;
the wandering waters gathered together; the course of the afflu-
ents regulated; the waters divided with rigorous measure in order
1-30


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ocean.
to retain that enormous mass of liquid in equilibrium, where the
slightest inequality might cost a province; and in this way all
the rivers that formerly spread their devastating floods about
the country were disciplined into channels and constrained to do
service.
But the most tremendous struggle was the battle with the
Holland is in great part lower than the level of the sea;
consequently, everywhere that the coast is not defended by sand-
banks it has to be protected by dikes. If these interminable bul-
warks of earth, granite, and wood were not there to attest the
indomitable courage and perseverance of the Hollanders, it would
not be believed that the hand of man could, even in many cen-
turies, have accomplished such a work. In Zealand alone the
dikes extend to a distance of more than four hundred kilometres.
The western coast of the island of Walcheren is defended by a
dike, in which it is computed that the expense of construction
added to that of preservation, if it were put out at interest,
would amount to a sum equal in value to that which the dike
itself would be worth were it made of massive copper. Around
the city of Helder, at the northern extremity of North Holland,
extends a dike ten kilometres long, constructed of masses of Nor-
wegian granite, which descends more than sixty metres into the
sea. The whole province of Friesland, for the length of eighty-
eight kilometres, is defended by three rows of piles sustained by
masses of Norwegian and German granite. Amsterdam, all the
cities of the Zuyder Zee, and all the islands, - fragments of van-
ished lands, — which are strung like beads between Friesland and
North Holland, are protected by dikes. From the mouths of the
Ems to those of the Scheldt, Holland is an impenetrable fortress,
of whose immense bastions the mills are the towers, the cataracts
are the gates, the islands the advanced forts; and like a true
fortress, it shows to its enemy, the sea, only the tops of its bell-
towers and the roofs of its houses, as if in defiance and derision.
Holland is a fortress, and her people live as in a fortress, on
a war footing with the sea. An army of engineers, directed by
the Minister of the Interior, spread over the country, and, ordered
like an army, continually spy the enemy, watch over the internal
waters, foresee the bursting of the dikes, order and direct the
defensive works. The expenses of the war are divided, -one
part to the State, one part to the provinces; every proprietor
pays, beside the general imposts, a special impost for the dikes,


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467
in proportion to the extent of his lands and their proximity to
the water. An accidental rupture, an inadvertence, may cause a
flood; the peril is unceasing; the sentinels are at their posts upon
the bulwarks; at the first assault of the sea, they shout the war-
cry, and Holland sends men, material, and money. And even
when there is no great battle, a quiet, silent struggle is forever
going on. The innumerable mills, even in the drained districts,
continue to work unresting, to absorb and turn into the canals
the water that falls in rain and that which filters in from the sea.
Every day the cataracts of the bays and rivers close their gigan-
tic gates against the high tide trying to rush into the heart of
the land. The work of strengthening dikes, fortifying sand-banks
with plantations, throwing out new dikes where the banks are
low, straight as great lances, vibrating in the bosom of the sea
and breaking the first impetus of the wave, is forever going on.
And the sea eternally knocks at the river-gates, beats upon the
ramparts, growls on every side her ceaseless menace, lifting her
curious waves as if to see the land she counts as hers, piling up
banks of sand before the gates to kill the commerce of the cities,
forever gnawing, scratching, digging at the coast; and failing to
overthrow the ramparts upon which she foams and fumes in
angry effort, she casts at their feet ships full of the dead, that
they may announce to the rebellious country her fury and her
strength.
In the midst of this great and terrible struggle Holland is
transformed: Holland is the land of transformations.
graphical map of that country as it existed eight centuries ago
is not recognizable. Transforming the sea, men also are trans-
formed The sea, at some points, drives back the land; it takes
portions from the continent, leaves them and takes them again;
joins islands to the mainland with ropes of sand, as in the case
of Zealand; breaks off bits from the mainland and makes new
islands, as in Wieringen; retires from certain coasts and makes
land cities out of what were cities of the sea, as Leuvarde; con-
verts vast tracts of plain into archipelagoes of a hundred islets,
as Biisbosch; separates a city from the land, as Dordrecht; forms
new gulfs two leagues broad, like the gulf of Dollart; divides
two provinces with a new sea, like North Holland and Friesland.
The effect of the inundations is to cause the level of the sea to
rise in some places and to sink in others; sterile lands are fertil-
ized by the slime of the rivers, fertile lands are changed into
A geo-


