De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 52
(1937)– [tijdschrift] Nieuwe Gids, De–
Gedeeltelijk auteursrechtelijk beschermd
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Dutch poetry and the romantic revival by Dr. J.A. Russell.
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Burns and Cowper, nothing could have kept it from attaining in the natural course of events - and not almost a century later by a brilliant but staged and engineered process - to that intense, lyrical phase which in its best sense the Romantic Revival must be regarded as being. But Van Alphen, Bellamy and Nieuwland were not themselves volcanic enough apparently to reach back to Thomson, far less forward to Wordsworth and Coleridge. The truth is that all the Dutch poets of this period were too tame, too conventional, too sane - for the highest flights of lyrical fancy one has really to be a little mad, like Cowper, Shelley, Blake, or even, to escape the expression of mere everyday thoughts in this same personalised form, be somewhat ill-balanced morally, like Burns, Heine, Byron. Van Alphen, Bellamy and Nieuwland may have sought to establish contact with German ideas, but withal they suffered from the fatal defect of having to satisfy the narrow, didactic tendencies prevalent in Holland. They lacked the passion to be virile eclectics like Burns; they lacked the steadiness of vision to perceive that the spiritual landscape of Holland was far more akin to that of Olney than to that of Weimar and Jena. The loss of Thomson's influence was bad enough, but it might have been made good by that of Cowper, expressing in mildly philosophic form what the other had done in descriptive form. ‘This glassy stream, that spreading pine,
Those alders quiv'ring to the breeze,
Might soothe a soul less hurt than mine
And please, if anything could please.’
It may seem that in such verses lurks a hint of the trivial and that, all over, the value of Cowper's poetry is not in itself very positive or compelling. But in the spirit that animates it we have the linking of the lyric form with human feelings and the deeper aspects of life; here we have passion, but informed by knowledge, the note struck most transcendently in the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ of Wordsworth and Coleridge a generation later. ‘All the true delights of man
Should spring from sympathy.’
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That is exactly the kind of simple sentiment from which sprang Wordsworth's high pantheistic vision and which serves to make Cowper a ‘John the Baptist of the Romantic Movement’. With him dawns a more serious and reflective age, and in England. from 1785 till the end of the century, he could claim to be the only great living poet recognized by the age in turn. Previous to that, it is true, he might have been thought to have come merely to continue the mode of feeling, of argument and of versification so popular since the days of Pope; and then, he would have possessed only the talented unimportance of Nieuwland and Van Alphen. To these his very case might have proved deceptive; but, on the other hand, it is not improbable that this last of poetical recognitions might have been theirs, and, then, they would have been discoverers of Wordsworth, with likewise nothing more fully justifying his peculiar theory of poetic diction than could already be found in their work. Through their very desire to achieve something totally different for Dutch poetry, they lost sight, however, of this most admirable of pre-Wordsworthians, Cowper, and the crucial moment being missed, it is doubtful if Holland after that was ever able to capture his spirit - by far the most handicapping misfortune in the whole of its modern literary history. No one will put Thomson and Cowper and Young and ‘Ossian’ into the same category, yet undeniably they were different manifestations of the same romantic vogue, which they expressed Bach according to his temperament. On the English side, indeed, the four great forces in consummating the Romantic Revival might be thought of as Thomson, Young, Macpherson and Bishop Percy. Thomson, as I have tried to bring out, led on to Cowper and eventually Wordsworth, but this more lasting, more fertile, altogether less febrile and sentimentally introspective side the Dutch poets neglected almost entirely, preferring to make up for the loss by a clamant recognition of these long-neglected ancient ballads and folk-songs, by bowing to the spell of heroic afflatus and nebulous rhetoric cast by a picturesque Scottish Highlander, and to the melancholy meditations among the tombs of an obscure English clergyman. Of the Dutch disciples of these - Feith and Bilderdijk chiefly - it can be said that, though from causes entirely different, they were likewise uprooted and divided indivi- | |
