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De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 52 (1937)

De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 52

(1937)– [tijdschrift] Nieuwe Gids, De–rechtenstatus Gedeeltelijk auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

[De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 53. Deel 2.]

Dutch poetry and the revival romantic door Dr. J.A. Russell.

I. The heritage of Vondel.

As with English history, so with English poetry; there is about it a degree of continuity that is little short of remarkable. As Mr. Norman Macleod1) well points out, ‘England has had, since the days of Chaucer, a succession of poets, each of whom has been aware of the work of his predecessors, if not indebted to it. Thus Spenser calls Chaucer his master; Dryden modernises him; Wordsworth goes back to the original, and William Morris is again a confessed disciple of the old poet. Even where an author like Pope writes in a new style, he is still in the succession.’ In the face of such a dictum, it obviously becomes ridiculous to narrow issues to an ‘influence’ here, a ‘tendency’ there - all that array of students' terms so wittily denounced by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch2) is disposed of for ever. In a word, then, it virtually serves to establish all poetry - and no mere single section of it - as ‘romantic’. In the one direction we have poets like Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare transmitting a great and increasing heritage; in the other, we behold Shelley, Keats and Wordsworth not as men who broke with tradition but as men who actually reasserted it.

Surveying the course of Dutch poetry, it is not usual to pretend that there is anything like the same continuous development as this; that, in fact, there is other than a marked absence of con-

tinuity, an alarming scarcity of great names over long periods, an almost dismaying lack of connection between the major achievements. Do we not see the poets of Holland swaying continually between the classical and romantic ideals - Bilderdijk, for instance, imitating Horace, Theocritus, Anacreon, abominating Shakespeare and Schiller, translating Pope and Goldsmith, paying adulous homage to ‘Ossian’? The ‘Golden Age’, again, with its sixty poets gives us a sheer embarrassment of riches; but what of the blankness of the succeeding era - in which the sophisticated measures of Poot and the fluctuating inspiration of Smits inevitably attract a preposterously disproportionate amount of attention? And what can be said to link the lyricism of Hooft and Da Costa, of Perk and Vondel or Cats? Have they, indeed, anything in common at all is what we often feel constrained to ask?

In such a view, it is obvious, lurks serious danger. There is, in particular, the danger of denationalising Dutch poetry altogether of reducing it to a mere series of poets. Uneven though the progression of that poetry may be, it is nothing like so inchoate as this. Where I believe the chief trouble to lie is in the lack of a recognized centre or starting-point. For the later poets there seems sadly lacking as Hardy phrases it, ‘some fixed star to stimulate their pace, toward the goal of their enterprise’. They see no Dante, no Shakespeare - or even a Camoens - and far too much have had to divorce their work from indigenous forms and motives and engross it in a classicism that could draw nothing from the springs of racial feeling and experience. Yet, what poetry should be more national in its essential features than that of the ‘land of sea-dunes and sea borders’, the land that shook off the yoke of Parma and became the equal of England in the spirit derived from the sea? If the florescence of Dutch art in the seventeenth century was the result of the nation's successful struggle for freedom, so also surely should that of Dutch literature have been.

It must always be a matter for astonishment that the painters of Holland should so immediately have spoken with a national voice of the national relief, by setting so lovingly to transcribe scenes of the now peaceful bourgois life of home and town in

their native land. The English painter, Constable, has a saying to the effect that the Dutch painters stayed at home and therefore were original. It is scarcely an exaggeration. Not for their canvases was the extraordinary and stupendous required. For the most part it was enough that their vision should comprehend the common objects of homely everyday life - canals and streets, villages and farms, church and domestic interiors. And when these were grasped with such precision and depth, an enduring charm had surely been given to the seemingly trivial and unremarkable.

Yet, not all the genius of the land was lavished on the pictorial art, not every famous name was that of a painter. The seeds of the sister art, poetry, being also watered and nourished, there arose in similar fashion the greatest names in the lengthy literature of Holland. The ‘Golden Age’ it assuredly was. But, unfortunately, it was not in both respects equally balanced. In art the spirit was manifestly great because it was so democratic and at the same time so dynamic. But in the literary sphere there were certain spurious, certain vitiating elements. We remember Verhaeren's remark that no writer is great who has not put into his work something of his nation. These seventeenth century-verse-makers tended to mirror, not Holland, but the whole age. No longer is their work recognizably that of a single nation, like the unmistakable landscapes of Ruysdael, the wooded hills of Hobbema; we do not return to it as we do to the gracious colouring of the ‘Old Masters’; there is no finely exciting relation to the Dutch scene, even as George Borrow's descriptions might be said to relate him to the ‘Norwich School’ of painters. The truth seems to be that these new poets could not keep their heads high enough above the running tide of the Renaissance. The poets of England managed that - with typical, obstinate insularity - so that still their work is filled with healthy life, sound and fury. It must, I think, ever be the great achievement of Shakespeare and the Elizabethans that they married the ‘New Learning’ with the old vernacular; whereas the Dutch poets never properly succeeded in the fusion of the Italian Renaissance with native folk elements. Only had they done so would they have created a school of poetry really worthy of the

supreme glory of Dutch painting. And then, to quote Mr. Jethro Bithell,3) ‘the Pléiade would have been out-sung and there would have been a lyric harvest as great as that of our Elizabethan days’.

