Het Bilderdijk-Museum. Jaargang 6

Willem Bilderdijk west of the Mississippi:
Evidence of the poet's continuing influence in the life of Hendrik Pieter Scholte^1.

Generally speaking, the record of Willem Bilderdijk's impact on Hendrik Pieter Scholte (1805-1868), spiritual and temporal leader of a group of religious separatists who founded Pella, Iowa in 1847, focuses on the poet's influence during the final years of his life upon a small circle of disciples, including Scholte, who formed the nucleus of the nineteenth-century Dutch Réveil^2.. It would seem that in some ways Scholte enjoyed a position of particular closeness to the mentor and his family: he was the individual chosen to prepare the Foreword to the 1830 edition of Bilderdijk's Beschouwing der vijf tafereelen van Josephs leven, and for a brief period following the poet's death enjoyed correspondence with Bilderdijk's son Lodewijk^3.. When he lay sick in 1836, Scholte compared his state to that of his beloved master in the final days, noting in a letter to Anne Maurits Cornelis van Hall: ‘Wat er dus van mij worden zal zal de tijd leeren, ik heb al eens gedacht dat deze toestand veel overeenkomst heeft met die van Bilderdijk in zijnen laatste tijd,’ observing by way of contrast, ‘doch deeze maakte nog heerlijke verzen’^4.. Nevertheless, it is generally conceded that the. mantle of the poet-as-prophet passed to Isaac da Costa, and that any further interest in Scholte would center upon his activities as a theologian and the charismatic and utopian visionary who, with a band of redoubtable followers, established a Dutch-American enclave in the American Midwest^5..

To an extent, this view is quite accurate. Though Scholte continued to write prolifically, his contribution to the annals of Dutch literary history remained negligible.

A study of the mature author Scholte must occupy itself primarily with the myriad publications, not necessarily of a literary nature, produced in America. In the new homeland, Scholte steadfastly resisted impulses toward Dutch particularism. In contrast to the trend witnessed in similar immigrant colonies, Scholte founded a newspaper whose language was not Dutch, but English^6.. When he produced the first anti-slavery tract

1. Special gratitude is due to Mrs. Martha Lautenbach, former curator of the Scholte House in Pella, Iowa, to Miss Alice Lammers, who has held the same position and for many years served faithfully as Central College Archivist, and to Mr. John Vande Voort and Mr. John Vroom for valuable technical assistance. The Scholte House is located at 728 Washington Street in Pella; much of the archival material is preserved at Central College, also in Pella.

2. It would not be possible in this context to cite all of the literature pertinent to a study of this movement. Among the standard works a special place must be conceded to M. Elisabeth Kluit, Het protestantse réveil in Nederland en daarbuiten 1815-1865 (Amsterdam 1970). For source material of unparalleled usefulness in researching Pella and its founder, see C. Smits, De Afscheiding van 1834, 7 vols (Oud Karspel-Dordrecht 1971-1986). In particular, one must note vols 3 and 5, replete with material from the Scholte papers in the Central College Archives, and vol. 6, Het réveil en ds. H.P. Scholte. Correspondentie. See also note 5.

3. In a letter to H.F. Kohlbrügge dated 29 September, 1830, Scholte refers to the Tafereelen as ‘het stukje Bilderdijk, met welks uitgave ik mij op het verzoek van den drukker belast had’ (reproduced in Smits, Afscheiding, 6, 229). The correspondence with Lodewijk Bilderdijk is discussed and reproduced in Smits, Afscheiding, 6, 22-28.

4. Reproduced in Smits, Afscheiding, 5, 316-318.

5. There is no single definitive study of Scholte. For a theologian's approach to this many-sided figure, see Lubbertus Oostendorp, H.P. Scholte. Leader of the secession of 1834 and founder of Pella. Th.D. dissertation, Free University of Amsterdam (Franeker 1964).

6. On Scholte's use of English in a journalistic context, see the comment by Henry S. Lucas, Netherlanders in America. Dutch immigration to the United States and Canada, 1789-1950 (Ann Arbor, Michigan 1955), 591. For a more recent assessment of Scholte's attitudes toward language use, see Philip E. Webber, Pella Dutch. The portrait of a language and its use in one of Iowa's ethnic communities (Ames, Iowa 1988), 48-49 and passim. The most comprehensive study of the Dutch-American press is Hendrik Edelman, The Dutch language press in America (Nieuwkoop 1986). See also Conrad Bult, ‘Dutch-American newspapers: their history and role’, The Dutch in America. Immigration, settlement and cultural change, ed. Robert P. Swierenga (New Brunswick, New Jersey 1985), 273-293.

