by Will Durant
CHAPTER VI
Tragedy in the Netherlands
1649–1715*
THE century from 1555 to 1648 had seen the heroic defense of the Netherlands against the world-embracing empire of Spain; the period from 1648 to 1715 saw the magnificent defense of the Dutch Republic against the swelling navy of England and the unprecedented armies of France. In each case the tiny state maintained itself with a courage and success that claim a high place in history. And amid these burdens and assaults it continued its development of commerce, science, and art; its cities offered havens of refuge to harassed thought; and its republican institutions flung an inspiring challenge to encompassing and powerful monarchies.
I. THE SPANISH NETHERLANDS
The southern or Spanish Netherlands continued till 1713 under Spanish rule. Their ethnically diverse peoples were overwhelmingly Catholic, and they preferred to be subject to a distant and weakened Spain rather than to the Protestants north of them, or to a neighboring France that threatened at any moment to engulf them. The Peace of the Pyrenees (1659) gave most of Artois to France; the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668) gave her Douai and Tournai; the Peace of Nijmegen (1678) gave her Valenciennes, Maubeuge, Cambrai, St.-Omer, and Ypres. And the Dutch Republic was as merciless as the French monarchy. By the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) Spain, eager to free its armies for continued war with France, not only ceded to the United Provinces the districts that they had captured in Flanders, Limburg, and Brabant, but agreed that the River Scheldt should be closed to foreign trade. This stifling humiliation crippled Antwerp and the whole economy of the Spanish Netherlands. La politique n’a pas d’entrailles.
Within such hostile walls what we now call Belgium cherished its traditional culture, welcomed the Jesuits, and followed the intellectual lead of Louvain. When the French bombarded Brussels (1695) a large section of the city was turned into debris; all the lovely architecture of the Grand’ Place was destroyed except a guild hall and the noble Hôtel de Ville. The Maison du Roi (in which the royal address was read to the States-General) was rebuilt in ornate Gothic (1696); this and the Hôtel de Ville are among the most beautiful structures in Europe today. Sculptors lavished their art in adorning the façades of churches and civic buildings, and the pulpits, confessionals, and tombs in church interiors. Brussels continued to make fine tapestries. 1
Flemish painting declined sharply after Rubens and Vandyck, as if those two lives had exhausted the pictorial genius of a century. The rise of France in art and wealth drew many Flemish painters, like Philippe de Champaigne. A greater man, David Teniers the Younger, stayed. Taught by his father, he became a “master” in the Guild of St. Luke by the age of twenty-three; and four years later (1637) he sealed his success by marrying Anne, daughter of Jan “Velvet” Brueghel and ward of Rubens himself. In 1651 the Archduke Leopold William summoned him from Antwerp to Brussels to be court painter and curator of the royal museum; one of Teniers’ canvases shows the Archduke and himself among the pictures of this gallery. 2 He painted with reluctant skill old themes like The Prodigal Son 3 and The Temptation of St. Anthony, 4 but like his Dutch contemporaries he preferred to catch within small frames the life of the peasantry, not reducing the peasantry to brutes as in Pieter Brueghel, but joining with them in their recreations and festivals. He showed himself acquainted in detail with the Interior of a Cabaret, 5 but he could also paint rural landscapes transfigured by an ever-changing sky. He loved light as Rembrandt loved shade, and he caught it on his brush with a sensitive delicacy that has not been surpassed.
II. THE DUTCH REPUBLIC
The seven Dutch provinces were now united in a proud and victorious republic whose wealth and expansion stirred the wonder and jealousy of its neighbors. Here was a nation anomalously without a king; each town was almost independently governed by a council of rich burghers; each town council sent delegates to a provincial assembly; each such assembly sent representatives to a States-General that ruled the interrelations of the provinces, and their foreign affairs. So far it was an ideal government for the merchant princes whose fortunes were swelling with the growth of Dutch trade. Against this oligarchy of businessmen stood one aristocratic force: the descendants of that William I and Silent of Orange and Nassau who had led the country through the darkest days of its struggle with Spain. The States-General had rewarded him with the title of stadholder and command of its armies; he had been able to transmit that title and command to his descendants; and the control of the military was now a power ever threatening to transform the oligarchic republic into an aristocratic monarchy. In July, 1650, William II of Orange, as stadholder and captain general, tried by a coup d’état to establish his supreme authority over all the United Provinces; several provincial leaders resisted; William and his soldiers imprisoned six of them, including Jacob de Witt, burgomaster of Dordrecht. But smallpox defeated William in victory; he died on November 6, 1650, aged twenty-four. A week later his widow, Mary Stuart (great-granddaughter of the last Queen of Scots), gave birth to William III of Orange, destined to surpass his father’s dreams by becoming King of England.
