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De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 43 (1928)

De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 43

(1928)– [tijdschrift] Nieuwe Gids, De–rechtenstatus Gedeeltelijk auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

The novel in the Netherlands:
A comparative study by J.A. Russell, m.a., Ph. D., University of Glasgow.
(Vervolg van blz. 82.)

III. Disciples of Scott.

The closing decades of the eighteenth century and the opening one of the nineteenth are notable everywhere for the absence of good fiction. In those years the classicism that had previously ruled was fantastically assailed, every thing mediaeval and ‘Gothic’ being advanced it. The reaction, as it gathered force was guilty of many excesses, but though the more real excesses of the French Revolution broke in on the period, it was apparently too transitionary and unsettled a time for novel-writing to escape the general condemnation of mediocrity. Yet it is the Gothic tale of terror that may be said to have opened the romantic era of fiction, for the great streams of Gothicism, chivalry and mystery were all united in the work of Sir Walter Scott, the new force in fiction and undoubtedly the greatest one to date. Part of his success can be explained by the mood of Europe in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. He reflected something of the militarism of the time and of the aristocratic revolt against the levelism the French Revolution sought to impose. But the roots of his amazing triumph are deeper than these things. Not only did he take the story of adventure and the saner elements of the Gothic romance and place them in an historic background, but he blended with them the realistic sketch of manners, which was then

culminating in the refined comedy of Jane Austen. By subsuming these varieties of romance and augmenting them with a great deal of the methods of the pure novel itself, he hit upon a kind of novel elastic enough to contain almost everything in fiction that pleases. This was the historical novel, and its striking style, which made it easy of imitation, attracted immediate attention and maintained Scott in immense vogue for more than thirty years.

The Netherlands, though set alongside the nations most concerned in the revival of romance, lagged behind the strong literary life of the time, and there, during the first quarter of the century, romanticism made little headway. For this state of affairs the miscegenation of the two peoples under William I need to be stressed too much, for the international arbitrariness apparent in the ‘congressional’ attempt to manufacture a United Netherlands acted neither as a special deterrent nor as momentary spur; as regards Holland at least, it served only to maintain the stagnation that had prevailed since the end of the previous century, and if in Flanders there glimmered no spark of intellectual life in those years, there had been no real literary response for two hundred years. When Holland's somnolence was at length shaken off - in prose, that is, for in poetry Bilderdijk and his disciple da Costa were active enough - the art of Scott was soon discovered through an organized national force. The medium in this was the scholar, D.J. van Lennep, who sighted the possibilities of his country's history and pictorial beauties for fictional contrivance in the manner of Scott, and in 1827 delivered his important dissertation.1) When stated, his purpose seems to suggest Wordsworth - the nature poet and pantheistic philosopher - rather than the more matter-of-fact Scott, but it was Scott, in his interweaving of history and the scenery of the Highlands and Borders, whose methods Van Lennep now sought directly to reflect. And his plan to encourage national historical research was an immediate stimulus to activity, since the first historical novel in Dutch, ‘De Schildknaap’, was written by one of his hearers. The powers of imagination and scholarship displayed by Mejuffrouw de Neufville were

certainly too flagrant to give her work more than an historical importance in Dutch fiction, but her well-intentioned effort facilitated and undoubtedly accelerated the reproduction of Scott in the Netherlands. More promising was the ‘Hermingard van de Eikenterpen’ of Drost, and more successful still was his ‘Pestilentie te Katwijk’, in which he shows a much greater emancipation from self-imposed moral and religious teaching. But his early death gave him little real chance to exhibit his latent powers, quickening under a deep passion for the past, and found a national historical novel, which, as Dr. Vissink suggests,1) might here have ended the influence of Scott, and won Holland for a national romanticism.

It was quite appropriate, on the death of Drost, that the son of the dissertationist Van Lennep should be destined to lead the Dutch romantic scool. With Scott's own life that of Jacob van Lennep had many parallels. He too was trained for the legal profession and did actually spend some part of his life as a lawyer. But like Scott he was much more interested in literature, and like him he made his literary debut in poetry, and abandoned the composition of poetic romances for the novel. Besides writing tales in verse as Scott did, Van Lennep wrote his ‘Nederlandsche Legenden’ as Scott did his ‘Tales of a Grandfather’ - for the amusement of children. But, of course, it is as an historical novelist that he is best known, and as such that we wish to compare him now.