So much for what might have been. Actually, no age in Holland was by nature more poetical than the seventeenth century, and none has proved richer in poetical achievement. One is struck by the great names included in it, by the number of lesser figures. Surely here, if anywhere, one would say the poetical leadership so desiderated for Holland would be found. Even among the painters, it can never be lost sight of, Rembrandt transcends uniquely, with no other is life at once dangerous and critical. The ‘Rembrandt’ of poetry? Of any can it truly be said that he speaks with the same distinguishing voice?

Claimants certainly are not lacking. They begin even with the sixteenth century, where three at least come into the reckoning, or almost so. There is Anna Bijns, to begin with. Never can we overlook the fact that in her we have the first writer to use the language with grace and precision of style. There is also that poet of tender feeling, Van der Noot, to whose ‘Theatre of Worldlings’ the youthful Spenser contributed translations from the French. And, finally, there is Filips van Marnix. Could there be anything more fitting than that the composer of the stirring national anthem, the ‘Wilhelmus-lied’, should point his countrymen the way on Parnassus' height? But alas! that place is not for him, or for any other of his century. With them assuredly may we say that modern Dutch literature has begun; yet never did they altogether enter the promised land.

However, if mere precursors they were, they were precursors at least of the acknowledged poetical ‘Golden Age’ the seventeenth century.

Within Dutch letters there is no other such powerful triumvirate as Vondel, Hooft and Cats. Here we have the nationally-acclaimed leaders in that period of greatest resurgence. Yet, why always Cats? Is his continued association with his mighty contemporaries not largely a matter of lip-service? If Cats, why

not Huygens? This may seem, of course, to concede to Calvinism far more than it deserves. But Huygens, if also a decidedly trite moraliser in verse, had at least the good sense to recognize the genius of John Donne and translate his songs and elegies. In any case, the Dutch poets have themselves generally preferred to hunt in couples, and our particular differentiation enables us to make full use of the two distinct Renaissance camps so well noted by Professor Prinsen4), assigning to the true lovers of beauty the pagan Hooft and the Catholic Vondel and to the seekers after vain learning and weary didacticism the lesser Cats and Huygens.

Upon no other writer, I would say, can such absurd and fulsome praise ever have been lavished as upon the well-meaning but insufferably tedious poet, Jacob Cats. As Grand Pensionary of his country, coming between the régimes of Oldenbarneveldt and De Witt, we give him the respect that is his due; as beloved ‘Vader Cats’, the serene philosopher of ‘Sorhvliet’, we are at all times touched by his piety, simplicity and devotion to humanity; we may even allow that ‘hij weerkaartst de volksziel van den 17den eeuwschen Hollander’5); but in accepting him as a great and considerable poet, a reshaper of Dutch verse, a powerful influence to all later generations, we refuse absolutely to lose our heads as the older critics have undoubtedly done. the maudlin lines of both Bilderdijk and his friend Southey we may dismiss as laughable nonsense. There is a little more point about the Englishman's reference to him as ‘the most useful poet that any country ever had’,6) though I doubt if the compliment is deserved just as he meant it. In its day his ‘Sinne- en Minnenbeelden’ may have constituted a ‘best-seller’, found equally in the cottage of the peasant and the library of the man of learning; it may have gained access to English, French and German; a copy of the original edition may have been the proudest possession of Sir Joshua Reynolds (though, again, it may only prove how much he cherished the memory of his Dutch grandmother). But today the ‘emblematic’ style he favoured, with its simple and artless but nevertheless utterly cloying didacticism, is completely

and in every way outmoded and totally without value in the organic study of poetry. ‘With Cats’, writes Delepierre,7) ‘all is calm’. There is no satiric intention at all behind the words, but might they not really constitute his literary epitaph?

As Cats shows the tame and pedestrian spirit of Dutch verse, so Huygens represents its courtly and scholarly, but almost inevitably artificial, side. Quite undeniably his work owes both its form and substance to prevailing taste. In England this is the age of Shakespeare and Milton, but Huygens seems never to have heard of either of them. Instead he sets himself to study the mind and method of that altogether strange and complex being, John Donne ‘de duistre zon’, no doubt, quite a favourite literary exercise of the time. But clearly he was following a wrong tack. Not in any of his work is there evidence that he could ever have hoped to assimilate the true ‘metaphysical’ spirit. Saturate his writings with ‘conceits’ as he might, this is not to allow that he ever penetrated to the deeper hinterland of thought latent in Crashaw; nor with them all could he at all express a religious emotion comparable to those exultant moods of Vaughan, when he:

 
‘Felt through all this fleshly dress
 
Bright shoots of everlastingness.’

Only by such intellectually intuitive flashes was it possible that his verses could have significance for later generations of poets, as the English ‘metaphysicals’ may still be said to give prompting to the mazy and erudite fancies of a modern like T.S. Elict. But Huygens was far too politically fixed, too keenly interested and preoccupied socially, much too Calvinistically centred, to possess individual value beyond his own immediate time. And even there it cannot be said that he is any too secure; for these are at least two contemporaries who dwarf him in almost every salient respect: ‘Vondel, that ‘mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies’, and Hooft, recapturing in his Batavian Arcadia the charming strains of Ronsard.

