De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 52
(1937)– [tijdschrift] Nieuwe Gids, De–
Gedeeltelijk auteursrechtelijk beschermd
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[De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 53. Deel 3.] | |
Dutch poetry and the romantic revival door Dr. J.A. Russell.
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ourselves for comparative purposes with England's literary division, sad though the change may be for the reputation of Dutch poetry. As in England the Augustan age followed the most outstanding literary era the country had ever known. But, unlike England, the last quarter of the seventeenth century witnessed a decline that was almost calamitously swift. Not a single name of note arrests attenion; for even Antonides van der Goes, though an avowed disciple of Vondel, was quite unable to resist the oncomning invasion of foreign taste and models. His stroomgedicht, ‘De Ystroom’, is epic only in the sense that it treats of the city of Amsterdam and its commerce in most patriotic fashion. But its style is far too frigid and it carries such a preposterously heavy burden of mythological imagery - defects, admittedly, to be imputed rather to the period than to the poet in particular - that we feel throughout it nothing of the essential purpose of poetic genius - that ceaseless effort to extend the range of human consciousness. After reading a love-lyric by Hooft or Vondel, ‘De Ystroom’ gives the effect of stepping out of a warm room inter a cold one; it is much like taking up Haeckel's ‘Riddle of the Universe’ in succession to Keats's ‘Ode to Autumn’. Beyond Antonides the final decline was complete and absolute. The native springs of Dutch poetry seemed altogether to dry up and be replaced by turgid streams of French classicism; which as it happened, derived an incalculable accession of strength from the exodus of French Protestants consequent on the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The rage for translations and imitations of French models had certainly been anticipated and deeply deplored by Antonides, but his single cry had been wholly without avail, amid a literature already moribund und but awaiting, as it were, the final dispatch. In this case it came at the hands of friends, for as Professor Oliver Elton says: ‘The literary glory of Holland during this period is be found in her hospitalities; her intellectual glory in her men of science’.Ga naar voetnoot1) For poetry, however, there is little consolation in this. Everywhere French influence predominated - even in England, where there was still a fair survival of healthy life. Yet, it must not be thought for a moment that it was merely because | |
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the prevailing taste was Gallic that this became probably the most blank and dull of all Dutch literary epochs. The plain, unvarnished fact is that the Dutch poets themselves seemed quite suicidally determined to suppress all native forces and inspirations and sacrifice their very birth-right on the altar of the classical unities. The true, lyrical impulses of Vondel and Hooft were totally forgotten within their own century, and insiduously those other ‘streams of false delight’ poured in, in deluging fashion, over the unprotected pastures of the Muse. A handful of pedants quickly gained possession of the whole field of literature, the climax being reached in the work of that pernicious literary fop, Sybrand Feitama, who though he may have settled all matters of literary taste in his own day - and in his own way - is wholly without significance for ours. In the state in which he found Dutch poetry we can only shake our heads sadly that he should ever have occupied twenty solid years of his life making feeble rhymed translations of Fénèlon's ‘Télémaque’ and Voltaire's ‘Henriade’. Such exoessive orientation towards French was the thing least of all calculated to launch Holland back into the miain currents of world literature, and could not, in fact, be other than an object-lesson in decadence to the rest of Europe. Never in any way could such worthless pastiche serve to link up the two great romantic ages and weld Dutch poetry into a homogeneous whole. The absence of a feeling for nature in the Augustan poets has become a commonplace of criticism. Their characteristic verse was written with Man as the theme. For them, as Pope asserted, ‘the proper study of mankind is man’. This conception cannot be at all confused with Wordsworth's idea of the poet as a ‘man speaking to men’, for by ‘man’ the Augustans clearly implied the poet in his capacity as member of a civilised society and by ‘men’ the other members of that closed society who resembled him not in poetic gifts. With this conception went a corresponding change of form - in England Waller's choice of the closed couplet is already significant of the strict aesthetic discipline under which the art was to be brought. Classicism was introduced, reason ruled, and, as Keats well said of the time, the verses of all the poets ‘tallied’. The absolute dominance of this classical spirit I would, never- | |
