…galant tulip will hang down his head like to a virgin newly ravished1…
—ROBERT HERRICK
1
HERE IS A STORY of human folly.
It is not about fire consuming a great city on a river, nor the slaughter of defenseless people. It is not about a vast plain bathed in morning light where armed riders meet other riders to find out which of the two commanders will earn at the end of the day, after a murderous battle, a modest place in history, a monument of bronze, or, with less luck, give his name to an alleyway in some suburb of poverty.
Our drama is modest and with little pathos, far from the famous hemorrhages of history. Because everything began innocently—with a plant, a flower, a tulip (this is hard to imagine) that unleashed collective, uncontrollable passions. Further, for those who have studied the phenomenon the most amazing thing was that this folly shook a sober, hardworking, and parsimonious nation. The question arises: How did it happen that in enlightened Holland and not somewhere else, tulpenwoede—tulipomania—reached such frightening dimensions, shook the foundations of a solid national economy, and drew representatives of all social levels into a gigantic frenzy of gambling?
Some explain it with the proverbial love of the Netherlanders for flowers. An old anecdote recounts that a lady requested an artist to paint a bouquet of rare flowers for her because she could not afford to buy them. This is how a new and so far unknown branch of painting came into being. Let us stress that for this lady, inspirer of a new genre in art, aesthetic motives played a totally secondary role. What she wanted most was a real object: a crown of petals on a green stem. The artist’s work was a mere substitute, a shadow of existing things. Similarly, lovers doomed to separation must be content with the likeness of a beloved face. In the beginning the painting expresses nostalgia for a faraway and unreachable lost reality.
There are other reasons, more prosaic and down-to-earth, that sufficiently explain the peculiar Dutch predilection for flowers. Deprived of luxuriant, exuberant vegetation and disciplined by a rational economy, the country amazed many travelers because they found no humming wheat-fields there. Wheat was imported from abroad. There was little land, its quality often poor, while the price was always exorbitant. Most arable land was devoted to pastures, orchards, and gardens. The nature of the country required an intensive economy of land that was spatially restricted.
Nature also challenges man aesthetically, so it is not difficult to understand that a certain monotony of the Dutch landscape gave rise to dreams of multifarious, colorful, and unusual flora. Possibly the nostalgia for a lost paradise lurked behind it, which medieval painters represented in the form of a rosarium, an orchard, or a flower bed. Eternal greenness speaks to the imagination better than eternal light.
In comparison with the pompous splendor of the gardens of French or English lords, the equivalents in Holland were of course modest. Most often they occupied the space of barely several score square feet. But what a wealth of plants, what conscious composition of colors. A lawn with islands of moss and patches of multicolored flowers, lilac bushes and an apple tree, a pattern imposed on all of it and a network of lilliputian paths strewn with white sand.
Everyone, even a simple artisan, wished to own a flower bed at the back of his house and cultivate roses, irises, lilies, and hyacinths that are more beautiful, more unusual than those in his neighbor’s garden. This adoration of nature, like an echo of the most remote vegetative cults, had all the attributes of enlightened love. Eminent connoisseurs of the world of plants lectured in Leyden and other universities—for instance the Frenchman Lecluse2, called Clusius (more about him later on), who founded the first botanical garden in 1587. Scholars set out with colonists on distant, dangerous expeditions to learn the secrets of exotic nature. The public at large avidly read books devoted to the classification, anatomy, and cultivation of plants. The summa of this rich literature is a fat, three-volume work by Jan van der Meurs3 with the telling title Arboretum Sacrum.
In the Mauritshuis in The Hague there is a canvas, “Bouquet against a Vaulted Window,” by an excellent painter of flowers, Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder4. This painting always fills me with a kind of anxiety, although I realize its cause is not the subject chosen by the painter. For what is more soothing, more idyllic than an arrangement of roses, dahlias, irises, and orchids presented with sophisticated simplicity against a background of sky and a distant mountainous landscape fading into the blue?