There is something in the mere juxtaposition of these two

names - Vondel and Hooft - that always seems to me to form an impressive blend of sound, a fine suggestion of intellectual and artistic integrity. These at last - or at first - are, undoubtedly, the twin deities of all Dutch poetry. Yet, never surely were there two contemporary writers of more dissimilar taste, outlook, style, temperament: Hooft, aristocratic and wealthy, founder of the highly cultural ‘Muiderkring’, the refined Dutch ‘Tacitus’, the frank pagan, for whom Montaigne is ‘the Godlike Gascon’; Vondel bourgeois and financially harassed, the strenuous citizen of Amsterdam, the belated, struggling student of the classics, the devout Catholic believer, less and less able to shake off the mysticism and obscurantism of the age. What a problem they have set the critics! However are their rival merits to be disentangled? Whose contribution is the greater? Which is the ‘Rembrandt’ of Dutch poetical literature? Time, surely, has given the answer long ere this.

In one incontrovertible respect Hooft and Vondel align themselves alongside, in the respect that they are both of the late brood of the Renaissance. Without that impulse working in them it is certain that they could never have succeeded in giving their common language its highest finish and melody. But Hooft is far more completely the ‘Renaissancist’ than Vondel, in the final analysis it is even doubtful if he is anything else but that. One critic at any rate appears to think it is enough. Thus, Professor Verwey writes:8) ‘De keel in Holland die het strakst gespannen stond, is niet die van den grooten Vondel, maar die van den artistieken Hooft geweest’. We can readily grant the artistic deftness of his couplets and strophes, the happy insouciance of his lovelyrics, the Petrarchan polish of his sonnets, the troubadour sweetness of his emotions. But it is all so exotic, so Italianate, ‘always he has an ear open for Italy’. As we read we begin to feel how welcome now and then would be a tender brushing of the native dews of Holland instead.

The truth is that Hooft is not really at home in the Holland of his day. He is a Renaissance exile in a country that had in great measure refused to ‘receive’ it. Between him and his

contemporaries (Vondel apart, of course) lay the Calvinistic theocracy (which he repudiated), cutting the line of Dutch literary history and sadly reducing, for national purposes, his exquisite garnerings in the fields of Italy. Here we have sunshine and laughter, a frank, sensuous enjoyment of life:

 
‘Vluchtige nimph waer heen soo snel?’
 
‘Hebt ghij bij ongeluck U Lief verlooren?’
 
‘Mijn lief, mijn lief, mijn lief; soo sprach mijn lief mij toe,
 
Dewijl mijn lippen op haer lieve lipjes weiden.’

Such poetry, of course, is in no sense philosophical; as Professor Grierson says;9) ‘There are no metaphysics in Hooft's love-poetry’. But it is just the lack of pensive undertones - rather than of direct meditation - that we miss; it is a lively Muse, this, too lively indeed; its mien is not what we associate with sober Holland at all. In the end, it is the smooth, tripping measures of Hooft that remain most of all with us; and his influence upon versification we must allow to be great. ‘Artiest-met-de-taal, dat is Hoofts Ideaal geweest,’ writes again Professor Verwey.10) But it was almost wholly an influence on technique; by itself not enough to place him among the Olympians; and his preoccupation with it does much to deprive him of the claim to be the first national lyricist among the poets of Holland. That title, I fully believe, must be reserved for Joost van den Vondel, the pride and glory of his age and by far the greatest force in the whole story of Dutch letters.

As a poet Vondel is far from faultless, and his works have undergone pitiless criticisms. But of the sheer immensity of his achievement no one makes question. The most voluminous of writers, he was surely also the most versatile. Every type of poetry he essayed - dramatic, epic, lyric. He was both moralist and satirist, classicist and nationalist. His wit may not have been delicate or keen - he was certainly no troubadour - but he had a mind capable of lofty contemplation, an imagniation intense and ardent.

This multifariousness he carried into his life. If the circumstances of his youth were favourable to the production of genius, he certainly paid back his debt to his country in fullest measure. To him his fatherland was the alpha and omega of his inspiration, and he was perhaps the first Dutchman to become deeply conscious of the power of nationalism. At heart he was a zealous republican, though at the same time he kept a reverence for kings and God-constituted authority. A fiery patriot he was, rejoicing in the triumphs and exploits of Tromp and De Ruyter and the intrepid adventures of explorers and pioneers. An intense love of justice was also his, as is shown by his hatred of the Spanish Catholics. And, paradoxically, though a devout pietist, he could approach questions of the time in a spirit of enlightened enquiry - writing, for instance in favour of Arminianism, though gradually heading himself for the Church of Rome. Little wonder that in Amsterdam - next to Holland itself the closest object of his affection - he lived to become the greatest man of his day.

Controversy still rages about the quality of the output of this truly remarkable writer; and more especially over the question as to whether his lyric or dramatic work merits the higher award. The ‘Dutch Shakespeare’ is a term that comes easily to mind, and probably it is in this rôle of dramatist that he is most characteristically regarded. For the view there is incontestably much justification. It was as a writer of tragedy on the classical model that he began his literary career, choosing this almost as deliberately as Milton the epic form. In all he wrote thirty-three tragedies and won a reputation as by far the outstanding dramatist of the day in Holland.