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theless, make bold to say has been exaggerated - even in Pope, probably the greatest poet of his time anywhere. Far too often is it overlooked that Pope, like Milton, like Keats, was a country poet before he was a town poet. Far too exclusively do we hear of his urban preoccupation with morals and satire. Actually his world of experience was as extensive as that of any other poet. We hold him to be deficient in a sense of beauty, overlooking the fact that Pope's sense of beauty is almost always incorporated in his sense of interest - though his way of seeing meaning among things, and hence becoming a ‘nature poet’, would doubtless not be without its disconcerting side to the romantic nature-poets. It may be that he is seldom exclusively interested in beauty, and in his greatest poetry is seldom interested in beauty for its own sake; but there is enough to show that he discerned and expressed most nobly something of that mystery in life which is the essence of all true poetry. Some of his earlier poems - notably, of course, ‘Windsor Forest’ - give free lyrical rein to natural description, while occasionally even in the longer poems there occurs a phrase or thought that suggests the road along which Gray and Collins were later to travel. In this way at least England managed to preserve some continuity in nature-writing, and there, in this respect, it might even be possible to speak of the ‘Romanticism of the Classics’. In Holland, with the city literature at its height it might appear that the lyric of nature had wholly dried up. Here, as we have seen, the general character of the eighteenth century was most formal, artificial, and prosaic. But in one poet, Hubert Corneliszoon Poot, it is constantly held by the critics, there was at least the promise of a counter-revolution. It is a verdict that, with the best will in the world, I cannot endorse with much enthusiasm. If any passionate and profound love of nature, as distinct from the simplicities of life, really informs Poot's verse, then I must confess I have not been able to find it. No really authentic fire of romantic fervour, it seems to me, glows in these pages, bearing so much the impress of a painstaking reading of the more elegiac and didactic verse of Vondel and the less characteristic and spontaneous measures of Hooft. It is De Clercq who probably set so many on a wrong trail, by | |
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applying to Poot the description of the ‘Burns of Holland’. Certainly in many external features of the lives of the two bards are obvious similarities - each was reared in hard circumstances, born to the plough, and each later sought the distractions of the town and of town society, to great deterioration of his personal character. But the chronological difference of over two generations between them is far more fatal to the theory than any number of such adventitious resemblances; spiritually, Abswoude can never be Alloway or Delft Edinburgh. Only in respect of a certain democratisation of poetry - and already this was apparent in the work of Vondel - I think, can they compared to any serious purpose. For one thing Burns stands at the very forefront of the Romantic movement - tentatively, certainly, as regards his ordinary English verse, but most potently as regards his developments of a Scottish native tradition. Of that great movement, of course, he was not aware of knowing anything at all, for he was born too soon - or, rather, died too soon - to be absorbed into it, as others, through him, were absorbed - Wordsworth, perhaps, most notably. But from the first his hedonism, his robust love of life, were in contrast to the morbidity of the early Romantics, and though he never shook himself wholly free of the shackles of transitionalists like Shenstone and Young and the weakly periphrastic English verse of the eighteenth century, he may be said to stand peculiarly apart from the main tradition. Certainly, in his matchless Scots songs, he struck out on a new path - or, rather, perhaps, drew the English lyric back to its natural fountain of inspiration in the old ballads; once again he asserted the right of naturalism against formulism, emotion against stiff reserve, imagination against dry reason. It is by these love-poems that he lives, the supremeness of that achievement atoning for the imperfect alliance betewen feeling and thought which would have placed him, philosophically, with Goethe, Wordsworth, and the Olympians. It is a strange phenomenon that poets of love should appear, for the most part, at moments of ebb or transition - Donne, for instance, and Burns, and, after the Romantics, Browning. Poot, unlike these, had the misfortune to be born into an epoch far more formally fixed in its tendencies than any other, with a language unduly elaborated from the classics. English influence at this time | |