His work, it mus be confessed at once, falls far below the standard set by even the lesser romances of Scott, though, it should be kept in mind, that Van Lennep wrote but five novels in all. In the first of these, ‘De Pleegzoon’, little of Scott's force of imagination is to discovered, though history professes to be no more than the binding of the story; there is a jejune unevenness about it all, the characterization is not impressive, the humour not too bright, and the style at times tediously verbose is at other times woefully inadequate when detailed treatment is called for. He was more indebted to Scott in his second novel, ‘De Roos van Dekama’; many incidents reveal his dependence in the matter of externals, and the handling of the historical material is now riper to the extent that there are fewer of the feeble co-incidences and sheer improbabilities that often reduce ‘De Pleegzoon’ to

something perilously near burlesque. But the general treatment is thoroughly uninspired, the incongruity between the story and its period and scene being so marked as to indicate that Van Lennep had extracted little yet from his imperfect studies of Scott's unique historical method and treatment in this all-important respect.

Even Van Lennep's accounted chef-d'oeuvre, ‘De Lotgevallen van Ferdinand Huyck’, is not an historical novel in the strictest sense, but merely a novel of the proximate past. It has not freed itself wholly from the picaresque style - Professor ten Brink has aptly described it as a very respectable picaresque novel -1) and even yet the local colour is much less striking than in Scott. But we do at last find some of his inner qualities. Except for the needless nimiety of horro piled up in the closing pages, there are few glaring weaknesses constructionally, and the characters, if occasionally still rather puppet-like, are now ‘less defined by description than by their own words and actions’,2) realizing a little of the dramatic ripeness of Scott. ‘Ferdinand Huyck’ does not belong to the order of great fiction, but in its increasing freedom from artifice and mere, ingratiating humour it stands as far above the work of its author's immaturity as ‘The Heart of Midlothian’ and ‘The Talisman’ do above ‘The Surgeon's Daughter’ and ‘The Pirate’.

‘Elizabeth Musch’, however, is a sad retrogression, for the history of a seventeenth century political intrigue holds so much the upper hand that it is only very nominally a novel at all Nor does Van Lennep's last novel, ‘De Lotgevallen van Klaasje Zevenster’ show many traces of Scott's direct influence. In this roman-de-moeurs of the author's own period - Van Lennep's ‘St. Ronan's Well’ - we have noted, with infinite elaboration, the successive phases of a somewhat nugatory career. It is difficult now to appreciate the controversy that came to surround this work over the immoral accidents that are supposed to figure in it. The section of the third volume concerned does witness a divagation from the uniformity imparted to the Dutch novel by Wolff and Deken, but to ethical standards of an entirely hypercritical order must the unnecessary contretemps be attributed. Van Lennep's

heroine, it can be said, is as conspicuously virtuous as Clarissa Harlowe or Sara Burgerhart, and the book in no way impugns the respectability of the Dutch share of the Novel. The happenings at Mont-Athos, indeed, afford a relief, lacking which ‘Klaasje Zevenster’ would much resemble ‘Pericles’ without the scenes which, artistically, if not in a purist sense, are most worthy of the genius of Shakespeare. As Professor ten Brink has done well to point out,1) Van Lennep only treats, with restraint and tact, what Guy de Maupassant has treated of in ‘La Maison Tellier’ and been much commended for.

If the critics of the past often failed to agree where to put ‘Klaasje Zevenster’, it is not a difficult matter to fit Van Lennep himself into his place in the evolution of the novel in the Netherlands. Assuredly he has no place in European literature, and even in Holland the infinitely greater talent displayed by the latter historical writers, Bosboom-Toussant, Schimmel, Wallis, tend do dwarf him, and if he be allowed the title of leader of the Dutch romantic school, it is solely by virtue of the historical position he occupies therein, despite his vast labours on the versatile of Scott. His plagiarism from the latter went to notorious lengths, and his careless eclecticism in the use of his material, his tricks of style and his false sublimities, make his net contribution of so little value as, without the fortunate chance of the great romanticist's example, to be almost negligible. To style him the Walter Scott of the country north of the Moerdijk is to describe him in a way that, by all trustworthy standards, must be thought of almost completely as a tribute to Scott's influence than as attempted inflation of Van Lennep's own mediocre powers.