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duals - a psychological, if not here pathological, condition that easily becomes ‘romantic’, since otherwise life would be - if not wholly unendurable in the imagined Byronic sense - at least dull and insipid. In the stirring measures of the ballads and Macpherson there was something ‘craggy’ upon which the Dutch poets break their minds, in the sombre recesses of Young's verse was that ‘note of romantic despair’ so fashionable at that precise hour in every part of Europe. At first the apostle of the German cult, wallowing in the sentimentalities of the many romances begotten by ‘Werther’, Feith later became dominated by the flood of sentiment released by the English writers, Richardson, Young, and Macpherson. Of these, however, Young came nearest to himself, in mood and in his ‘pale cast of thought’, and it was his famous ‘Night Thoughts’ that became for him the typical poem of the melancholy-simulating age. To us today this work seems made rather to destroy, than to excite enjoyment, but its importance for these transitional days of repudiation of the clarified poetic principles of Pope and his school was undoubted and must not blind us to its difficult but definite merits. So profound, indeed, was its influence on the brooding, romance-starved minds of the eighteenth century that suicides, following a reading of it, were by no means unknown, while Baculard d'Arnaud put it on the same level as Dante's ‘Inferno’ and Milton's ‘Paradise Lost’, and Chateaubriand considered it the foundation of all descriptive, elegiac poetry. Remembering its own initiature in Thomson's ‘Seasons’, however, and its noisy, declamatory, exaggerated and vulgarising style beside the perfect expression of brooding contemplation in Gray's ‘Elegy’, neither must we permit ourselves to endorse such indiscriminate and fulsome praise. Next to the poets of nature in popularity in England came the poets of melancholy, Young, Blair and their tribe, and if Feith had not the domestic calamities to give his verse the same apparent finality of touch, his disposition was naturally plaintive and theatrical enough to make him wish to make the most of his grief and turn it into a matter of attitudes and studied effects. What more obvious, therefore, than that he should encourage his anti-vital droop by imitating the current mode best calculated to serve | |
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it? For nature and folk-poetry, it is true, he had no real feeling whatever, but there are many worse poems in Dutch, nevertheless, than ‘Het Graf’ and ‘De Ouderdom’, and in deriding his romances imitated from German, Kinker placed his finger on the weak side of his by no means weighty genius. These poems, besides ministering to his natural bent, enabled him to cloak his thoughts on eternity, death, the grave, under vague Platonic reveries that were distinctly to the liking of a public, didacticallybred, and earnestly prepared to find even the sternest passions worth a struggle to understand. Perhaps it was as Professor Brink declares: ‘In zekeren zin kende Feith zijn publiek.’Ga naar voetnoot1) Today ‘Het Graf’ with the complementary ‘De Ouderdom’ cannot but cause a revulsion of feeling in us for their gross artificiality and sickly sentiment. Inspired by the intense sadness of a Leopardi or even by the self-pitying musings of a Byron, ‘the wandering outcast of his own dark mind’, they might well have been landmarks in Dutch poetry; fostered conventionally and correctly by a man of ample means, living healthily in the country at beautiful Boschwijk, with his wife and large household, they could not but be mere academic exercises in the art of grief, adulously accepted by a generation little enough prepared to differentiate between the maudlin and the natural, the false and the true, in the outpourings of the heart. It was an inevitable phase to accept the superficial Feith as ‘de vriend der treurigen, de dichter van het hart’. Sometimes in themselves the words sound like anticipations of the later Thomson, author of ‘The City of Dreadful Night’, as: ‘Mijn beste tijd vloog heen in tranen en ellende’.
But even in the more rationalistic and materialistic days of the twentieth century people are usually found to be less tawdry than their creeds and less literal than their professed opinions. In the exciting change-over from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century Dutch people found it the most delightful thing in the world to enter into the spirit of: | |
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‘Zoo is de stille rust voor eeuwig de aarde ontvloden?