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counted for almost nothing at all, and his sole mentors were Vondel and Hooft. Within his own language, of course, he could not have been more magnificently instructed; but the strange paradox arises that, while their influence was necessary to make him a poet, it was of a sort unlikely to make him a very great one. In essaying their scholarly Renaissance effects, it was bound to arise that he, who by every token should have remained the most completely and harmoniously human of all his country's poets, would become a stilted and overpretentious one. Burns was luckier with his first mentors, Ramsay and Fergusson, for they were at least suited to an early, budding stage of his genius. But Poot's work could never hope to develop height or fire or do other than breathe a plain, pleasant devoutness and contentment. Fifty years later, sensing the revolt against his Augustan contemporaries and an outworn poetic diction, he would probably have set himself to compass the use of a language much more adequate to the expression of his inner and reflective self, singing with fluent sincerity and in much more easy measures. The songs he would then have sung would have implied a more healthy and truly rustic outlook, simply and kindly, but not tritely and lachrymosely so. As it was, seeking the complete imitation of Vondel and Hooft, he was like a man with a personal hand setting himself to emulate a writingmaster's copy - as a kind of Vondel in clogs might not be an inapt way to think of him. For the fact that the unconscious healthiness of a robust nature was not there to fashion just such a vocabulary as Burns adapted for his songs we must not, of course, blame him - we have no reason to demand that he should have been a Burns before Burns. But, at the same time, there is no denying that he has been fulsomely overpraised and quite uncritically exalted beyond his merits. In the other direction Longfellow, thinking doubtless of the bombast and meretricious mythologising that disfigure his work, goes so far as to refer to him as ‘the poet of the plough, whom we mention more because he was a ploughman, than because we deem him a poet’.Ga naar voetnoot1) But Professor Prinsen, I think, preserves a better balance of fairness towards him in writing: ‘Hij was bij al zijn nationalen zin en eerbied voor de | |
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17de eeuwers, een man van zijn tijd, die de pastorale cultiveerde en veel liefhebberij had in uiterlijke fraaiigheden uit de mythologie der Ouden’.Ga naar voetnoot2) Undoubtedly, he has his definite niche in Dutch poetry, though not for a moment would Wordsworth's tremendous summing-up of Burns apply to him: ‘Deeg in the general heart of man his power survives’. Anyone who doubts this or still thinks with Hofdijk that in him Holland lost an actual Burns has only to peruse the appropriate pages of that delightful volume compiled by William Jacks, ‘Robert Burns in Other Tongues’, After that, I think, he will be ready to agree with De Clercq's own contradictory dictum quoted by Holdijk that he ‘was een dichter door de natuur gevormd, door de kunst bedorven’. As much, I consider, as the wholesome influences required to give him, in the highest sense, ‘den naam van dichter der natuur’, were unfortunately absent, so were those other strangly incongruous elements present, to make his homespun wear thin by turns and then assume the gorgeous flashiness of the improperly assimilated classic style. ‘'s Lichts jeugt, gansch lief, in 't heldere oost ontloken,
En ryklyk aengedaen
Met gout, saffier, puikpaerlen, purperstrooken,
En koele roozeblaên;
Beloofde thans door aertsbevalligheden
En goddelyken lach
Een' goên, gedweên, hoogmilden, luisterbreeden,
En schoonen dagh.’
This may be well-shaped, finished verse, technically, but it lacks the all-round, happy mastery of effect shown in: ‘Hoe koud en snerpend toch de herfstwind loeit!
Hoe snel verzwonden een Novemberdag!
Van akkers keeren guil en os, vermoeid,
De kraai scheert nestwaarts, traag, met loomen slag.
Na gansch een week van eerzaam veldwerk, treedt
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de landman huiswaarts met verhaaste schreê,
en, staat hem nog op 't voorhoofd 't edel zweet,
- 't is morgen Zondag, tijd van troost en vreê; -
gereinigd hark en schop! Hij is ter rust gereed!’
In measured, retrospective key Poot ponders: ‘Schoon troost en tyt den rou verzoeten,
Waermê wy eertyts Moeders lyk
Geleidden naer het stille ryk,
Daer alle menschen komen moeten,
Nogh denk ik om de vrome weêr.
En zou ik niet van haer gewagen
Die my heeft onder 't hart gedragen?’
Sincerity and simplicity are doubtless written here, but not very much more; the spirit revealed is too orthodox and complacent to tug strongly at the hearth-strings and truly sublimate us for the moment, as in Burns's ‘Aan Mary in den Hemel’: ‘O niets vergat ik, niets en week
Uit mijn geheugen, sinds dien stond...
