De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 43

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The novel in the Netherlands:
A comparative study by J.A. Russell, m a., Ph. D., University of Glasgow.
(Vervolg van blz. 177.)

IV. The later romantics.

It has been noted that even before the middle of the nineteenth century the novel had begun to acquire that quality of realistic transcription now grown to such immense vogue. But though the people of Holland, Byron-like, desiderate usually for ‘something craggy’ upon which to break their minds, they were almost the last to release the pleasant forms of romanticism. The explanation is that it was not the temptation to the grotesque so potent in Hugo, Dickens, Balzac, Collins, that fascinated them, but the simpler romance of Scott. Even in the third quarter of the century the main body of Dutch novelists gave no more than spasmodic indications of outgrowing his influence; but there was one towering exception. Eduard Douwes Dekker, who more than anyone else among his countrymen has given to this period in Dutch literature a European significance, was still a romantic, but an independent, an uitlander. He was, indeed, a novelist, (as which he excels) not by intention at all, but merely by chance, since his greatest book was given forth in sheer social protestation and his other novel had to be posthumously extracted from his miscellaneous ‘Ideën’. Circumstance surely never played a larger part in determining any writer than in the case of this most original of Dutch novelists.

The appearance in 1860 of ‘Max Havelaar of de Koffie-

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veilingen der Nederlandsche Handelmaatschappij’ was undoubtedly the signal for an eruption in Dutch literary, domestic, and governmental circles; ‘Multatuli’ was a name on everyone's lips, and was suggestive of tropical climes in itself - ‘the name, or rather pseudonym, of Multatuli, glimpsed on a shelf or in the pages of a catalogue, might suggest an exotic isle or vegetable rather than an author.’¹⁾ As everyone knows, the author possessed a thoroughly good Dutch name (Thomas Dekker, the Elizabethan dramatist, was of Dutch extraction), but since nonage had been connected with the Dutch Indies. In ‘Max Havelaar’, of course, we have but thinly-veiled autobiography; Max Havelaar is Dekker himself, who imposed on his own story only a few external happenings, such as the episode about Saïdyah and Adinda, for purposes of effect. So definitely-framed an arraignment of colonial administration could hardly be a novel in the strict sense. It is Holland's ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin’, but even as a roman-a-thèse it lacks the coherent charm of Harriet Beecher Stowe's work. Its satire is too mordant, though often brilliant and telling, as when, after a horrible massacre of natives by regular troops, the author sums up the report of the responsible governor with the words, ‘Tranquillity had been restored in the Lampoons’; and there is a sting of a Swift in his comment on the governor-general who was resolved to grant him no audience before quitting the Batavian stage, ‘Another excellency had retired to the mother country to rest.’ But the climax especially, in which Dekker declares that if he is denied a hearing he will proclaim through Europe ‘there is a band of robbers between Germany and the Scheldt’, suggests, by its complete lack of restraint, the hysteria of parts of the book, when sentimentality turns the edge of he saire.

‘Max Havelaar’ was certainly a tremendous auxiliary in the breaking up of conventional illusions and forcing reflection on vital problems, and it still retains its place as the most-read novel in the language and one of the few known outside of it. But the truth seems to be that though Douwes Dekker showed himself well endowed with such appropriate talents as a fertile imagination, spontaneity in description, and a keen sense of humour, the aber-

1) Review of the new English translation in ‘The Times Literary Supplement’, March, 1927.

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rations of the book are too numerous and glaring, through the ill-balance of purpose, content and style, to let it rank with the work of the great masters of fiction. It has been described as ‘one of the most exasperatingly inartistic books ever written’,¹⁾ a fact recognized, of course, by the author when he heralded it. ‘The book is a medley; there is no order, nothing but a desire to make a sensation.’ There is life in everything in it - and that counts for far more than dead correctness of form - but had its vitality been embodied in a more perfect form its powers of attraction would in the long run have been enhanced. As it is, it must rank as a potent satire, not so great as a novel, and not at all the work of art Professor ten Brink finds for it.²⁾

Douwes Dekker has been rather grandiloquently called by Anatole France the Voltaire of the Netherlands. His pen certainly ‘aroused a sleeping wold’ there, but it scarcely ‘shook a far mightier empire than that of Charlemagne, the European empire of a theocracy.’ He too was a preacher of revolt, but of a revolt often blind, illogical, inconsistent with itself, and which, from our point of view, seems curiously out of date. His views were almost entirely negative, for he was seldom a teacher of anything save revolt. But something a little Voltairian does emerge in his satiric wit and subtle humour, and stamps him as Holland's greatest humourist as well as her greatest iconoclast.