So much for the bare record of Vondel's achievement in drama. He would be a bold person, however, who would hold that it ranks alongside Shakespeare's or that the loosely-conferred title of the ‘Dutch Shakespeare’ is merited other than on the historic concept. Only eighteen of his plays, for intance, were ever acted on the stage, and it is questionable if he ever created any really outstanding tragic character or developed any truly dramatic action in the Shakespearean manner. There seems, in fact, no possible basis of comparison between the unfettered sweep of the English writer, holding a high, philosophic balance between

good and evil (‘the Spinozistic deity’ of Coleridge), caring only for beauty - and not even whether it were of God or the devil - and his Dutch counterpart, concerned at all times with the unities of Aristotle, the moralities of mediaeval Christianity, the mythology of Greece, the historicity of the Old Testament; freely propagating his own ideas on politics and religion; never seeming to realize the limitations imposed by his endless rhymed Alexandrines. No more than Shakespeare did Vondel invent plots. But whereas the former imposes an English form upon his classical or Italian material - only thus finding scope for his comedies - Vondel's presentations remain true to the spirit of his sources: whether Euripides, Sophocles, Seneca, the Bible. The romantic liberties taken by Shakespeare in plays like ‘The Merchant of Venice’, ‘Twelfth Night’, ‘As You Like It’ - and even in the deeper tragedies like ‘Hamlet’, ‘Macbeth’, ‘King Lear’ - would have been utterly impossible to the other. At the most he allowed himself a little trafficking with Du Bartas and Tasso.

Companies of English players, we know, visited Amsterdam from time to time, performing Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare. But Vondel, if he ever witnessed them at all, must have found it extremely difficult to appreciate the treatment given ‘The Jew of Malta’, ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’, even perhaps ‘Volpone’. An English audience, on the other hand, would doubtless have seen in plays like the ‘Joseph’ trilogy merely an application of the dramatic art of the Renaissance to the matter of the old ‘Mysteries’ and ‘Moralities’, while ‘Hierusalem Verwoest’ and ‘De Amsterdamsche Hecuba’ would have struck them as pretty dull sort of stuff. Perhaps the only plays of Vondel that would have been reasonably palatable to them were the popularly-conceived ‘Gysbrecht van Amstel’ and the pastoral ‘De Leeuwendaelers’. These apart, the whole range of Shakespearean comedy or that inspired mixture of the comic and the tragic is a closed book to the great Dutch dramatist.

Speaking of his double loyalties to Hebrew and classical literature, Dr. Prinsen well expresses it:11) ‘De dochter van Sion

wijkt niet voor Hecuba, de koninklijke harpenaar staat naast Euripides’. In the face of such massive devotion it is not to be wondered at that Holland's own bistory came but incidentally into Vondel's dramatic reckoning. ‘Gysbrecht’, of course, infiltrates legend with its local history, but it seems the only possible approach to what Shakespeare did for England with his great series of historical plays.

Unless, of course, we can take stage-satires like ‘Palamedes’ as yielding a more exact equivalent. But that would be almost like imagining Shakespeare having in mind directly to indict the times in penning ‘Hamlet’. As it happens, fortunately there is no need to go to such an extreme, since Vondel's observations both on and of the contemporary and of older Dutch history are far better revealed in his poems, and not in his dramas at all.

So far it may seem strange that we have taken no notice of ‘Lucifer’, Vondel's undoubted dramatic masterpiece and one of high-lights of all Dutch literature. Is it possible that these stricturen apply here also? Hard though it may be to avow it, I am rather afraid they do. This, if anything is, is Vondel's ‘Hamlet’, yet I make so bold as to say that even here the expected dramatic intensity is never quite reached. And once more it would seem as if the poet's natural enthusiasms were overbalanced by his religious dread of taking too great liberties with the sacred matter inherent in his subject. ‘In “Lucifer”’ as Van Noppen12) puts it, ‘there is no death, no blood, no murder; it remains the drama of a magnificent ruin.’ And so as any exact comparison with the supreme art of Shakespeare is concerned, I consider that this verdict is by no means an unjust one.

But, in respect of ‘Lucifer’, it is not with Shakespeare that Vondel is usually compared, but with Milton. Here, outwardly at least, there seem many more affinities between the two poets. Both were grasped by the life of the time and suffered many private vicissitudes of fortune. Both were men of intensely religious conviction, and the influence of the Bible upon their separate work was prodigious. All the independence of the poet was in their character, creating an excessive freedom of opinion

- for the time - and causing them to sacrifice personal interests to principles. This character, however, was somewhat harsh, involving them in quarrels and disputations. Like Milton himself, Vondel was ‘a good hater’, though ‘all his fighting was for peace’. It is assuredly this factor that gives to the very invective hurled against tyranny by the one and the satires on current injustices and vices launched by the other a certain note of sublimity, if also it serves to indicate an absolutely humorous lack of compromise.