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EDMONDO DE AMICIS
deserts of sand. With the transformations of the waters alternate
the transformations of labor. Islands are united to continents,
like the island of Ameland; entire provinces are reduced to
islands, as North Holland will be by the new canal of Amster-
dam, which is to separate it from South Holland; lakes as large
as provinces disappear altogether, like the lake of Beemster; by
the extraction of peat, land is converted into lakes, and these
lakes are again transformed into meadows.
And thus the country
changes its aspect according to the violence of nature or the
needs of men. And while one goes over it with the latest map
in hand, one may be sure that the map will be useless in a few
years, because even now there are new gulfs in process of forma-
tion, tracts of land just ready to be detached from the mainland,
and great canals being cut that will carry life to uninhabited dis-
tricts.
But Holland has done more than defend herself against the
waters; she has made herself mistress of them, and has used
them for her own defense. Should a foreign army invade her
territory, she has but to open her dikes and unchain the sea and
the rivers, as she did against the Romans, against the Spaniards,
against the army of Louis XIV. , and defend the land cities with
her fleet. Water was the source of her poverty, she has made
it the source of wealth. Over the whole country extends an
immense network of canals, which serves both for the irrigation
of the land and as a means of communication. The cities, by
means of canals, communicate with the sea; canals run from
town to town, and from them to villages, which are themselves
bound together by these watery ways, and are connected even to
the houses scattered over the country; smaller canals surround
the fields and orchards, pastures and kitchen-gardens, serving at
once as boundary wall, hedge, and road-way; every house is a
little port.
Ships, boats, rafts, move about in all directions, as
in other places carts and carriages. The canals are the arteries
of Holland, and the water her life-blood. But even setting aside
the canals, the draining of the lakes, and the defensive works, on
every side are seen the traces of marvelous undertakings. The
soil, which in other countries is a gift of nature, is in Holland a
work of men's hands. Holland draws the greater part of her
wealth from commerce; but before commerce comes the cultiva-
tion of the soil; and the soil had to be created.
There were
sand-banks interspersed with layers of peat, broad downs swept


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469
by the winds, great tracts of barren land apparently condemned
to an eternal sterility. The first elements of manufacture, iron
and coal, were wanting; there was no wood, because the forests
had already been destroyed by tempests when agriculture began;
there was no stone, there were no metals. Nature, says a Dutch
poet, had refused all her gifts to Holland; the Hollanders had to
do everything in spite of nature. They began by fertilizing the
sand. In some places they formed a productive soil with earth
brought from a distance, as a garden is made; they spread the
siliceous dust of the downs over the too watery meadows; they
mixed with the sandy earth the remains of peat taken from the
bottoms; they extracted clay to lend fertility to the surface of
their lands; they labored to break up the downs with the plow:
and thus in a thousand ways, and continually fighting off the
menacing waters, they succeeded in bringing Holland to a state
of cultivation not inferior to that of more favored regions. That
Holland, that sandy, marshy country which the ancients consid-
ered all but uninhabitable, now sends out yearly from her con-
fines agricultural products to the value of a hundred millions of
francs, possesses about one million three hundred thousand head
of cattle, and in proportion to the extent of her territory may be
accounted one of the most populous of European States.
It may be easily understood how the physical peculiarities of
their country must influence the Dutch people ; and their genius
is in perfect harmony with the character of Holland. It is suffi-
cient to contemplate the monuments of their great struggle with
the sea in order to understand that their distinctive characteristics
must be firmness and patience, accompanied by a calm and con-
stant courage.
That glorious battle, and the consciousness of
owing everything to their own strength, must have infused and
fortified in them a high sense of dignity and an indomitable spirit
of liberty and independence. The necessity of a constant struggle,
of a continuous labor, and of perpetual sacrifices in defense of
their existence, forever taking them back to a sense of reality,
must have made them a highly practical and economical people;
good sense should be their most salient quality, economy one of
their chief virtues; they must be excellent in all useful arts,
sparing of diversion, simple even in their greatness; succeeding
in what they undertake by dint of tenacity and a thoughtful and
orderly activity; more wise than heroic; more conservative than
creative; giving no great architects to the edifice of modern