Yet the treatment of the subject is striking and somewhat eerie. The flowers in this painting—quiet servants of nature, and helpless givers of delight—flaunt themselves; they are exclusive sovereigns who domineer with an intensity and force never encountered until then. It seems that an important and decisive act of liberation has occurred here. The “quiet servants of nature” abandon their role of ornament: they do not try to be graceful; they don’t languish, but attack the spectator with their proud, one wants to say their self-conscious, individuality. They seem overnatural, insistently present. All of this happens not because they are an expression of violent, internal states of the artist (like Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”), but quite the opposite. The shape, color, and character of the flowers have been reproduced scrupulously, in detail, with the cold impartiality of a botanist and anatomist. The light of the painting, clear and “objective,” means that the artist has abandoned all the charms of chiaroscuro and the painterly hierarchy that plunges some objects in shadow and accentuates others by lighting. The “Bouquet against a Vaulted Window” can be compared to Frans Hals’s collective portraits in which there is no division into persons who are more important or less.
Bosschaert’s painting was made around 1620, shortly before the artist’s death. The events we are about to relate took place several years later. But already in this painting it is possible to notice omens of an approaching storm. For aren’t these emancipated, dominating, rapacious flowers, loudly demanding admiration and praise, a symptom of a peculiar cult? The composition of the painting indicates this. The bouquet is placed on a high window as if on an altar, elevated above the rest of nature. A pagan monstrance of flowers.
In Bosschaert’s painting—auguring nothing good—are a few tulips.
2
It is not at all unlikely that illnesses have their history, and every epoch has its own definite sickness which did not occur in such guise before, and will never again return in the same form.
—TROELS-LUND5THE TULIP IS A gift from the East, like so many other blessed and ominous gifts: religions and superstitions, medicinal and intoxicating herbs, holy books and invasions, epidemics and fruit. Its name comes from Persian and designates a turban. For centuries it was a favorite and honored flower in the gardens of Armenia, Turkey, and Persia. At the sultan’s courts a tulip holiday was celebrated every year. The poets Omar Khayyam and Hafiz sang its praises, it is mentioned in the tales of The Thousand and One Nights; before it traveled to Europe it had a long Oriental career of many years behind it.
Its appearance in the West was the contribution of a diplomat. He was Augier Ghislain de Busbecq6, envoy of the Austrian Hapsburgs at the court of Suleiman the Magnificent in Constantinople. An educated man and curious about the world (his interesting travel descriptions have been preserved), he dutifully wrote comprehensive diplomatic reports. But it seems he had far greater enthusiasm for collecting Greek manuscripts, ancient inscriptions, and naturalia. In 1554 he sent a transport of tulip bulbs to the Viennese court of the Emperor Francis I. Such was the innocent beginning of the evil.
From this time on the flower’s popularity spread in Europe with surprising speed. Konrad Gesner7, called the German Pliny, gave the first scientific description of the plant in his work De Hortis Germaniae (1561). In the same year guests of the banker family Fugger admired patches of this still rare flower at their gardens in Augsburg. A little later it appears in France, the Netherlands, and England, where John Tradescant8, gardener of Charles I, boasted of cultivating fifty varieties of tulip. For a short period gastronomers tried to make a delicacy out of it for elegant tables: in Germany it was eaten with sugar. In England, on the other hand, it was spiced with oil and vinegar. The infamous conspiracy of pharmacists to make a medicine against flatulence from this plant also luckily came to nothing. The tulip remained itself, the poetry of Nature to which vulgar utilitarianism is foreign.
Thus in the beginning it was a flower of monarchs, of the well-born, the wealthy—very precious, carefully kept in gardens, and inaccessible. Contemporaries invented a soul for it; they said it expressed elegance and refined meditation. Even its infirmity—its lack of smell—was interpreted as the virtue of moderation. One could indeed say that cold beauty has an introverted character. The tulip allows us to admire it but does not awaken violent emotions, desire, jealousy, or erotic fervors. It is a peacock among flowers; at any rate, this is what the courtly “philosophers of gardens” wrote. History proved that they erred.
It is well known that court fashions are contagious; also they are often imitated by the lower classes, and for this they meet a well-deserved divine punishment. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, chroniclers in France observed the first symptoms—let us put it this way—of acute tulip fever. In 1608 a miller parted with his mill for a single bulb of a rarely encountered variety called “Mère brune.” A young groom was supposedly enchanted when his father-in-law gave him a single precious plant as his entire dowry, appropriately called for the occasion “Mariage de ma fille.” Another enthusiast did not hesitate to exchange his flourishing brewery for a bulb, which since that time carries the not very elegant name “Tulipe brasserie.”
One could multiply examples without difficulty to prove that wherever the tulip appeared cases of tulipomania were registered, sometimes more, sometimes less. But only in Holland did it reach the intensity and dimensions of an epidemic.