His finest fund of humour is to be found, unquestionably in ‘De Geschiedenis van Woutertje Pieterse’, also a kind of autobiographical novel. But this time the treatment is as refreshing and joyous as that of ‘Max Havelaar’ is severe and astringent; it is, in fact, brighter, freer, wittier, than any other work in Dutch fiction. The writing itself, as inevitable in a book so amassed, is decidedly uneven, but is at all points indicative of mental alacrity; though it is certain that beneath its apparent artlessness many a stinging implication lurks. But it is essentially a joyful book - or rather, torso - as full of life as ‘Pallieter’. It is hardly too much to say that ‘Multatuli’, the penner of the most atrabilious satire in Dutch, is in this inchoate character-study almost Barrie-esque in his pathos and pawky humour.

1) A. Werner, ‘The Humour of Holland’, Introduction, XX.

2) ‘Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Letterkunde’, p. 653.

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It is forty years since Dekker's death and now that something like a final criticism may be ventured upon, it is possible to say that he hardly justified the high hopes awakened by that first, great, revolutionary work. In some ways he was a writer cast in as un-Dutch, or even anti-Dutch, a mould as it is possible to imagine, ignoring for the moment that he was the product of reaction. He was too haphazard, too unstudied, a force to give permanency to his literary modes, adjuncts of a volatile temperament, but by his moral lashing of plodding contemporary letters and current conventions and shams, he cut into a deep-set complacency with spoliatory incisions. He may have put little in place of it, - though his own positive contribution is never likely to be forgotten - but by rousing Holland from lethargy he became a fore-runner of the great renaissance of 1885 - the latent activity so released was undoubtedly instrumental in itself in ensuring the culmination of this formative period in reasoned revolution.

The immobility of Dutch letters in the third quarter of the nineteenth century was never so low as the corresponding state of Belgian literature, in which for more than thirty years so trite a novelist as Conscience was able to hold the premier place. Admittedly, the conditions necessary for the cultivation of a novel of manners were not yet attainable - even in France the fiction form preponderating in the second half of the century had not yet arisen in its full glory. Any opposition to Conscience meant, therefore, a change within the historical form, removing it from the religious exaltation of Conscience, and, while establishing it in accordance with the aesthetic principles of romance, making it positive in its effect to reflect the serious and practical nature of the Netherlander. This was the accomplishment of Charles de Coster, the real founder of modern Belgian literature, who in the masterpiece of his life, ‘La légende et les aventures héroïques, joyeuses et glorieuses d'Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzak au pays de Flandres et ailleurs’, epitomized the spirit of the Flemish race in the most salient piece of romanticism ever presented to the Netherlands. The sources of his inspiration were multiple, but though handling well-worn material and borrowing freely, de Coster to what he took over and adapted to his Flemish setting, supplied sufficient of his own invention to form a work without

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rival in this well-tilled field, an epic novel, an inexhaustible hymn ‘au coeur de la Mère Flandre’.

The style of ‘Thyl Ulenspiegel’ is frankly Rabelaisan, even to the old French idiom, but, under the disreputable guise of the old-time joyous vagabond who wandered from city to city and lived by his wits, de Coster has made his hero the representative of the modern spirit by insinuating for the flamboyant jollity of Rabelais an intellect and a wit truly Flemish. But the true greatness of the book lies in the wonderful way in which history and symbolism, romance and satire, have been intertwined.

‘Thyl Ulenspiegel’ is in many ways the most remarkable thing in Belgian literature - it is certan that it carries off the major honours of Belgian romanticism. It is not free from barbarities and it is decidedly episodic, but in its vitality and concealed passionate fervour, in its witty presentation of a difficult theme, in its unusual hold over both satire and pathos, without a touch of moral indignation, in its maintenance of historical accuracy, it is likely to sing through Flemish literature and Flemsh life as long as these continue to be cultivated. It is amusing to find this great patriotic work interpreted by Catholics as the work of the devil, and it is just as amusing to see the work of so ardent a freethinker accepted as a Protestant tract spurring Calvinistic bias. De Coster conceived in a spirit of generosity too admirable either to merit the approbrium or the plaudits of mere sectarians. His enthusiasm for national liberty was far stronger than for any creed. He was, indeed, the first of the great French-writing Belgians who made Flanders their province. His history came too near the tail-end of the romantic period for him to have any imitators in the matter of specifics, but, more important, he made it the fashion to be Flemish. As he said of his own Thyl, ‘A Fleming am I from the pleasant land of Flanders, workingman, nobleman, all in one- and I go wandering through the world, praising things beautiful and good, but boldly making fun of foolishness.’