Zoo woont zij nergens meer dan in 't verblijf der dooden,’
and go on sentimentalising through four complete - perfectly selected term - ‘Songs’. Kinker might condemn with all his vituperative force and his equally humourless pedantry, but for a professor of philosophy - and one capable of trying to popularise Kantian metaphysics through the medium of verse - to alarm these striving if uneasy aspirants to the slopes of Helicon was simply to show himself quite out of touch with the age; it was almost a complete parallel to Dr. Johnson's parody of the ballad or his raining down of censures on the poetry of Milton and Gray. Had not a more robust mind than Feith's steeped itself in these same introverted splashes of troubled feeling: Betje Wolff, with her ‘Eenzame Nachtgedachten over den Slaap en den Dood’ and her rendering of Blair's much less subtle ‘Grave’. Beside these works the heroic poetry of ‘Ossian’ fell naturally into place; and Young and Macpherson may be said to have made the tour of Europe together, with Bishop Percy and his ‘Reliques’ cropping up to meet them in the most unexpected places. It is the impulse given to the Romantic Movement in Holland by the epics, ‘Fingal’ and ‘Temora’, and the rediscovery of the old-time balladry that we wish now to consider, through the various ballads and romances produced by such romantics as Bilderdijk, Starter, Tollens. To Europe they came as bright, new stars in the firmament, at a moment of transition and uncertainty, when the search for Volkspaësie was just beginning. Macpherson especially could only have been accepted when Europe was in a mist of despondency and despair, sounding a wail of wistful longing for the chants of the dim, heroic past. Like Edmund Waller he belongs to that class of writers who for a time enjoy a considerable vogue but whom later generations, after their novelty and immediate applicability have worn off, find unreadable. In his own country, for example, he was received far more coldly than on the Continent - his own shuffling, in part, destroying his credit, and, in part, the relentless scorn of Dr. Johnson. Much more surprising is it to reflect that Bishop Percy, that other spearhead of the Romantic attack, changed | |
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early acceptance into hostility, while the greatest uncompromise was at all times shown by Sir Walter Scott, himself the founder of the new romantic school of fiction. In Holland, lagging behind the general Romantic Movement in Europe, Macpherson had a belated acclamation - when, in fact, the most important littérateurs in England, on somewhat niggardly ethical grounds, had all pronounced against the authenticity of his work. But this made little difference to the enthusiasm shown towards his spirited reconstructions of the epic story of Fingal: Macpherson was a real poet, and nothing else was allowed to matter. Nor can it be said that there was ever any spectacular denunciation by them of this initiator of a picturesque craze; just as their delight was a prelude to uncritical imitation, so did they latterly grow out of him, when his unflagging passages of Biblicalcum-Gaelic rhetoric had done their work in releasing men's mind from the fetters of a stringent, outmoded classicism. At this naive stage in the development of the romantic ideal, he came as a supremely unconscious artist, with no conception of what he was doing so skilfully and plausibly. The way may have been paved for him by the ‘vernacular’ revival - in Gay and Ramsay - by the growing love of natural beauty - (the part of Thomson), and by the emotional ferment and the idealistic revolt initiated by Rousseau; but there was still lacking an embodiment of the vague feelings thus aroused, and this projection of awakened subjectivity he brilliantly supplied. The first indication of Holland's awareness of Macpherson, ‘that poet of the genius of ruins and battles’, was probably Van Alphen's prefixing a quotation from him to his ‘Nederlandsche Gezangen’. But the first really effective study of him did not come until the scholarly Van de Kasteele's indirect translation in 1793 - as we now know, it was a metrical following of Bilderdijk, published as ‘De Gedichten van Ossian’. Then we have Feith's free following in prose of ‘The Songs of Selma’; while the same author's novel, ‘Ferdinand en Constantia’, may also be said to be full of Ossian, as it is of Young. Yet, when all is said, the real precursor and creator of this new romantic epoch was none other than Willem Bilderdijk, a master of the classics, a penner of the most atrabilious satires, a composer of | |
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tragedies, a haughty and stiff-necked controversialist - a man, in fact, so little in the fashion of the day as to seem the least likely upholder and virtual resuscitator of poetical romantic literature. Even today there remains something enigmatical about Bilderdijk. He was too myriad-minded ever to be easy of assessment, too versatile to fit into any ready-made scheme, too combative to gain the serenity he really sought and which his work required. Both classicist and romanticist he was, the writer of over a hundred works in almost every conceivable vein, an upright but unhappy soul forced to accept the bread of exile, away from the Fatherland he loved and served in his own strange and devious way. But in his ‘Fingal in zes Zangen, naar Ossian gevolgd’, published in 1905, we have, I think, the key-point in his whole literary development. His translation of Sophocles' ‘OEdipus Tyranuns’ into Dutch Alexandrines we can readily understand, and his writing of a national history, his experiments in philology, his translating of Pope's ‘Essay on Man’ and Goldsmith's ‘Deserted Village’ - that is precisely what we would expect his regularising genius to disclose. It demonstrates his ‘infinite capacity for taking pains’, the formal side of him, cultivated by hard study and scholarship, by stern professional training and fixity of early Calvinist principles. In all this he is a despotic literary dictator, a Dutch Dr. Johnson pontifically pronouncing in favour of the past against the present, making ponderous and pompous utterances to display his vast erudition, fulminating against his supposedly puny rivals with a self-righteous opinionativeness wholly devastating: to himself, as to them. Many have accepted this dry, musty scholar, this outrageous and intolerant castigator of mankind as the real, indeed the only, Bilderdijk. But modern psycho-analysis would probably have a far different story to tell us. We need not perhaps go all the way along the road with Freud and his school to penetrate the objectively healthy, the sturdily independent, the eminently sane Bilderdijk, but it need not surprise us to learn that there was distinct enigma here, as in almost every mind. This poet, just because he was seemingly so sure of himself, so aggressively certain of his political, religious, and artistic creeds, would be the very type to be suspect in our own day. May it not well be that this | |
