"But to enjoy the Low
Countries, we have to put on a very particular pair of
spectacles and bend our nose well over our task, and,
beyond our consciousness that our gains are real gains,
remain decidedly at loss how to classify them. This is
the charming thing in Holland — the way one feels
one's observation lowered to a relish of the harmonies
of the minor key; persuaded to respect small things
and take note of small differences; so that really a
week's sojourn here, if properly used, ought to make
one at the worst a more reasonable, and at the best a
more kindly, person. The beauty which is no beauty;
the ugliness which is not ugliness; the poetry which is
prose, and the prose which is poetry; the landscape
which seems to be all sky until you have taken particular pains to discover it, and turns
out to be half water
when you have discovered it; the virtues, when they
are graceful (like cleanliness), exaggerated to a vice,
and when they are sordid (like the getting and keeping
of money), refined to a dignity; the mild gray light
which produced in Rembrandt the very genius of chiaroscuro ; the stretch of whole provinces
on the principles of a billiard- table, which produced a school of
consummate landscapists; the extraordinary, reversal
of custom, in which man seems, with a few windmills
and ditches, to do what he will, and Providence, holding the North Sea in the hollow of his
hand, what he can... " p. 383
Henry James,
Transatlantic Sketches (1875)
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