Notes sur la Hollande
Henri Michel
NOTES ON HOLLAND AND ON INTIMACY
The taste for adventure and that for intimacy are perhaps the two primitive feelings whose alternations and conflicts best explain the rhythm of human sensibility. To live within oneself and to step outside oneself — it is always one or the other of these wishes that presides over all the movements of the soul. There is no deep passion that is not made of the known and the unknown, of security and risk, of intimacy that is its strength and sweetness, and of some adventure that is its mystery, its boldness, its motion. The reconciliation of these contradictories is the stumbling-block of happiness or the miracle of love. Our desires and our regrets are made of their antinomy, and is this not, transposed to the life of feeling, that famous opposition of subject and object which remains one of the most difficult problems of thought?
I have just spent some weeks in Holland. I went to see that Dutch nature whose charm is so particular and so rare. An idle stroller, free of every preoccupation of business or study, I simply mingled in the cities with the life of the streets, as far as one can in hasty excursions; I visited, as one should, the admirable museums of The Hague and Amsterdam. But I had promised myself in advance not to try to see everything. The curiosity for detail — leaving nothing behind at which one has not for a moment rested one’s eyes — is a somewhat childish concern and at the same time a very tiring enterprise. The multiplicity of impressions never made lasting memories, and to see everything is perhaps the best way to forget everything. It is at once far wiser and far easier to let impressions come of their own accord without seeking them overmuch, and to resign oneself to knowing of things only what one retains when one is not expressly looking at them. After all, is this not the essential — what recurs, what imposes itself upon our eyes and our thought, the soul everywhere present of the country visited? Now the essential in Holland is precisely the taste and, as it were, the cultivation of intimacy. No people possessed it more naturally, in a manner more profound, more delicate. The country itself invites it. Wrested from the sea, it must be ceaselessly defended against her, and this homeland that man had in some measure to create step by step through his efforts and his industry, whose preservation costs him so many cares and labors, is all the more jealously his own. With its sky veiled in clouds, its tranquil waters, its low meadows sprinkled with flocks, its turning mills, its gliding barges, its horizons closed in the distance by the blond undulation of the dunes or the serious line of a dike, Holland in its entirety is like a vast closed dwelling, full of air, of shadows and light, of silence and movement. Although the space is very free and the landscape everywhere open, man here always has the impression of being closely and gently at home. All the paintings of the Dutch masters — if one excepts Rembrandt and Ruysdael, of whom one must speak apart — even the landscapes, even the seascapes, have the look of interior paintings. But it is a spacious interior, widened to the horizon, furnished with trees and ships, steeples and clouds, where the painter has known how to admit the sky and the sea and the limitless countryside. Everything there is serious, collected, profound, and yet happy and smiling and never austere. Even where man is absent, one senses that human life is the center and the purpose of things, and that nature has been seen through eyes and reflected by a mind. It is a faithful country, made for meditating or for loving at length.
“If, passing from Belgium into Holland,” says Michelet in his travel notes, “you wish to have at first glance a true impression of the Low Countries, take them by their most aquatic side — by Breda, Rotterdam.” The advice is judicious; it is that of a great diviner who rarely erred in such matters. I did better than follow it: I entered by an even more aquatic side, by that curious province of Zeeland which is nothing but the silt of three rivers, where earth and water are so intermingled that one often does not know where one ends and the other begins. By a reversal of strange charm, great barges with their masts and sails cross meadows in the narrow grooves of canals one cannot see, and sometimes herds of cattle, their hooves in the shallow water where the sky is reflected, seem to graze a pasture of clouds.
The crossing from Antwerp to Rotterdam takes some dozen hours. It is an almost entire day of navigation in which one has hardly anything to do but watch the landscape pass — a monotonous landscape and yet always changing; but the changes are only imperceptible nuances. The colors and lines blur and deform themselves incessantly, without one’s quite being able to tell how or at what precise moment the deformation occurred. It is the opposite of the surprises and sudden visions that mountain countries afford us. Everything connects, interpenetrates, follows upon itself. The little town, Zype or Stavenisse, whose steeple one spies far ahead, seems to turn slowly on the horizon. It is passed without one’s noticing. But here comes another, Tholen or Zierikzee, rising from the line of meadows or waters, against the same white sky, in the same light, quite like the one just fled, and already fleeting in its turn. This continuity of the landscape irresistibly suggests that of a human existence in which days are linked to days, bringing similar thoughts and prolonging the same cares — an existence not inert and vainly immobile, but wholly filled by a single pursuit, remaining through its progress long faithful to some way of feeling and of living that refines and deepens through its very duration.
