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. 450.)

VI. New guides in Holland.

By 1880 Dutch letters, as clearly as Belgian, stood in need of some revivifying force, for they had again lapsed for the most part into the pedestrian gait that had characterized them in the very orthodox '40's. The novel of the time was at once petty and provincial, with the crass sentimentalities and undistinguished banalities of the ‘Kailyard’ school; it merely continued the easy-going tradition of ‘De Pastorie te Mastland’. Even in Professor Prinsen's comment on Vosmaer's erstwhile classic ‘Amazone’, as ‘een goed boek voor het Holland van 1880,¹⁾ there is a wealth of implied depreciation. Under these ambling conditions a new canon of art was so urgent a necessity that Dutch literature now witnessed the remarkable phenomenon of an aesthetic revolution cleverly engineered by a group of young and daring innovators. ‘It would perhaps be difficult’, says Sir Edmund Gosse, ‘to point to another European example so well defined of the vicissitudes which keep the history of literature varied and fresh.’²⁾ The natural style of Douwes Dekker and the critical insight of Busken Huet were probably the great influences in this awakening, but

1) ‘De Oude en de Nieuwe Historische Roman in Nederland’, p. 49.

2) ‘The Encyclopaedia Britannica’, Vol. VIII, p. 728.

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the weapon by which the transmogrification was actually wrought was ‘De Nieuwe Gids’ itself, when its editor - to-day the doyen of Dutch poets - ranked among the revolutionaries.

The great renaissance, to paraphrase Professor Prinsen's remarks on it,¹⁾ was the outcome of a passionate desire for beauty - hitherto not very conspicuous in either Dutch prose or poetry - for beauty not merely as the highest, but as the only, aim of art. Like the corresponding movement in Belgium, it was primarily a revival in poetry, but, as there, the new literature did not leave the novel neglected. At first this was an avid reproduction of French Naturalism, so that, to quote Sir E. Gosse again, ‘the new Dutch literature became a sort of mixture of Shelley and Zola, very violent, heady and bewildering.’²⁾ Frans Netscher and Marcellus Emants at least marched deliberately in step with the French naturalists, in satisfying an ardent and voluptuous curiosity and making their pictures out of the enumeration of an infinity of detail; but extremism reached its climax in Lodewyk van Deyssel's ‘Een Liefde’. Like Netscher and Emants, Van Deyssel was - to begin with, at least - in sympathy with Naturalism, and especially with Zola's work, but on him Zola's influence was merely to shed some light on the road; the mixture of Grecian classicism and lush sensuousness, which was the result of their interpretation of Zola's attachment of the novel-interest to supposed fact, was not for him. He saw that in its objectivity and style Zola's conception often came nearer to science than to art, and sought for his painstaking, factual fidelity an ‘inward-seeking’ phase, formed by observation, impression, and sensation, to which he gave the name ‘sensitivism’. ‘It is a development of impressionism, grafted upon naturalism’,³⁾ but it escapes the vagaries of the former and does not descend to the brutalities of the latter. One of the greatest exponents of the method in criticism and fiction is, of course, the famous American writer, Henry James, who says that ‘a novel is in its broadest definition a perception, a direct impression of life: that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the

1) ‘De Oude en de Nieuwe Historische Roman in Nederland’, p. 87.

2) ‘The Encyclopaedia Britannica’, Vol. VIII, p. 728.

3) E. Gosse, Introduction to ‘Foosteps of Fate’, XIV.

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impression.’¹⁾ Dutch sensitivism, it will thus be seen, is not at all unlike Belgian symbolism,²⁾ and, in considerable measure, it was also a reaction to naturalism, a reaction that has operated even in France, in the novel of manners of Anatole France, the sociological novel of Barrès, the psychological novel of Bourget. A certain amount of fatigue had been produced alike in the artistic and the public mind by the exaggerations of the naturalistic and ultra-scientific schools; as George Ebers wrote at the time, ‘We might call Realism the headache which has followed the intoxication of Romanticism.’³⁾

