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 en slot van blz. 648.)

English bibliography.

When in 1824 Sir John Bowring, honorary correspondent of the Royal Institute of the Netherlands, put forth his ‘Anthology of Batavian Poetry’ he prefaced it with the remarks: ‘There is a country within sight of the shores of our island, whose literature is less known to us than that of Persia and Hindustan; a country, too, distinguished for its civil and its imperial contributions to the mass of human knowledge.’ Eighty years later an American critic is still able to write: ‘Most of us know that Holland is somewhere in Europe; and we all know that Queen Wilhelmina takes a beautiful picture; but to how many of us has it occurred that the land of Spinoza and Rembrandt is still running a literary shop?’¹⁾ Even among the intelligentsia of England and America there is, admittedly, large disinterest in the literature of the Netherlands, despite the educative aims of Dutch authors and English translators. The English mind has scarcely been disturbed by these painstaking endeavours, but it should not be overlooked that in English there exists a body of excellent and often scholarly material on Dutch literary modes and movements far more considerable than might be gauged from the apathetic attitude just noted. Unfortunately, these materials of study are so much dispersed as to defy any attempt at co-ordination, for the contributions

1) Hubert Evans in the Preface to ‘Walter Pieterse’, New York, 1904.

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made by individual English writers to the criticism of Dutch literature have rarely been more than occasional studies. In a ‘Letter from the Low Countries’, published in ‘The London Mercury’ in July, 1921, there is the corroborative remark that ‘Mr. E. Gosse is the only English scholar who ever went so far as to study some periods and authors of Dutch literature. I think that a complete history of Dutch-Flemish literature does not exist in English.’ This is very true and rather sad.

Of all literary forms it is the novel that has most chance to be reproduced in a foreign tongue, and today the novel is surely the lingua franca of literature. The number of such translations from Dutch and from the Belgian variety, whether written in Flemish or French, is surprisingly large. Altogether I have been able to note the presence in English of 40 Dutch and 8 Belgian works of fiction. For the most part the work of translation is well done, and a number of the translators have appended preliminary studies of the work of the authors concerned. But at best these essays - even when written by men of eminence like Andrew Lang and Edmund Gosse - are fragmentary and inconclusive, since commissioned by contemporary assessment. For the reader of Dutch, of course, numerous reliable text-books are available, but these do not enter into our considerations here, for if ever Dutch literature is to be popularised in English it would seem that access to some critical works in the native language is imperative.

It is still correct to say that there is in English no standard history of Netherlands' literature; the time for such a work is scarcely ripe. But sectional works continue to make their appearance. The Cambridge Press, for example, has just announced the approaching publication of a comparative work by Mr. W.J.B. Pienaar, ‘English Influence in Dutch Literature’, while only the other day I received from Holland an enquiry as to the English prospects of a certain Dutch critical work. Coming now to existing texts we find that the chief of the histories of European literature published in English give a fair degree of prominence to the literature of the Netherlands. First and foremost we would put ‘Periods of European Literature’, under the general editorship of Professor Saintsbury, which in appropriate volumes treats of

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the main developments in Dutch literature. Another useful, though much less detailed work, is Mr. Laurie Magnus' ‘Dictionary of European Literature.’ But the most accessible fund of both fact and criticism is perhaps to be discovered in ‘The Encyclopaedia Britannica’, to which the late Sir Edmund Gosse contributed lengthy articles on Dutch and Belgian literature. Even Sir Edmund - sound critic as he is on most of the literatures of Northern Europe - is, however, by no means infallible; he errs violently in including ‘Charlotte van Bourbon’ among ‘romantic stories of mediaeval life’, while Beets he emphasizes as a great novelist - apparently from lack of personal acquaintanceship with his work. Elsewhere this voluminous critic confesses that ‘life is too short’ for him to have found time to read many of Couperus' novels. These articles have now been brought up-to-date by extensions in the post-war volumes, contributed on the Dutch side by Dr. J. Walch and on the Franco-Belgian side by M. Emile Cammaerts, and on the Flemish side by Professor Vermeylen. Other general studies that may be cited are Dr. Persyn's ‘A Glance at the Soul of the Low Countries’, B.W. Downs' and H.L. Jackson's ‘A Manual of the Dutch Language’, Johan de Meester's ‘A General View of the Netherlands’, de Vries' ‘The Influence of Holland upon English Language and Literature’.

Considering how scanty is the general English bibliography on the Dutch novel, it is not surprsing that individual writers enjoy little critical attention - in fact the lacunae in this respect are almost more numerous than the links. The early novelists in particular suffer almost total eclipse. We can hardly look for English works on Van Heemskerk and Heinsius, Feith, Loosjes, but the same cannot be said about Wolff and Deken; unfortunately, these great authoressses have been no more introduced to an English public than have their celebrated novels. For the writers of the next period, however, an excellent piece of criticism exists in English: this is Dr. H. Vissink's ‘Scottt and his Influence on Dutch Literature’, which deals copiously and altogether admirably with the romantic tendencies in the work of Van Lennep, Oltmans, Bosboom-Toussaint, Drost, Schimmel.

Eduard Douwes Dekker receives more liberal, though still inadequate, attention than falls to the lot of most Dutch writers. Most

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apposite is Dr. H. Evans' ‘Who is Multatuli’, but there is an excellent study in A. Werner's ‘The Humour of Holland’, and in the prefaces to the English versions of ‘Max Havelaar’ Baron Alphonse Nahuys and Mr. Stephen MacKenna supply much interesting data.