It is thus, moreover, that the people of this country most often lived. The realism of its painters is always as though permeated with conscience. Descartes chose it above all others in which to pursue his meditation and find the silence and continuity of life of which Spinoza, after him, proved so jealous. And one may, it seems, recognize other effects of the same tastes and the same disposition of soul in the patience of its scholars and the ingenuity of its horticulturists. It is not at Constantinople that Candide should have cultivated his garden, but rather in the land of tulips, around some low, painted house of Dordrecht, Haarlem, or Middelburg. It is there that exterior life best imitates interior life, and that everything seems to incline man toward that wisdom which seeks in the world only the extension of thought.
While the little steamer peacefully followed its course, I watched pass, to right or left, like a silent backdrop, the contrasts of clear shadows and unglaring light to which this restful nature most often reduces itself. The flat and, as it were, washed tints juxtapose without clashing. They are stretches of pale gray water, bordered on the horizon by pale green bands that are some low shore of reeds or meadows; in the white sky, the color of linen, gray gulls wheel or flights of curlews file past, their fine structures visible, long beaks and stretched necks and feet trailing in the air. And all this gray and all this white remain nonetheless surprisingly rich in color. Let a cloud pass, let a ray of sun pierce through, and everything changes delicately. It is gray always, but green-gray or rose-gray or gray powdered with gold. This sensitivity of the landscape — a landscape made of nothing — is the great charm of this country. It is like a delicate pale face where the blood is nonetheless close to the surface, which a smile of the eyes transfigures and in which the most fugitive impressions are reflected.
Two or three times during its brief navigation, the boat leaves the broad waters of the Scheldt or the Meuse to enter one of the narrow canals that join them. One need then only climb to the bridge to have, over the always fairly low dike, a close view of the country. At the lock of the Zuid-Beveland canal, it is a whole animated scene, one of those “landscapes with figures” as van Ostade, Wynants, Wouwerman painted them. In the lock chamber, around our steamer, a dozen small boats with brown or gray sails press gunwale to gunwale, along with a large barge painted in gleaming colors of red and light green, whose tiller is held by a sturdy young woman. To the right, at the roadside, beneath large leafy plane trees, a cheerful little house — no doubt an inn or tavern — forms the background of the picture, of which the great meadow is the setting. Two rustic carts stand before the door. The horses have the bridle on their necks and the oat bags at their nostrils. Through the open window, one catches a corner of table with a jug and glasses. A whole little crowd has pressed forward to the lock railing; several jolly fellows hail the boatmen and bargemen from above. A little apart, on a stool, sits a fellow, his torso tight in a brown knitted vest, wearing a wool cap, his cheeks rough and unshaven, his eyes clear, his mouth toothless beneath a pointed nose. He follows the lock-keepers’ maneuver with the fixed gaze of an old peasant, and I did not see him shift a line the entire time we stayed there. But the most charming feature of the scene was certainly two little girls of seven or eight, dressed alike in a black dress, somewhat ample, high-waisted, with a velvet bodice. A gray kerchief, tightly drawn, crossed on their chests; two brass ornaments held their lace cap at the temples. They ran this way and that, hand in hand, and pleasing was the contrast between the liveliness of their eyes and the finely reasonable expression of their full, well-colored features. The comfortable little women stopped to watch us leave, on the lock bridge, both with one hand on hip, in a rounded gesture of their bare arm, and I turned to see from afar, against the very gentle sky, their graceful double silhouette.