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is the man merely on a superficial, outside view, the stereotyped classicist, the ranging and prideful linguist, the Vondelian purveyor of drama and epic, the anti-revolutionary, the anti-liberal, the anti-Shakespearean. May it not well be that there is to him another, a repressed side, covering an equally wide variety of inhibitions and natural longings, great personal impulses and secret urges - the real Bilderdijk as likely as not! If he was a great classicist, it is as easy to show that he was a great romantic at the same time. Technically correct, but almost prosaic, too much of his verse must appear, with its fatal lack of beauty in the eyes of a later generation; but we must not overlook and neglect these many free-flowing love-lyrics, all these fresh evocations of natural life and wonder. Shakespeare he may have abominated, yet he was not above writing a love-poem on the drama of ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Nor with all his expressed fondness for the Augustans did he forget to worship at the feet of Chaucer and Spenser. He may have aspired to reproduce the glories of the Athenian stage, but he was in no sense a creative dramatist. His irony and satire were expended on his contemporaries, the German and English romantics, but he was not fine enough in wit to produce anything outstanding himself. Cats he amazingly calls ‘Meester’, and for Van Lennep in turn ‘Vondel zelf was uit het graf herboren’; but such references reveal largely his respect for form and accuracy and religious elevation of tone; they tell nothing of the occasional sensualist, of the continuous rebel against the restrictions and conventions of his time, of the troubled seeker after spiritual freedom. As with Vondel himself, we can now cast away as having served their day most of the works for which Bilderdijk has been chiefly lauded. In dramatic theory, based on the recognized Aristotelian canons, he may have been strong, but in actual practice his weaknes was fully exposed. For the long-sustained, unfluctuating style of the epic his disposition was by no means ideal - though on his own admission he was no ‘geboren dichter’; it was not ‘an epic poem’ through laborious self-discipline and unwavering purpose, after the high manner of Milton, that he was apparently willing to make his life into. Much controversy has arisen over what then was his real forte; but this, I think, admits of little | |
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further cavil and discussion. Ten Brink never wrote truer words, I would say, than when he summed up Bilderdijk's vast and miscellaneous output with the almost laconic remark: ‘De lyrische, de didactische poëzie, vooral, als hij uit den vollen overvloed zijner kennis kan putten en in breede schilderingen zijn rhythmisch genie kan openbaren - ziedaar zijn terrein.’Ga naar voetnoot1) With this verdict, of course, the forerunners and leaders of ‘De Tachtiger Beweging’ were far from being in agreement, and it has to be admitted that the qualification over Bilderdijk's didactic strain strikes a chilling note to the moderns. Poetry, so overcharged with such unbendingly dogmatic principles must remain of a mediocre, sententious order; but, despite the sombre cast given to much of his work in this vein, there remains a good deal of brighter, simpler, more attractive subject-matter altogether, that is too apt to be overlooked. A lyric poet in this sense, almost malgré lui, Bilderdijk may have been, but the urge, if insufficiently backed by an abounding joiede-vivre, was undeniably there. Some of these critics, in fact, have, I think, tended to confuse two distinct and separate issues. In recapturing the unrestrained measures of Keats and Shelley, they have looked back to the early nineteenth century as in general an age of lyricism; but only if Wordsworth and Coleridge in the ‘Lyrical Ballads’ had been their starting-point could their theory have tenability. The prevailing spirit of the time otherwise was romantic before it was lyrical. For Bilderdijk there might have been - perhaps should have been - a Wordsworth, but there was no Keats, no Shelley. His ‘Lake School’ poet was the pedestrian Southey - by far its least distinguished exponent - and this hedged him with similar limits in his own country. Baroque and tedious though Bilderdijk's style so of ten is, it is just part of that amazing contrast, that profound paradox, which was the man and poet, that in this lyric verse he can rise at times to airy and swift-moving heights - if never to the sublimities of Shelley's ‘Cloud’ and Rossetti's ‘Blessed Damozel’. If only he could have realized in his not inconsiderable body of aesthetic theory that beauty is something we might receive and not something to be reproduced for us, he might well himself have been | |
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the torch-bearer, the prophet, for a new and radiant era of poetry, by comparison with which the splendours of Byron and Scott would have burned very low indeed. Bilderdijk had all the subjectivism for a great lyric bard, as he had little of the objectivity for a great dramatic one. It is feeling, above all, that for him makes the poet. As he himself writes in his ‘Kunst der Poëzie’: ‘Ja, uw kunstkracht is gevoelen,
Juist gevoelen, met een hart’.