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EDMONDO DE AMICIS
thought, but the ablest of workmen, a legion of patient and
laborious artisans. And by virtue of these qualities of prudence,
phlegmatic activity, and the spirit of conservatism, they are ever
advancing, though by slow degrees; they acquire gradually, but
never lose what they have gained; holding stubbornly to their
ancient customs; preserving almost intact, and despite the neigh-
borhood of three great nations, their own originality; preserving
it through every form of government, through foreign invasions,
through political and religious wars, and in spite of the immense
concourse of strangers from every country that are always coming
among them; and remaining, in short, of all the northern races,
that one which, though ever advancing in the path of civilization,
has kept its antique stamp most clearly.
It is enough also to remember its form in order to compre-
hend that this country of three millions and a half of inhabitants,
although bound in so compact a political union, although recog-
nizable among all the other northern peoples by certain traits
peculiar to the population of all its provinces, must present a
great variety. And so it is in fact. Between Zealand and Hol-
land proper, between Holland and Friesland, between Friesland
and Gueldres, between Groningen and Brabant, in spite of
vicinity and so many common ties, there is no less difference
than between the more distant provinces of Italy and France;
difference of language, costume, and character; difference of race
and of religion. The communal régime has impressed an indeli-
ble mark upon this people, because in no other country does it
so conform to the nature of things. The country is divided into
various groups of interests organized in the same manner as the
hydraulic system. Whence, association and mutual help against
the common enemy, the sea; but liberty for local institutions
and forces. Monarchy has not extinguished the ancient munici-
pal spirit, and this it is that renders impossible a complete fusion
of the State, in all the great States that have made the attempt.
The great rivers and gulfs are at the same time commercial
roads serving as national bonds between the different provinces,
and barriers which defend old traditions and old customs in each.


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471
THE DUTCH MASTERS
From Holland and Its People )
THE Dutch school of painting has one quality which renders it
particularly attractive to us Italians; it is above all others
the most different from our own, the very antithesis or the
opposite pole of art. The Dutch and Italian schools are the most
original, or, as has been said, the only two to which the title
rigorously belongs; the others being only daughters or younger
sisters, more or less resembling them.
Thus even in painting Holland offers that which is most sought
after in travel and in books of travel: the new.
Dutch painting was born with the liberty and independence of
Holland. As long as the northern and southern provinces of the
Low Countries remained under the Spanish rule and in the Cath-
olic faith, Dutch painters painted like Belgian painters; they stud-
ied in Belgium, Germany, and Italy; Heemskerk imitated Michael
Angelo, Bloemart followed Correggio, and “Il Moro” copied
Titian, not to indicate others; and they were one and all pedantic
imitators, who added to the exaggerations of the Italian style a
certain German coarsenesss, the result of which was a bastard
style of painting, still inferior to the first, childish, stiff in design,
crude in color, and completely wanting in chiaroscuro, but at least
not a servile imitation, and becoming, as it were, a faint prelude
of the true Dutch art that was to be.
With the war of independence, liberty, reform, and painting
also were renewed. With religious traditions fell artistic tradi-
tions; the nude nymphs, Madonnas, saints, allegory, mythology,
the ideal -- all the old edifice fell to pieces. Holland, animated by
a new life, felt the need of manifesting and expanding it in a
new way; the small country, become all at once glorious and
formidable, felt the desire for illustration; the faculties which had
been excited and strengthened in the grand undertaking of creat-
ing a nation, now that the work was completed, overflowed and
ran into new channels. The conditions of the country were favor.
able to the revival of art. The supreme dangers were conjured
away; there was security, prosperity, a splendid future; the heroes
had done their duty, and the artists were permitted to come to
the front; Holland, after many sacrifices, and much suffering,
issued victoriously from the struggle, lifted her face among her
people and smiled. And that smile is art.