Approaching Dordrecht, the countryside and the river, until then rather empty and solitary, take on a character of life and animation. The Dordsche-Kil, a very narrow little arm of the Meuse, is all cluttered with boats. As the wind direction forces them to tack, they cross in every direction, changing aspect at every instant, their image doubled in the water, in a sort of harmonious and regulated confusion. Along the banks, houses, mills, hamlets multiply. On the brick roads of a fine, deep, fresh brown color, further softened by the shade of great trees, men and women go without haste and turn their heads or pause a moment to watch us pass. The neighing of a horse or the lowing of a cow answers now and then the steamer’s whistle; but these rare sounds harmonize with the picture of life and do not seem to break its silence. Movement of sails, gliding of clouds, busy roads, mobile wings of windmills — silent movement: there is yet another impression that remains.
What I was able to see of the Dutch countryside in this navigation of a few hours, then a little later in a quick excursion around Amsterdam and in the too-brief day I spent on the island of Walcheren, would hardly authorize me to generalize impressions in which the chances of the hour and of encounter no doubt played the greatest part, were it not true of the faces of the earth, as it is true of human faces, that the first sight is often the most instructive, the one with the best chance of seizing the essential trait. Besides, this impression of calm and security accords well with the image one had formed in advance of this country. In the real Holland one recognizes without disappointment the ideal Holland one already had in mind, with the sole surprise of discovering there a fineness of detail and a delicate charm one had only half-imagined.
Modern life has passed through here, no doubt; one does not fail to hear on the roads the impertinent horn of the cyclists. But by some compelling influence of the milieu, the gestures of our machinist and industrial civilization shed there, sooner than elsewhere, whatever hostility and barbarism there is in their impertinent novelty. The assimilation of present to past occurs without effort and without shock, as does that of nature to man. Being little given to dreaming, this people has put into humble reality all the poetry that is in them. Their ingenious good-nature saves them from vulgarity and attains harmony and depth by dint of sincerity. The adaptation and arrangement of things to the ends of intimate human life — that is the charming secret they always have to teach us. One senses it already merely by crossing the happy countryside where clouds cast shadows like curtains and the splendors of sunset have the gentle glow of a hearth. But one grasps it better still in the fuller life of the cities, and the genius of their old masters completes our instruction in the museums they have filled with images of their homeland.
Though The Hague is assuredly, as Fromentin sensed, one of the most original cities in Europe, it takes some reflection to discern the causes of the interest we take in it and the attraction it exercises over us. It is a great city, but not among the greatest. It has broad streets, vast houses, and some fine buildings, without however being comparable in this to most European capitals. It is rich, but there are richer; aristocratic no doubt, and of grand air, but of an aristocracy, when all is said, somewhat recent and bourgeois. Nor should one seek there the powerful charm of death or the noble sadness of very old memories. Its past dates from three centuries, and while not born yesterday, The Hague, in old Europe, is rather a young city. In what, then, does its originality consist; how does it touch us, and by what privilege is it truly one of those elect places where one can taste in the very air one breathes something invisible and unique, a singular soul one would not find elsewhere? What one savors there, it seems to me, is still intimacy, but intimacy in its nuance of well-being, of perfect ease and familiar distinction. There are more curious cities; there is none more attractive or that leaves more regret.
It suffices to have visited certain places famous in the history of human thought and to have participated in them once, in order to enrich our memory with whatever they may hold of emotion or of dreams. One passes through; our fancy puts on, for a few days, a new form among the innumerable forms of life; they murmur to us a secret that we carry away with us. But here that cannot suffice, and these trophies of memory do not satisfy us. The Hague has nothing more important to tell us than to stay and to live there, its prestige lying not in a certain dream of life but in life itself. “As for me,” says Fromentin, “if I had to choose a place of work, a place of pleasure where I wished to be comfortable, to breathe a delicate atmosphere, to see pretty things, to dream of finer ones, especially if I were to encounter worries, troubles, difficulties with myself and needed tranquility to resolve them and much charm around me to calm them, I would do as Europe after its storms — it is here that I would establish my congress.”