Gelijk de bedding eener beek
Wordt dieper steeds mijns harten wond
O Mary, mijner ziele ontrukt,
Waar, lieve schim, verwijlt ge nu?
Ziet gij me vóór uw graf gebukt?
Hoort gij mijn bang gezucht om u?’
Poot's much-praised lines, ‘Op de Dood van mijn Dochtertje’, show a tender pathos that serves to place them high among his three hundred poems. I dought, in fact, if he ever wrote anything more nearly approaching the truly sublime: ‘Jacoba trad met tegenzin
Ter snode werelt in;
En heeft zich aen het endt geschreit
In haere onnozelheit.
Zy was hier naeu verscheenen,
Of ging, wel graeg, weêr heenen.’
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But after reading them through carefully, it cannot be said that Burns is in any way recalled - Hood, if you like, or Wordsworth in a weaker moment. One wishes there were a Dutch version of ‘Afton Water’ to put alongside, with its haunting refrain: ‘Flow gently, sweet Afton! among they greens braes,
Flow gently, I'11 sing thee a song in thy praise;
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream -
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.’
But, if not, there are two separate renderings of that classic, ‘John Anderson, my Jo’, showing how nobly and beautifully death may be conceived and accepted. I take Potgieter's work in preference to Frans De Corts'; it bears the impress of deeper understanding, shows higher poetic powers, and contrives to give a local suggestion to the name and situation: ‘Wij klommen zaâm den heuvel op,
Claes Hendrikszen, myn schat!
En hebben op zijn groenen top
Veel vreugde en heils gehad;
Wij stromp'len nu vast naar beneên,
Maar helpen d'een den aêr,
En slapen ginder niet alleen,
Claes Hendriksz, beste vaêr!’
It is, at last on the same ground, that the two poets seem te meet when we come to Poot's ‘Ryke Armoede’ and Burns' ‘Eerlijke Armoê’, as the translator, Potgieter again, entitles ‘Is there for Honest Poverty’. Thus Poot, first, sums up his philosophy of life: ‘Bid dan om rykdom dien geen lage zinnen vatten,
Te blint in hun bedryf.
Bedrukte Salonyn, de waerdigste aller schatten
Is een gezonde ziel in een welvarend lyf.’
It is this kind of sentiment, doubtless, that makes Kalff deplore Burns's lack of penitence compared with Poot and see him as | |
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far inferior to the other in the Victorian virtues of ‘vroomheid en zedelykheid’. But this is to overlook the terseness, the boldness, the independent manliness of the Scottish national poet, standing naturally at the opposite end of the scale in the attempt to impart universality to his feelings, based on pretty much the same kind of actual experience: ‘Zoo laat ons bidden om den tijd,
Die komen zal, trots wat niet?
Waarin zal gelden wijd en zijd
Geboorte of goud? zie dat niet!
Waarin verdienst, waarin verstand
Gevierd worde en geprezen,
En alle liên uit alle land
Als broeders zullen wezen.’
Strictly, of course, even this does not ascend to the pure metaphysical, as Goethe's ‘Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’, for example, does, but it marks a certain advance from the concrete impression towards the symbolical, and it shows Nature being used, not as a shelter from life, but as the supreme way of affirming it. The truth is that, all other considerations apart, the mind of Poot was limited by a certain flatness. He doubtless saw and felt many sides of life, which provided the minor excellencies of his poetry, but his moral restraints and mystic reflections always prevented him from entering into the full life of the peasants around him - or of letting his art run gaily away with him. Burns may have, in Henley's over-picturesque phrase, ‘drunk his life to the lees’, but, at the same time, the poet had fulfilled himself - to be a Satanist (a harsh term here), it is clear, one must also he a Godist. Poot was, unfortunately, denied contact with a still living tradition, but, even so, I still seem to detect a fundamental difference in the quality of his mind which would probably never have enabled him to reject the unessential, the ephemeral, and the insignificant, and rise to the same great and impressive heights of song. This may seem an unwarranted assumption, to which it is easy to reply that Burns lived in a romantic age. Yes, that is so. But, as I have tried to point out, he remained apart from his time, | |
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and his lyric poetry is not romantic, in the sense that it builds a new world in the wonderland of Fancy; the same sort of realism was, I think, possible to Poot. But when the latter gives us, brightly for him: ‘En hy kust er Elsje voor.
