Here was a confessional; there a farewell between lovers;
here a wounded Boer meeting his death at the bayonet of an English
dastard; there a Queen Eleanor sucking poison from her husband's
arm. A series of illuminated scenes of rapine and disaster might be
studied through magnifying glasses. The presence of a wax bust of
Zola was due, I imagine, less to his illustrious career than to the
untoward circumstances of his death. The usual Sleeping Beauty heaved
her breast punctually in the centre of the tent.
In one point only did the exhibition differ from the wax works of
the French and Italian fairs--it was undeviatingly decent. There
were no jokes, and no physiological models. But the Dutch, I should
conjecture, are not morbid. They have their coarse fun, laugh,
and get back to business again. Judged by that new short-cut to
a nation's moral tone, the picture postcard, the Dutch are quite
sound. There is a shop in the high-spirited Nes Straat at Amsterdam
where a certain pictorial ebullience has play, but I saw none other
of the countless be-postcarded windows in all Holland that should
cause a serious blush on any cheek; while the Nes Straat specimens
were fundamentally sound, Rabelaisian rather than Armand-Sylvestrian,
not vicious but merely vulgar.
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