I arrived at The Hague after dark and, being somewhat tired from a day of travel, contented myself, after my meal and before going to my room, with spending a brief hour at the hotel café, time enough to doze for a moment in the smoke of a cigar. The layout of Dutch cafés is quite particular. In truth, what distinguishes them depends on very little; but nothing better reveals a people’s character than such slight details of their habits and tastes. A large curtain that remains open during the day is drawn, as soon as the lights are lit, across the room, dividing it into two distinct parts. In the inner part, one plays, one talks, one reads the newspapers as one does anywhere else in similar places. But thanks to the thick velvet hanging that separates from the street and muffles its sounds, one feels discreetly and comfortably at home. The banality of the place takes on an unexpected character of retreat and shelter. But it is the front part of the room — on the other side of the curtain — that is truly full of interest. There, no light but the glow from outside, no sound but the murmur of the street. One smokes there in silence, or speaks only in low tones. It is another Dutch custom that a certain street in the city — a central street, usually quite narrow — serves in the evening as a place for popular promenading. Carriage traffic is halted, so that on the roadway as on the sidewalks flows in two contrary torrents a whole remarkably lively populace that talks loudly, laughs, sings. They go in groups, arm in arm, the young men exchanging with the young girls some solid pleasantry and sometimes, quite simply, more than pleasantries — a resounding kiss, wrapped in a shove. This animation and tumult remain however without mockery and without fever, with a certain quality of honesty, tranquility, and good nature. At The Hague, it is the Spui Straat that takes on this aspect of a kermis each evening, and it was precisely on the Spui Straat that the hotel café I was staying at was located. Nothing is more striking than to see framed in the window bays this whole flood of people in gaiety. The contrast between the dark room and the luminous street imparts a strange relief to the gestures and features of the promenaders, while giving the passing crowd an aspect of an optical show, something objective and distanced. One sits there, a little apart, in shadow and silence, very close to life, watching life pass before one like a spectacle. To arrange a brasserie as a sort of magic lantern — once again, it is not much, but one had to think of it. The entire genius of Holland is in this find.
It would take long pages and memories of a long stay to speak worthily of The Hague. From the deserted quarters where the meditative image of Spinoza stands near a dead canal, in the middle of a small square, to the aristocratic avenues whose fine trees extend toward the heart of the city the freshness and shade of its two woods, one would need, with the leisure of a slow assiduity, to mingle with the life of the people, to sit on the benches of the promenades, to follow in the evening, in the calm waters, the fleeting images of the sky, the play of shadow and light. Above all, it would not suffice, a mere passerby, to have spent a few hours or days there, without ties, without connections or social relations. The exterior here interests us above all by what it makes us sense of the interior — a hospitable grace, a full and smiling life, a taste and habits of comfort that one divines to be the order and rule of the humblest houses as of the most opulent.
It must be understood that this is not the kind of comfort which, under the pretext of convenience, serves only to encumber existence with an entire apparatus, uselessly ingenious, from which grace and freedom are absent. True comfort is only the full bloom of intimacy. Far from stupidly stifling the gentlest aims of life beneath the complication of its most insignificant practices, it consists, it seems, in surrounding oneself with things at once beautiful and familiar, shaped by use to the fingers that handle them, pleasure of the eyes and of the mind, an extension of ourselves into the objects that surround us. It is good that these things be beautiful, but beauty alone does not suffice; a house is not a museum, and the rarest collections soon become tedious to one who is only their guardian. It is good that they be useful and convenient, but convenience alone does not suffice either; elevators and electrical installations do not make life better or enrich happiness. What is needed is that, being if possible beautiful and useful, they should above all be alive and loved; that they should bind us to beings and places, hold us by the secret ties of a dear familiarity, make more profoundly ours the house where the hearth of our life burns, and fill it entirely with the presence and the thought of those we love there.