Dus brengt Melker 't leven door,’
Burns in his characteristically artless and buoyant way rejoins with: ‘Mijn lief is als de roode roos
Den knoppe versch ontsprongen;
Mijn lief is als de melodie
Bij snarenspel gezongen.’
Not till the middle of the eighteenth century was it evident that a considerable reaction against the Augustans had set in. It was still, however, a confused, unconscious struggle, the uncertainty of the way creating a spirit of disillusionment and tending towards indulgence in a somewhat gloomy moralising. To this transitional period we give the name Romantic Revolt, recognizing that the vaguer and less specialised forms of romance must precede those which are more definite and specific: Gray, and Thomson, therefore, before Wordsworth, Feith before Potgieter and Perk. From England it now was that Europe began to receive those germs which were destined, later on, to destroy all sorts of ‘old régimes’ - whether in politics, in thought, or in literature. Even these, of course, Reason, sorely tried though it was, gave way only gradually, and it was long before there was anything like a real national reaction to the age of common-sense. In their individual fashion many voices spoke, but none as yet with such prophetic utterance as to compass the revolution. In Crabbe, for instance, we see the nudity of description and poetry without an atmosphere. It is with his work, much rather than with Burns's, that I would compare Poot's, and likewise say that with his departure went the last hope of an Augustan Revolution. No more of Shenstone can it said that he escaped from the pseudo-classical tradition, though his verse, again, is wholly different from | |
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the starkness of Crabbe's. Its fundamental quality is its placidity, reflecting a somewhat moody renunciation of life's exaltations - the natural nemesis of an age of genteel boredom. There is an artificial note about it all, with only very occasionally the production of genuine verse. There is, no doubt, a foretaste of the slightly vapid sensibility of genuine Romanticism, but none of that blending of nature with human passion so characteristic of Wordsworth and his school, none of the marmorean resignation of Gray, of the despairs of Manfred-Byron, of the struggles of the chained Titans of the nineteenth century. In a word, it would be quite impossible to imagine Shenstone living at any other time than the mid-eighteenth century. Even Gray, achieves but a half-success. Keeping to classical forms, he has been named ‘the last Renaissance scholar’, while the ‘Elegy’ itself, perfect expression of brooding melancholy though it be, could not induce him to ‘speak out’. Dr. Johnson's sad misjudgment of him we may now dismiss or smile over, but Wordsworth's ridiculing of him was not for any placing of sentimentality with romance as an ally on equal terms, but for the far more real anomaly of trying to wed romance with the (to him) speciously false diction of the classics. After 1770 we begin at last to note a new and sustained development in romantic literature throughout Europe. English and German influence especially is shown as having won the day over French classicism, and the doctrine of the ‘return to nature’ is now the admitted watch-word, already mildly hinted at in numerous references to landscape-gardening and by Voltaire when - thinking of Scotland - he said that Europe got both its models of gardens and its epic poems from the barren north. That so many people should have given themselves the uncongenial task of posing as lovers of nature was due, undoubtedly, to the fashion established for the works of poets like ‘Ossian’ and Thomson, reinforced by Rousseau in France, who educated the French public up to an appreciation of this novel English nature poetry. For England the statement of the matter is much easier than for Germany, and we must take separate stock for a moment of the greater ramifications in a country which, not without a good show of reason, regards the Romantic Movement as peculiarly its own and the one which has exerted the maximum of influence on other countries. In the | |
