De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 43

[p. 632]

The novel in the Netherlands: A comparative study by J.A. Russell, m.a., Ph. D., University of Glasgow.
(Vervolg van blz. 537.)

VII. The novel to-day.

‘So now, and for a long time to come, it would seem, the novel is the preferred form of artistic utterance. In the novel the century has found that for which it passionately yearned.’¹⁾ This was written, not yesterday, but so long ago as 1894, and the novel, the most mobile and variable of artistic modes, is now clearly established in proud predominance. There are always some, however, prepared to dissent from the view contained in the added comment, ‘In the novel the century has found that for which it passionately yearned,’ and to hold ‘that the books which live are the books which express, not the current ideas and attitudes, either positive or negative, but the personalities of the writers.’²⁾ Yet, while it may be conceded that it is not necessarily the function of the novel to furnish material for the social historian, the fact seems to remain that most good novels do make their time and place important, do invoke life and the world for their characters and situations. To imagine otherwise may appear to dispense with ‘trends’ in literature. But does it really do so? We can aver, Maeterlinckian-wise, that ‘nothing happens to us which is not of the same nature as ourselves,’ but do we thus easily escape from the shadow of the age in which we live? Personality is not a

1) J. Gray, Introduction to ‘Ecstasy’.

2) Elizabeth a Drew, ‘The Modern Novel’, p. 27.

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lesser thing than the Zeitgeist, but one must be expressed in terms of the other, no matter what subject is dealt with; the chief material of literature, human nature, may not change, but the fashion of expression does vary, implicit in changing conditions.

The important intellectual changes of last century certainly did not occur apart from the successive and profound social, economic and mechanical changes of the time. In a broad sense they may be traced back to the Industrial Revolution and to the increasing exactness of science since Darwin's advent, when, through the failure of the century's triumphs to continue to provide spiritual regeneration on transcendentalist lines, men's thoughts were driven to bestow first consideration upon Man.

‘Glory to Man in the highest, for Man is the master of things,’

was the fearless chorus of the poet,¹⁾ for literature, eager for instruction, had been watching science. One result of this was that the novel aimed at scientific exactness of perception, or, as Professor Cross puts it,, ‘by theory or practice or both, insisted that imagination should be subordinated to observation.’²⁾ Even Meredith, a somewhat unwilling product of science, declared that ‘art is the specific’, which is precisely what Henry James, the critic's novelist, detected in the new fiction: ‘An appetite for closer notation, a sharper specification of the signs of life, of the consciousness of the human scene, and the human object in general than three or four generations before us had been at all moved to insist on.’³⁾

Undoubtedly the quality which introduces value into the fiction of the time is an intense humanity, an apparent obsession with human beings and human character. By the 'nineties this realistic reaction was in full swing under the guise of Naturalism in France, of Psychology in England, of Impressionism in Holland, of Symbolism in Belgium, and it is to those crowded years that the widespread popularity now enjoyed by the novel is due. It is true that less may be heard of realism than then, but it is not that there so much less of it that it is negligible, but that there

1) A.C. Swinburne.

2) ‘The English Novel’, p. 263.

3) ‘Notes on Novelists’, p. 254.

[p. 634]

is so much more of it that the word has grown idle as a distinguishing term; ‘The Prisoner of Zenda’,¹⁾ which was a good enough book for fin-de-siècle England, had become an impossible one for the next decade. The novels which then tended to supplant it, works like ‘The Old Wives' Tale’²⁾ and ‘Tono-Bungay’’³⁾ are, however, still good and typical books for the 'twenties.

By the Netherlands' novel to-day is meant the novel as written by the younger generation and those older writers to have not so far been mentioned, because they still count as active contemporaries. As only a very general survey of this latest period is possible, it must, obviously, omit many sections, deal scantily with many worthy names, and if an opinion more than tentative be admitted, it is only because the novel in the Netherlands is at that restraining stage or two behind which has always characterized it relative to Franco-British progress. Holland and Belgium have as yet no Tchekov, no James Joyce, no Dorothy Richardson; the novel, in the traditional sense, is not yet for any of their writers an effort which involves too wide a departure from the vivid moments of the novelist's own consciousness.