Of another great writer of this period, Charles de Coster, it is strange that, save for the prefatory criticism in the English edition of his ‘Thyl Ulenspiegel’, there is no satisfactory ‘outside’ work. Even in his own country, of course, de Coster has never received his due, and only a few years ago the Bibliothèque Royale in Brussels did not even possess a complete set of his works. Great, but still inferior, Belgian writers like Camille Lemonnier, Georges Eekhoud, Eugene Demolder, Georges Rodenbach have been accorded noteworthy English homage. Mr. Jethro Bithell's comprehensive work, ‘Contemporary Belgian Literature’, deals particularly with these four writers along with Verhaeren and Maeterlinck. G. Turquet-Milnes' ‘Some Modern Belgian Writers’, published in 1916, also pays greatest attention to Lemonnier, Eekhoud and Rodenbach. In the English translation of ‘Escal-Vigor’, published in Brussels, there is an able vindication of this recalcitrant but courageous novelist and his conception of his art. For additional works on Rodenbach the reader may be referred to T. Duncan's lengthy ‘Critical Introduction’ to the English translation of ‘Bruges-la-Morte’, and to V.M. Crawford's excellent essay, ‘The Singer of Bruges’, contained in her ‘Studies in Foreign Literature’, London, 1899.

It is a notable achievement that almost half of Couperus' thirty novels should be available in English, but the work of the critic is here in no way commensurate with that of the translator, for A.T. de Mattos confined himself almost wholly to rendering Couperus worthily into English. The student of Couperus should not omit, however, to read the remarks of Sir Edmund Gosse and Mr. Stephen MacKenna in ‘Footsteps of Fate’ (Noodlot) and ‘Old People and the Things that Pass’ respectively. Gosse's well-known ‘Silhouettes’, published in London in 1925, also contains a polished essay on Couperus, inspired professedly by a visit paid by the equally polished novelist. For the little data that exist in English upon Dr. van Eeden we must go to his own

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‘Happy Humanity’, issued in New York in 1912, and to the criticisms of Andrew Lang and W.H. Dorcks that are appended respectively to the English renditions of ‘Little Johannes’ and ‘The Deeps of Deliverance’ (Van de Koele Meren des Doods).

With regard to contemporary writers the English reader whose interest is aroused must depend primarily upon his own critical perspective, for almost literally there is no ‘help’ save in himself. In England there is perhaps a lesser proportion of people than elsewhere in North Europe who possess a wide acquaintanceship with European literatures, and even these make French and German, with a dash of Danish or a sprinkling of Spanish, all-sufficient; the people in Britain who have any acquaintanceship with Dutch might almost be singled out as units. The result of this insularity of appreciation and this linguistic inaptitude is that even in periodical literature there are few efforts to engender an interest in Dutch literature other than of the most fragmentary order. America is slightly more fortunate in this respect, for the number of her population of Netherlandish extraction makes it certain that a sympathetic chord will be struck somewhere - in New York at any rate, if not now by the Haarlem river. The work done by the ‘American Review of Reviews’, ‘The Outlook’, ‘The Bookman’, ‘The Dial’ and ‘The Living Age’ (Boston) is wholly commendable; it must have served to give many their first glimpse of the beauties of Holland's literature. Of English journals that contrive to stimulate a like interest ‘The London Mercury’, ‘The Times ‘Literary Supplement’ (for reviews chiefly), ‘The Westminster Review’, ‘The Saturday Review’ should be placed in the forefront. This list is not great and possibly it is by no means exhaustive; doubtless there are still to be unearthed from both English and American archives masses of useful material for the research worker on Dutch and Belgian literature. Before me as I write, for example, I have an enticing heading, ‘A Young Dutch Realist who is Creating a Sensation in Europe’. This is a reference to Querido, but as it is from an extinct American periodical, ‘Current Literature’, for February, 1910, the difficulties of distance have contrived to eliminate it as a possible source of usefulness. Daring judgments are also suggested in another article in this same journal for July, 1910; this is entitled

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‘The Restorer of a National Literature’, and Lemonnier is the writer so hailed. From the British Museum catalogues I also note up-to-date articles which have appeared in a New York periodical, ‘Current Opinion’. The earlier of these relates to Stijn Streuvels, who is indicated as ‘The Flemish Maupassant’, while the second one names itself ‘A Vindication of Belgium's Greatest Writer’ - in this case Georges Eekhoud. Unfortunately, the British Museum is not a repository for these attractive-reading reviews.

In the course of these remarks I have purposely refrained from touching, even indirectly, upon the Dutch bibliography of the subject, in comparison with which the English sources indicated are quite infinitesimal. But while these Dutch texts are admittedly praiseworthy and comprehensive, it is not invidious to remark on the purely adventitious aids supplied by English scholarship. Quite frequently I have enquiries from correspondents in Holland - Mr. Kloos among others - about recently-published English critical works or about rare editions of little-studied authors. It cannot be altogether a tribute to English scholarship that there is practically no reciprocity in this respect, though it is at least gratifying to know that English writers can acknowledge their obligations to their Dutch confrères. In the ‘Review of English Studies’, for example, I remember to have read of Professor Herford drawing attention to an interesting article appearing in a review published in Holland. To a Dutchman it may savour of British naïvety to refer to this as an apparently isolated phenomenon, and to those who know how systematically and how exactly Dutch newspapers and periodicals cater for the most catholic tastes in literature, the item calls for no special comment. For myself I can say that the finest essay I ever read on James Stephens, the Irish poet, was in the pages of ‘English Studies’. The time for a corresponding journal published in London is clearly not yet, but this article will have served its purpose if it demonstrates that only when such an event transpires will the relations between Holland and England, which have always been close and mostly cordial, be as complete as they ought to be.