This is what I believed I glimpsed or divined behind the browned facades of the mansions of the Lange Voorhout or behind the railings of the Wilhelm Park gardens. The undulating lawns, of a green so deep it astonishes and holds the eye, impose on the walks, from gate to porch, an inviting curve one would take pleasure in following. On the balconies, faience and flowers; flowers again behind the veranda glass; and sometimes, through a half-open window, a fold of curtain, the corner of a tall sideboard, or in the shadow the gleaming copper of a chandelier. No doubt there is nothing very rare in all this, and these are things one can see anywhere. But it is with images of life as with masterpieces of art: their expressive value depends on imperceptible nuances, on something elusive that analysis cannot reach and the approximations of language are powerless to express. I remember, at the corner of two canals, a house of rather modest appearance, all enveloped in foliage, its rather dark stone bathing in the green water. A window opened, and among the frame of flowers I caught the firm and delicate profile of a young woman, a face that seemed made of the same luminous paleness as the waters and the sky of the country. She emerged for only a moment from the interior shadow before retreating at once. It was nothing, and it was charming. The complicity of shadow and light, of a dead canal and a flowering wall, had painted, fleetingly, a finished picture of which the brush of a Metsu or a Mieris would have made, without changing a thing, a masterpiece.
One cannot imagine a more perfect contrast than that between The Hague and Amsterdam. As much as one of the two Dutch capitals evokes the idea of a calm existence that has nothing left to do but enjoy itself and has preserved of activity only just what is needed for the full consciousness of its elegance and well-being, so much does the other — the capital of the sea — astonish by the animation of its streets, its movement and traffic of a merchant city. A place of banking and commerce, it is at all hours, in all quarters, the swarming of a singularly mixed population dominated by stock-exchange men and seafarers — hooked noses and long Jewish frock-coats, tanned faces under the wool cap. Here is the Dutchman of trade and adventure who conquered Borneo and Java and trampled upon the Cross in Japan. Through the canals that extend it, the port has, as it were, penetrated the city. Everywhere the scarcely swaying masts of ships are vaguely profiled in the mist against the facades of the gabled houses — tall, narrow, pointed, all checkered with innumerable little windows.
No great thoroughfare crosses Amsterdam or creates a line of orientation. The tangle of streets and canals seems all the more inextricable because all the crossroads of this labyrinth have the same face and the same aspect; all the houses look alike; on all the quays it is the same blurred perspective of masts and stunted little elms. Yet if one glances at a map of the city, or if from the top of the old tower of the Palace one embraces it at a glance in its extent, one perceives that this confusion is ordered according to a strange symmetry that makes Amsterdam resemble some great spider’s web stretched in a half-rosette on the banks of the IJ. The concentric canals, in parallel and broken lines, the streets that cut them in the direction of the radii of a circle, imitate the threads of the web — all the more tangled and close-pressed as they approach the center; and that center itself, the heart of the whole figure, is the Dam Square, between the Exchange and the Palace, where the life of the city beats at full pulse.
This outward form of the city is not without significance. It symbolizes perfectly the inner order of the city, the vocation and moral character of its people. The comparison it suggests is more than a game of the imagination; it gives meaning to scattered impressions and draws out the common thread. Everything here is concentric; everything is oriented from without to within, from periphery to center. In the animation of this working-class city one senses something watchful and huddled. If there is movement in the streets and enterprise in the souls, it is because one must leave one’s lair to bring back a booty of money, merchandise, or ideas. But this movement is not that of a people whose life is spent outdoors; this activity does not seem to seek its reward or find its end in its very exercise. Its reason remains interior and secret. One sees the circulation of life and feels its pulse; the sensitive point, the vital point, remains hidden. Each of the individuals contributing to this bustle has, somewhere, the hidden center of his activities; and so many comings and goings are but the maneuvers of an industrious and prudent activity that watches and waits.
This great port of commerce is not open upon the world; one would rather say it draws the world toward itself. The movement of ships, the coming and going of sailors suggest, I know not how, ideas of return more than of departure. Along the quays moist with mist, the old boats with their slack sails have returned toward the old houses that watch them from their innumerable little windows. Do they not share a family resemblance — the same architecture in tall vertical lines, the same color, the same smell of wet wood? They are not strangers here; they have regained the home port; they are part of the city.
Thus in the genius of Rembrandt and in that of Spinoza, in their work and in their life, we find again the same power of concentration, the same convergence that is, as it were, avaricious and jealous, of which the city had furnished us the imperfect sketch. Is this not intimacy still — not smiling and charming, as we saw it at The Hague, but reduced, with a kind of harshness, to what is most essential in it, to that extreme point where human thought is on the verge of escaping itself by being nothing more than itself?