Dutch literature - so far as the novel is implicated in it - which began in a renaissance of feeling, passed through a phase of adventure, reverted in Dekker, as in Dickens, to a literature of feeling, is again in the manner of Richardson. But there has been added the trained perception which comes with science, an attitude ‘subservient to its object.’ The writers who dominate the novel to-day - Herman Robbers, Israel Querido, Johan de Meester, Jac. van Looy, and most of the others - would undoubtedly be called realists; all are preoccupied with the great problems of human society; they have abandoned ruined castles and dreaming cathedrals for Amsterdam and Rotterdam slum-life and The Hague's middle-class apartment-houses; they have assumed the instructional and prophetic mantle of such accredited reformers as Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, and quite ostensibly undertake the post-scholastic education of the intelligentsia of their generation.

1) Anthony Hope, 1894.

2) Arnold Bennett, 1908.

3) H.G. Wells, 1909.

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Mr. Edwin Muir speaks of two types of present-day artists: ‘those who desire to escape the environment and those who desire to escape from it.’¹⁾ The D.H. Lawrence outlet of scouring the globe to find some order of life sufficiently primitive to be the antitheses of contemporary Europe’²⁾ does not commend itself to any brother-novelist in Holland. But a number certainly strive to escape the consequences of not making their eyes ‘aver their ken from half of human fate,’ by expressing towards the environment an uncompromising opposition. In the case of the painter-novelist, Jac. van Looy, this attitude has led, through his own early experiences, to a closer study of the child-mind, in Herman Heyermans - the Zangwill of Holland, in drama as well as in fiction - it induced a revolutionary conviction through ‘a minutely detailed study of proletarian life,’³⁾ for De Meester it has come to mean an intense hatred of respectability, and an ironical style of presentation, the object of his hostility being the bourgeoisie as the upholders of an effete economic and ethical system. ‘Zijn rubriek’ (in de N.R.C.) says Mr. Robbers deservedly, ‘was het hechtste bolwerk der nieuwe kunst.’⁴⁾

This ‘rubriek’ of De Meester was made by Israel Querido more like the conspicuous moral marking of Zola (whose method, be it said, has never captured Holland and England as it has France, Germany, Russia and Sweden). Even in Querido's case it seems unlikely that it was a conscious attempt to make literature proceed altogether like science, by experiment or ‘provoked observation’. More probably it was simply the result of experiences during the impressionist years in the less salubrious quarters of Amsterdam. In ‘Levensgang’ and ‘De Jordaan’ we have certainly the most realistic descriptions ever penned of phases of Dutch town-life, while ‘Menschwee’, the Dutch ‘La Terre’, takes rank with the stories of Coenen and Van Hulzen as one of the most vivid and terrible portrayals of those who subsist in appalling peasant fashion. These books all have the painful force of knowledge; their purpose is never to amuse, but always to reveal and so assist the cause of social progress. This is done simply by drawing what

1) ‘Transition’, p. 15.

2) Ibid., p. 15.

3) Ashley Dukes, ‘Modern Dramatists’, p. 257.

4) ‘De Nederlandsche Litteratuur na 1880’, p. 63.

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is there, but, paradoxically enough, because they have not Zola's added didactic deduction, a pessimism adheres to them that most of the French writer's works escape; it is certainly Dutch to be hard-headed and matter-of-fact, but it is un-Dutch to be morose and unhopeful. Yet, Dr. Persyn is able to pronounce on these books that they ‘are perhaps too lyrical for being realistically true in their pictures of human misery.’¹⁾

If we consider ‘Menschenwee’ it will be apparent that Querido has no interest in the superficialities of country life, which for so long constituted country life in the urban mind; pretty milkmaids, buttercups, and ploughmen plodding home their weary way: in his work there is little of pastoral loveliness; he is often brutally frank in description as in speeches. This recurring sentence may be taken to summarise the whole: ‘The workers, absorbed in their heavy toil, sang no more.’ There is lyric beauty in this, but it is an infinitely sad beauty, ‘which accentuates the ugly contrast to nature of degrading human conditions. Such a spontaneous sentiment as

‘....I have found

That English fields are splendid in their growing,
And night comes with a golden sunset crowned,’²⁾

is a vain expectation from the brooding Querido. Nature's panoply can go unnoticed if ‘the course of life’ (to use Querido's own phrase) does not permit man, amid his blind or half-blind but gigantic toilings, to reciprocate its beauty.