Its beginnings are unclear and difficult to establish precisely, both in terms of time and of space. With the plague the matter is much simpler: One day a ship from the East puts in at a harbor. Part of the crew has a high fever; some are delirious, and tumors can be seen on their bodies. They go ashore and are put in hospitals, houses, and inns; the first deaths occur, and the number of fatal illnesses rapidly grows. The entire city, the entire region, the entire country is swept by plague. Princes and beggars, saints and freethinkers, criminals and innocent children all die. Since the time of Thucydides this pandemonium of death has been described many times and in detail.
On the other hand, tulipomania is a mental phenomenon, and here the troubles begin. In other words, it is a social psychosis like other psychoses, whether associated with religion, war, revolution, or the economy—for instance, gold fever or the crash of the American stock market in 1929. Despite numerous, striking analogies, it cannot of course be explained in terms of infectious diseases (but what a pity!). We lack instruments that would allow us to measure quantitatively the range of the epidemic, its degree of “infectiousness,” the number with an acute or mild sickness, “the temperature curve” of affected individuals. The only method left is to enter into the spirit of the events, a cautious description that notes both the extreme and characteristic cases.
It is not possible to define exactly when the tulip appeared for the first time in the Netherlands. Most likely it was quite early. We know, for example, that in 1562 a shipment of tulip bulbs was received in the port of Antwerp. But the intensive interest in the flower occurred many years later, most likely reflecting the fashion reigning at the royal courts, especially the French. At the end of the sixteenth century something happened that on the surface seems an unimportant case from police chronicles but in fact was one of the first symptoms of tulipomania on Dutch soil. We have already mentioned Carolus Clusius, professor of botany at the famous university in Leyden (he previously held the rank of Director of the Imperial Gardens in Vienna). This scholar was widely known, at the same time talkative and possibly somewhat vain. At every occasion he talked about the plants he was cultivating, not only to university colleagues but also to chance listeners. Usually he spoke with enthusiasm and unconcealed pride about the tulips, which, he claimed, he would not exchange for any of the world’s treasures. It was an open provocation, which the scholar probably did not realize. One night—let us say moonless—unknown persons forced their way into the university gardens and stole Clusius’s tulips. The thieves must have had considerable scientific qualifications, because their loot was exclusively the precious and truly rare tulip varieties. The embittered botanist stopped studying this plant till the end of his life.
The story recalls the ballad about the sorcerer’s apprentice. A sudden transmutation occurs: the object of patient, scholarly, and therefore disinterested studies is transformed into an object of insane financial transactions. An important question comes to mind here: Why precisely was it the tulip, and not another flower, that liberated the madness?
There were several reasons. We already noted that the tulip was an aristocratic, almost worshipped flower. What a pleasure to possess something that was the pride of monarchs! Aside from snobbish considerations, there were also reasons that might be called purely biological, for the cultivation of a tulip did not involve any large problems or troubles. It was a grateful flower, easy to tame. Everyone who owned even the smallest patch of earth could give himself up to the passion.
In Dutch gardens a certain kind of virus was rife that often caused the petals of the tulip’s crown to take on fantastic shapes with ruffled or pleated edges. It was quickly learned how to draw a profit from this pathology.
Finally, and this is particularly important for our thoughts on the scientific basis of tulipomania, no other flower possessed such a quantity of varieties. People were convinced that this plant had a peculiar property: sooner or later it would produce spontaneously—that is, without man’s participation—new mutations, and new multicolored forms. It was said nature particularly cherished this flower, and endlessly played with it. To speak in a less ornate way, it meant that the buyer of a tulip bulb was in a situation like a man playing a lottery: blind chance could bestow a large fortune on him.
In the first half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch took pride in three things: a powerful and invincible navy, “the sweets of freedom greater than anywhere else,” and—if one may combine important and unimportant matters in a single sentence—at least several hundred varieties of tulips. It seems the dictionary could not keep pace with this wealth of nature. We have simultaneously five kinds of “Miracle,” four “Emeralds,” as many as thirty “Paragons of Perfection” (a semantic abuse of the word). Those endowed with fantasy invented names full of poetry—“Royal Agate,” “Diana,” and “Harlequin”—while those deprived of imagination called their specimens simply “Gaudy,” “Virgin,” or “Yellow-Red.” To cope with the growing task, military ranks were introduced and even history was harnessed, so we have “Admiral van Enckhuysen,” “General van Eyck,” and many others. A certain clever cultivator boldly decided to bid higher, calling his variety “General of Generals.” There is, of course, “King,” “Vice-King,” and “Prince,” as if someone wanted to introduce military and aristocratic order into this multifariousness bordering on chaos.