But it is over the interpretation of this ‘feeling’ that the critics have found judgment against him. Assuredly, it is not Keat's undiluted feeling for beauty or Shelley's for freedom and truth, nor could Wordsworth's great definition of poetry be applied anyway here - ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’. Actually for Bilderdijk to feel is to think - but to think religiously and ‘upliftingly’. Wordsworth's tremendous conception of imagination as ‘reason in her most exalted mood’ comes nearest of all, I think, in giving clarity to this vaguely-expressed notion of the usually clear-thinking Bilderdijk - if only Calvinistic firmness and rightness had not to be so invariably upheld and every line measured against the Bible, and the harp of David in particular. Inwardly, too, there intervenes a far more sentimental and unquiet heart than ever Bilderdijk - who knew everything, seemingly, but his own nature - would have deemed possible, a heart demanding romantic nurture for its very life, a heart long satiated with all the heavy pabulum of ancient Greece. It is the heart, in a word, of Byron, not of a Wordsworth, and it is only by so regarding it that we can possibly hope to unlock it: a heart born out of pain and passion, not out of quiet repose and pantheistic serenity. For the literature of the eighteenth century - French apart - Bilderdijk's admiration was in no sense fanatical, and this explains why in the due evolution of his mind and ideas, he became reconciled gradually to the newer school of English romantics - to Scott, Southey, and to Byron, to Byron above all. Yet, he was far from being able to follow even Byron all the way. He found, as all his kind were bound to find, ‘iets aanstootelijks’ about the | |
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life - and hence the work of the English poet, and dealt more tentatively and sparingly with him on this account than he would otherwise have done. A parallel has been drawn by Professor Prinsen between the actual life - if not actual experience - of Byron and Bilderdijk - the disastrous marriage of each, the subsequent political and social exile they underwent, their reactions to the authority of the time. And between their respective ideas - Byron's lashing of the English hypocrisy beside Bilderdijk's vituperation of his colleagues and contemporaries, their joint espousal of Napoleon, their unusual fondness for the writings of Pope. But not much can be made on such scores, to my way of thinking - the use made of these experiences and ideas being so wholly at variance. Actually, it would be easy to compare Bilderdijk - in his later period at least - with the church-going, conservative ‘Sage of Rydal’, Wordsworth himself. Nor is it because the subject of that unfinished epic ‘De Ondergang der Eerste Wereld’, may be much the same as Byron's ‘Heaven and Earth’ that a strong case can be built up for their strength of affinity - actually his epic machinery militates heavily against the Dutch poet's success here; but neither had he the feeling nor the imagination which enabled the other to give life to so perilous a theme. The whole thing is far more general than this - as ‘Romantic’ comparisons should be. Professor hits the nail well on the head this time when he says of his compatriot: ‘In den grond is hij dezelfde romanticus, beheerscht door dezelfde wereldsmart.’Ga naar voetnoot1) Only, as I said earlier, the credit for awakening this feeling, we must first allow to James Macpherson and his ‘Ossianic’ sagas. It would probably have annoyed that writer intensely to learn that his work had proved of value in releasing men's minds from the fetters of a stringent, outmoded classicism, that it was pre-eminently admired as a splendid defiance of canons and conventions, for its naïvety, its ruggedness to Nature and the primitive things. But could he have made the same contact with Bilderdijk as Southey did, could he have learned of his bulky translations from the ‘ancients’, that he knew fifteen different languages, that he was a hidebound traditionalist, he would | |