In every country there were writers who remained outside the main stream of romanticism, but the strength of the movement is decisively shown by the fact that it drew many whose natural tastes, inclinations and temperaments were realistic, and forced

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them to produce romances. George Eliot was such a writer, so was Lord Lytton, and, later, Stanley Weyman, and within the compass of this study Douwes Dekker and Charles de Coster may be referred to; these had the cause of humanity rather than that of romance at heart - but at heart they were romantics. It was different with a third novelist in this isolated Netherlandish group, A.S.C. Wallis. She was less rich in natural endowment than either of her confreres, but wrote with more soberness of mind; her style was classical, not realistic. She did not, however, fashion Gothic-romance material to modern purposes as Lytton did - she had merely renounced much of the picturesqueness of Scott, but through the comprehensiveness of her historical historical researches and her verisimilitude in displaying the results of these she was not entirely outside the limits of the novel as so largely formulated by him.

For a time the place of Bosboom-Toussaint in popular esteem was taken by Wallis. She was meticulous in her reading into externals, but though she was concerned more to indicate these past-times for more than the official few of the history-texts, she was, unforunately, not altogether happy in her execution of this intention. The fault of all her work is that it bears too much the impress of recorded history - the last of her three long novels¹⁾ is so overweighted with solid historical matter as to be visibly sinking below the surface of literature. Her disposing of the accessories was far more skilful in her stupendous conceptions ‘In Dagen van Strijd’ and ‘Vorstengunst’, but even in them her style is so concentrated as to suggest that she wrote in shadow. This lack of brightness and humour, however, sprang from a natural earnestness of disposition decidedly Dutch, from a depth of mental life that combated Scott's romanticism and the pointed Gallic genius with the dignity of suffering and the fine melancholy of the Scandinavian sagas of old.

The title of ‘the Dutch George Eliot’ has been somewhat loosely applied to Mevr. Bosboom-Toussaint, but the closer analogies between the work of the English writer and that of Mejuffrouw Wallis seem to make the title more appropriately a

1) ‘De Koning van een Vreugderijk’.

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reservation for her. The detail of the invented part of ‘In Dagen van Strijd’ especially is strikingly reminiscent of ‘Romola’ - we have in Van Vredenborg the same scholarly nature that we have in Bardi, in the intellectual - apparently unimpassioned - heroine who ‘had reflected, not experienced’, we have another Romola, and in the cynical and intriguing, but far from utterly bad, character of Reynold, we have a lesser Tito. For a counterpart to Macchiavelli we must go to Göran Person in ‘Vorstengunst’, who takes his stand beside the great Italian for the cupidity at least attributed to him. The plot of neither of these books is so interesting nor so well-knit as that of ‘Romola’, and the psychology generally is on a lower level - there is nothing so touching as Tito's discovery in the cottage of the domestic felicity denied him in the palace of the Bardi - but they are pervaded all over by a more gentle spirit.

The novelistic stock of A.S.C. Wallis shows a romancière gifted differently from the main group of historical writers in Holland, her inspirers being not Van Lennep and Oltmans, nor even so much Bosboom-Toussaint, but Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare, Lessing, Schiller and Goethe.’¹⁾ ‘She competes’, to quote Professor ten Brink again, ‘with Bosboom-Toussaint, in fineness and greatness of psychological analysis’, but her work is animated with something of the epic stateliness of these universal writers. She was, above all, an intellectual, with much of the mental vigour associated with George Eliot and with the same faculty for analysing moods and emotions, while her heavy style, inclining to Germanism, is decidedly allied. But she remained a peculiarly inconclusive and misplaced sort of writer, in a transitional period possessing neither the power to turn to the past nor to anticipate what was to come - her fiction belongs to the subjective-historical school, but the blend is imperfect. What fresh lustre might not an authoress of such genuine talent have shed on the genius of Scott, dispersed through the Netherlands, had she sought to impose on the dry bones of official history his brightness of dialogue and picturesqueness of detail! She was still very young when ‘the new wind began to blow’,²⁾

1) J. ten Brink, ‘Geschiedenis der Noord-Nederlandsche Letteren’, Part. III, p. 376.

2) E. Gosse, ‘Footsteps of Fate’ (English translation of ‘Noodlot’), Introduction, VIII.

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but as her work was so much less inevitable than Dekker's and Charles de Coster's she was not even the indirect influence to the new writers that these other ‘later romantics’ were.