Strictly speaking, the realist is like a photographer who can make no distinction between one detail and another and gives a crude impression of all; the impressionist, on the other hand, does not describe all that he sees, though he too describes only what he sees; this is art. As original adherents of the impressionist school, we must couple the names of Jac. van Looy and Ary Prins, although their respective chef-d'oeuvres⁴⁾ were not ready until 1917 and 1913. The work of these writers, though not borne of even plausibly romantic imagination, is yet too much aglow with poetic fire and too richly endowed in the plastic art so emphatically of the Netherlands to be held rigidly to realism. But it was in Louis Couperus that the new novel fructified most immediately and most lavishly, though he was not one of the official ‘Nieuwe Gidsers’ during the actual maelstrom.

The place of Couperus in the evolution of the novel in the Netherlands has been already considered in detail in these pages⁵⁾ by the present writer, so that only the chief conclusions with regard to him need be recapitulated here. Couperus is named a realist, but he was, like Balzac, ‘a realist haunted or attacked by phantasms and nightmares of romance.’⁶⁾ Like his friend and first English admirer, Sir Edmund Gosse, he seems to have realized quite early in his literary career that ‘the limits of realism

1) ‘The Art of Fiction’: ‘Partial Portraits’, p. 265.

2) In the Preface to his ‘The Symbolist Movement in Literature’, Arthur Symons writes, ‘I am told of a group of Symbolists in Russian literature, there is another in Dutch literature.’

3) Introduction to the English edition of ‘Amazone’, ‘The Amazon’.

4) ‘Jaapje’: ‘De Heilige Tocht’.

5) ‘De Nieuwe Gids’, Mei, 1927.

6) E. Dowden in ‘French Literature’, p. 404.

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had been reached.’¹⁾ According to the critic-poet, Couperus ‘thought that Dutch literature was overcrowded with bourgeois tragedies, and that he himself had been too passive under the influence of Flaubert. He began to revolt against social realism, and to lead a reaction in favour of individualism and romance.’²⁾ His best works, ‘De Boeken der Kleine Zielen’ and ‘Van Oude Menschen. De Dingen die voorbijgaan’, have their scene and surrounding in Den Haag, but as Couperus often felt the notion ‘to stare Reality out its brassy countenance’, he went to the pleasanter land of phantasmagoria, or reconstructed the romance of antiquity on the model of the new historical novel.

The artist is not formed by the milieu and the race, but only by being true to himself. Couperus was certainly most true to himself in his novels that deal with that upper society of Den Haag which he knew so well. But even there he was not always absolutely so, being disposed to dally with this and that fancy, and to sacrifice verisimilitude in the process. He was disposed far too much to play the part of the dilettante or to pose as the superior ironist, being too easily reconciled to remaining baffled by the spectacle of life's processes, instead of heroically facing their implications, like Zola, Dostoievsky, Hardy. Not all the elegance and flourish of his style can hide the absence of the epic note or atone for the lack of that ‘high seriousness’ which the supreme novelists, as well as the supreme poets of the world, possess; the cleverness of the construction may be admired, but it is impossible to guess for what object the structure has been raised. Had Couperus always been true to himself, he might, indeed, have justified Arnold Mulder's prediction. ‘I had been priding myself,’ wrote this American admirer, ‘on the thought that I could pick the winner of a Nobel prize some years before the judges found him. And I had picked Couperus.’³⁾ The novelist himself had almost certainly no such high anticipations, but after ‘De Boeken der Kleine Zielen’ and ‘Oude Menschen’, the potentiality was undoubtedly a receding one.

It has been urged against him that he is too effeminate, and

1) Quoted by W.L. Phelps in ‘The Advance of the English Novel’, p. 142.

2) E. Gosse, ‘Silhouettes’, p. 264.

3) In ‘The Outlook’, 28 Nov., 1923, p. 549.