While I traveled through Amsterdam and The Hague, there remained within me the image of the Dutch countryside, so quickly traversed, of skies, waters, and great pastures whose calm and profound vision I found everywhere in the museums, in the paintings of the old masters. An attraction drew me back toward that sober and clear nature I had barely glimpsed. I resolved to devote the last days of my voyage to some thoroughly rural region, without too much historical past or wealth of art, where the silence and uniformity of things would create silence in the mind as well, let memories arrange themselves, and bring into focus impressions too hastily gathered. Thus, after a reading, with the book still open before us at the last page, it happens that we dream a moment about the work that has just absorbed us, try to discern its meaning and its conclusion, and draw back our thought a little, to judge it as from without.
It was on the island of Walcheren that I made this halt before returning. Truly unique days, in which the charm and novelty of the country, its remoteness from any great city, something set apart and abandoned about it, conspired to make me better savor the solitude in which I found myself. Who has not known such moments of truce and happy forgetting? Everything clears by stripping itself away; one finds oneself, without effort, as though freed from oneself; cares become distant and the present hour is so free and so full that the bond of time seems untied.
The island of Walcheren is the most western of Zeeland, between the sea and the two arms of the Scheldt. How is it that the vast river does not carry off this barely aggregated bank of silt? Its waters are too slow, no doubt, and too heavy; the breadth of their course has broken their force. Their invisible gliding does nothing but pile up new sands along the dunes. The sea is more formidable, and on that side they have had to raise the most robust dike in the Low Countries. Dunes and dikes encircle the entire island and separate it from other lands. A high enclosure bars the horizon everywhere, like the rim of a broad cup. The interior, with its little central town of Middelburg, its tranquil villages, its narrow roads, its great mills that turn without noise, forms the smallest, most sheltered little world one could see under the open sky. The clouds that go with the Scheldt toward the sea, like another river, never cease to pass above the island. It is a perpetual voyage, an endless flight, and these images of adventure make all the more striking and penetrating the images of security. Though one does not see the agitation of the sea or the infinity of its horizon, one feels its breath in the air. One senses it present or very near. The grass of the pastures is damp with its spray as with the mists of the river, and the cattle, raising their heads, seem to inhale its scent or listen to its rumbling.
Despite the fine showers that alternated with the hesitant smiles of the sun, I had taken at Middelburg an open carriage to go see the great dike of Westkapelle and the seaside village of Domburg. The country stretched green and flat, veined with great distant lines, with clumps of trees and bushes, the fine silhouette of a mill or a steeple against the sky. Beams of white light pierced through the rain. A silver radiance shone on the horizon over the dunes, then furtively stole into the plowed fields and pastures, among the shadows of the clouds. There was then a quick scintillation in the small details of the landscape, and these shivers of light, which seemed to widen the plain, made everything more vivid and lighter, brought out a thousand delicate features one had not perceived, like crosshatching in an etching.
It was a Sunday and the morning. At every moment, under the great elms of the road, I passed groups of peasants heading toward the city. All wore the folk costume. The men, with their short brown jacket, trousers too short, and high bristling brimless hat, had a somewhat clumsy air — but so naively satisfied! The women, on the contrary — especially the young girls — were for the most part quite graceful under their white cap, flowered shawl, and complicated silver or copper jewelry.
How happy and remote everything seemed — country and people! Had this little corner of earth not truly remained outside time and life, forgotten by the course of the century? In the great calm spread everywhere over things, I thought more freely of all that had interested or charmed me during these three past weeks; I tried to glimpse a conclusion to the counsels of intimate life and closed happiness that this small people proposes to us, with an insistence at once so discreet and so persuasive — the people who found therein the reason for their customs and the inspiration for their art.