‘Zijn realisme is aanvankelijk verwant aan dat van Zola,’ says Professor Prinsen, but adds that ‘de realistische waarnemer wordt visionnair.’³⁾ This is very true of his epic cycle ‘De Oude Wereld’, a gorgeous dream-panorama after the fashion of ‘Salammbô’. Yet, just as his alternate frigidity and riot of fancy in his novels of the homeland are due to the misfit of an Oriental genius with Occidental forms, we now have a Teuton's inability to wear with grace the borrowed robes of Oriental romanticism; he seems more true to himself after all in these earlier novels, and

1) ‘A Glance at the Soul of the Low Countries’, p. 88.

2) E.W. White, ‘By the Touch of Life’.

3) ‘Geïllustreerde Nederlandsche Letterkunde’, p. 273.

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Professor Prinsen is right in referring to him as ‘een artist van het echte Hollandsche ras’ who is merely ‘doorzond van de Oostersche natuur.’¹⁾

Like many other moderns Querido is often branded as a disillusioned pessimist; but like so many of his time he is agnostic rather than actually pessimistic,, for the standpoint of the intellectual modern rests more on doubt than on a conviction of evil triumphant; it is simply that he questions profoundly the confident and glib assurance of the old standard truth, which, to him, enjoins poverty and acquiescence in the existing order, and respects property and discredits remedial discontents. Whether or not these opinions are accepted, we can ask no more of any artist than that he be sincere, and of the sincerity of the emotional Querido - this ‘man van hartstocht’, as Professor Prinsen calls him -²⁾ no one makes question.

Markedly different from Querido is the other central pillar of the Dutch novel to-day, Herman Robbers. He is distinctly more optimistic and humorous, and though not given over unduly to these attitudes, he might well be attached to the English school which comprehends Arnold Bennett, Hugh Walpole, Sheila Kaye-Smith. If anything, he tends, not to the sordid, but to the banal, descending too frequently to expressing commonplaces (if a fault is to be urged against both Querido and Robbers, it is in the prominence they allow to elementary ideas and humdrum conversation, when the flat-footed domestic style disperses artistic theories of selection).

Like Querido, Robbers writes principally of the city, but whereas the former wields his pen as the chronicler of the lower-classes, the latter stands in the same rôle to the middle-classes, and the British reader cannot fail to be struck with the approximations of his studies of domestic, business and student life to the corresponding phases of British society. Only in the greater freedom of his ideation - or perhaps merely of his expression, such being British diffidence - does he strike a note more distinctively of the Netherlands. There is nothing in his work that ought in any way to offend, for Robbers brings into his work what English

1) ‘Geïllustreerde Nederlandsche Letterkunde’, p. 273.

2) Ibid., p. 273.

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writers banish on moral and conventional rather than essential grounds; it is simply, then, that there is less aversion ‘to face the difficulties with which on every side the treatment of reality bristles.’¹⁾ Zola's unshrinking fortitude in face of nightmare horrors is not necessarily a symptom of the moral passion, but neither is the absence of discussion.

Much of Robber's work is patently ‘founded upon fact’. His greatest composition, the long novel, ‘De Roman van een Gezin’, is especially of an autobiographical nature. In this closely-detailed study of the family of a well-to-do Amsterdam master-printer the incidents are so well-devised and inevitable as never to give the impression of mere padding. It is undoubtedly a contribution of the first magnitude to the Dutch novel. By a curius co-incidence it was published in the same year²⁾ as Arnold Bennett's ‘Clayhanger’, which is likewise ‘a history homely and rude’ of a master-printer and his family in an industrial town. But it is rather for the similarity of its treatment - really a difference that is unseizable - than for its resemblance in subject-matter that ‘De Roman van een Gezin’ is a relative of the celebrated ‘Clayhanger’ trilogy³⁾ which is not to be despised.

Since Dutch correspondences have been found for Richardson, Scott, Dickens, George Eliot, George Moore,⁴⁾ we may go further and allocate the title of ‘the Bennett of Holland’ to Mr. Robbers. His achievement proves that at no time during the century and a half in which the Dutch novel has been moving alongside the English has it come so near it in spirit, which, considering the insularity and racial prejudice of the English variety, is little short of marvellous. The Dutch novel has not yet winged its flight to the art of a Hardy - even in the English-speaking world no one can possibly be acounted his rival - but in qualifying unmistakably to enter the company of representative writers of the next grade, it may be said to have taken a decided step towards a general levelling.