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it must be allowed that he is so to some extent, even a little ‘deliquescent’, as Dr. Walch phrases it.¹⁾ Yet, this decadent strain, this want of robustness, this ultra-refinement of detail, arose from the extreme sensitiveness of the aesthete; his prose was erected on the substructure of his poetry And this was probably responsible also for a definite and rather distressing stylistic fault - the notorious extent to which he carried the habit of verbal repetition. The result is a stock of hackneyed locutions, single words and tours de phrase, which have been repeated until they have deteriorated from trouvailles almost into clichés. Yet, despite such mannerisms, despite the fact that Couperus was not a creator of universal types like Hugo, Dickens and Tolstoi, he may be said to rank in his conscious art as the Henry James, in his classical fancy as the Flaubert, in ‘the air of reality’ he lends to his work the Arnold Bennett, of Holland.

A more direct product of De Nieuwe Gids Beweging is Dr. Frederik van Eeden. From then until now he has been in the forefront of Dutch literature, though his versatile talents in prose, poetry and drama have long ceased to be at the disposal of any coterie, however much he may have been fostered by the group in the ascendant in the middle '80's. As he has given most of his time in recent years to dramatising - the last of his occasional novels having been published before the death of Couperus - his novelistic productivity may be considered here in its entirety.

Right off it may be said that Dr. van Eeden is more of a lyric poet than a philosopher, more of a philosopher than a novelist; he is neither a creator of characters nor an inventor of plots. He is an altruistic dreamer and thinker about life, and his personages are simply the reflections of his own ideas at different periods of his existence, with ‘vague mental gestures’ for all narrational mobility. His novels are a personal allegory, co-terminous with the crises of the poet-soul. They represent his attempts at working out the enigma of life, ‘a series of practical tests, as it were, of casuistry’,²⁾ but their peculiar technique, deriving from his philosophic media, differentiates them even among romans-à-thèse. The first of these products of the author's spiritual evolution, ‘De Kleine Johannes’ takes the old form of the märchen; its

1) In ‘Le Mercure de France’, 1 Oct., 1923.

2) M. Robinson in the Introduction to ‘The Deeps of Deliverance’.

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continuation, ‘Johannes Viator’, is a short, lyrical-didactic sketch: ‘De Nachtbruid’ is a set of metaphysical memoirs; ‘Sirius en Siderius’ forms another ‘Kleine-Johannes’ history; and ‘Het Roode Lampje’ is a piece of Catholic mysticism.

As has been said of Tolstoi, ‘he went through life searching for truth’, for the zoeker in it all is, of course, the writer himself, first of all at the threshold of life and asking Nature her secrets, by passing ‘the data and forms of the child's imagination’¹⁾ through the mature intellect, advancing to investigate the different systems, rejecting them all and taking temporary refuge in sophistry; ending the search finally at the lamp of Catholic sanctuary. Well may we ask what part the novel plays in this unravelment of personality, which appear to postulate definite antithesis to the admitted conception, with its divagation from the ordinary conditions of experience and its failure to sustain a story with some pretence at objectivity. It may be answered that the novel is newer in nothing more than in this occupation with the independent and inscrutable workings of the subconscious self, and that there is vitiation of value only if the auhor, in choosing to be ‘ego-centred’, fails to give expression to ideas that are universal. It is just such failure that we have to record here; the novelist has not become the striver after primal truth that is in all of us, but with the easy penetration of his disguise as the Kleine Johannes, as Sirius, as Dr. Vico Muralto, stands revealed merely as Frederik van Eeden.

It is curious that so unimpassioned a novelist, whose ondriving to Catholic orthodoxy is rather unmotivatedly registered in his life's work, should have shaped that work into what may be regarded as the two fashionable philosophies of the hour, Bergson's metaphysics and Freud's psychology, unconsciously and independently, of course, for his own more hazy speculations can claim to have preceded both. But in Dr. van Eeden these elements have never fused; his best novel, the melancholy but haunting ‘Van de koele meren des Doods’, reads like a case selected for illustrative purposes in a Freudian treatise, and though it commends itself to modern minds - for the year 1900 it was decidedly ‘modern’ - its medico-scientific nature requires the relief of more actual interests. Had one so well-equipped technically as Dr. van Eeden

1) Andrew Lang in the Introductory Essay to ‘Little Johannes’.