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What that art would necessarily be, might have been guessed
even had no monument of it remained. A pacific, laborious, prac-
tical people, continually beaten down, to quote a great German
poet, to prosaic realities by the occupations of a vulgar burgher
life; cultivating its reason at the expense of its imagination; liv-
ing, consequently, more in clear ideas than in beautiful images;
taking refuge from abstractions; never darting its thoughts beyond
that nature with which it is in perpetual battle; seeing only that
which is, enjoying only that which it can possess, making its hap-
piness consist in the tranquil ease and honest sensuality of a life
without violent passions or exorbitant desires;- such a people
must have tranquillity also in their art, they must love an art that
pleases without startling the mind, which addresses the senses
rather than the spirit; an art full of repose, precision, and deli-
cacy, though material like their lives: in one word, a realistic art,
in which they can see themselves as they are and as they are con-
tent to be.
The artists began by tracing that which they saw before their
eyes — the house.
The long winters, the persistent rains, the
dampness, the variableness of the climate, obliged the Hollander
to stay within doors the greater part of the year. He loved his
little house, his shell, much better than we love our abodes, for
the reason that he had more need of it, and stayed more within
it; he provided it with all sorts of conveniences, caressed it, made
much of it; he liked to look out from his well-stopped windows
at the falling snow and the drenching rain, and to hug himself
with the thought, Rage, tempest, I am warm and safe! ) Snug
in his shell, his faithful housewife beside him, his children about
him, he passed the long autumn and winter evenings in eating
much, drinking much, smoking much, and taking his well-earned
ease after the cares of the day were over. The Dutch painters
represented these houses and this life in little pictures proportion-
ate to the size of the walls on which they were to hang; the bed-
chambers that make one feel a desire to sleep, the kitchens, the
tables set out, the fresh and smiling faces of the house-mothers,
the men at their ease around the fire; and with that conscientious
realism which never forsakes them, they depict the dozing cat, the
yawning dog, the clucking hen, the broom, the vegetables, the
scattered pots and pans, the chicken ready for the spit. Thus
they represent life in all its scenes, and in every grade of the
social scale — the dance, the conversazione, the orgie, the feast, the


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473
game; and thus did Terburg, Metzu, Netscher, Dow, Mieris, Steen,
Brouwer, and Van Ostade become famous.
After depicting the house, they turned their attention to the
country. The stern climate allowed but a brief time for the
admiration of nature, but for this very reason Dutch artists
admired her all the more; they saluted the spring with a livelier
joy, and permitted that fugitive smile of heaven to stamp itself
more deeply on their fancy. The country was not beautiful, but
it was twice dear because it had been torn from the sea and
from the foreign oppressor.
The Dutch artist painted it lov-
ingly; he represented it simply, ingenuously, with a sense of
intimacy which at that time was not to be found in Italian or
Belgian landscape. The flat, monotonous country had, to the
Dutch painter's eyes, a marvelous variety. He caught all the
mutations of the sky, and knew the value of the water, with its
reflections, its grace and freshness, and its power of illuminating
everything. Having no mountains, he took the dikes for back-
ground; with no forests, he imparted to a single group of trees
all the mystery of a forest; and he animated the whole with
beautiful animals and white sails.
The subjects of their pictures are poor enough, - a windmill,
a canal, a gray sky; but how they make one think! A few
Dutch painters, not content with nature in their own country,
came to Italy in search of hills, luminous skies, and famous
ruins; and another band of select artists is the result, - Both,
Swanevelt, Pynacker, Breenberg, Van Laer, Asselyn. But the
palm remains with the landscapists of Holland; with Wynants
the painter of morning, with Van der Neer the painter of night,
with Ruysdael the painter of melancholy, with Hobbema the
illustrator of windmills, cabins, and kitchen gardens, and with
others who have restricted themselves to the expression of the
enchantment of nature as she is in Holland.
Simultaneously with landscape art was born another kind of
painting, especially peculiar to Holland, --- animal painting. Ani.
mals are the riches of the country; that magnificent race of
cattle which has no rival in Europe for fecundity and beauty.
The Hollanders, who owe so much to them, treat them, one
may say, as part of the population; they wash them, comb
them, dress them, and love them dearly. They are to be seen
everywhere; they are reflected in all the canals, and dot with
points of black and white the immense fields that stretch on