Beneath these rival ruling classes the farmers and fishermen who fed the nation shared only such remnant of its prosperity as the merchants, manufacturers, and landowners neglected to absorb. If we may believe the Dutch painters, the peasants had been depressed by war and exploitation to an almost bestial poverty, redeemed by festivals and dulled by drink. The craftsmen in their shops, and the workers in the factories of Amsterdam, Haarlem, and Leiden were better paid than their like in England, 6 but they staged a bitter strike in 1672. Huguenot immigrants from France enriched Dutch industry with their savings and their skills. By 1700 the United Provinces had replaced France as the leading industrial nation in the world.
The greatest fortunes were derived from overseas commerce and development. In 1652 the Dutch made their first settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, and founded Capetown. The Dutch East India Company paid dividends averaging eighteen per cent over a period of 198 years. 7 The natives in the Dutch colonies were sold or worked as slaves; the investors at home heard little about this, and took their dividends with Dutch placidity. Dutch foreign trade continued till 1740 to exceed that of any other nation; 8 of twenty thousands vessels carrying the maritime commerce of Europe in 1665, fifteen thousand were Dutch. 9 The merchants and financiers of Holland were by general agreement the ablest of the time. The Bank of Amsterdam had evolved practically all the techniques of modern finance; its deposits were estimated at what would now be $100,000,000; 10 accounts running into millions could be settled there in an hour; and confidence in Dutch solvency and reliability was so high that the Dutch Republic could borrow money at a lower rate of interest—sometimes as low as four per cent—than any other government. 11 Amsterdam was probably the most beautiful and civilized city in Europe in this age. We have seen Descartes’ eulogy of it; Spinoza spoke likewise. 12 Pepys was equally enthusiastic about The Hague—“a most neat place in all respects, the houses so neat in all places and things as possible.” 13
These thriving provinces would have been a paradise but for the nature of man. Their prosperity invited attacks by England and France; the struggle for internal control led to the tragedy of Jan de Witt; and the rivalry of religious creeds divided an otherwise amiable people into devout hostilities. The predominant Calvinists, wherever they could, prevented the public exercise of Catholic worship. In 1682 the Synod of Dort (Dordrecht), probably retaliating the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, drew up a confession of orthodox Calvinism, required every pastor to sign it or be dismissed, appointed Pierre Jurieu, an ex-French Huguenot, to conduct a Calvinist Inquisition, subpoenaed, tried, and excommunicated heretics, and invoked the “secular arm” to imprison them. 14 Nevertheless the Arminian heresy grew; bold men dared to think that God had not predestined the majority of mankind to everlasting hell. Dissenting sects—Mennonites, Collegiants (who sheltered Spinoza), Lucianites, Pietists, even Unitarians—found it possible to live in Ho
lland in the interstices and slumbers of the law. Socinians had sought refuge in the United Provinces from persecution in Poland, but their Unitarian worship was forbidden by a Dutch statute of 1653. Daniel Zwicker published at Amsterdam in 1658 a treatise questioning the divinity of Christ, and subordinating the Bible to “the universal reason of mankind”; yet he managed to die as peaceably as a general. In 1668, however, one Kerbagh, for expressing similar ideas, was sentenced to ten years in prison, where he died. Hadrian Beverland was jailed for suggesting that the original sin of Adam and Eve was sexual intercourse and had little to do with apples.
