BOOKS
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Calvinists prepared to make a highly formal declaration in favor
of the state religion while still covertly practicing their own. The
book is as cautious in theory-making as it is uninhibited in style,
and it does not leave itself open to the familiar objection that
much that is claimed for Dutch painting as an effect of the
Reformation could be claimed for the art of Catholic Europe too.
There are no easy answers here, of a general sort: not Calvinism,
not sea-flooding, not nationalism, and not language, which the
Dutch share across a southern frontier with Antwerp and Ghent.
The Netherlands was what it was, as a space on the map, and is
what it is, because it was as much as the Dutch could free from
Spain down to the Twelve Years' Truce of 1609, and as much as
they could keep at the final Treaty of Munster in 1648. The Dutch
are Dutch because they are Dutch.
It
is a land unified and de–
fined neither by language nor by religion.
By culture, then, or popular manners. And here the book
turns into a whimsical romp, its documentation shoved to the
end. Whimsy is attractive in itself. It is also an important
ideological tactic of the historian in a post-utopian age like the
1980s, and the book breathes an air of detachment, even
skepticism, so natural that one suspects the author has long since
abandoned all prospect of anything else. It is not the truth-content
of propositions that interests him, but the fact that some three
centuries ago Dutchmen thought and believed them. It is only
with a start that one realizes that they may have thought
something because it was true . An excess of luxury can
endanger the moral life, after all. If epics of shipwreck
"emphasized the suddenness of catastrophe even when fortunes
seemed brightest," as he puts it, it may be that they did so because
shipwrecks, like car crashes, really are like that. The tone is
amused, anthropological, gay. Schama is always in control of his
concepts: mentalities and moral geographies, one feels , can be
wildly amusing after three hundred years, and are seldom
anything else. Only in the prelude on the heroic struggle against
Spain and in the chapter on the tolerance of minorities do we
hear a hint of what Holland has given to the world that is
The book justly ends with a conclusion in which nothing is
concluded-unless the proposition that all general conclusions,
in this matter, are risky or false. "If there is one Dutch culture,"
Schama remarks , "there are many rooms within it." The last