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(
every side, giving an air of peace and comfort to every place,
and exciting in the spectator's heart a sentiment of 'Arcadian gen-
tleness and patriarchal serenity. The Dutch artists studied these
animals in all their varieties, in all their habits, and divined, as
one may say, their inner life and sentiments, animating the tran-
quil beauty of the landscape with their forms. Rubens, Luyders,
Paul de Vos, and other Belgian painters, had drawn animals with
admirable mastery; but all these are surpassed by the Dutch
artists Van der Velde, Berghem, Karel du Jardin, and by the
prince of animal painters, Paul Potter, whose famous “Bull,” in
the gallery of the Hague, deserves to be placed in the Vatican
beside the « Transfiguration” by Raphael.
In yet another field are the Dutch painters great, — the sea.
The sea, their enemy, their power, and their glory, forever
threatening their country, and entering in a hundred ways into
their lives and fortunes; that turbulent North Sea, full of sinister
color, with a light of infinite melancholy upon it, beating forever
upon a desolate coast, must subjugate the imagination of the
artist. He passes, indeed, long hours on the shore, contemplat-
ing its tremendous beauty, ventures upon its waves to study the
effects of tempests, buys a vessel and sails with his wife and
family, observing and making notes, follows the feet into battle
and takes part in the fight; and in this way are made marine
painters like William Van der Velde the elder and William the
younger, like Backhuysen, Dubbels, and Stork.
Another kind of painting was to arise in Holland, as the
expression of the character of the people and of republican
manners. A people which without greatness had done so many
great things, as Michelet says, must have its heroic painters, if
we call them so, destined to illustrate men and events. But this
school of painting, - precisely because the people were without
greatness, or to express it better, without the form of great-
ness,— modest, inclined to consider all equal before the country,
because all had done their duty, abhorring adulation, and the
glorification in one only of the virtues and the triumph of
many,- this school has to illustrate not a few men who have
excelled, and a few extraordinary facts, but all classes of citizen-
ship gathered among the most ordinary and pacific of burgher
life. From this come the great pictures which represent five,
ten, thirty persons together, arquebusiers, mayors, officers, pro-
fessors, magistrates, administrators; seated or standing around a


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475
table, feasting and conversing; of life size, most faithful like-
nesses; grave, open faces, expressing that secure serenity of
conscience by which may be divined rather than seen the noble-
ness of a life consecrated to one's country, the character of that
strong, laborious epoch, the masculine virtues of that excellent
generation; all this set off by the fine costume of the time, so
admirably combining grace and dignity,- those gorgets, those
doublets, those black mantles, those silken scarves and ribbons,
those arms and banners. In this field stand pre-eminent Van der
Helst, Hals, Govaert, Flink, and Bol.
Descending from the consideration of the various kinds of
painting, to the special manner by means of which the artist
excelled in treatment, one leads all the rest as the distinctive
feature of Dutch painting - the light.
The light in Holland, by reason of the particular conditions
of its manifestation, could not fail to give rise to a special man-
ner of painting. A pale light, waving with marvelous mobility
through an atmosphere impregnated with vapor, a nebulous veil
continually and abruptly torn, a perpetual struggle between light
and shadow,- such was the spectacle which attracted the eye of
the artist. He began to observe and to reproduce all this agita-
tion of the heavens, this struggle which animates with varied and
fantastic life the solitude of nature in Holland; and in represent-
ing it, the struggle passed into his soul, and instead of repre-
senting he created. Then he caused the two elements to contend
under his hand; he accumulated. darkness that he might split and
seam it with all manner of luminous effects and sudden gleams
of light; sunbeams darted through the rifts, sunset reflections
and the yellow rays of lamp-light were blended with delicate
manipulation into mysterious shadows, and their dim depths
were peopled with half-seen forms; and thus he created all sorts
of contrasts, enigmas, play and effect of strange and unexpected
chiaroscuro. In this field, among many stand conspicuous
Gerard Dow, the author of the famous four-candle picture, and
the great magician and sovereign illuminator Rembrandt.
Another marked feature of Dutch painting was to be color.
Besides the generally accepted reasons that in a country where
there are no mountainous horizons, no varied prospects, no great
coup d'æil, - no forms, in short, that lend themselves to design,
the artist's eye must inevitably be attracted by color; and that
this might be peculiarly the case in Holland, where the uncertain