Such external pictures of the two poets, of course, would be without value if they did not help to shed some light upon their inner activities and relationships. But at once they bring us to the supposed influence of Vondel upon Milton- and particularly of ‘Lucifer’ upon ‘Paradise Lost’ one of the great causes célèbres of Dutch literary history. No longer is this really an open question, yet in the minds of various individual critics there still seems room for considerable speculation. The case made out for Vondel, of course, begins with the fact that his great work appeared thirteen years before that of the English writer; and much scholarship has been displayed in the attempt to prove the indebtedness that must thereby have been incurred. The hypothesis proceeds naïvely that there could not but be the most indelible traces, a heavy inflow everywhere of ‘Vondelisms’. Of ‘Paradise Lost’ Mr. George Edmundson,13) for instance, goes so far as to state that ‘“Lucifer” has indisputable claims to be regarded as its literary parent’. This in itself would seem to establish that the works of Vondel were accessible to Milton and that he could read Dutch. He is known, of course, to have been deeply interested in Dutch theology, and his name became a household one in Holland through his controversies with Morus. Some knowledge of the language he may possibly have acquired from Roger Williams, founder of Rhode Island; while in London he also met the Pensionary Cats. But, in the main, these are remarkably slight proofs upon which to base a far-reaching literary theory.

Against it might even be offered a complete denial, as

Dr. Moorhuizen14) for one solves the matter. But, while of direct borrowings few instances can be adduced, neither can all suggestion of them be ruled out. Perhaps it is not at all a bad settlement to accept Milton's own dictum: ‘To borrow, and better in the borrowing, is no plagiarie’. Too much also, I consider, is it forgotten how utterly dissimilar are the two works in form, treatment, execution. Only in their general scope and in the fact that the two astronomies were much more drawn upon than was at one time supposed, would it appear that their implications can seriously be considered together. Otherwise it is the epic form against the dramatic, Hellenic and Hebraic sublimity against the orthodox and conventional canons of a deep Christian Fundamentalism, the experiment of blank verse against all the variations rung upon the rhymed Alexandrine. Far more obvious, would it seem, in face of these irreconcilables, to concentrate on their common debt to Du Bartas and to Grotius. Vondel's ‘Adam in Ballingschap’, we know, is substantially a translation of the ‘Adamus Exul’, and from Dr. Cowley's unpublished thesis Edmundson quotes15): ‘We can safety say that the outlines of “Adamus Exul” and “Paradise Lost” are the same’.

If it be really desired to regard Vondel as the ‘Dutch Milton’, there is, I would say, a far greater series of probabilities in certain other directions. Vondel, so often on a loose application of the term accounted an epic poet, happens to have written no true epics at all. But there is his ‘Johannes de Boetgezant’, an historical poem in six books, almost meriting the description. Published in 1662, it was also a forerunner of ‘Paradise Lost’, yet the critics have been singularly neglectful of its possible influence - even Ten Brink, who places the handling of many incidents in ‘Lucifer’ high above that of corresponding ones in ‘Paradise Lost’. And there is ‘Samson’ - a play certainly - making its appearance eleven years before ‘Samson Agonistes’. Here surely, one would say, would be the gist of that tremendous conception. But again the critics are silent. ‘Samson’ this time is no personal and political allegory. Times have changed Vondel. No longer is he the poet of ‘Palamedes’. The laureate of Amsterdam, a national figure now

- and, well over seventy years old, with his dramatic powers greatly failing - he rather pathetically attempts to go back to his well-worn Biblical choices of theme and achieves a sombre but safe piece of orthodox reconstruction. ‘Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves’ was never again to be the metaphorical lot of Joost van den Vondel.

Professor Grierson, I think, gets much nearer the truth when he writes16) that ‘his highest flights are on wings of adoration and love and recall Crashaw rather than Milton’. These incidental lyrics in the great dramas are often of compelling beauty, steeped as they are in the stately word-music of the Bible itself. One has only to think of the chorus in ‘Gysbreght van Amstel’, the many choral songs in ‘Lucifer’, that of ‘Eubeers’ in ‘Palamedes’. It is the Crashaw of the ‘Hymn to Saint Teresa’; the Crashaw who wrote:

 
‘We saw Thee in Thy balmy nest,
 
Bright dawn of our eternal day!
 
We saw Thine eyes break from their East
 
And chase the trembling shades away.
 
We saw Thee: and we blest the sight.
 
We saw Thee, by Thine own sweet light.’

Only, in ‘Jephta’, I think, he might well be echoing Milton in the ‘Nativity Ode’, as in the song:

 
‘In gelaetenheit
 
Tegens eigen oordeel,
 
Dat hier tegens pleit,
 
Afstaen van zijn voordeel,
 
Heeft een stercker maght
 
Onder sich gebracht
 
Dan die heiren overwint.’

It is a narrow and misleading basis of comparison, however, that confines Vondel as lyricist to what after all was but incorporated, after the Greek manner, into the plays. And just as there was a Crashaw who wrote ‘Wishes to his Supposed Mistress’ ‘The

Weeper’, ‘The Temple’, so there was a Vondel who knew love and tenderness and passion apart from the ardour and elevation inseparable from the presentation of sacred drama.