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assuredly have counted him most completely satisfactory convert among all the many that he made in every clime. If the melancholy tenderness of Macpherson's treatment of the ancient Celtic legends did more than any other single force to bring about the Romantic Movement in Europe, it is hardly too much to say that Bilderdijk, more than any other, spread the gospel in Holland. During his period of exile in both London and Brunswick he seems to have steeped himself in every form of balladry and folk-poetry, as he had previously done in the classics and the literature of France. It was in those years that he served his apprenticeship to Romance and prepared actively to enter the lists as its staunch upholder. Scott and Byron had not yet appeared. Who was there to follow but the mighty ‘Ossian’? There was Bishop Percy, of course, like a literary Odo, assembling his ‘Reliques’ as magically as the old-time Tapestry of Bayeux. And if the miracle of Bilderdijk's conversion must be shared, it can only be with that pious revivalist of the mediaaval balladpoetry. In fact, it is not possible to separate the influence of these twin-gods; and Dr Zijderveld, for instance, in his compendious study, ‘De Romancepoëzie in Noord-Nederland van 1780 tot 1830’, makes no real attempt to disentangle the respective shares, wisely taking the view that nothing is to be gained by pedantically giving strict and proportionate attention to the twenty ballads he translated straight from the ‘Reliques’ and the many songs he drew from the pages of ‘Ossian’. Jointly these were the great and inexhaustible sources of his romanticism. Even if he had been able to share with Byron more than his general Weltschmerz, and even if had made any deeper acquaintanceship with Scott than through the ‘Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border’, I think it quite unlikely that he would ever have surrendered a whit of his allegiance to Macpherson and Percy in favour of their more sophisticated arts: most probably he would not have rated them above these others - just as, without justification other than prejudice and ignorance, he implied that Southey was the superior of Wordsworth. With truth it has been said that Bilderdijk reserved his best blooms for age. His poetry, in fact, developed from strength to strength through the years, just as Wordsworth's art stood still | |
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or even declined into triteness and bathos, compared with the freshness of the work produced during his association with Coleridge. Coldly correct these first effusions may be, but they are difficult reading, with their experimental and imposing classical forms and their constant dependence on mythology and on inflexible morality. ‘Wat hangt ge, o lang verstramde Luit,
Aan dees verdorden olm ten speeltuig van de winden?
Wat hangt gij 't vuig gewormt' ten buit,
En galmt, terwijl ge u voelt van roest en molm verslinden,
Van tijd tot tijd een zucht en flaauwen rouwklank uit,
Die ongemerkt in lucht verzwinden?
Wat hangt ge, o lang verstramde Luit,
Ten speeltuig van de winden?’
Poems of this sort are still in the style of academie exercises, and in them we have no more than echoes of the classical Vondel with a dash of Poot. The sonnet, ‘De Wareld’, however, shows already the release that could come over the poet's mind when he sought to express something personal and not be merely at the mercy of every passing classical illusion and scholarly whim. And in ‘De Zwaan’ from ‘Elius’ we begin to strike the true descriptive note: Aan d'inham, daar de breede stroom,
In 't schuren van de wallen,
Een' houten voorburg omgeleid,
Zijn meeste slib liet vallen.’
‘De Winter’, trips merrily along, though it displays a certain want of judgment and taste, and its style is almost prematurely simple: ‘Het vochtige teeken
Der stortende beken
Rijst over ons hoofd.’
‘Gebed’ is a piece that has been greatly and deservedly praised and, even allowing for the poet's indebtedness to the prose of Fénélon, it has a lofty, Vondelian suggestion about it that makes | |
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it fit perfectly into the Dutch scheme of things in poetry. ‘Grootheid’, on the other hand, I think, receives less than its deserts, but its vigour and forcefulness, coupled with an underlying pathos, make it one of the most striking of these early poems: ‘De stormen mogen om hem gieren,
Hij lacht met kluisters en lauwrieren,
Zijn eigen waarde maakt zijn eer.’