At no time, then, has the standard of novelistic attainment in Holland been higher than it is to-day, with sociological writers

1) Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’ in ‘Partial Portraits’, p. 405.

2) 1910.

3) ‘Clayhanger’, 1910; ‘Hilda Lessways’, 1911; ‘These Twain’, 1916.

4) Wolff and Deken, Van Lennep, Beets, A.S.C. Wallis, Frans Netscher.

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of the calibre of Querido and Robbers, Van Looy and De Meester, and with the ‘necessities of history’ so well safe-guarded by such excellent romanticists as Arthur van Schendel and P.H. van Moerkerken. The number of women-novelists whose success is worthy of note has also never before been so imposing - even in a country where they have always maintained themselves in the fore-front of literature. Their prepossessions are generally along realistic lines, though often on account of their intentness on objectivity, there is little place for a wide philosophy of life; a number of them make a speciality of the psychology and the dependent social position of their sex, but here again it is rare to find the emotional intensity of this literature supported by a commensurate wealth of ideas. In their bleak and often bitter realism we discern a reading of life, but we see also a preoccupation with life's less important things. We would well wish that they performed their worthy function by marrying their art to a wider wisdom.

‘Een Huis vol Menschen’, the accepted masterpiece of Margo Antink and Carel Scharten, is without doubt a constituent of the emancipated modern novel, and their novels generally - whether written about Paris or Italy or Spain - convey a ‘Dutchness’ by their restrained handling of the theme of sex - Dutch seriousness being opposed to French and Belgian insouciance - and by their admixture of loftiness and lightness which yet just fails to achieve the middle course of spacious humour. The tendency to a particularist parochialism is evident in the writings of Top Naeff, Ina Boudier-Bakker and Carry van Bruggen, though, if their thoughts do not ‘wander through eternity’, they have compensatory moments of sublimity. Of the first-named Mr. Robbers is able to assert: ‘Top Naeff, zeker niet minder dan Johan de Meester, is een geboren litterair artiest.’¹⁾ ‘Carry van Bruggen,’ says Dr. Walch, ‘is inclined to indulge in one-sided argument,’ but adds that ‘her sketches.... are mostly masterpieces of observation, full of subtle humour.’²⁾ As interesting as any among the contributions of these feminine writers are the ‘theatre’ novels of Jo van Ammers-Küller, the product of interesting experiences

1) ‘De Nederlandsche Litteratuur na 1880’, p. 91.

2) ‘The Encyclopaedia Britannica’, Supp. Vols. No. 1, p. 884.

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as a play-wright, the ‘tendencious’ novels on the aspirations of the modern woman of this same authoress and of Ada Gerlo, and the stories of Jeanne Reyneke van Stuwe, who fuses in her manifold works styles so dissimilar as those of Zola and Conan Doyle.

Turning now to contemporary Belgian literature, the traditional dividing-line of French and Flemish confronts us as still the most difficult hurdle to be surmounted. For the first time since Conscience's day it is Flemish that is in the ascendant, for though there may be more writers of French, the three novelists of most moment all compose in Flemish. During the nineteenth century Flanders enjoyed but a mediocre literature, with Conscience, the Snieders and Sleeckx as very local and limited leaders,¹⁾ and the liberation of the Vernacular from antiquated traditions and stupid prejudices was brought about in much the same way as that of its French and Dutch associates - by the founding of a critical journal. ‘Van Nu en Straks’ became for the renaissance of Flemish letters, as André de Ridder says, ‘the foyer of light that “De Nieuwe Gids” was for the youth of Holland and “La Jeune Belgique” for our writers of French.’²⁾

With Cyriel Buysse, the most distinguished of the early editors of the new review, the novel of Flanders soon commenced its more meritorious development, though in the novels of his first period - 1893 until 1905 - he was far too violently swayed by indignation at the miserable and brutalised state of Flemish life, of peasants oppressed as much by the cure as by the patron or proprietor,’³⁾ to do justice to his art. When his talent lost a little of its outrageous force, when he railed less at ‘whatever brute and blackguard made the world,’⁴⁾ when he found consolation in witnessing man toiling on indomitably, when he acquired serenity from contemplation of the quiet pasturages of Scheldt and Lys, where always

1) In 1868 Hyppolyte Taine could write, ‘Philosophie de l'Art’, Vol. 1, p. 35: ‘To-day their literature is almisa nil. They cannot cite any of those creative minds that impose great original views upon the world or enshrine their conceptions in beautiful forms capable of commanding universal admiration.’

