Hoofdstuk 11

My dear girl, never put vegetable acid with fruit! Cucumbers with salt, pineapple with salt, pomelo with salt, everything that comes out of the ground, with salt.

Vinegar with fish and with meat ... there is something about it in Liebig ...

--Dear Max, asked Tine, laughing, how long do you suppose we have been here?

This ketimon is from Mrs. Slotering.

And Havelaar had trouble remembering that he had only arrived the day before, and that Tine, with the best will in the world, could not yet have arranged a thing in kitchen or household.

He himself had long since been at Rangkas-Betoeng!

Had he not spent the whole night reading in the archive, and had too much not already passed through his soul that bore on Lebak, for him to be able to grasp, just like that, that he had only been there since yesterday?

Tine understood this well: she always understood him!

--Ah yes, that is true, he said. But still you ought to read some of Liebig.

Verbrugge, have you read much of Liebig?

--Who is that? asked Verbrugge.

--He is someone who has written a great deal about the pickling of gherkins.

He has also discovered how one turns grass into wool ... you follow me, of course?

--No, said Verbrugge and Duclari at the same time.

--Well, the thing itself was always known, after all: send a sheep out into the country ... and you will see!

But he has traced out the manner in which it happens.

Other sages say again that he knows little about it. Now they are busy looking for ways to leave the whole sheep out of the process altogether ...

Oh, those scholars!

Molière knew it well ... I am very fond of Molière.

If you like, we shall hold a course of study together, in the evenings, a couple of times a week.

Tine will join in too, once Max is in bed.

Duclari and Verbrugge were quite willing.

Havelaar said he did not have many books, but among them there were nonetheless Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Vondel, Lamartine, Thiers, Say, Malthus, Scialoja, Smith, Shakespeare, Byron ...

Verbrugge said that he read no English.

--What the deuce, you are past thirty, surely!

What have you been doing all that time?

But that must have been rather awkward for you at Padang, where so much English is spoken.

Did you know Miss Mata-api?

--No, I do not know that name.

--It was not her name either. We called her that, in 1843, because her eyes sparkled so.

She is surely married by now ... it is all so long ago!

I have never seen anything like it ... yes, though, at Arles ... there you really must go someday!

That is the most beautiful thing I have found in all my travels.

There is nothing, it seems to me, that sets beauty before you so clearly in the abstract, as the visible image of the true, of the immaterial-pure, as a beautiful woman. Believe me, go once to Arles and Nîmes ...

Duclari, Verbrugge, and--I must confess it!--Tine too, could not suppress a loud laugh at the thought of leaping all at once from the western corner of Java over to Arles or Nîmes in the south of France.

Havelaar, probably standing in his imagination upon the tower the Saracens built on the gallery of the arena at Arles, had to collect himself somewhat before he grasped the cause of that laughter, and then he went on:

--Well yes, I mean ... if you happen to be in that neighborhood.

I have never met with anything like it anywhere else.

I was used to disappointments at the sight of everything that is praised so highly.

Look, for instance, at the waterfalls people speak and write so much about. As far as I am concerned, I have felt little or nothing at Tondano, at Maros, at Schaffhausen, at the Niagara.

One has to consult one's guidebook to have the prescribed measure of one's admiration ready to hand, about "so many feet of fall" and "so many cubic feet of water per minute," and when those figures are high, one is supposed to say ooh. I never want to see waterfalls again, at least not if I have to go out of my way for one.

Those things say nothing to me! Buildings speak to me a little more loudly, especially when they are pages out of history.

But here a feeling of an altogether different kind speaks! One calls up the past, and lets the shades of bygone things pass in review.

Among these are some that are quite ghastly, and so, however significant this may sometimes be, one does not always find in one's sensations a satisfaction for the sense of beauty ... unmixed, at any rate, never!

And without calling in history, there is indeed much that is beautiful in some buildings, but it is usually spoiled by guides--whether of paper, or of flesh and bone ... it comes to the same thing in the end!--guides who steal away your impression with their monotone: "this chapel was erected by the bishop of Münster in 1423 ... the columns are 63 feet high, and rest upon ... I do not know what, and I do not care, either.

That prattle is tiresome, for one feels that one must then have exactly sixty-three feet of admiration at the ready, so as not to pass, in the eyes of some, for a Vandal or a commercial traveler ... now there is a breed! --The Vandals?

--No, those others. Now one might say: keep your guide in your pocket, then, if it is the printed kind, and let it stand outside or hold its tongue in the other case; but apart from the fact that one really does often need information in order to judge at all rightly, even if one could always do without that information, one would still seek in vain, in any building, for anything that answers our longing for the beautiful for longer than a very brief moment, because it does not move.

This holds, I believe, for sculpture and paintings as well.

Nature is movement.

Growth, hunger, thinking, feeling, is movement ... stillness is death!

Without movement, no sorrow, no delight, no emotion!

Try once sitting there without stirring, and you will see how soon you make a ghostly impression on everyone else, and even on your own imagination.

At the finest tableau vivant one soon longs for the next number, however glorious the impression was at the beginning.

Now since our craving for beauty is not satisfied with a single glance at something beautiful, but needs a series of successive glances at the movement of the beautiful, we suffer something unsatisfying at the contemplation of that sort of artwork; and that is why I maintain that a beautiful woman--provided it is not portrait-beauty that stands still--comes nearest to the ideal of the divine.

How great the need is for the movement I mean, one can gather somewhat from the disgust caused by a danseuse, were she Elssler or Taglioni herself, when after a dance she stands on her left leg and grins out at the audience.

--That does not apply here, said Verbrugge, for that is absolutely ugly.

--I think so too. But still she offers it as beautiful, and as the climax to all that went before, in which there really may have been much that was beautiful.

She offers it as the point of the epigram, as the aux armes! of the Marseillaise she sang with her feet, as the rustling of the willows over the grave of the love just now assailed. Oh, sickening!

And that the spectators too, who usually--like all of us, more or less--ground their taste on habit and imitation, regard that very moment as the most striking, is plain from this: that it is precisely then that one bursts out in applause, as though one wished to convey: all that came before was very pretty too, but now I really cannot contain my admiration any longer!" You said that closing pose was utterly ugly--so do I! but where does this come from?