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EDMONDO DE AMICIS
light, the fog-veiled atmosphere, confuse and blend the outlines
of all objects, so that the eye, unable to fix itself upon the
form, flies to color as the principal attribute that nature presents
to it,- besides these reasons, there is the fact that in a country
so flat, so uniform, and so gray as Holland, there is the same
need of color as in southern lands there is need of shade. The
Dutch artists did but follow the imperious taste of their country-
men, who painted their houses in vivid colors, as well as their
ships, and in some places the trunks of their trees and the
palings and fences of their fields and gardens; whose dress was
of the gayest, richest hues; who loved tulips and hyacinths even
to madness. And thus the Dutch painters were potent colorists,
and Rembrandt was their chief.
Realism, natural to the calmness and slowness of the Dutch
character, was to give to their art yet another distinctive feature,
finish, which was carried to the very extreme of possibility. It
is truly said that the leading quality of the people may be found
in their pictures; viz. , patience. Everything is represented with
the minuteness of a daguerreotype; every vein in the wood of a
piece of furniture, every fibre in a leaf, the threads of cloth, the
stitches in a patch, every hair upon an animal's coat, every
wrinkle in a man's face; everything finished with microscopic pre-
cision, as if done with a fairy pencil, or at the expense of the
painter's eyes and reason. In reality a defect rather than an
excellence, since the office of painting is to represent not what is,
but what the eye sees, and the eye does not see everything; but
a defect carried to such a pitch of perfection that one admires,
and does not find fault. In this respect the most famous prodi-
gies of patience were Dow, Mieris, Potter, and Van der Helst,
but more or less all the Dutch painters.
But realism, which gives to Dutch art so original a stamp and
such admirable qualities, is yet the root of its most serious defects.
The artists, desirous only of representing material truths, gave to
their figures no expression save that of their physical sentiments.
Grief, love, enthusiasm, and the thousand delicate shades of feel.
ing that have no name, or take a different one with the different
causes that give rise to them, they express rarely, or not at all.
For them the heart does not beat, the eyes do not weep, the lips
do not quiver. One whole side of the human soul, the noblest
and highest, is wanting in their pictures. More: in their faithful
reproduction of everything, even the ugly, and especially the ugly,


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477
they end by exaggerating even that, making defects into deformi.
ties and portraits into caricatures; they calumniate the national
type; they give a burlesque and graceless aspect to the human
countenance. In order to have the proper background for such
figures, they are constrained to choose trivial subjects: hence the
great number of pictures representing beer-shops, and drinkers
with grotesque, stupid faces, in absurd attitudes; ugly women and
ridiculous old men; scenes in which one can almost hear the
brutal laughter and the obscene words. Looking at these pictures,
one would naturally conclude that Holland was inhabited by the
ugliest and most ill-mannered people on the earth. We will not
speak of greater and worse license. Steen, Potter, and Brouwer,
the great Rembrandt himself, have all painted incidents that are
scarcely to be mentioned to civilized ears, and certainly should
not be looked at. But even setting aside these excesses, in the
picture galleries of Holland there is to be found nothing that ele-
vates the mind, or moves it to high and gentle thoughts. You
admire, you enjoy, you laugh, you stand pensive for a moment
before some canvas; but coming out, you feel that something is
lacking to your pleasure, you experience a desire to look upon a
handsome countenance, to read inspired verses, and sometimes
you catch yourself murmuring, half unconsciously, "O Raphael! ”
Finally, there are still two important excellences to be recorded
of this school of painting : its variety, and its importance as the
expression — the mirror, so to speak — of the country. If we
except Rembrandt with his group of followers and imitators,
almost all the other artists differ very much from one another;
no other school presents so great a number of original masters.
The realism of the Dutch painters is born of their common love
of nature: but each one has shown in his work a kind of love
peculiarly his own; each one has rendered a different impression
which he has received from nature; and all, starting from the
same point, which was the worship of material truth, have arrived
at separate and distinct goals. Their realism, then, inciting them
to disdain nothing as food for the pencil, has so acted that Dutch
art succeeds in representing Holland more completely than has
ever been accomplished by any other school in any other country.
It has been truly said that should every other visible witness of
the existence of Holland in the seventeenth century - her period
of greatness - vanish from the earth, and the pictures remain, in
them would be found preserved entire the city, the country, the