The huge quantity of tulip varieties that Holland managed to cultivate stirs our admiration and bewilderment, but it contained the seeds of catastrophe as well. If a game uses a small number of cards as a rule it is simple, banal, and quickly ends. However, when the players dispose of let’s say several decks of cards, the field is open to complex combinations, intelligent strategy, a balanced risk, and shrewd methods. The same happened with tulips; one had only to agree which varieties would have the value of an “ace” and which would be counted among “minnows.”
Of course this is a greatly simplified scheme, a first, timid approach to the subject. Ludic elements undoubtedly played a role. But in fact tulipomania was a very complex phenomenon. It seems the most decisive and important aspect of the problem was economic; in other words, the order of the stock market was introduced into the order of nature. The tulip began to lose the properties and charms of a flower: it grew pale, lost its colors and shapes, became an abstraction, a name, a symbol interchangeable with a certain amount of money. Complicated tables existed on which individual varieties were arranged according to the changing market prices like valuable papers or money rates. The hour of the great speculation had struck.
During the entire period of tulipomania, which lasted several years, “Semper Augustus” invariably remained at the top of these price lists, like a sun standing motionless at the zenith. I never personally encountered it. It is vain to look for it in flower shops, which like all our other shops sell standard roses, standard eggs, standard cars. My fault. If I visited botanical gardens as assiduously as museums, the meeting might have occurred. I know this tulip, however, from old, colorful engravings; it is indeed beautiful, thanks to its sophisticated and at the same time simple harmony of colors: petals impeccably white, and with small, fiery, ruby veins running along them, the bottom of the chalice blue like the reflection of a sunny sky. It is an exceptionally nice specimen, but the price reached by “Semper Augustus,” 5,000 florins (the equivalent of a house with a large garden), causes a shiver of anxiety. The dikes of common sense had broken. From now on we will move on the slippery terrain of unhealthy fantasy, feverish desire for profit, insane illusions, and bitter disappointments.
Transactions were often made in kind. These allow us to measure the dimensions of the madness even better. For a bulb of the tulip “Vice-King” (it was worth half the value of “Semper Augustus”), the following was paid in the form of farm products:
2 carts of wheat
4 carts of rye
4 fat oxen
8 fat pigs
12 fat sheep
2 barrels of wine
4 barrels of the foremost beer
1,000 pounds of cheese
A bed, clothes, and a silver chalice were added to this drink, food, and fatness.
In the initial phase of tulipomania, prices went constantly up. As stockbrokers would say, the trend on the “flower stock market” was at first “friendly,” then “lively,” all the way to “very lively,” to pass in the end to a state of euphoria completely uncontrolled by common sense.
A greater and greater gap opened between the real value of the plants sold and the price paid for them. It was paid willingly, with joy, as if expecting the smile of fate. Most of those touched by tulipomania counted on a boom; they were convinced the rising trend would continue forever (don’t they resemble the progressives?), and that a bulb bought today would double its value tomorrow or at the latest the day after tomorrow. If one treats these fantastic speculations seriously and without irony (because “seniority” in history does not entitle one to it), we can see something more profound—for instance, the old myth of humanity about miraculous multiplication.
In earthly categories the matter looked as follows: the sellers took no account at all of the actual possibilities of the buyers, and what is worse the buyers seemed to have entirely lost the instinct of self-preservation. They were no longer aware of their own possibilities. The hectic atmosphere that accompanies large stock operations is universally known, but in the case of tulipomania it was something more serious and more pathological than an “atmosphere.”
The psychological deviations defined as manias possess certain common features. The persons affected by the disease have a tendency to create imaginary, autonomous worlds governed by their own rules. In our case it was like a gigantic flower lottery, and all those who played expected the first prize. The game, however, did not take place on an island especially leased for the purpose, but in a country where the cardinal virtues were caution, moderation, and accountability. A system based on bourgeois calculation could not coexist with a system of financial phantasmagoria. The collison of the world of desires with everyday reality was inevitable, and as is usual in such cases, painful.