2) ‘La Littérature Flamande Contemporaine’, p. 39.

3) Ibid., p. 64.

4) A.E. Housman, ‘Last Poems’, IX.

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‘Les villages songeaient au fond des avenues,’¹⁾

he was ready for the masterpieces ‘Het Leven van Rozeke van Daelen’ and ‘Het Ezelken’. And the resignation that had come with his realization that ‘you cannot swerve the pulsion of the Byss,’²⁾ has continued into his latest work.

With Buysse there has, however, been excessive productivity (and he ranks as a conteur as well as a novelist). It ought to have taken him three years instead of three months to write some of these books, and because this was all the time apparently that he could spare, there is in them a greater unevenness of style and a lesser depth of thought than one would expect to find, even allowing for the fact the Buysse belongs irrevocably to the vigorous but erratic Flemish race. His métier is the roman rural, but it is the rustic population that he sees first, and only in an indeterminate way the wide landscape melting in a haze of beauty and mystery around it. The story is more his concern than the circumjacencies or the style; he follows neither the devious Flaubert nor the recording Zola; he tends far too much to keep within the measure of the perceptions of his characters. Flaubert, the supposedly ‘impersonal’, constantly ‘must intervene with his superior knowledge,’³⁾ to render a sufficient account of the world he is describing. But Buysse, relying on the rudimentary conceptions of rustic minds themselves created by the surroundings, reveals the life of his province as inadequately as Yonville would be revealed if we had to depend on Emma's vision, as distinct from Flaubert's. Perhaps Buysse lacks the humour that is needed to give shape to this outstanding factor in the individual case, for too frequently the ostensibly noble object of shedding light on the lamentable lot of the Flemish peasants and workmen is defeated by the sheer grim-visaged sternness of the narration, when the artist's love for his story is consumed by his frenzied solicitations for the dispensations of even-handed Justice.

The Netherlands' novelists have not hunted in couples so much as their English confrères, but with Buysse it is, of course, impossible not to partner Stijn Streuvels, in especial the novelist

1) E. Verhaeren, ‘Les Visages de la Vie’: ‘L'ivresse’.

2) T. Hardy, ‘The Dynasts’.

3) P. Lubbock, ‘The Craft of Fiction’, p. 65.

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of West Flanders as Buysse is of East Flanders. Yet Streuvels provides a distinct contract to his fellow-leader of the Flemish group. In his work nature assuredly has the capital rôle; he is emphatically the product of his milieu; with him the story is always slender, he is concerned merely with the impression, the reproduction of the mood. He himself has declared that he has ‘ni modèles, ni maîtres en dehors des peintres de l'école flamande.’¹⁾ And A. de Ridder has admirably described his greatest work, ‘De Vlaaschard’, as ‘the rythmical march of the seasons, the synthesis of the innumerable beauty of the natal earth.’²⁾ This paramount difference between the work of Streuvels and of Buysse has been well summarized by Professor Vermeylen. ‘Streuvels,’ he says,, ‘is lyrischer, Buysse meer dramaturg. Streuvels ziet de natuur, met de menschen daarin, als brokken van de natuur.’³⁾

Yet, though Streuvels has chased away Buysse's ‘ferocious primitivism’ for a very judicious realism - in which his descriptions of the flat countryside and the people that so heroically inhabit it succeed in being poetic - the freshness of nature has not freed him wholly from pessimism. Life, he seems to think, is regulated by a force obscure, and thus he always makes the environment determine in some way the action. It is the sombre view of Dostoievsky and Hardy in face of ‘the giant agony of the world,’ but though Streuvels is courageous, he has not the ‘heroic humanism’ of these great philosophical realists; he quickly compromises with approaching disillusion on the futility of existence by idealising his characters.