Toward the close of the seventeenth century religious toleration increased. Dealing with many countries of diverse cultures, opening their ports and bourse to merchants of many faiths or none, the Dutch found it profitable to practice a degree of toleration imperfect indeed, but considerably broader than elsewhere in Christendom. Though the Calvinists were politically supreme, the Catholics were so numerous that their suppression was impracticable. Moreover, as Sir William Temple noted, the social and political dominance of the business classes left the clergy with far less influence than in other states. Refugees from other lands, contributing to the economy or the culture, demanded and received a limited religious freedom. When Cromwell seized power in England, its Royalists sought safety in Holland; when Charles II was restored, English republicans took refuge in the Dutch Republic; when Louis XIV oppressed the Huguenots, they escaped in part to the United Provinces; when Locke, Collins, and Bayle feared persecution in England or France, they found a haven in Holland; when the Portuguese synagogue of Amsterdam excommunicated Spinoza he was received and aided by Dutch scholars, and pensioned by Jan de Witt. Little Holland became “the school of Europe” 15 in business and finance, in science and philosophy.
This civilization would have been depressingly materialistic had it not been for its religious liberty, its science, its literature, and its art. Huygens and other Dutch scientists will meet us later. There were Dutch poets, dramatists, and historians, but their language confined their fame. The Dutch cities were alive with books and publishers. England had only two publishing centers, London and Oxford, France had Paris and Lyons; the United Provinces had Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Leiden, Utrecht, and The Hague, printing books in Latin, Greek, German, English, French, and Hebrew as well as in Dutch; Amsterdam alone had four hundred shops printing, publishing, and selling books. 16
The taste for art competed with the lust for money and the bargaining for eternal salvation. The Dutch burghers, who had denuded their Protestant churches of ornament, gave to their women and their homes the decoration they had taken from the Lord. They quieted their wives with velvet, silk, and gems; they spread their tables with gold and silver plate; they brightened their walls with tapestries, and their shelves or cupboards with pottery or engraved glass. At Delft, after 1650, Dutch potters, inspired by imported Chinese and Japanese wares, produced glazed earthenware, chiefly blue on white, that gave a bright loveliness to homes that had once been puritanically bare. And there was hardly a Dutch family but had at least one of those little paintings that brought the ideal of the clean and peaceful dwelling, and the refreshment of trees, flowers, and streams, within arm’s reach on domestic walls.
III. THE FLOWERING OF GENRE
The heroic age of Dutch painting had passed. The new clients were more numerous but less wealthy; they asked for small pictures that would let them see their own daily life in a distilled and refined extract, reproduced with a realism that aroused the pleasure of recognition, or touched with some delicate but homely sentiment, or inviting the soul into a landscape’s liberating view. The Dutch painters met this demand with a refinement of line and light and color that crowded meticulous artistry into a little space. These artists are known throughout Europe and America, for their desperate competition with one another led them to pour forth a quick profusion of small pictures at low prices, and now there is hardly a museum that does not hang them. Letting a lazy footnote attest their abundance,* we must look more leisurely at the unfortunate but joyful Jan Steen, and the greatest of the genre painters, Jan Vermeer, and the greatest of Dutch landscape painters, Jacob van Ruisdael.
Steen was a brewer’s son in Leiden, worked in The Hague, Delft, and Haarlem, and ended as a tavernkeeper in Leiden; in between he made himself the best figure painter, barring Rembrandt, in Dutch art. At twenty-three (1649) he married Margarete, daughter of the painter Jan van Goyen; her face and figure were her only dowry, but they served him as inspiring models for a time. He was so poorly paid for his pictures that in 1670 an apothecary attached all the paintings he could find in Steen’s house, and auctioned them off to cover a debt of ten gulden. His early pictures record the pleasures or penalties of intoxication. An excellent example, Dissolute Life, 17 shows one woman drowsy, another asleep, with liquor; seizing the moment, a child steals from a cupboard; a dog eats from the table; a nun, entering, launches into a homily on the sinfulness of rum; everything here, though picturing chaos, is composed and drawn with the order and harmony of art. A lovelier theme animates the misnamed Menagerie: 18 a little girl feeds milk to a lamb, garden fowl prance about, a peacock dangles his tail from a blasted tree; pigeons perch aloft, a dove soars in from the street: this is an idyl that makes all the problems of philosophy seem meaningless; it is life, each part with its own sufficient reason, ignoring ultimates. When Steen bypassed the tavern he gave bright views of Dutch civilization: pleasant interiors, music lessons, concerts, festivals, happy families, and the artist himself, smoking in The Merry Company, 19 or playing the lute. 20 Then, discouraged by the unappreciative prices paid for his work, he returned to selling beer, drank forgetfully, and died at the age of fifty-three, leaving four hundred paintings unsold.