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been more alive to realities than to unreality, his speculative mind might have earned for him, indeed, the title of ‘the Dutch Tolstoi’ which is bestowed with the discrimination that counts for lefthanded compliment than for guidance (unless the comparison is restricted to his social experiments). As it is, he must be looked on as something of a ‘lost leader’. His power of vision cannot be called intense or keen, and he lacks the steadfast force of will which goes to make a complete artist; he chooses characters unable to bear their own dramatic burden and in substituting for the scène-à-faire revelatory records he sheds the objectivity that even the newer conceptions of the novel require. So much, indeed, is the artist obscured by the mystagogue and moralist that it is not unlikely that his best work will yet count for psycho-analysis and the others be claimed for Catholic theology.

Of the other products of the new novel whose work can be finally assessed, there are none so prominent as Couperus. Mention of Maarten Maartens, however, can hardly be avoided in such a study as this, however anomalous it would be to give one writing in English a place in non-comparative Dutch literature. With few exceptions, however, the novels of this count of Holland deal with aspects of Dutch life, and they are infinitely more faithful pictures than his accounts of English and Rivieran modes. He was wise to keep close to his native soil, though I am aware that it is precisely these Dutch stories that are least accepted by his own countrymen, who affect to find distasteful, even untrue, the often sordid details of peasant life and the contrasted rendering of crassly prosperous ‘Koopstad’ burghers. Such criticism may be applicable to certain of his more realistic short stories, but it is certainly unfair to his novels. These, where they introduce ‘unpleasant’ elements, do so in no cynical or irresponsible vein; such things are but made the dark background against which the author throws into relief nobility and self-sacrifice; characters like Lis Doris, Joost Avelingh and Suzanne in ‘An Old Maid's Love’ can but go to re-inforce opinion of Dutch national character, for though not a very masterful writer, Maartens was at least a gracious and sincere one. After perusing his work, we feel no less than Thackeray ‘that a Dutchman is a man and a brother’.¹⁾

Like Joseph Conrad, Maartens is distinguished by his cosmo-

1) ‘Roundabout Papers’, p. 116.

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politanism. Both, again, are subjective writers, but Maartens has nothing like the intensity of imagination of the other. Nor has he Conrad's amazing mastery of English style, though he was able to affirm, as Conrad said of himself, ‘The English seemed to me a part of my blood and culture.’ The Polish writer could be betrayed into linguistic gaucheries, but Maartens' English, - stiff and staccato and infinitely les adventuresome, - was little more than that of the ‘correct’ foreigner. Conrad, of course, can never be extradited from English literature, but Maartens seems to be too complacently left to both British and Dutch claims, and he is not great enough to stand for division of value. To me, it seems that it is in Dutch literature that he most merits a place, for at heart he always remained a true and loyal Hollander, never freeing himself from the idiom of his native tongue and not at all from his own people.

Women-writers at this time also buttressed the new psychological novel, but, despite their greater numbers, scarcely so brilliantly as in the past; the feminist question occupied them principally, but no ‘Anne Veronica’¹⁾ was forthcoming. Champions of women's rights like Mev. Goekoop de Jong van Beek en Donk, Anna de Savornin Lohman and the ill-starred Cornelie Huygens, however, were forerunners of the host of ladies who to-day make the novel the vehicle for opionating on every social and domestic matter. They showed a starker realism than Couperus, since more didactic, and whenever their treatment of aspects of real life was romantic, it was only so in the colloquial sense. Yet, Professor Phelps' somewhat misleading definition that ‘at its best realism was made up of afternoon teas; at its worst it was garbage,’²⁾ was never fulfilled to the letter in Holland. Naturalism's orgy there was surprisingly mild, but, nevertheless, it definitely emancipated the novel by the democratic tendencies towards social and psychological effects to which it gave rise under Couperus. The mission of the novel, it was finally recognized, is the study of life, the interpretation of life, the one ineluctable law imposed upon the artist being ‘that he shall dominate the prodigal wastefulness of life.’

(Wordt vervolgd.)

1) The great feminist novel of Mr. H.G. Wells.

2) ‘The Advance of the English Novel’, p. 135.