A truer disciple was Jan Frederik Oltmans, who on an extremely narrow foundation, has built for himself a firm place in the prose literature of his country. His approach to the romantic field differed fundamentally from that of his contemporary, Van Lennep. The latter, though he served a long apprenticeship to Scott, never succeeded in executing an entire work in the manner of his accepted master; emulation was his aim, yet at no time did he give intensive study to his task; and in default of original genius and in face of a stong rationalistic bent such tergiversation was

fatal to the production of real historical novels. From the first Oltmans devoted himself conscientiously to the task of the illimitable storage of historical data so essential to the romanticist, and, well-equipped through this systematic preparation, he produced in his first novel a work that already seemed almost to mark the high water-level of his steady capability. He was thoroughly the disciple of Scott, quite incapable apparently of developing further than his admirable pastiche could render him, for with his second romance there was not retardation but sheer exhaustion of art.

It cannot be pretended that his work equals even the lesser works of Scott, to whom he was in all respects indebted. He had not the astounding creative energy of Scott, for though in both of his books there are incidents recounted with the epic skill of his literary progenitor, he was in the main less artistic and not infrequently deficient in the delineation of character. Nor had he ‘the genius of history’ of Scott, for his inerrancy was primarily due to meticulous scholarship, not so much to an instinctive sense of historic values. On the whole perhaps he deserves to rank higher than Van Lennep. A finer student of historical records, he was also sufficiently sure of his local colour to weave into his historical matter an inspiring story. No less patriotic than Van Lennep, he turned the portions of history upon which his mind operated to better account, and if the novel-guise but too lightly veiled the history behind, it was a fault that went far to reveal the possibilities for romanticising in Holland's storied record, when to the exactness of the historian there would be conjoined the developed skill of the novelist of manners.

So far the literary history of Belgium, the complementary part of the Netherlands, has perforce been mentioned but incidentally, for, as was alluded to, since mediaeval times and right into the sixteenth century - during which the contributions made to French and Dutch literature by those southern states were of high positive value and were proportionate from the numerical standpoint - intellectual stagnation had reigned there, save for a few exceptions in drama. Into the deep-lying causes of the resultant literary separation of two peoples so linguistically, racially and geographically akin as the Duch and the Flemish we need not enter here. Suffice it is to say that, after Waterloo, when the Belgian people

were again free to assume an interest in their native speech, the emergence all at once of a set of fully-developed romanticists was something neither vaticinated nor miraculausly realized - even a nation with so great a past as Belgium possessed, - required a considerable period of leavening. The formation of a national literature was not even synchronous with the events of 1830 when Belgium became a ‘new’ nation, for as Mr. G.K. Chesterton has wittily put it, to insist that a ‘young nation’ must needs produce a literature is like saying a nation must soon grow a moustache. Besides, the literati of the time expended their energies in trying to settle between French and Flemish as the natural ideal for the expression of the new-found national spirit, and until the flamingants carried the day, there was no ministration to the long-deferred literary aspirations of the South Netherlands.

The Novel was then the rebirth of Belgian letters, due in some measure to the appearance on the continent of ‘Quentin Durward’, which may be regarded as the first ‘Belgian’ novel. But the work of the first historical novel written in Belgium was, curiously enough, the work of an Irishman, Thomas Colley Grattan His book,1) published simultaneously in English and in French, has since lost interest, but as the first evocation of local history and geography, it ought to be regarded as a landmark in that country's literature. Belgium was far more stirred, however, when the first novel written in Flemish by a Belgian was produced by Hendrik Conscience.