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ports, the ships, the markets, the shops, the costumes, the arms,
the linen, the stuffs, the merchandise, the kitchen utensils, the
food, the pleasures, the habits, the religious belief and supersti-
tions, the qualities and effects of the people; and all this, which
is great praise for literature, is no less praise for her sister art.
But there is one great hiatus in Dutch art, the reason for
which can scarcely be found in the pacific and modest disposition
of the people. This art, so profoundly national in all other re-
spects, has, with the exception of a few naval battles, completely
neglected all the great events of the war of independence, among
which the sieges of Leyden and of Haarlem alone would have
been enough to inspire a whole legion of painters. A war of
almost a century in duration, full of strange and terrible vicis-
situdes, has not been recorded in one single memorable painting.
Art, so varied and so conscientious in its records of the country
and its people, has represented no scene of that great tragedy, as
William the Silent prophetically named it, which cost the Dutch
people, for so long a time, so many different emotions of terror,
of pain, of rage, of joy, and of pride!
The splendor of art in Holland is dimmed by that of political
greatness. Almost all the great painters were born in the first
thirty years of the seventeenth century, or in the last part of the
sixteenth; all were dead after the first ten years of the eighteenth,
and after them there were no more, - Holland had exhausted her
fecundity. Already towards the end of the seventeenth century
the national sentiment had grown weaker, taste had corrupted,
the inspiration of the painters had declined with the moral ener-
gies of the nation. In the eighteenth century, the artists, as if
they were tired of nature, went back to mythology, to classicism,
to conventionalities; the imagination grew cold, style was impoy-
erished, every spark of the antique genius was extinct. Dutch
art still showed to the world the wonderful flowers of Van Huy-
sum, the last great lover of nature, and then folded her tired
hands and let the flowers fall upon his tomb.


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479
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
(1821-1881)
BY RICHARD BURTON
藏
​CHE French have long been writers of what they call Pensées,'
- those detached thoughts or meditations which, for depth,
illumination, and beauty, have a power of life, and come
under the term «literature. ” Their language lends itself to the
expression of subjective ideas with lucidity, brilliance, charm. The
French quality of mind allows that expression to be at once dignified
and happily urbane. Sometimes these sayings take the form of the
cynical epigrams of a La Rochefoucauld; are expanded into senten-
tious aphorisms by a La Bruyère; or reveal more earnest and athletic
souls, who pierce below the social surface froth to do battle with the
demons of the intellect. To this class belong men like the seven-
teenth-century Pascal and the nineteenth-century Amiel.
The career of Henri Frédéric Amiel illustrates the dubiety of too
hasty judgment of a man's place or power in the world. A Gene-
vese by birth, of good parentage, early orphaned, well educated,
much traveled, he was deemed, on his return in the springtime of
his manhood to his native town as professor in the Academy of
Geneva, to be a youth of great promise, destined to become distin-
guished. But the years slipped by, and his literary performance,
consisting of desultory essays and several slight volumes of verse,
was not enough to justify the prophecy. His life more and more
became that of a bachelor recluse and valetudinarian. When he
died, in 1881, at sixty years of age, after much suffering heroically
borne, as pathetic entries in the last leaves of his Diary remain to
show, there was a feeling that here was one more faithful failure. ”
But the quiet, brooding teacher in the Swiss city which has at one
time or another immured so many rare minds, had for years been
jotting down his reflections in a private journal. It constitutes the
story of his inner life, never told in his published writings. When a
volume of the Journal Intime' appeared the year after his taking
off, the world recognized in it not only an intellect of clarity and
keenness, and a heart sensitive to the widest spiritual problems, but
the revelation of a typical modern mood. The result was that Amiel,
being dead, yet spoke to his generation, and his fame was quick and
genuine. The apparent disadvantage point of Geneva proved, after