Somewhere round about 1300 lyrics he wrote on an infinite variety of occasions. Strange wonder if we do not find in this - Holland's greatest heritage of song - that he ‘unlocked his heart’ as he was never at all able to do amid the classical demands of his ‘Gebroeders’, ‘Peter en Pauwels’, ‘Salomon’, and only in a tendentious Catholic sense in ‘Marie Stuart’ and a coarse, attacking one in ‘Roskam’ and ‘Harpoen’! Small wonder if in these simple poems - ‘Uitvaert van mijn Dochterken’, ‘Het Lof der Zee Vaert’, ‘Olyftack aan Gustaaf Adolf’ - these sonnets Milton-wise rather than Shakespeare, like that on the knighthood of Laurens Raael by Charles I of Great Britain and ‘De Bruyloft van Cana’ - these epithalamia, these birthday odes, the man Vondel is revealed in his most characteristic and personal moods! Indeed, in any study of the evolution of his mind and art it must be noticeable how these antinomies between his lyric and dramatic capacities are ever being increased and widened. He may in the beginning have set out to dedicate his life to the dramatic art - as Milton in his prime to epic - but in the end so great is the resurgence of his more natural lyric impulses that they almost succeed in sweeping away such shreds of dramatic opposition as remain in ‘Samson’ and ‘Noah’ Irresistibly the conviction is borne in one that his lyrical gifts exceeded his dramatic, that in many ways he was really a romantic poet fretting under the restraints imposed by classical diction. It is always interesting - if completely futile - to speculate on what various writers might have been, living in other ages and times. Vondel, if he had been reincarnated a century later, would almost certainly not have adopted drama - even for his graves themes - but might well have led his Dutch confrères in the greatest of all modern literary movements - the Romantic Revival.

To regard Vondel as primarily a lyricist is not nearly so revolutionary a view as it sounds. Following Lyly and Shakespeare, he had already in his dramas shown an appreciation of the purpose and value of the incidental lyric. Indeed, like the master of English drama himself, he might well be said to owe his immortal vogue in

some dgree to these often exquisite interludes. After all, in writing a song which can and will be widely sung, is not a poet of general accomplishment reverting to his primary function, and at the same time establishing a living link with the people, by which they will be drawn on to read his other works? Already, with Lodge, Drayton, Campion, Shakespeare, England was ‘a nest of Einging birds’.

For the Elizabethans lyrical poetry was made to be sung, and they established the modern world's great age of song with matchless melodies like Shakespeare's ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I’, ‘Hark, hark the lark at heaven's gate sings’, ‘Who is Sylvia’, Marlowe's ‘Come live with me and be my love’, Ben Jonson's ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes’. The Jonger poems of these writers may have their weaknesses; their dramas their matter-of-fact portions; but in these lyric gems nothing is admitted that is of inferior quality; all is perfection in lightness and dexterity of touch, in a melody various if generally slight, in brilliance of fancy and unfailing vivacity. Conventionality of theme there may be, a lack of intensity, an imitation of precedent and example; but these features are all well adapted to its essentially impersonal character.

Not for an instant can it be contended that Vondel's lyricism combines all the variety, aesthetic discipline, peculiarly objective idealism worthy of this high poetic attainment. In many ways it might even be imagined that Hooft's delicacy of art and perception would more fittingly represent the genre. But this is only superficially so. Hooft for the most part expresses the lyrical sentiment in terms of the older, Italian pastoral manner, while in his lovesongs he reaches the faintly decadent stage expressed by Herrick in England. Vondel, on the other hand, while he still keeps his turn for moralising - being really a Renaissance writer seeking to reform the Reformation - and allows his satirical tendencies to weaken his lyric impulses, can still display the simplicity of diction and style, the suggestion of brooding melancholy, the sincere love of nature of a quite good romantic. And through this notable service, he must undoubtedly be regarded as the great ‘maker’ of Dutch poetry.

If we consider the position in England we will see that that precisely was the prerogative of Spenser. Charles Lamb has named

him the Poets' Poet, implying thereby that by his learning, passion, exquisite sense of form, and delicate ear he was able to establish to the English language all that it would admit of the tunes and technique accumulated previously, and that he became as a result the great teacher of English poets - ‘Milton's poet’, ‘Keats's poet’, perhaps even ‘Shakespeare's poet’.

True, the analogy is by no means complete. In Holland there has been as much need as in England for poets to learn - not their ‘art’, of course - but how to express it. But Vondel had not himself the specific skill to transmit this ungovernable, incalculable and inimitable element - in no way to be confused with poetic ‘material’ - to those who might come after him, as Spenser, already asserting the principle of beauty for its own sake, had it in the full measure of his genius to do. Perhaps as much as anything the time-honoured question of moral intention comes in to complicate the issue. Both in Holland and in England the Renaissance was in the main ethical - as in Italy it was unmoral. There were exceptions, of course - Hooft notably in Holland. In England it may seem little short of preposterous to place Spenser in the same category - remembering the atmosphere of ‘The Faerie Queene’ and the poet's open parade of its moral purpose. But actually this ethical intention amounts to little; Spenser's heart was truly not in his morality - whenever it comes to a struggle between his sense of morality and his sense of beauty, the sense of beauty, very properly, triumphs. As a moralist, thus, Spenser was hopelessly divided, being fairly caught between the old ascetic morality and the new enthusiasm for beauty above all else.