The position of this writer in his country's literature is an assured one, due to the fact that he revived the Vernacular at a time when it had fallen into disuetude and disrepute. Yet it is hard to see how he can be acclaimed as a great writer in any sense, however unpleasant it is to pronounce such a verdict. His historical importance may be readily conceded, but the immense volume of his writings in moralitarian and patriotic vein seems to blind many to his irrefragable literary inferiority. It is, after the lapse of nearly fifty years, high time that the eponymous proliferation of make-believe which has been responsible for the creation of a Conscience-legend should be disposed of, if only in fairness to truly great compatriots like de Coster, Lemon-

nier, Maeterlinck, Verhaeren, with whom Conscience can no more sustain comparison than Van Lennep with Bosboom-Toussaint or Couperus.

Conscience is considered essentially as a novelist, yet here we immediately encounter a difficulty in logomachy. His productivity was so geat as to run to a hundred volumes, but this is not to say that he achieved what the endless labours of Balzac and Zola, with definite orientation, never looked like realizing. After an exhaustive examination of his complete works I find that only a relatively small number of them can with any sense of propriety be labelled novels at all. By far the greater number rule themselves out by their brevity - as a matter of fact, Conscience has specialized not in the novel but in the short story, more accurately, the tale, as written a hundred years ago - others, though extending to the length of somewhat short novels, do not deserve to rank as serious novels by reason of triteness of subject-matter and almost childish simplicity of treatment. The result is that of the imposing centurian array of ‘novels’ not a large proportion have any reasonable claim to inclusion here as such, and even those saved from summary rejection have a precarious hold on mature opinion.

Conscience's works fall naturally into two divisions, those describing the heroic past of the Flemish people and those describing contemporary Flemish life. Among his own people his immense popularity mainly rests, not surprisingly, on his roman-de-moeurs rather than on his historical romances, a preference that in itself is almost a condemnation of popular opinion in failing to keep ‘this side idolatry’ where Conscience is concerned. His accredited chef-d'oeuvre, ‘De Leeuw van Vlaanderen’, is modelled definitely on Scott, and it is so incomparably his finest work as almost literally to outweigh the other ninety-and-nine. Next in order - again almost indisputably so - is ‘De Boerenkrijg’, again an historical tale. It is nearly safe to affirm that his reputation would be little less had he written only these.

‘De Leeuw van Vlaanderen’ has been called ‘the Flemish bible’, but that this single work should ever have idealized the aspirations of the whole Flemish race is a striking commentary on the political and intellectual backwardness in which the dawn of the Victorian era found it. It ranks certainly as the epic of the battle of the Spurs, but

how far behind the work of Scott or ‘Thyl Ulenspiegel’, a Belgian historical novel of international reputation! It is his closest approximation to the style of Scott, and certainly in specific incidents as well as in its romantic colouring in re-echoing the chivalric times it bears a resemblance to ‘Ivanhoe’. Conscience, however, lacked the vivacity, the imagination, and above all the historical verisimilitude of his much-admired master; he fell constantly into the worst excesses of pseudo-archaism, and often by the superficiality of his characterization made of his historic personages mere martinets.

Aesthetically ‘De Boerenkrijg’ is probably his best novel, for usually, to quote M. Sabbe, ‘in the art of Conscience it is difficult to separate the aesthetic point of view from the educational’.1) His Francophobio, however, was dispersed too freely for the book to be accepted as an entirely admissible interpretation of history. In few particulars did he successfully emulate Scott, his acknowledged guide, and certainly never carried through an entire book in his manner; always marring his approaches by incredible climaxes, incongruous readings of history, and filling his pages with unimpressive bathos. Suffice it is to say that not with all his historical writings has he so adequately treated the boundless possibilities of Belgium's heroic story as the foreigner Scott in his isolated ‘Quentin Durward’. Out of the grand material of the bourgeois-dictator, Van Artevelde, he has given us a piece of uninspired dulness, a bald chronicle that is ill-conceived history rather than romance; his ‘Burgemeester van Luik’ is az haphazard historically, and, novelistically, just as insipid. As inaptly as Van Lennep - that is, in no more than in the historic concept - does he deserve to be established as the Belgian Scott.