Of this intimacy that I was trying to define for myself, the first characteristic, it seems, is a setting apart of the beings and things that are dearest to us and touch us most closely. We separate them from all the rest to compose of them a small private world that is self-sufficient and borrows nothing from the outside. The most furtive light, the most timid warmth of this secret hearth has more value for us than all exterior splendors. No barrier seems sure enough, no curtain thick enough, to shield from foreign eyes this narrow domain that is ours. To designate those who people it, it is not enough to say “we”; but by a fine nuance of ordinary speech one will rather say “we others” — that is, we who have ties, habits, secrets of life that are our own, we who are not “the others.” The only true happiness, it seems to us, is that in which nothing is transmitted from outside, but where everything grows from within, slowly and spontaneously.
But to separate does not suffice, and if one separates, it is first in order to possess better. This instinct of appropriation is assuredly one of the most irreducible in the human heart. Is it not a form of the more general law that makes of each particle of being a center of attractive force? When poor children cry out, “This dog is mine,” let us beware of saying it is the beginning of usurpation; they collaborate unknowingly in universal consistency, and it is on the contrary the beginning of love. For if love is a gift, it is also a grasp. Every affection is jealous and wants to know everything about its object. As long as there remains in it an unknown part, something that resists or eludes us, we feel we have done nothing yet. What one pursues is perfect assimilation; what one wants is to have so thoroughly drawn this other back to oneself that one recognizes oneself entirely in him and he has nothing more secret from us.
Things themselves do not resist this patient conquest. In the house of intimacy, see how the humblest objects are at the master’s service; how they bear, sculpted by use, the fine imprint of his tastes; and with what reflections of thought the gaze has clothed them that has so often rested upon them. This is what makes the unique charm of all those small paintings of the Dutch masters — the interiors of Pieter de Hooch, the festivities of Jan Steen, the bourgeois scenes of Metsu, Terborch, Caspar Netscher. The subject here is nothing, and it matters little that it is most often of a familiarity bordering on insignificance and sometimes on coarseness. What must be admired is the love and the sense of life, that penetration of reality which reaches through forms the interior soul they make visible.
To separate in order to possess better; to bound one’s domain narrowly so as to keep closer those one encloses there with oneself; then, under the protection of these frontiers, the slow assimilation of the objects of our knowledge and the objects of our affection — that, then, is intimacy in what is essential about it, and its deepest foundation is the instinctive movement that leads man to make himself the center of what surrounds him and to relate to himself alone everything that falls within his grasp. The universe being too vast a field for this design, he confines his life within a closed system where nothing of his warmth and expansion will be lost. He creates an empire within an empire, with the secret hope of finding there the end of his desires and the refuge where he may at last possess rest and security.
That this hope is vain, Holland denies — not by words, which one can always suspect of falsehood, but for having lived by its success, for having found its fine achievement in the seduction of its art, in the smile of its customs, in the appeased sweetness of its very nature. What is particular about these images of intimacy it sets before our eyes is the feeling of fullness and satisfaction that almost always accompanies them. Nothing anxious, nothing troubled. It seems that with domestic joys, the delicate pleasures of eye and mind, or other more tangible pleasures like those of Jan Steen’s and van Ostade’s cheerful drinkers, one has reached the bottom of happiness, and that nothing remains but to keep the doors firmly closed so that nothing from outside may disturb the interior peace one has arranged for oneself.
It is truly a very singular thing, this absence so complete of anguish and fever, this exclusion of dream and passion, this ignorance or forgetting of everything that makes the ardent restlessness of life, its mystery and its painful price. “One is always tempted,” says Fromentin, “to question these careless and phlegmatic painters and to say to them: Is there nothing new, then?… There has been a great wind — has the wind destroyed nothing? Thunder has roared — has the lightning struck nothing, neither your fields, nor your livestock, nor your roofs, nor your workers? Children die — are there no bereavements? Does no one ever weep at your house? You have all been in love — how is one to know?” The peril, the lie of intimacy is precisely its very success. To believe one has reached the end is not to understand that there is no end; to think one holds happiness is to mistake its enigma. The rhythm of our desires is more complicated, and the movement proceeds in two contrary directions. To draw back to oneself, to possess, to know, to thirst for rest, for faithful tenderness, for certainty and conclusion — this is the movement that goes from without to within. But life is also an emigration and an exodus. The feeling of adventure is no less essential to it than that of intimacy. Adventure — that is to say, the need for progress and change, the inability to be satisfied with what one possesses and holds, the taste for the unknown, for mystery, for risk, the aspiration toward what one does not reach and cannot reach; finally, the sense of what is incomplete and precarious in every possessed reality. If intimacy makes the sweetness of human affections, adventure is the salt that keeps them from growing stale and corrupt.