It is worthwhile now to ponder in what way, in what places, and in what social framework the speculation in tulip bulbs took place. The answer closest to the truth would be: on the margin of normal economic life, in its dark corners, so to say. Several times we have mentioned the stock market, but this should not be taken literally. There never was and there could not be an official tulip stock market, because this institution assumes openness, admits a limited number of those authorized to take part, and the results of transactions are announced to all who are interested.
On the other hand, we know the wild commerce in tulips caused the authorities to be seriously worried and alarmed. Orders were given to limit and curb, if not eliminate, this dangerous social phenomenon. But these did not help much; strictly speaking their effect was the opposite of what was intended. The elements cannot be calmed by gentle persuasion.
The country lived in fever. Whoever remembers war knows very well that the most fantastic, unverified information is capable of pulling people from the bottom of despair and transporting them to towering heights of optimism, of illusory hopes. A similar thing happened in our case. News of sudden fortunes achieved because of the tulips spread with the speed of lightning. A citizen of Amsterdam who owned a small garden earned 60,000 florins in four months, a wealth not dreamed of by an average merchant even at the end of a laborious life. An Englishman who knew nothing about flowers managed to make five thousand pounds by ingenious speculations. One had to have a stoic character indeed to resist these temptations.
Because the whole procedure was unofficial and even had the character of a forbidden game, it became more attractive for precisely this reason, drawing ever new participants. It was like a period of prohibition when those with only a moderate liking for intoxicants manifest their freedom by excessive consumption of alcohol.
There are of course no statistics that show how many people were touched by tulipomania. But it is possible, even probable, that they numbered in the tens of thousands. What is particularly important, they cannot be assigned to any single, specific social group. Among them were the wealthy and the poor, merchants and weavers, butchers and students, painters and peasants, peat diggers and poets, city clerks and junk dealers, sailors and virtuous widows, persons generally respected and criminals. Even the followers of all twenty or more religious denominations took unanimous part in this race for fortune.
The poor risked most of all—the poor risked everything. When we read that a criminal drawn into the whirlpool of speculations pawned his tools, we realize the full horror of the situation. Preachers thundered from their pulpits against wicked tulipomania, but the malicious maintained that they slipped away to other cities where they could succumb to the sinful craze without unwanted witnesses.
But never mind the pastors. They will always find some excuse at the Last Judgment. What is worse, or frankly disgraceful, is that children were drawn into the action. Success in the game required among other things collecting the greatest possible amount of information—prices, places of transaction, fluctuations of the market. In simple language, to know which tulip bulbs the neighbor hid under his jacket and for how much he sold them in the tavern At the Braying Donkey, all of it had to be found out by a teenager performing the vile function of spy.
Fever, raving, and sleeplessness. Sleeplessness, because many tulip transactions were sealed at night. Active participation in speculating often swallowed up many hours of the day, and could not be combined with other more productive occupations. Those who cultivated tulips lived like misers in a sack of gold. Ingenious systems of alarm bells were installed in gardens to rouse the owner to his feet if an uninvited guest approached his patch.
The epidemic character of tulipomania explains its enormous geographic range. It touched not only the traditional garden districts—for instance the regions of Haarlem, but also Amsterdam, Alkmaar, Hoorn, Enkhuizen, Utrecht, Rotterdam—that is, all the greater conglomerations in Holland. It is precisely there that the number of victims was the highest. The bacillus of tulipomania was everywhere in the air, and threatened everyone. How much easier it is to dispose of a visible enemy: the gates of the city are closed, the brave defenders go out onto the walls…
But after all, something exists that we call the power of reason, and it is an effective weapon (not always) against unbridled irrational powers. We know that Holland was a country of people who liked to read, with wise authors, educated book-sellers, and enlightened publishers. Actual problems would meet a response in print very quickly; this was true not only of serious political and religious disputes. The affair of tulipomania, whose dimensions awoke understandable anxiety, also met with decisive resistance and protests from sober citizens. But the country was liberal; public opinion differentiated. Together with voices of reason, pamphlets appeared that were practical introductions to the principles of tulip speculation, prolegomena to insanity: teach-yourself manuals on how to become a madman.
In all of it there was a method, and even a ritual. One author recommended that if someone succeeded in cultivating an unknown variety of tulip he should act as follows: immediately go to a professional gardener (time presses, because someone else might have managed a similar trick), not alone but accompanied by acquaintances, friends, even persons encountered by chance. The goal was evident: to give the greatest possible publicity to the event. A council took place at the gardener’s, each person present expressing his opinion about the botanical revelation—exactly like high church councils preoccupied with the problems of real and imaginary miracles.