Turning to the other part of his work, it can be said right off that Conscience in the same way as he saw an ideal past-time took over an ultra-romantic view of contemporary Flemish life. Within his beloved Flanders his favourite locale was the Kempen, those desolate moor-lands - reminiscent of Hardy's sombre Edgon Heath - that extend between Antwerp and Venlo. This little-visited pays Conscience portrayed vividly, but his idyllic pictures of life as lived there are at utter variance with those of later

writers. His images of reality are too beautiful, too virtuous, and in every way too sentimentalised, to be at all convincing. Even the best of these studies, ‘De Arme Edelman’, is a thoroughly conventional piece of work - it is, in fact, in the writings of Conscience impossible to escape the leit-motif. While we can give him every credit for his giftst of heart, for his aims for the unification of his country, and for his proudest boast that there is not a line in his multifarious writings to be wished away on ethical grounds, we can also take an unbiassed perspective of his place in literature, for no more extravagant claims have ever been made for conscious mediocrity.

The lenitive teatment meted out to Conscience appears in such a description of him as ‘the most famous novelist on the continent before Zola and Tolstoy came’.1) Nowadays such hyperbole merely causes frank amusement, for was he not contemporaneous with Hugo, Balzac, Dumas, Thackeray, Dickens! With the imaginatively-endowed Hugo he had, it is certain, nothing in common, while his uneflecting Catholic optimism was wholly opposed to the satiric subtlety of Thackeray; Dumas, it is true, based his ‘Dieu et Diable’ on ‘Wat eene moeder lijden kan’, honouring his hero with the name of Conscience, but the literary inter-relationship goes little further. With Balzac we may compare him in respect of output, and a titular affinity is suggested in such books as ‘De Burgers van Darlingen’, ‘De jonge Dokter’, ‘De Koopman van Antwerpen’, but the penetrating analysis of the great Frenchman is nowhere to be found - Conscience's mind was not capable of a ‘Père Goriot’ or a ‘Eugénie Grandet’. His simplicity and tenderness had perhaps most in common with Dickens, but his compositions are steeped in a maudlin sentimentality to which Dickens at his worst never descended. The conclusion is reluctantly forced that he has no place in European literature and no very high one in that of the Netherlands. Yet, though his works may not possess those literary qualities that make for endurance, we can agree with M. Sabbe2) that it was no slight achievement to gift to Flanders what it needed most, that ‘hij leerde zijn volk lezen.’

It is hardly possible to say more of Conscience than that he initiated the writing of the Novel in Belgium; beyond this he did nothing to ensure its continuance; he prescribed no directions for his fellows to follow, but by his provinciality and pedestrianism left it just as he started it. All was yet to do to make the Novel representative truly of the Belgian people, and to make it a reflection of the elements the Netherlands' peoples have in common; at an empirical stage he did not even try to wrest from his Dutch neighbours the secret of the success that they, through their freely developed political ideas, had more quickly attained in the hierarchy of romance. His failure to found the national novel in the history of Belgium meant that when the Novel came iresistibly to fructify it was too late for it to yield the best romantic flavour, which was a distinct loss to the Belgian side of the Novel, sating it too onesidedly with naturalism. The small extent to which Conscience affected subsequent literary styles is shown by the manner in which his successors had to seek new media for themselves His influence was so ephemeral that the so-called ‘school’ developed from his work was no more than a number of undistinguished followers prepared to sacrifice to the same forced optimism, and who were soon swamped on the oncoming tide of realism. Even his historical novels were bettered by those of August Snieders without anything very noteworthy being accomplished The inevitable re-action set in the ‘80’s, when, deprived of his pleasing personality, ‘la jeune Belgique’ looked in vain for something behind the name that for so long had been supposed to carry her literary burdens.

Holland's case was more fortunate, for though the nonage and novitiate of the romantic art applied to the novel had even there a modest enough beginning, it was through the work accomplished by Van Lennep and Oltmans in seeking an imaginative rendering of Dutch history that Scott remained for well-nigh fifty years the paramount force in the prose literature of Holland. In this long period of influence, Scott himself was never in danger or being vanquished, yet neither were his later disciples unworthy nor contemptible. Indeed, in Mevr. Bosboom-Toussaint and H.J. Schimmel the two greatest appeared, and their achievements brought the novel in Holland into line with recent Anglo-French developments.