But the synthesis is not impossible between the apparent contradictories of adventure and intimacy. It is, on the contrary, easy to understand that the powerlessness in which we stand to possess anything to its depths maintains and reserves, within the closed field of the most shut-in existence or the most jealous love, an indefinite possibility of surprise and discovery. This freshness of novelty, this restlessness and attraction of an impenetrable mystery — need one go seek them outside if they are in us and near us, in the obscure reality that one would vainly try to enclose and hold? As the sound of the sea is found entire in the shell one brings to one’s ear, there is no house so narrow where one cannot, without crossing its threshold, if one’s heart is attentive, hear an infinite murmur. Nothing is so known that it is not still to be known; nothing is so sure that it is not fragile and precarious; nothing is so near that it is not far; nothing is said that does not remain to be said; nothing is so familiar that it cannot astonish by its mystery.
This is what those old Dutch masters hardly imagined — scrupulous and delicate artists, exquisite souls in joy or in silence, but whom a ray of dream or a shiver of anguish never traversed — too-wise lovers of life. One alone among them, for having sought with an ardent heart what they believed they had found with a tranquil one, and for having pushed to the extreme their concern for intimacy, knew how to touch the mysterious depths of souls and beings, and the solitary infinity they conceal within. Those ultimate limits of emotion and thought that others attained, like Michelangelo, through the heroic transport of a lofty idealism, or like Shakespeare, through a clairvoyance that penetrates every secret, Rembrandt reached by the interior and subterranean path. He shuts himself in his turn in the gentle Dutch house, but he transfigures and disintegrates it by the lights he encloses there with him. Is not the reconciliation of restless adventure and discreet intimacy wholly contained in the admirable little painting in the Louvre where the pilgrims of Emmaus recognize the Master by the gesture of his hands? Everything there is in accordance with the simplicity of life — the rustic chairs, the linen tablecloth, the rough garments, and the servant bending to set upon the table a frugal inn supper. How the two disciples hold near them, between them, the divine friend they met upon the road! Who could take him from them in the secret shelter where they have led him, under the protection of the thick walls and the massive door? Is he not, besides, one of them, a man as they are? He breaks the bread they will eat together; he speaks, one sees his lips tremble; and his traveler’s feet, which one glimpses in the shadow, are all the more reassuring in their familiar pose. And yet how distant he remains! A supernatural light bathes his brow and streams with his hair; a breath of miracle has entered with him into the narrow room, and the disciples’ joy, astonished at itself, is expressed in fearful gestures. The mystery whose presence they have felt is dearer and more poignant to them for all the frail security that encloses it. To these simple hearts it has been given to understand and to make us understand the last secret of love: they possess what escapes them, and in the simple companion of the road whom they were able to set apart from all others and keep, this evening, for themselves alone, they adore the incommunicable life of which he is the form and the garment.
When I arrived at Domburg, the downpour that had threatened since morning suddenly came. The beach was solitary. In a plank cabin, some children had taken shelter, happy and laughing at their adventure. I went to shelter with them until a lull let me climb the nearby dune to take in the whole landscape at a glance.
The clouds, piling over the sea, had abandoned all the sky above the island. On one side, one saw before one only the deserted sand, the sea all dark and without a sail, roughly lashed by the wind, and confused and rapid clouds gorging themselves at the horizon. On the other, it was the contrast of the sparkling and refreshed countryside, with its details of rustic life, and far in the distance, against the blue of the sky, the barely visible steeple of Middelburg. The grass of the dune was soft underfoot like velvet — soft and thick, with little blue flowers so humble in the dense turf that the vast sea wind scarcely stirred them. I heard from up there the laughter of the children, still huddled in their refuge like little Robinsons; then, as the hour advanced and I had to leave the island that very evening, I returned to the carriage that was waiting for me.
HENRI MICHEL