With ‘Graaf Floris de Vierde’ Bilderdijk begins to get seriously into his stride as romancer: ‘Zij droeg een gouden keten
Met diamanten boot;
Die hong haar van de schouders,
En wapperde in haar' schoot.’
‘Minerva’ reverts again to the pastoral, but it is as sparkling almost as anything in Hooft himself: ‘Minerve vond de veldfluit uit,
En speelde 't eerste lied,
Aan d' oever van Permessus vliet
Gehurkt in 't jeugdig kruid.’
In ‘Landzang’ and ‘Aan den Nachtegaal’ we find a surprising and delightful appreciation of nature, especially in the later poem, written but a few years before his death: ‘Zing Dichter! schep bewonderaren
Voor 't golven van uw melodij;
Doch wacht u, 't flikkeren aan te staren,
Van goud, of staat, of heerschappij.
Neen, laat uw ader welig vloeien,
En 't goud om Midas schedel gloeien;
Uw oogst is 't ruischen van uw lof!
Die oogst moet slechts op d' adem zweven,
Uw adem heeft haar u gegeven;
Uw doel, uw loon, zij nooit in 't stof.’
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‘Het Aardsche Leven’, too, is written by a poet who has attained to a mastery of his craft, while ‘Licht en Schaduw’ breathes a serenity not merely in the child-like manner of Cats but it is indicative of a settled philosophy of purposeful life. Fifty romances at least Dr. Zijderveld counts as having been translated by Bilderdijk from English in the period 1795-1806. But it would be superfluous to detail these here, when he has given such a complete account of them. Sometimes, however, I feel it a pity that Bilderdijk's own selections were not by any change to means the best available, and that he took so many undue liberties with usage of these folk-songs, if not with their metres. Also I can hardly excuse his rendering of the title of ‘Edom o' Gordon’ - one of the most famous of all and included in many a later anthology - as ‘Adam Gordon’ - this seems to me no lose the whole ballad effect right away, turning the old poem too definitely into a mere modern reconstruction. To the wealth of tradition behind the ballad form I do not think Bilderdijk had really given sufficient study when he essayed his task, and the effect on his products is to make them smack of a sentimentality which this most sturdy growth in the entire development of poetry certainly does not have. But his colossal range, his indefatigable energy, scarcely merit harsh criticism, and we readily now pay tribute to the incalculable fillip his reorientated view of Romance, through Macpherson and Percy, gave to a barren period otherwise in the poetry of Holland. That poetry, it is already clear, made no absolute distinction, like the poetry of Germany and England, between romance and ballad. ‘Bij Bilderdijk en zijn vrouw,’ as Dr. Zijderveld notes, ‘is romance de gewone naam voor allerlei epische gedichten.’Ga naar voetnoot1) He thinks, however, that De Vries and Te Winkel err in regarding ‘ballad’ as still a foreign word, in view of the efforts of Tollens and Bogaers to popularise it. That may be so, but for both the Bilderdijks it cannot be gainsaid that they confounded all ancient poetry together and sought the reproduction of metrical heroic tales rather than the incorporation of the earth-bound realism of the spirit that is the abiding charm of the authentic ballads of | |
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tradition - and probably of all great art. They were not real students of the genre, as Scott showed himself in his ‘Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border’. And for this vagueness and confusion their mentor, Percy, was largely to blame, paradoxical though such a statement must undoubtedly sound. Professor Herford speaks of his ‘Reliques’ as ‘the Bible of the Romantic reformation’.Ga naar voetnoot1) Even Wordsworth and Coleridge, it is worth while noting, began with ballads: Wordsworth even thought the ‘Reliques’ the true redemption of English poetry, and said so in his famous ‘Essay on Poetry’. Bishop Percy's purpose in compiling his great work was to show the world what treasures of beauty, pathos, and magnificence lay buried in the old Minstrel Ballads of the Middle Ages. But as with his predecessors - and remember there were nine collections of ballads published before the ‘Reliques’, notably Allan Ramsay's ‘Tea-Table Miscellany’ and ‘Evergreen’ - he embraced love-poems and pastorals, beside those genuine folk-pieces in which the people act for the sake of the action itself and live in the world of the eternal moment, as it were. It is not generally recognized that Percy includes such diverse types - Henryson's pastoral ‘Robin and