One glance at a single picture by Jan Vermeer, The Head of a Girl, 21 reveals a world and an art almost antipodal to Steen’s. This pearl beyond price was auctioned away in 1882 for two and a half gulden; a good critic now ranks it as “one of the dozen finest pictures in the world.” 22 The young lady obviously comes of a good home and family; her eyes are clear of fear, unclouded with even the normal wonderment of youth; she is quietly happy, and alert to the music of life; and she is given to us with a careful craftsmanship of color, line, and light that make the brush an astonishing vehicle of understanding and sympathy.
Vermeer was born at Delft in 1632, lived there, so far as we know, all his life, and ended there (1675) at the age of forty-three; he was an almost exact contemporary of Spinoza (1632–77). He married at twenty, and had eight children; he received good prices for his paintings, but he toiled at them with such time-consuming care, and spent so much money in buying pictures, that he died in debt; his widow had to apply for aid to the court of bankruptcy. Yet his thirty-four surviving works suggest a background of middle-class comfort. One of them 23 shows him in his studio, with fluffy cap and particolored jerkin, stockings, rumpled but of silk, his buttocks bulging with prosperity. Doubtless he lived in one of the better quarters of Delft, perhaps in the outskirts from which he could have a View of Delft; 24 we feel, in that famous picture, his fondness for his native town. He seems to have been more contentedly domesticated than the artists of our time. Love of the home shines out in most Dutch painting, but in Vermeer the home becomes a little temple, and the housewife is proud of her ministrations; in his Christ with Mary and Martha 25 the latter shares the pedestal with Mary. His women are no longer the heavy bundles of flesh sometimes seen in Dutch art; they are of some refinement and sensitivity; they may even, like the seated lady in Mistress and Maid, 26 be expensively robed, delicately featured, carefully coiffured, or be rich in silk and musical instruments, like the Lady Seated at the Virginals. 27 Vermeer makes an epic of family life, or a lyric of simple and normal domestic moments; not group scenes of confused and multiple activity, but at his best one woman alone, quietly reading a letter, 28 or intent on her sewing, 29 or adorning herself with a necklace, or asleep at her sewing, 30 or just
a girl and her smile. 31 Vermeer recorded with perfect art his gratitude for a good woman and a happy home. In the eighteenth century he was almost forgotten; his little masterpieces were ascribed to de Hooch, Terborch, or Rembrandt; only in 1858 was he disinterred. Now his name stands only after those of Rembrandt and Hals in Dutch painting.
One thing is missing in these genre painters—the life of nature that surrounded the interloping towns. Italy, and Poussin in Italy, had caught some of the fresh air and open fields; England would discover them in the next century; now Dutch painters, leaving for a while their chaste or hilarious interiors, placed their easels to capture the lure of rippling streams, silent and leisurely windmills, burgeoning farms, trees shaming our hectic transiency, exotic vessels swaying in crowded ports, clouds kaleidoscoping the sky. All the world knows the Middelharnis Road of Meindert Hobbema—perspective vanishing into endless space; but far more beautiful is his Water Mill with the Great Red Roof. 32 Aelbert Cuyp found his inspiration in plump kine wading in lush marshes, 33 horses halting thirsty at an inn, sails disappearing on the sea. 34 Salomon van Ruisdael marveled at the tremor of waters reflecting and inverting boats and trees (Canal and Ferry 35), and taught his nephew to surpass him.