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H.P. Scholte as a young man. Scholte house. Photo courtesy of The American Folklife Center, United States Library of Congress.

published west of the Mississippi (a work that Bilderdijk would scarcely have authored), Scholte signed the piece with the by-line ‘An Adopted Citizen’^7.. Even when he wrote in Dutch, e.g. in his messianic (and short-lived) periodical De Toekomst, Scholte warned against any feelings that a Christian soul might enjoy special benefit because of national origin: ‘in Christus is niet Dutch, German or American [sic]’^8..

All this, however, bypasses the unusual and manyfaceted evidence from Pella for the livelong esteem accorded by Scholte to his beloved master.

When Scholte arrived in America, he brought with him a variety of Bilderdijk memorabilia. To this day, visitors touring Scholte's near-palatial residence (by standards of the time) are shown the wooden penbox (80 × 225 × 55 mm) with the name Bilderdyk in inlaid work, that remained on the preacher's desk as long as he lived. Though we do not know the exact history of the penbox, it appears to have been made expressly for Bilderdijk (the inscribed name is clearly part of the original workmanship of the piece), and may well have been presented by the family of the deceased poet to Scholte. In a sense, the mantle of the poet may have come to rest upon the shoulders of Da Costa, but the pen - or at least the penbox - passed into the hands of Hendrik Pieter Scholte!

It is intriguing to browse Scholte's library, where one finds a first edition of Bilderdijk's various works in near-mint condition. Here one encounters a variety of highly personal reminders of Scholte's abiding affection for his mentor, such as a separate copy of the engraving by Velijn. This personal copy of the print has been trimmed down a bit in size and perforated at the top by a number of pinholes, suggesting that Scholte may at various times have tacked the picture to his wall for memory's (and inspiration's?) sake^9..

Still more personal is the November 10, 1830 albumleaf (88 × 150 mm). Bilderdijk, who composed the poem on the occasion of Scholte's call to military service, certainly seemed to have understood already in 1830 that his young protegé harbored those impulses that would one day send him forth into the American Midwest, brandishing the sword of faith, though never - in contrast to hopes expressed here - to return to the European fatherland^10..

Scholte also possessed manuscript material of possible interest to scholars concerned with the development of Bilderdijk's style. Bound into the collection of miscellanea published in 1804, preceding the first stanza of the printed version, is the corrected manuscript of the historical romance ‘Graaf Floris de Vierde’^11.. On loose sheets tucked inside the same volume (though first found by the investigator in the 1809 Pestel) is the draft, with manuscript corrections, of a poem dated 1804, ‘Op den Moord des Hertogs van Adinghen’ [later: Enghien].

Unfortunately, the permeation of ink into the manuscript leaves makes it extrordinarily difficult to recover the original version of particular lines. Nevertheless, evidence for the process of correction abounds. In ‘Graaf Floris de Vierde’, for example (where recovering the original text often presents special challenges), we note that in at least one instance Bilderdijk simply rearranged words within a poetic line by using small superscript numbers to indicate the desired sequence. In ‘Op den Moord des Hertogs van Adinghen’, one can point to the evolution of several reworked passages, e.g. ‘glorie niet in bloed gebouwd’ to ‘glorie niet op 't zwaard gebouwd’, ‘Europa was beschoren’ to ‘Europa stond beschoren’, ‘In hem is Cesars Geest te ontmoeten’ to ‘Een Cesar zij in hem te ontmoeten’, etc. It is a pity that some of the more extensive corrections cannot be fully analyzed without special technical procedures not available to the investigator. It would be instructive to reconstruct the series of variations that led to the long closing line ‘Wij sterven zo 't moet zijn, maar in de naam van God’, where it is abundantly evident that the poet tried several possibilities before deciding on the one with ‘in de naam van God’ as the final phrase of the poem!

It would appear that Scholte also held Katherina Wilhelmina (Schweickhardt) Bilderdijk in particular regard. To the left of his desk is a fine piece of needlecraft reported to have been her handiwork.

The Scholte house c. 1930.

7. American slavery, in reference to the present agitation of the United States. By an Adopted Citizen (Pella 1856).

8. De Toekomst 2 (1868), 3.

9. In a letter of August 9, 1833, Isaac da Costa asked Scholte: ‘Hebt gij reeds het portret na den dood door Michaelis en door Velijn in 't koper gekocht?’ (See also below, note 12.) The letter is printed in Smits, Afscheiding, 6, 69-76.