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German sense the term Romanticism is really one of such wide extension as almost to defy the human wit to define. Yet, in this brief space, it may be easiest to consider it as the art of the infinite as opposed to the classical art of the finite. No less a definition will, in fact, do if we are to hope to include the Idealist philosophers, the discovery of Shakespeare by Schlegel, the ballads of Bürger, the enormous wealth of lyric poetry let loose by the new doctrine of spontaneity and culminating in the work of the young Goethe and the songs of Heine. And the reason for this? Simply that the Renaissance was over two hundred years late in coming to Germany; and this, in the latter half of the eighteenth century, meant the romanticisation of the classical tradition of ancient Greece. Inevitably it meant a tendency to see things cloudily, in a golden haze - to indulge in a nebulous historicism (or, as it might also be called, an antiquarian idealism) - to return to a fabulous past, and see in that past the goal of the future. In a word, the Romantic temper in Germany made a Märchen out of Greek art, Greek poetry, and Greek mythology: it married Faust to Helen and gave to Europe that ‘total’ personage, Goethe. The mutual claims of England and Germany seem to grow more difficult to apportion, even allowing for the relative originality of the movement in each country. But for Holland in the main, I think, England wielded the more potent influence. We must in this, however, except the first three writers to harbinger a better epoch than the dull, denationalised days of the Augustans; Van Alphen, Bellamy, and Nieuwland. This trio, indignant at the deplorable state of nature poetry in their own country, had themselves but indifferent powers to change its current, but in their recourse to the remarkable German Romantic spirit, we see clearly how deeply stirred they were and how fervently they desired a fresh poetical canon for Holland. For a movement so widespread and revolutionary, they may seem somewhat feeble forerunners, but their historic place is not without importance. It was certainly more than time that a native tradition should be developed, and for Holland it can be said that their first specimens of blank verse - a metrical form scarcely known there, remembering Vondel's partiality for the Alexandrine - were as notable as Thomson's taking over of the Spenserian stanza. | |
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Van Alphen for his union of practice with theory stands rather apart from the others. If, however, in Lessing he hoped to find an aesthetic more fine and delicate by means of which he might initiate his countrymen into the secrets of the art of poetry, I cannot think that he was greatly successful - at least, no more than was another poet-critic, Wordsworth, can it be said that his own practice was in conformity with his enunciated theory. But, of course, this is little to be wondered at - Van Alphan's theory was of too academic order to carry much weight; he had already, in fact, written his poems before he thought of learning how to write poetry. Every Romantic would agree with him that art is ‘de nabootsing der schoone Natuur’, but none, that Shakespeare would have been a greater genius had he lived in the Augustan Age of Pope and Addison: almost, indeed, he seems to rate ‘Ossian’ higher (if objecting to having him called ‘The Homer the North’), while finding a counterpart for his didacticism in the moralisings of Young. Sometimes at his best, however, he echoes afresh the true lyrical spirit of Vondel, as in his ‘Stroomspiegel’: ‘Vloeit, vloeijende stroomen! glijdt zacht door dit dal!
En laat me mij spieglen, ô kabblend krystal!
Ontrolt mij niet golfjes! wordt effen, gij stroomen!
Of ben ik te laat aan uw oever gekomen?’
Not yet of such poems can we say emphatically that we ‘dissolve in Nature as a Buddhist dissolves in Nirvana,’ but there are now and again suggestions of the refreshing tunes of Burns, of the tender, child-like flute of the ‘Songs of Innocence’, and eventually of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’. Blake speaks cosmically but disjointedly of the power ‘to see the world in a grain of sand’; Van Alphen, too, it has sometimes occured to me, shows a force of conception far beyond his skill in execution: ‘Ik zie mij zelf bij 't eeuwig Licht
En spiegel me in Gods aangezicht.’