‘Whence comes Solace? - Not from seeing
What is doing, suffering, being,
Not from noting Life's conditions,
Not from heeding Time's monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream,
And in gazing at the gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.’⁴⁾

1) Quoted by P. Hamelius in ‘Introduction à la Littérature Française et Flamande de Belgique’, p. 294.

2) ‘La Littérature Flamande Contemporaine’, p. 57.

3) ‘Van Gezelle tot Timmermans’, p. 99.

4) T. Hardy, ‘Poems of the Past and of the Present’: ‘On a Fine Morning.’

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Streuvels, then, despite his powerful rhythms and his pictorial energy, does not get anywhere near to the epic note; he juxtaposes his types, but fails to unite them into a synthetic whole - a weakness much insisted upon by Mr. Querido¹⁾ at the very outset of Streuvels' literary career. Like Buysse he buries himself in a single kind, instead of following Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoi, Dostoievsky; and his novel, with more colour and less precision is no more than the embryo of theirs. Yet if it be the common fault - or perhaps simply shortcoming - of both these intense but fitful Flemings that the sphere of their spiritual observation is not wide enough, their excuse - or, if none is needed, their justification - must be that the alluring and indefinable distances of unlocated Flanders fields - of what Verhaeren calls ‘les au-delà mystérieux des plaines’ - are dearer to them than literature or even life itself.

We now come to the third of the great Flemish trio of to-day, Felix Timmermans, the exuberant leader of the younger school, and the truest inheritor among them all of the spirit of ‘Van Nu en Straks’. His ‘Pallieter’ was hailed on its appearance²⁾ as a masterpiece, but it was in the explosion of the plenitude of youth after the war that ‘Pallieterism’ became a regular cult, an irrepressible and irresponsible joie-de-vivre. ‘It was,’ as André de Ridder states, ‘the revenge of life on death and sadness.’³⁾

It would be true to call Pallieter himself a mixture of Thyl Ulenspiegel, Falstaff and John Buncle; he lives as carelessly and as gaily as the animals on his farm, with no thought of the morrow; he is a child of the open fields and the broad skies. He lives in a way that soars above the tumults and anxieties of modern town life; we see the far-stretching lands of Flanders, we smell the magic scents of evening and see the mist rising from the Nethe beside Lierre. But to the sophisticated intelligence, so frankly jocund and vagabond a life would seem to carry with it the abrogation of all ratiocinative conduct, would even hint at that deplorable ‘Belgianism’ of which Arnold Bennett speaks,⁴⁾ and,

1) In ‘Litteratuur en Kunst’, Amsterdam, 1906.

2) In ‘De Nieuwe Gids’, November, 1912.

3) ‘La Littérature Flamande Contemporaine’, p. 185.

4) ‘From the Log of the Velsa’, p. 164.

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‘the first, fine, careless rapture over,’ are we not constrained to demand if Pallieter's rubicund countenance is really that of health and strength, and not the flush and febrile excitation of the kermesse? But even if we admit the possibility of this being the reflection, not of shameless sensuality, but of sheer, youthful abandon, we do not remove ‘Pallieter’ from the list of true Flemish writings. Here is no mere opportunist work; this sparkle of spirit, this originality of tone, ‘this Rubens-like excess of sensual strength,’¹⁾ and this mystical tenderness borne of the beguinage, is Flemish through and through. Such a book need bring no ‘message’, simply to its sprightly autor²⁾ has it fallen to be identified with the most essential of tasks, ‘the great cause of cheering us all up,’ in which respect he is surely the supreme ‘Card’ of grey Flanders.³⁾

Even with Streuvels, Buysse and Timmermans, the Flemish genius in this latest period shows few signs of exhausting itself, for these three are admirably supported by writers of uniform merit like H. Teirlinck, A. Vermeylen, M. Sabbe. So abundantly, indeed, does it flow that it has burst beyond its linguistic boundaries, for many French-writing novelists of Belgium (not to mention the poets Maeterlinck and Verhaeren) are Flemish in every other important respect. The best-known perhaps is Georges Virrès,⁴⁾ who really belongs to the older generation of Lemonnier, Eekhoud and Demolder, but who remains an active post-war writer. It is customary to bracket Virrès with Eekhoud as a chronicler of the Kempen, and though he is not like that forceful writer, a rebel against all authority, but a pious Catholic, his conception of its primal race agrees surprisingly well with his. This is shown above all in ‘Les Gens de Tiest’, in which the little town of Tongres is painted with Balzacian precision and a delicate irony, realizing the ideal that ‘Literature is the expression of Society.’