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480
HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
all, the fittest abiding-place for the poet-philosopher. A second vol-
ume of extracts, two years later, found him in an assured place as
a writer of Pensées. '
The Journal of Amiel is symptomatic of his time,- perhaps one
reason why it met with so sympathetic a response. It mirrors the
intellectual doubtings, the spiritual yearnings and despairs of a stren-
uous and pure soul in a rationalistic atmosphere. In the day of
scientific test and of skepticism, of the readjustment of conventions
and the overthrow of sacrosanct traditions, one whose life is that of
thought rather than of action finds much to perplex, to weary, and
to sadden. So it was with the Swiss professor. He was always in
the sanctum sanctorum of his spirit, striving to attain the truth; with
Hamlet-like irresolution he poised in mind before the antinomies
of the universe, alert to see around a subject, having the modern
thinker's inability to be partisan. This way of thought is obviously
unhealthy, or at least has in it something of the morbid. It implies
the undue introspection which is well-nigh the disease of this cen-
tury. There is in it the failure to lose one's life in objective inci-
dent and action, that one may find it again in regained balance of
mind and bodily health. Amiel had the defect of his quality; but
he is clearly to be separated from those shallow or exaggerated speci-
mens of subjectivity illustrated by present-day women diarists, like
Bashkirtseff and Kovalevsky. The Swiss poet-thinker had a vigor of
thought and a broad culture; his aim was high, his desire pure, and
his meditations were often touched with imaginative beauty. Again
and again he flashes light into the darkest penetralia of the human
soul. At times, too, there is in him a mystic fervor worthy of St.
Augustine. If his dominant tone is melancholy, he is not to be
called a pessimist. He believed in the Good at the central core of
things. Hence is he a fascinating personality, a stimulative force.
And these outpourings of an acute intellect, and a nature sensitive to
the Ideal, are conveyed in a diction full of literary feeling and flavor.
Subtlety, depth, tenderness, poetry, succeed each other; nor are the
crisp, compressed sayings, the happy mots of the epigrammatist,
entirely lacking: And pervading all is an impression of character.
Like Pascal, Amiel was a thinker interested above all in the soul
of man.
He was a psychologist, seeking to know the secret of the
Whence, the Why, and the Whither. Like Joubert, whose journal
resembled his own in its posthumous publication, his reflections will
live by their weight, their quality, their beauty of form. Nor are
these earlier writers of Pensées' likely to have a more permanent
place among the seed-sowers of thought. Amiel himself declared
that “the pensée-writer is to the philosopher what the dilettante is
to the artist. He plays with thought, and makes it produce a crowd


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HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
481
escapes him.
of pretty things of detail; but he is more anxious about truths than
truth, and what is essential in thought, its sequence, its unity,
In a word, the pensée-writer deals with what
is superficial and fragmentary. While these words show the fine
critical sense of the man, they do an injustice to his own work.
Fragmentary it is, but neither superficial nor petty. One recognizes
in reading his wonderfully suggestive pages that here is a rare per-
sonality, indeed, — albeit “sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. ”
In 1889
an admirable English translation of Amiel by Mrs.
Humphry Ward, the novelist, appeared in London. The introductory
essay by Mrs. Ward is the best study of him in our language. The
appended selections are taken from the Ward translation.
Richara Burton
0
EXTRACTS FROM AMIEL'S JOURNAL
CTOBER IST, 1849. - Yesterday, Sunday, I read through and
made extracts from the Gospel of St. John. It confirmed
me in my belief that about Jesus we must believe no one
but Himself, and that what we have to do is to discover the true
image of the Founder behind all the prismatic refractions through
which it comes to us, and which alter it more or less. A ray of
heavenly light traversing human life, the message of Christ has
been broken into a thousand rainbow colors, and carried in a
thousand directions. It is the historical task of Christianity to
assume with every succeeding age a fresh metamorphosis, and to
be forever spiritualizing more and more her understanding of the
Christ and of salvation.
I am astounded at the incredible amount of Judaism and
formalism which still exists nineteen centuries after the Redeem-
er's proclamation, “It is the letter which killeth”— after his pro-
test against a dead symbolism. The new religion is so profound
that it is not understood even now, and would seem a blasphemy
to the greater number of Christians. The person of Christ is the
centre of it. Redemption, eternal life, divinity, humanity, pro-
pitiation, incarnation, judgment, Satan, heaven and hell,- all
these beliefs have been so materialized and coarsened that with a
strange irony they present to us the spectacle of things having a
1-31


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HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL
profound meaning and yet carnally interpreted. Christian bold-
ness and Christian liberty must be reconquered; it is the Church
which is heretical, the Church whose sight is troubled and her
heart timid. Whether we will or no, there is an esoteric doc-
trine — there is a relative revelation; each man enters into God so
much as God enters into him; or, as Angelus, I think, said, “The
eye by which I see God is the same eye by which He sees me. ”
Duty has the virtue of making us feel the reality of a positive
world while at the same time detaching us from it.
F
EBRUARY 20TH, 1851. - I have almost finished these two vol-
umes of ( Joubert's] Pensées' and the greater part of the
[.
Correspondance.