No such doubt arose to trouble the mind and consciousness of Vondel. From the beginning he made the inculcation of morality his highest aim and purpose. The Greek chorus he adapted and always kept before him to impress ‘the moral of the play’. Unequivocally we might take the words significantly used of the earlier poet Gower and apply them here as: ‘Grave, moral Vondel’. It is the poet on perhaps his most characteristic side; but while it is a trait that has been of inestimable service in making religion a theme for poetry equal with nature and with love, it has also had a retarding, conventionalising and delimitating effect. Certainly not on this side was Vondel's romantic influence at all marked, despite

the fact that it is at once both his strength and his weakness. It has fixed a Christian strain, certainly, but left the poets of Holland ‘painfully at ease in Zion’: as, for example, Beets, Da Costa, even Bilderdijk.

Exaggerated importance I think has been attached to Vondel's poetry influence on nature poetry. Here again I do not consider his services to romanticism as either deep or strong. I quite fail to understand those critics who affect to find in his descriptions the brooding landscapes of the ‘melancholy Ruysdael’ or are reminded by his realistic touches of the creations of Lingelbach and Pynacker. It is just the absence of any appreciation of the sister art that I miss most off all on this side of his work. Van Noppen goes the length of calling him the ‘Painters' Poet’, but few terms could be used that would be more inapt. He should have been that, of course. The contours of the country admirably suited natural delineation, as the painters were quick to discover. But poetry lagged behind, a fault mostly to be accounted to be accounted to Vondel. His most considerable nature poem is probably his ‘Rynstroom’ - it is the type of all the rest, a patriotic paeon far more than an actual description of scenery. A river like the Rhine is in itself a great symphonic poem, but Vondel reduces it to a tame exemplification of mere data:

 
‘De Maes, die met een myterkroon
 
Om d'eer met onzen Rijn wil vechten,
 
De Roer, die 't hair met riet vertuit,
 
De Necker, met een riem van trossen,
 
De Lip, gedoscht met mosch en kruit
 
Van overhangende eikenbosschen,
 
En duizent andren, min van roem,
 
Bekranst met loof en korenbloem.’

Doubtless it was the fashion of the time. Drummond in the same wen shows singularly little personal reaction to his own native Scottish scenery, while many of the epithets in his rhymed catalogue as applied to rivers are curiously inappropriate. In Vondel, of course, we have no right to expert a definite ‘philosophy of nature’, but it is a disappointment that we should not even find the vaguest intimations of one: how the whole course of Dutch poetry might

have been changed and reoriented if we could have been given here something of the gently inspired ruminations of Cowper wandering by placid Ouse! But the truth seems to be that in the men from whom he might best have learned an imaginative love of nature - the contemporary painters - Vondel was amazingly disinterested. Though he may have written inscriptions now and again for paintings and makes a few mentions of Rembrandt, there is a very superficial sort of acquaintanceship with the works of realists like Steen, Ostade, Brouwer, Teniers. For Rubens only does he seem to have a very high regard among the ‘Flemish School’ and actually indicates a preference for the Italian idealists Raphael above all. For Dutch poetry this failure of Vondel's to realize what was probably the most powerful natural influence of the time was certainly an incalculable loss, leaving it on this side more slight, more occasional, than it had any right to be.

According to Professor Grierson17) the themes of lyric will be ‘the themes which most readily evoke the ecstatic, the Dionysiac mood’. Vondel, as we have seen, was too much the orthodox religionist - Milton's modifications in ‘Paradise Lost’, in the light of his own heretical convictions, would have been abhorrent to him - too much the poetic moralist - still standing very near to the Middle Ages and supporting himself by authority - to feel this note of ecstasy, ‘the lyric cry’, at a level other than considerably below the highest; in him it was too reasoned and controlled a thing ever to be accepted with ‘dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth’. And, again, as I see him at least, he was too much the busy townsman, too much ‘the recording citizen’ ever to be able sufficiently to spare time for that quiet browsing among natural scenes which, as a form of escape from all the routine of life, would have induced a mood, less infectious, but more philosopically complete perhaps - a mood that, with later developments in mind, we might incline to regard as romantic rather than lyrical in essence.

For these poetic handicaps - one proceeding from a sheer excess of conventional fervour, the other from a denial of opportunity largely - we must blame, in some form, both the age and Vondel himself - the first, however, not in the sense that its

current philosophies, like those of Spinoza and Descartes, failed to find a place in his work; but, certainly, that he could not more effectively unite his art to one of the Muse's great, perennial themes.

The imaginative experiences into which Vondel did enter were, nevertheless, sufficiently wide and varied - and at times even rhapsodical - to produce a definite, lyrical temper in him. Other ecstasies there are - of joy and sorrow, of love and death - culled from common life and circumstances, as from beatific visions and mere fundamentalist religious prompting - and these he knew well and uttered in a manner free from literary complication and subtlety. This he surely does in such a blithesome poem as his ‘Uitvaert van Orpheus’

 
‘De leeu zyn brullen staeckt,
 
De leeu zyn brullen staeckt en blaeckt.
 
De duiven treckebecken,
 
Tierelier, tierelier,
 
Wat Godt blyft ongeraecht!
 
 
 
‘Maer onder spel en zang,
 
Maer onder spel en zang eerlang.
 
Een Rey van Boschbuchanten,
 
Tierelier, tierelier,
 
Nam derwaert haren gang.’