Her lack of humour was a severe drawback in the way of humanising her work, for if Dekker and de Coster showed that it is hardly possible to be lyrical without being romantic, they also showed that wherever there is humour and satire there is, if not reality itself, a sense of reality. It can be said of all three of them that they ‘suffered much’ - both through their sensitive natures and through material hardship - but only in Mevr. von Antal's case was there no predisposition towards humour - even of the satiric order -, as is seen by looking at her twinmasterpieces, written before the innumerable sorrows of life had touched her at all. Pathos and pity relieve these works, but how we long sometimes for those lively touches that do more to raise the curtain on character than whole chapters of packed description!

The humour of the Netherlands has, in common with that of Scotland, a certain canniness and practical shrewdness, characteristic of men and of nations that have bought their experience at first hand and at a heavy price. That indefinable native strain, that ironie narquoise or ‘slimness’, to give it its Dutch name, is found abundantly in Dekker and de Coster; and its presence improves their work as much as its absence detracts from Mevr. von Antal's. It may be that this nimbleness of mind was derived from - or at least was combined with - that French influence so potent in de Coster, and in which Dekker seems also to have shared. De Coster was first and last a Fleming, with a different kind of tradition to draw upon from that of literary France, for, though using a French medium, he expressed the soul of Flanders in this form. From the pure lineage of French literature, de Coster's work must for ever stand apart (and this is the justification for his inclusion here). But it cannot be overlooked that it was to the art and civilization of France he deliberately turned for models to stimulate and refine his talent-reference has been made to his adoption of the sixteenth century idiom of Rabelais, which he imitated with greater assurance than Balzac had done in his ‘Contes Drôlatiques’. Dekker, of course, did not make his cultural approach through the French classical spirit, but his

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mental calibre was initially allied to the perspicacity of the French. The effect of the new French naturalism was soon to provide Dutchmen with their first opportunity to exercise their natural gifts; and sincerity - the direct intuition of nature -, which was the fundamental quality of Dekker, was, with the faculty of plastic creation, also that of the naturalists.

Energy is the proper word to use to define the essential quality of their temperaments, an energy of individualism, leading to the same impatience of all that was formal, and measured, and restrained, and to the same awakening of ‘a sense of largeness, remoteness and mystery.’¹⁾ They were still sufficiently romantic to make their personalities shine through everything they wrote, being undesirous and, indeed, incapable of producing purely objective work, in which their own personalities would be reserved, and their audiences glanced at occasionally with a look of superior irony. If they were not great novelists in the strict sense, they were certainly great men who wrote novels.

Outside of the ‘Scott-ites’ what contemporary writers can be put alongside them? Van Koetsveld with his ‘Pastorie te Mastland’ or Johan Gram with his ‘Familie Schaffels’? A sense of humour, admittedly, is made to play round the village folk of these books, falling most genially upon the predikant and the dominee - as happens in Scots literature of the same kind, a genre-painting in which Jean Paul himself also excelled. But for us to-day it cannot be said that these books satisfy ‘the only obligation to which.... we may hold a novel.... that it be interesting.’²⁾ Worst of all these books maintain the old ‘heresy of instruction’, that absoluteness of opinion, that fetish to ‘improve’, which Dutch writers have likewise in conjunction with Scottish. Even the work of Dr. M.P. Lindo, transporting into Holland the more superficial characteristics of Thackeray, and of that of the most accomplished exponent of the new Netherlands-Indian literature, ‘Melati van Java’ was decidedly but ‘for an age’; and if Busken Huet's ‘Lidewijde’ was an antidote where platitudinarianism was concerned, it was also sufficient to prove that he could never hope

1) T.S. Ormond, ‘The Romantic Triumph’, p. 396, in ‘Periods of European Literature’, vol. XI.

2) ‘The Art of Fiction’ in ‘Partial Portraits’, p. 384.

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to become a great novelist. ‘Art,’ says Henry James, ‘is essentially selective, but it is a selection whose main care is to be typical, to be inclusive.’¹⁾ In the novels of the minor authors of this time it can be said that the characters selected are familiar types; their saliences are not hilariously exaggerated as so often in the creations of Dickens and Hugo. But if they do not make, (as Pecksniff is made) a man into a vice, or create figures (as Jean Valjean is created) something less and something more than human, their characters fall far short of being ‘inclusive’, and thus of gaining permanence as universal types.

(Wordt vervolgd.)

1) ‘The Art of Fiction’ in ‘Partial Portraits’, p. 384.