Now a very important step followed. We could call it comparative: the consideration of the new variety side by side with others that were already known. If it showed similarity to some famous “Admiral” but was less beautiful, it should be modestly called “General.” This ritual of baptism was incredibly important. The tulip became a personality, or to speak less grandiloquently and use stock-market terminology, a value admitted into circulation. In the end it was proper to offer a fine wine to all those present, because it was up to them to spread the news about the birth of a new variety, to praise its graces.
Transactions with tulip bulbs would take place in the fumes of beer, gin, and lamb, in restaurants, inns, and taverns. Some of them had rooms specially designated for this purpose; they were a kind of club, or branches of a huge and well-concealed stock market. The fight for each precious variety of tulip must have been fierce. If several buyers competed for it, the one who wanted to outbid others would add to an already excessive price a carriage with a pair of horses.
The entire country was covered by a network of more or less known, secret, or almost open gambling “dens” for tulips. It did not involve any demonic power but the simple rule of every “big game,” every powerful addiction—to draw in and entrap the greatest possible number of people. Because madness cannot be logically justified, it is necessary to have strong statistics in one’s defense. This is what everybody does, or almost everybody, including politicians: to eliminate or substantially decrease the number of those who stand aside, who look on or observe critically and spoil the game. The world of tulipomaniacs strove to become a total world.
How did it happen in practice? A document exists, literary to be sure but trustworthy, which provides precious information about the means of capturing new enthusiasts. A dialogue takes place between two friends. The first, Pieter, is an expert speculator; the second, Jan, plays the role of a novice in this conversation:
PIETER: I like you very much. This is why I want to propose to you this advantageous transaction. I do it without any self-interest, and out of pure friendship.
JAN: I am listening carefully, my dear friend.
PIETER: I have a bulb of the tulip “Harlequin.” It is a very beautiful variety, and in addition much sought after on the market.
JAN: But I never had anything to do with flowers in my whole life. I don’t even have a garden.
PIETER: You don’t understand a thing. Please listen to me; don’t interrupt because who knows, maybe today a great fortune is knocking at your door. Can I go on?
JAN: Yes, yes, of course.
PIETER: Well, the “Harlequin” bulb is worth a hundred florins, and maybe even more. In the name of our unblemished (as I said) friendship, I will let you have it for fifty florins. Still today, without any effort, you can make quite a lot of money.
JAN: This is indeed a splendid proposition. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. Only tell me, please, what am I to do with this “Harlequin”? After all, I will not stand at the street corner…
PIETER: I will tell you the whole secret. But note it down well in your memory. Why are you fidgeting?
JAN: I am listening, only I am a bit dizzy.
PIETER: Do exactly as I say. Go to the inn At the Lion. Ask the innkeeper where the tulip vendors meet. You will enter the room he indicates. Then someone will say in a very thick voice (but don’t you be put off by it): “A stranger has come in.” In answer to that, cluck like a chicken. From that moment on you will be included in the community of vendors.
May God protect Jan’s Calvinist soul! We part with him on the threshold of farce and a step away from tragedy. Darkness covers his future fate. It is not even known whether he managed to cluck in an appropriate and persuasive manner at the decisive moment. On the basis of this tale there is little hope he would become a shark of the tulip stock market. It seems he was assigned the role of victim.
One more detail merits our attention. This introduction to the trade of the tulipomaniacs reminds us of patterns known from other areas. Keeping all proportions in mind, it recalls the ritual of initiation. Of course the Masonic lodges arranged it with greater pomp and better knowledge of esoteric science.
Mania is an elevated state of mind. Those who have not experienced it at least once are the poorer for it. Besides, in certain conditions it brings advantages. An ordinary man who was unknown to anyone—he was neither a poet nor painter nor statesman—recalled with genuine sentiment the times of the tulipomania. His name was Waermondt9; he held office always in the same tavern, and his function was that of broker. Between one transaction and another, “I ate fried meat and fish, chicken and hare, even delicate pâtés. I also drank wine and beer from early morning till three or four at night. I always carried more money away at night than I had at the beginning of the day.” A true Shlarafia10, land of laziness and plenty.
3
“La maladie infectueuse tend à la fois à se perpétuer et, pour assurer cette perpétuité, à se modifier suivant les circonstances11.”