Of Bellamy and Nieuwland, in turn, I am afraid I can speak only in the most severely critical way. The former especially has | |
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for me no real place in Dutch romantic poetry at all. It may be that he was a man governed by the impulse of his heart and devoting himself to love, to friendship, and to his country. But these is no necessary groundwork for poetry in these things, and I can only find his religious verse weak, dull, and uninspired, descending to the most disastrous types of bathos and arousing only feelings of wonder at the sheer temerity of the writer in seriously putting forward such inartistic, thought-denuded stuff. To say, as Delepierre does,Ga naar voetnoot1) that ‘his “Roosje” is a masterpiece of simple tenderness’ and that he ‘had every quality necessary to become one of the greatest poets of his country’ seems to me to mark a woeful lack of discernment on that critics's part. His erotic poems are thought to be less pleasing; but, distinctly mannered though they too often are, I must confess that I find them the only readable section of his work. Nieuwland is more polished, more tutored, but it is the polish of the classics for the most part, the incompatible union of the exact sciences in which he so greatly revelled. Patriotic he is too; of course: ‘Zo gloeit nog 't oude Vuur in 't Hollandsch hart en adren’
But it is a jingling - and even at times jingoistic - sort of patriotism, with none of the grander reflection that Campbell instils into his most martial poetry. It so quickly palls on one that for Delepierre to speak here of ‘the sublimity of his poetic genius’Ga naar voetnoot2) appears to me as the most arrant nonsense. Nieuwland is not incapable of lofty thought, but most of the effect is lost by his stiff, unmusical way of seeking to convey it. His lines, ‘Op de Afbeelding van David Hume’, for instance, are necessarily steeped in great ideas, yet they would really be much better said in prose - Nieuwland has all the pomposity and ponderosity of Wordsworth in handling such subjects and rarely compensates with anything more touching than his well-meaning but platitudinous elegies. From the painstaking but singularly unsuccessful endeavours of Van Alphen, Bellamy, and Nieuwland to impart to Dutch poetry | |
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something of the intellectual force of the German Romantics, it would seem that it might well have been better for them if they had sought to explore in those other, English, strongholds of Romance, already not outwith the vision and reach of Dutch poets. At all epochs a dreamy and sentimental literature had sprung up on Dutch soil, and nothing at this time seemed more ready-made for it than the somewhat wistful nature poetry of James Thomson. Thomson was already the recognized giant of the movement that sought to lead back to the land. Everywhere the Continent was buzzing with the smooth yet varying pictures of his ‘Seasons’. In Germany a translation of that work appeared as early as 1744, and brought about a complete change of style in descriptive writing. In France the reputation of Thomson was extraordinary, and there too a complete translation of his masterpiece was made. The poet himself was dead - since 1748 - but the extent of the revolution he brought about in European literature would have been immensely pleasing to him, too personally associated with the spirit of ‘The Castle of Indolence’. In England it was the same. Hardly any of the poets who wrote after him in the eighteenth century, it can be said, remained uninfluenced by him; and even if his rather placid view of nature was not later adhered to, he at least made the use of blank verse for narrative and descriptive poetry the fashion and consolidated the revolt against the cloying heroic couplet of Dryden and Pope. What, then, of Holland? No one can say that it did not stand in need of some powerful reviving force, since for a century now it had not contained a single new idea of external nature. The poetry of Thomson, one would have thought, was quite admirably suit to render service at this transitional time. It was the work of a Scotsman, and the Scots like the Dutch have an inevitable tendency to pictorialise their thoughts - indicating surely a definite leaning towards the graphic arts and displaying another useful affinity with the great etchers and tone painters for whom Holland is so justly renowned. It is a poetry that is little localised - only here and there in the first season, ‘Winter’, are the influences of Thomson's early environment at all marked; for the rest the well-ordered landscape around Richmond, in the congenial neighbourhood of Pope, would seem to offer less scope than the sense | |
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of space and wind and lonely freedom that a Dutchman might reasonably be expected to feel. In every sense it is directly descriptive poetry; this landscape possesses no sentiment of its own. Thomson, unlike Wordsworth, has little reflection, little instinct; his imagination is not capable of transforming the sense perceptions into symbols of spiritual truth. It may make Thomson the genuine father of English rural verse, yet both in form and content, it might seem, there is as much looking back to Pope as forward to Wordsworth. Perhaps this is the trouble - for trouble I am afraid ther is - that it is both too pseudo-classical in its form and too romantic in its ideas to make it easily adaptable to the still-fettered, vainly theorising Dutch poets, whose work was but touched at the very edges by that elsewhere dominating influence. Van Winter's ‘Jaargetijden’, indeed, we scarcely feel gives us Thomson at all - least of all does it convey his new and refreshing feeling for nature. The manner of its publication was perhaps in itself symbolical, for in the prose translation from which Van Winter worked, there was the inspiration only for just such a rhymed essay as he achieved in his own severely practical fashion.
(To be continued.) |
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