To acquiring the Scott-method Mevr. Bosboom-Toussaint gave almost as much application as Oltmans had done, but from the outset her aim was somewhat opposed to that of the king of romanticists and his most formally-fit disciple. Her obsessions for history and archaeology were not intended to adapt her specifically as an historical novelist - her major concern was not history but psychology. Nevertheless she was more under the sway of Scott than she was aware of, for as she advanced in her art she tended to write more in his manner. While artistic development was yet immature, adherence to her plan could but result in a loss of pictorial beauty, not yet compensated for by the complexity of the characterization.

For an Englishman it is pleasing to record that the novelist made her greatest successes in the field of historical narrative by her excursions into Queen Elizabeth's reign, her finest body of work, indeed, being her ‘Leycester’ novels. In this famous cycle and in her best solo work, ‘Het Huis Lauernesse’, she returned admirable contributions to the tuition of Scott to prove she had assimilated his conception of the novel of the past. She was far in advance of both Van Lenenp and Oltmans in disdaining the reproduction, with slight emendations and adaptations, of particular scenes, incidents and types from Scott, and may claim to have written the first absolutely original novels in his manner. What she took over from him of method, device and general factor in the art of the romanticist, she made her own, and any modifications they wrought on her work were the result of skilful and intelligent usage. She took over the mechanism of the Scott-novel, but the technique she used was essentially her own, for her matter was original and at all times her work remained typically Dutch.

She possessed a real talent for evoking the spirits of vastly-differing epochs, and whether dealing with the time of Charles the Bold,1) middle-classe life in sixteenth century Holland,2) Maurice's reign,3) the fortunes of patriarchal houses.4) contrived

to make her historical characters live again in her pages. But, neither possessed of nor seeking to cultivate, Scott's pictorial art, she endeavoured to subordinate topography and history alike to the central love-interest of imaginary characters. And ultimately she resolved apparently to get away altogether from the demands of history and write in an entirely altered style. ‘Majoor Frans’ a Dutch ‘Wuthering Heights’ in its colourful delineations of wild, lonely, heathy Gelderland and in its portrayal of elemental passion showed especially a surprising sympathy with modern ideas. In a broader sense, she gave evidence in this new onder of prose that the Novel in the Netherlands had now, as elsewhere, reached a period of transition, and that a more effective talent was about to follow from the influx of the rationalistic into the sentimental.

While, everything considered, the vast yield of Bosboom-Toussaint was a notable advance on anything yet achieved for Dutch letters, it was not without patent defects. Most of her novels, like a great many of Scott's, suffer from their excessive longueurs - there is altogether too much talk to too little action. Her personages are living beings and their hearts are compounded of real human passions, but she tended to be tediously fastidious in her descriptions of their faintest peculiarities; she sinned repeatedly against Lessing's cardinal law, and forgot the due demands between painting and writing, a perversion of the novelistic art that still lingers in the Netherlands, without the mitigation that the historical novel of this time ofen afforded. Impossible as it is to put literary valuations on a ‘percentage’ basis, the critics are infinitely more in order with their lavish praises of her than with those they bestowed on her predecessor Van Lennep. But after the lapse of forty years it seems safe to say that her final place is not so high as at one time she seemed destined to fill; in each of her novels there is something that remains after reading, but there is always a vitiation of something else by her overdone metaphor, her introduction of fearsome neologisms, and her interwoof of abstruse speculations and reflections dictated by an aggressive Calvinism. When all is said, however, she remains one of the most gifted of Dutch writers, and brilliantly supports the influential part played by women in shaping the Novel in the Netherlands.

Holland was the citadel that maintained the romantic phase directed from Scott longer than any other, yet even there it might have passed away but for the advent of Hendrik Jan Schimmel. In the final period of Bosboom-Toussaint it was visibly waning, and in England and France the day of the novel of psychology had clearly come. Schimmel, a whole-hearted romantic of the best water, was, therefore, a tremendous re-inforcement for the Scott cause. He brought back the objectivity inherent in the historical form, and maintained this throughout his long career against the forces of subjectivity and neo-psychology. Far from Scott becoming a spent power his hold on Holland was even strengthened by Schimmel, who was one of his most complete disciples and who, though not the last historical novelist, was the last to be influenced directly by Scott.