—CHARLES NICOLLE
THE GREATEST INTENSITY OF tulipomania fell during the years 1634 to 1637. The great crash took place in the winter of 1637—the whole imaginary world fell apart. If someone managed to reproduce “the curve of the tulip fever,” it would closely resemble the temperature chart of a patient with a serious infectious disease. The line rises fast, continues for some time on a very high level, and at the end falls rapidly.
A question comes to mind, however: What fate, or implacable logic of events, caused it to happen exactly in the winter of 1637? There are many answers.
Some believe that the victory over the tulip epidemic was the merit of the healthy portion of Dutch society. It created a sanitary belt that blocked the spread of the illness. There were those who actively opposed tulipomania; the opposition must have been quite strong since a number of brochures, magazines, pamphlets, satires, and cartoons from those times—they have been preserved until today—pitilessly make fun of the unfortunate maniacs. In colloquial language they were called “the hooded ones” or madmen; in those times the mentally ill wore hoods drawn over their faces, a peculiar device for “visual” protection of the healthy part of the nation.
Henry Pot12, a painter of collective portraits, religious and genre pictures, represented the mania afflicting his country under a veil of transparent allegory in his work “The Cart of Madmen.” On this cart we recognize Flora holding in her hand three of the most precious varieties of tulip: “Semper Augustus,” “General Bol,” and “Admiral Hoorn.” Behind the patron of nature there are five symbolic figures: Good-for-Nothing, Wealth-Craver, the Drunkard, and two ladies, Vain Hope and Poverty. A huge crowd of people runs after the cart calling, “We too want to sell our tulips.”
A countless number of stories, anecdotes, and jokes show that tulipomania was answered with a decided tulipophobia, an unrelenting hostility to what was, after all, an innocent plant. In fact it deserved neither frantic adoration nor boundless spite, but we are speaking of times rocked by passions. It was said that a professor of Leyden University, Fortius13, not a theologian but a professor of botany, attacked a tulip whenever he saw one, destroying it with his cane. In this unrefined manner he transformed himself from scholar into inquisitor and moralist.
Fortius’s cane did not possess magic power, and even the most vicious pamphlets could not tame the insanity. Some maintain that the mortal blow to tulipomania was dealt by the authorities, with their wise orders and decrees. They realized the situation was serious and could not be looked at passively, because limitless speculation threatens the foundations of a national economy.
A number of institutions, from the florists’ guild all the way up to the Estates General, or parliament, decided to oppose the folly. Instructions and resolutions poured from them, at first hesitant and inefficient but continuing all the way to the drastic decree of the Estates in April 1637, that annulled all speculative agreements and established a maximum value for a tulip bulb. It was 50 florins. “Semper Augustus” was now worth one-hundredth of its recent market price. This happened quickly and unexpectedly, like a palace revolution, like the dethronement of an emperor.
The authorities’ efforts to overcome tulipomania, their concern about the fate and wealth of the citizens, are worthy of praise and of course should be fully appreciated. It seems, however, that the majority of scholars are mistaken when they ascribe to them a decisive role. We know from experience that all bans and prohibitions in cases of acute narcomania bring results that are the opposite of those intended. Ever since Paradise, the fruit that is forbidden is the most desired.
The decision of the Estates General was made late, very late, when the mania was already dying out. It was, therefore, a council gathered at the bed of a patient who was hopelessly ill, or to use an expression taken from the lexicon of tauromachy a coup de grâce. Indeed, nothing could be saved any longer.
In our opinion, tulipomania was killed by its own madness. Proofs supporting the thesis are provided by an analysis of the changing moods of the tulip market. In the period of euphoria the profits of the speculators were huge; however, they were not always expressed in negotiable currency or liquid money, but in credit. The owner of the variety “Semper Augustus” was universally considered to be a wealthy man; consequently he could borrow large amounts, and this is what he did most of the time. The crazy turnover of the market became more and more abstract. What was sold was no longer the bulbs (their value was absolutely arbitrary, further and further removed from reality and common sense), but the names of bulbs. Like shares, they often changed owners ten times a day.
Prices rose. It was expected that they would grow endlessly, because such is the logic of mania. A large number of the wary accumulated “values” in order to throw them on the market at the most propitious moment. It was precisely these cautious ones—as usually happens with greedy people entangled in the nets of gambling—who suffered the most painful defeat. Faith in the bright future of tulipomania broke down already in 1636. The edifice of trust and rampant illusions caved in. The supply of tulips was larger and larger, the demand frightfully diminishing; at the end everyone wanted to sell, but there were no bold risk takers any longer. Henry Pot represented this phase of tulipomania accurately: the desperate cry of the crowd running after Flora’s vehicle becomes quite clear in this context.