The work of the other French-writing Belgians is hardly so

1) D. Pissens and J. Festraets, ‘Vlaamsche Weeld’, p. 51.

2) B.W. Downs and H.L. Jackson write in ‘A Manual of the Dutch Language’, p. 23: ‘Felix Timmermans.... shows promise of becoming one of the most considerable figures in European literature.’

3) ‘Card’ is colloquial English for a person who acts in non-conventional fashion. It is the title of a book by A. Bennett.

4) The nom-de-plume of Henry Briers.

[p. 645]

good as that of Virrès. The one of whom most was expected, Edmond Glesener, has not yet justified expectations, due perhaps to the poor opinion he holds of his countrymen, of whom he is quoted as saying, ‘To Belgians the finest idea in the world was never worth a crown piece.’¹⁾ His ‘Monsieur Honoré’ and its sequel, ‘Le Citoyen Colette’, give us a sorry picture of Belgium. To these navels of Liége Glesener gives the secondary title of ‘Chronique d'un Petit Pays,’ but he is only one of numerous writers ‘regional’ à l'outrance.

The black gulf of the years 1914 to 1918 yawns across the work of all Belgian writers of to-day-and of many Dutch ones too. The war, naturally, inspired - or, more accurately, provoked - a great amount of literature, but of satisfying novels very few. The invasion left Eekhoud aghast; Streuvels, isolated in his village-retreat at Ingoyghem, took to recording notes, banal and uncritical;²⁾ Buysse in Holland remained nearer the heart of his country, and produced one poignant novel in ‘De Strijd’,³⁾ but subject like most of its calamitously-produced kind to the ‘emotional escape.’ No Belgian war-novel, then, discloses the unity of mood and the steady vision of Barbusse's ‘Le Feu’ or Mottram's ‘Spanish Farm Trilogy’; all are ‘tendencious’, like the wonderful, Essex-written ‘Mr. Britling Sees It Through.’⁴⁾ Accepting this as inevitable, much credit should go to Henry Davignon, who, previous to the war, sought the reconciliation of the two races of his country,⁵⁾ and since then has done much to cement Anglo-Belgian friendship.⁶⁾

It is foolhardy to attempt to proceed any further in our trespass into present-day preserves. The novel itself is only a creation of modern times - foreshadowed perhaps in Italy, approached in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and not formed until the eighteenth- - but already what a far cry it seems from Richardson to Wells, from Wolff and Deken to Scharten-Antink! Every generation, every decade, has witnessed a wider and wider latitude

1) Quoted by J. Bithell in ‘Contemporary Belgian Literature’, p. 311.

2) ‘In Oorlogstijd’, 1915.

3) 1918.

4) H.G. Wells, 1918.

5) In the much-discussed novel, ‘Un Belge’, 1913.

6) Chiefly in ‘Jan Swalue’, published in English in 1918.

[p. 646]

in the genre of Marivaux and Fielding, of Scott and Dickens, so that to-day it might seem that, as we started out with something not yet the novel, we finish with something no longer the novel. But the acumen of Henry James sorted out this crux for us by his witticism. ‘There was,’ he said, ‘a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding.’¹⁾ More so even than in his hey-day the novel has grown to be the epic of common life, so that now there is no study of human character, human motive, there is nothing within reach of man's knowledge or of his imaginataion, that cannot be presented in this form. This ‘disorientation of the novel’ Mr. Middleton attributes to the great Russian writers of last century, but comments that, despite ‘their impatience of a minor perfection,’ - the formal perfection of a Flaubert or a James - they had a form of their own.²⁾ It seems certain that the supposedly-threatened ‘break-up of the novel’ is still so seldom in evidence in a work of power ‘that the old art of the long story seems likely to go on developing through its traditional forms.’³⁾ As Mr. Eden Phillpotts says, ‘The art of the novelist embraces every sort of mental interest,’⁴⁾ but these interests, although they make or are the all-important ‘story’, must still be built in, not emptied from a cart; formlessness as such is never a virtue.