Elizabethan sprightliness dances in these measures, and there is even something like an advance echo of Tennyson's ‘Lady of Shalott’. Verve and spontaneity also mark both ‘zang’ and ‘slotzang’ in his ‘Blyde Aenkomste t' Amsterdam van zijne Excellentie D. Estevan de Gamarra’

 
‘Wie rijst zoo heerlijck op van verre,
 
En voert den glans der Avondsterre
 
In 't helder voorhooft, daer men niet
 
Dan vrede en vreugt uit straelen ziet?
 
 
 
‘Zijt wellekoom: ry in, en nader,
 
O Estevan, ghy vredevader,
 
En vredevoeder, vredetong.
 
Ry in, onthaelt van out en jong.’

Time and again it is the note of patriotism and of devoted loyalty to his ‘Holy City’, Amsterdam, that speaks with inspired accents in Vondel's verse. His famous ‘Princelied’, for instance, must be accounted one of his finest evocations, combining as it does the best romantic traditionalism of Scott with the glamorous force and reflection of Campbell in his great battle odes; for a Dutchman the stanzas beginning:

 
‘Frederick van Nassauwe
 
Ben ick vroom Hollandsch bloed’

and

 
‘Mijn vroomheyd is gebleken
 
By Nieuwpoort in den slagh’

must, I think, be as memorable as Scott's ‘Breathes there a man with soul so dead’ and Campbell's ‘Ye Mariners of England’.

Not always in the poems produced for state and official occasions is Vondel so happy as this. Many of these strike a stiff and subdued note that is the reverse of lyrical, however much the lyrical form may seem to be kept. As regards Amsterdam, again, no communal happening but must have its due meed of laureated attention. The opening of a theatre it may be, the destruction of a church by fire, the laying of the foundation stone of the new Stadhuis, the opening of this building eight years later. This kind of thing possesses interest, of course, as a sort of poetical commentary on the age, but the poetry is, not unnaturally, of an almost ‘local’ order, descendng easily to the banal and commonplace - the paramount weakness of all voluminous writers, it goes almost without saying. Poets like Wordsworth. however, can help partially at least to redeem their unselectiveness and their lapses into bathos by the theories concerning the essential dignity of human life and of poetic diction behind which they work. But Vondel, we feel far too often, has nothing but the ‘fatal facility’ of the versifier to justify his effusions; unmitigatedly they descend to an easy jingling leve,l infinitely removed from the high Miltonic strain or the lofty ‘Vondelian’ manner itself. The last lines of the poem celebrating the birth of Philip, Prince of Spain, give the cue to what I mean:

 
‘Zingt om strijt met negen kooren:
 
Philips de Vijfde is nu geboren’.

This is assuredly nothing but Drydenesque rhyming of the most inferior sort. In his ‘Bruiloftsliedt’ for Johan George, Count of Anhalt and Henrietta Katharina, Princess of Orange at least comes approachably near to the joyous freedom of ‘John Gilpin’:

 
‘Hy zong ze voor: zy zongen na:
 
Hier heeft het oorlogh uit.
 
Wy winnen 't rijck, tot niemants scha,
 
Noch vlammen op vrybuit.
 
 
 
‘Wy houwen, noch wy kerven niet.
 
Wy staen naer niemants bloet.
 
Het is al blyschap wat men ziet.
 
Wat smaeckt dees bruiloft zoet’.

From this, given a somewhat less constant sense or dignity and a more marked ability to get away from the particular incidence and lose himself in the general experience, it might well be judged that Vondel could easily, but so profoundly, have developed his ultimate powers of kindliness, humility and abounding human sympathy. To a surprising extent he does surmount his often self-imposed restrictions on the density of his material. He does it, for example, I think, in his lines addressed to Amelia, Princess of Orange:

 
‘Leeft zy zoo lang als 't Maurits wenscht,
 
Zy leeft noch hondert jaer,
 
Gelijck een bloem, die niet verslenst.
 
Nu rustigh, paer en paer,
 
Eens omgedroncken voor Mevrouw,
 
Dat Godt haer spaeren wil,
 
En haer doorluchtste stammen bouw.
 
Nu sta de schael niet stil’.

This, doubtless, is a sincere expression of feeling, but falling just short of that show of cosmic imaginativeness which would have made it into a pre-Burnsian ‘John Anderson, my Jo’.

In this connection it is perhaps not without interest to quote the opinion of Laurie Magnus. ‘Great Vondel himself’, says Magnus,18) ‘may even be cited as the originator of the Bucolic drama.’ It is not a case we need argue here, but it serves to draw attention to an important element in Vondel's genius - the innumerable choric songs which fill out his dramas. Many of these odes, with their elaborate cadences, doubtless play their part admirably in lightening yet impressing the heavy, overhanging sense of tragedy, but others again might have gone on singing through our heads in the true manner of the bacchantic songs of Greece, had wine and revelry been less sparingly permitted. Not that, for one moment, I would wish to rule out lyrics that have not this quality, or have it only in small measure. It is probably but a mark distinguishing the ineffable singer and the poet of a vast medley of forms. But there is nothing to be gained at this stage in the history of poetry by defining too precisely what is lyrical and what is not. Vondel, with his huge corpus of non-dramatic, non-epic work must surely be allowed an unalienable right to stay within its compass, thereby becoming the first great representative of Dutch Romanticsm, the veritable ‘Rembrandt’ of seventeenth century verse, for Holland the Poets' Poet, the great teacher, read deeply and studied by his similars, so long as there remained any of these to be taught.


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