Thus the crisis had far outpaced the intervention of the authorities. On the third of January 1637, four months before the decree of the Estates General, an Amsterdam gardener bought a precious tulip bulb for a bargain price of 1,250 florins. At first happy, he soon found that he could not sell it for even half or even one-tenth of his own cost. For a sharp drop had now begun, and the game was not to make money but lose as little as possible. The entire story of this unfortunate affair extends between two poles—a long, desperate assault upon fortune, and a sudden wild panic.
We are parting thus with tulipomania, and it is a separation full of tears, curses, and moans. The statement that it could not have happened otherwise is small consolation for the victims.
What was the outcome? Because everything took place secretly, on the margins—in dark corridors and in the underground of official life—it is difficult to evaluate the dimensions of the catastrophe in measurable terms. But the outcome was without any doubt tragic: thousands of ruined estates, tens of thousands of people without work and, in addition, threatened by trials. Bankruptcy was punished, as a rule, with severe prison sentences. There were legions who had lightheartedly gone into debt. Finally—no statistics account for it—a long list of innocent families deprived of means of existence, children doomed to poverty or public charity, broken careers, destroyed reputations and dignity. The bankrupts did not have many ways out: joining the merchant marine and navy, which required certain qualifications, or begging, which did not require any special talents.
It does not need to be argued that it was an “exclusively” bourgeois tragedy. But the scale of the passions of the flower speculators equaled the scale of a heroic tenor in an opera. The aria of the stockbrokers was loud and trivial, that is evident. If we are to drag this theatrical analogy out by the hair even further, it was played without sword or blood, even without poison. Why on earth, then, does it move the imagination?
Throughout all the periods of tulipomania, not only during its fatal epilogue but during the days of its victorious euphoria, small and great human dramas were occurring. Among the many that memory has preserved we select one, a theme that might be taken straight from Chekhov’s stories.
The union of florists in Haarlem became alarmed by sensational news that gripped everyone with feverish excitement: a poor, unknown shoemaker from The Hague was growing an unusual variety of tulip called “Black Tulip.” It was decided to act immediately—that is, to check the matter on the spot and as far as possible to obtain the specimen. Five gentlemen dressed in black entered the dark cubbyhole of the shoemaker. They began commercial negotiations—very strange negotiations, because the gentlemen from Haarlem were playing the role of benefactors. Supposedly they had come there out of pure philanthropy to help the poor artisan, but at the same time they were unable to conceal how much they cared to possess the “Black Tulip.” The master of last and leather took in the situation, and tried to get the highest price. After much haggling a transaction finally took place: 1,500 florins, not a trifling sum. A moment of happiness for the poor shoemaker.
Now something unexpected happened, something that in drama is called a turning point. The merchants threw down the bulb bought at such a high price and in fury trampled it to a pulp. “You idiot”—they shouted at the stupefied shoepatcher—“we also have a bulb of the ‘Black Tulip.’ Besides us, no one else in the world! No king, no emperor or sultan. If you had asked ten thousand florins for your bulb and a couple of horses on top of it, we would have paid without a word. And remember this. Good fortune won’t smile on you a second time in your entire life, because you are a blockhead.” They left. The shoemaker staggered, dragged himself to his attic, lay down on his bed and, covering himself with his coat, breathed his last breath.
TULIPOMANIA—THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY botanical folly we know—was an episode inscribed on the margin of Great History. We have chosen it not without reason. It should be honestly confessed: we have a strange liking for presenting follies in the sanctuaries of reason, and we also like to study catastrophes against a gentle landscape. There are reasons more important than frivolous personal or aesthetic inclinations, however. For doesn’t the affair we have described remind us of other, more dangerous follies of humanity that consist in the irrational attachment to a single idea, a single symbol, or a single formula for happiness?
This is why we cannot put a large period after the date 1637 and consider the matter definitively closed. It is not reasonable to erase it from memory, or count it among the inconceivable fads of the past. If tulipomania was a kind of psychological epidemic, and this is what we believe, the probability exists—bordering on certainty—that one day it will afflict us again in this or another form.
In some Far Eastern port it is getting ready for the journey.
Zbigniew Herbert
The Collected Prose 1948–1998