The Netherlands, with their immense vitality, have sprung tardily into activity with a great company of novel-writers. And if these, for the major part, are markedly limited in scope and cannot fairly be compared with the masters of their art, the Netherlands can make answer that their poetry and drama have at all times been above the level of their fiction. That fiction is still untouched by the artistic subjectivism of books like ‘Pilgrimages’ and ‘Ulysses’, but though Mr. Lubbock's dictum that ‘the novelist must state, must tell, must narrate - what else can he do?’⁵⁾ holds good even of them, it need argue no weakness of the creative fancy on the part of Netherlandish writers that they do not share in such remarkable developments of the species. The

1) ‘The Art of Fiction’ in ‘Partial Portraits’, p. 376.

2) ‘The Break-up of the novel’ in ‘Discoveries’, p. 136.

3) Cornelius Weygandt, ‘A Century of the English Novel’, p. 478.

4) ‘The New York Times’, 22 August 1915.

5) ‘The Craft of Fiction’, p, 63.

[p. 647]

method of seeing and feeling everything through one consciousness may be a symptom of the time, but the resulting books are still isolated exceptions, and the novelists of Holland and Belgium can again make answer that they seek the same sense of proportion that governs the daily life of the twentieth century. In spite of subjective moments their novel has largely ‘externalised’ itself by conscientious and careful painting of life; it may have provided no ‘War and Peace’, no ‘Les Misérables’, no ‘Vanity Fair’ - even de Coster, the most ‘European’ of all - has not produced a ‘Don Quixote’ -¹⁾ but though it has not captured the world's press as the drama of Norway or Ireland, for example, has done, it is enough that it has found its inspiration around it, in places where the average Britisher feels more at home than anywhere else on the continent, and among strata of society by which a nation's manners can be judged, for as E.M. Forster truly says, ‘Perfect knowledge is an illusion. But in the novel we can know people perfectly.’²⁾ Yet, how little reckons the tourist, who rushes by night past the roaring conurbations of Belgium or who casually surveys the green pastures of Holland from the arched back of a canal bridge, that the novel will enable him to penetrate to the secrets of these small but renowned nations! Here we have the work of a people like ourselves, who love home and country supremely - and, be it added, who also relish smoking and the table supremely - a people to whom a perpetual struggle against the sea and against avid neighbours - has given the predominant characteristics of firmness, patience and high courage. These Dutch and Belgian peoples I have considered as one, in view of their rapprochement on the basis of a common civilization, realizing de Coster's sublime ideal:

‘North, 't is the Netherland:
Belgium is the west;
Girdle is alliance,
Girdle is friendship.’³⁾

1) Lest this opinion be thought too severe, I would draw attention to the statement of De Hoog in his ‘Studièn’ that ‘even the best authors of Dutch literature, like Vondel, Bilderdijck, Cats, Tollens, Da Costa, Van Lennep and Beets do not belong to world literature.’

2) ‘Aspects of the Novel’.

3) ‘Adventures of Tyl Ulenspiegel’, p. 349.

[p. 648]

As cultured countries, the Netherlands remain at the front of Europe: Belgium with her imperishable heritage of art, Holland to whom, proportionately, most Nobel prizes are awarded. But however nuch we ought to be flattered at the amount of tutelage the novel there has received from England, the eminence attained by Holland and Belgium in other branches of art surely indicates a higher destiny yet for the genre. Lemonnier, Couperus and Streuvels were at one time or another held to be in the running for the coveted, if somewhat capricious, Swedish award, and, though no big enough novelist may at the moment be descried for it, may we not hope confidently that there is someone writing to-day in Bruges or Arnhem, in Malines or Breda, who will bring the honour to the Netherlands, as Knut Hamsun and Ladislas Reymont have done to their small, co-lateral countries, or that among the elect of Dutch authoresses there is someone who will emulate the recent example of Italy!¹⁾ It is impossible surely to overlook the chances of Holland and Belgium in Mr. Laurie Magnus' prophetic utterance in viewing the prospect for post-war literature. ‘Possibly,’ he says, ‘the new renaissance will spring in one of the smaller countries, redeemed or restored in recent years.’²⁾ Nowhere would such a reviving touch be more deserved, nowhere would it be better received, than in quiet, plodding Holland or on the smooth, green plains of Belgium, whose story is now so much our own.

(Wordt vervolgd.)

1) Signora Deledda.

2) ‘A Dictionary of European Literature’, Preface.