10. Only the verses are cited in the transcription of Scholte's album leaves offered by Smits, Afscheiding, 6, 311-336. This particular inscription appears ibid., 318. As Smits correctly points out, entries 12-23, reproduced ibid., 318-323, all deal with Scholte's service in 1830-1831 as a ‘Vrijwillige Jager der Leidsche Hoogeschool’. The poem was printed under the heading ‘In het album van den heer H.P. Scholte, Th. Stud.; voor zijn vertrek naar het leger’ on the penultimate page of the posthumous collection Nalezingen van Mr. Willem Bilderdijk 2, Amsterdam 1833, 163. For a complete list of individuals whose names appear in Scholte's album, see Smits, Afscheiding, 6, 337. The names are too numerous to cite here, though many will be familiar to readers of this article, including inter al. A. Capadose, A.M.C. van Hall, H.F. Kohlbrügge.

11. The printed edition appears in Mengelingen door Mr. Willem Bilderdijk 1, Amsterdam 1804, 75-84.

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The Bilderdijk penbox on display at the Scholte house.

Bound into the posthumous collection of her lyric works, preserved in fine tooled leather bindings that match the volumes of her husband, are the manuscript of a poem ‘Aan mijnen Echtgenoot’ (dated ‘Leyden, in Louwmaand 1809’) and the facsimile of ‘Aan Mevrouw Kemper’^12.. The last item to be noted in the Scholte holdings is an envelope containing small fragments of various dimensions, clipped from what evidently was once a more extensive collection of notes in sheets approximately 150 × 140 mm (with considerable variation). One of the smaller snippets bears the inscription: ‘Excerpten door mij genomen... Brieven van Bilderdijk aan Dacosta [sic]’. These fragments, variously dated in the early 1820's and with page citations from Messchert's 1837 edition, appear to be notes taken by Scholte (recopied by another hand at a later date). As such, they afford insights into the developing personality and outlook of H.P. Scholte. Not so very surprisingly, one encounters a number of statements dealing with the glorious, victorious

Bilderdijk's inscription in Scholte's album.

and Messianic age that commanded so much of Scholte's attention throughout his lifetime, e.g., ‘Dit is de dispensatie des Almachtigen, die wij in ieder overgang van de nacht tot den dag waarnemen, en die Hij ook in de verspreiding der Waarheid door deze nevelen van verblindheid betoont’ (Messchert, 69).

The realization of all this, however, presupposes a valiant battle by the faithful: ‘Ja, het is zoo, ons leven is een gedurige stryd en worsteling en ieder oogenblik moeten wy sidderen daarin te bezwyken. Dit is de staat des Christens hier op aarde, in 't midden van de eindelooze aanvechtingen van wereld en boozen geest, en boven al van onze eigene zwakheid’ (Messchert, 106). The battle, however, goes not to those who are mighty in human valor, but rather to those who groan at their own human limitations and rely upon the Lord: ‘Het zijn onze daden niet, het is de zucht des harten waaruit zy voortvloeijen, die kracht heeft, en die zucht is van God’ (Messchert, 65). There also seems to be a thematic clustering on the idea (also expressed in a number of writings composed in America) that suffering, rather than a sign of the Lord's displeasure, is to be taken as evidence of His having chosen the individual for a special blessing: ‘doch, myn vriend, wy ken[nen] ook 't lyden als weldaad onzes Hemelschen Vaders en mogen er voor danken; en dit is zaligheid!’ (Messchert, 54).

Often misunderstood in later years, Scholte may well have drawn upon the experience and inspiration of his more youthful encounters with Bilderdijk and his circle of disciples for the strength needed to face what at times may well have seemed to be ‘eindelooze aanvechtingen’. Bilderdijk would certainly have wished nothing more than that he might have inspired Scholte to continuing steadfastness.

Philip E. Webber

Central College, Pella, Iowa USA

12. The first sample of the poetess' work is bound in at the beginning of the Nagelaten gedichten van Vrouwe K.W. Bilderdijk, Leeuwarden 1833; unlike the first, which js not represented in the Nagelaten gedichten by a printed text, however, the second appears across from the published version, p. 139, with the additional subtitle ‘Dankzegging voor een doosje oranjebloesem’. In the letter cited above in note 9, Isaac da Costa wondered of Scholte: ‘Hebt gij ook den bundel nagel[aten] gedichten van Mev. Bilderdijk?’ Da Costa then added: ‘Hiernevens enige facsimile's van haar schrift.’ (Smits, Afscheiding, 6, 74). Might these have included one or (in a very loose interpretation of the term facsimile) both of the items preserved here?