His early work provided little fore-taste of what was to come; simply good, patriotic Dutch history, written not without an eye to the picturesque, but containing roughnesses, stylistically, not found in the corresponding part of the work of Scott, exaggerated romanticism scoring off literalism on the historical side. But soon the fruits of a patient study of Scott began to appear; and once more the author found a congenial field in English history, his three novels treating of stirring events in the reigns of Charles I, Charles II, and William III1) being, like the three novels of Bosboom-Toussaint on the Earl of Leicester's campaign in the Netherlands, his most notable achievement. These all display a praiseworthy study of British history and the interpretation is essentially fair-minded. Schimmel copied Scott's plan of making his central character in each case non-historical, but was more reliant on actual history and tended to make the factual parts incorporate dramatic material at every turn. Though he made the story centre round the neutral hero and heroine, and was well aware that history must not be obtruded unduly, the proximity of so many great ones and the suggestion of impending historical crises could not but draw chief attention - a fascinating, if faulty, form of art.

On the other hand, when Schimmel dealt only with history he

did not expand on his historical background, about which so much is always known. Theoretically, he wished to subordinate those people who have lived and those events that have happened to the imaginative and dramatic interest involving the public services and the domestic affairs of more ordinary figures, but in the interplay of fictitious and historical characters there is not always the blend of history and romance that Scott so consistently achieved, which is no more than saying he was not a second. ‘Wizard of the North’. Like Oltmans he was first and foremost his disciple, and though in psychologizing he evidenced a profounder insight into human nature than the author of ‘De Schaapherder’, he was, wanting an historical background, of little account. The rarer phenomenon of the influence of Dickens is seen at work in his non-historical books, but these are in no way comparable with his Scott-formed work. As a painter of contemporary life he ranks far below Bosboom-Toussaint, but in his more characteristic historical productions has established virtual equality. Of what he loses in this one-sidedness he gains something back in his simpler, more direct style, and - in the broad sense - in his more humorous conception of life.

With Schimmel the long and honourable reign of Scott in Holland comes practically to a close. His influence, indeed, never knew any definite passing, but in its full extension threw open fresh possibilities for fiction-writing. His inception there was slower than in most other countries, for by 1824 excellent imitatory work was produced in Germany by Wilhelm Häring1) and in Italy by Alessandro Manzoni,2) while in France Alfred de Vigny's ‘Cinq-Mars’ was the work of but two years later. Still, it would be difficult to speak of a ‘school’ of Scott in any of these countries, to maintain, for example, that writers like Victor Hugo and the Dumas père et fils laid themselves under a very heavy burden of debt to Scott. In Holland it was quite otherwise. No considerable Dutch novelist of the mid-period of the nineteenth century remained outside of his direct influence - Beets, termed by Hough ‘the Dickens of Holland’,3) was largely a sketchwriter - and nowhere

had he such a successive line of close and obvious followers, novelists who claimed his specific form of art as their definite momentum. Elsewhere there was even in Scott's own time a reaction to romance, leading to the rehabilitation of other forms of fiction, but in Holland, save for the classical novels of so unrepresentative a writer as Professor Petrus van Limburg-Brouwer, a romantic treatment of real life continued its sway, a domination of all fiction forms, even after 1850 or so, when the stand for realism was maintained by Thackeray and soon afterwards by Flaubert. Holland only caught up this thread later, but the gap was bridged by developments within the historical novel itself on the part of the later devotees of Scott. Even so ardent an historiographer as Bosboom-Toussaint early sensed the necessarily-neglected psychological and social aspects in Scott, and Schimmel gave glimpses of escaping at times from the spell of the Wizard to cross the bonder-line of the rival kingdom of realism. And it is quite probable that by this ‘reform from within’ practically boundless, that it would take, as Henry Tames says ‘about all we bring in good faith to the dock.’

(Wordt vervolgd.)


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