Makyne’, for instance, the Elizabethan Marlowe's ‘Come live with me and be my love’ and Suckling's ‘To Anthea from Prison’ and ‘To Lucasta, on going on the Wars’ - in addition to straight-forward narratives like ‘Edom o' Gordon’ and ‘Sweet William’; where the ballad stands out as the most human form of literary expression, fundamentally a song of the people, evolved by instinct before writing became a conscious art, when the singer spoke not in his own person but for mankind. Had Percy fully realized the endless importance of the ballad, with its direct and primitive appeal, he would almost certainly have concentrated his being upon this ‘unliterary literature’, and not virtually have apologized to his literary acquaintances for his rude taste in offering them such rough fare. It took, therefore, the further - and creative - genius and imagination of Scott to lift the ballad right to the heights of Parnassus; completely reversing the previous attitude and joining its history to the ranks of science by the wide research made into the story of origins and | |
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variant versions. The uses of ‘Reliques’ and ‘Minstrelsy’ in their titles might be taken as not a bad indication of the different motives actuating the worthy Bishop and the gallant Baron of Abbotsford; and we might, therefore, think of the ‘Reliques’ as standing somewhere between the pleasant scrap-book of neglected treasure and the full copy-book of antiquity. It is small blame, then, to Bilderdijk and his wife if they also gave a wide interpretation to the word ballad. Where they erred was in not striving to afford it ‘a local habitation and a name’ in Holland itself. Had they worked on less heroic - even less epic - lines and realized that at best it meant a simple spirited poem, graphically reciting some popular story, they would have rendered a more notable service than even they did. For Vrouwe Bilderdijk it would have meant advancing from Burger - not to Southey merely, but to Scott himself; for Bilderdijk it would have meant asking why, with all these foreign and imported elements, there was not intertwined a native oral element - in a word, it might have sent him back to the minstrelsy of Van Maerlant himself, or, if that were accounted too completely moralitarian, to that first collection of Dutch folksongs, made in 1544: as Willems and Hoffmann took it upon themselves later to edit the old Dutch-Flemish romances. Delay meant a golden opportunity lost, for by the succeeding age a certain sophistication had set in and the tendency was to adapt the form to suit it for the recapitulation of stirring episodes in the national story. In one way, this meant a definite advance, of course, on the too staidly reproductive method of Bilderdijk, who tantalisingly failed to tackle picturesque historical material comparable with Percy's selection of ‘Sir Patrick Spens’, ‘Chevy Chase’, ‘Otterbourne’, ‘Bonny Earl of Murray’. Strictly speaking, it may be that in continuing the work of Bilderdijk, disciples like Staring, Tollens, and Hofdijk give us likewise the metrical tale or poem of patriotism; but there is a more homely and direct, if sometimes too conventional, appeal in their work. As Dr. H.G. Ten Bruggencate writes: ‘De burgerlijke poëzie - en dat is haar glorie - is huiselijk, is innig, is sentimenteel.’Ga naar voetnoot1) Of Staring's early productions it is not easy to be | |
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enamoured, his approximation to Feith and Bellamy being so close and obvious. Nor is there much to he gained by analysing his adaptation of Goldsmith's ‘Edwin and Angelina’, with its all too fatal ease of metre and diction: ‘Eens leefde er in den ouden tijd
Een Meisje schoon en jong;
Haar zoet gelaat het teder hart
Van menig' ridder vong.’
Even in ‘Jaromir te Praag’ he sinks to quite hopeless levels of bathos. Not Wordsworth himself in his notorious sonnet-line, ‘Jones, when from Calais southward you and I,’ can be said to commit a greater enormity than this: ‘Een Oud-Student, dien 'k Jaromir zal noemen:
Een Theoloog; befaamd aan Karels School te Praag.’
Too fulsome altogether, I think, has been the recognition accorded Staring - when we consider the amazing eulogies passed on his work by Potgieter, for example, we seriously wonder what had suddenly atrophied that writer's usually keen enough critical powers. ‘Nervous and caustic in expression,’ writes Delepierre, ‘he transported into verse the history and customs of his native country, Guelders, the land of the warriors and minstrels of the Middle Ages.’Ga naar voetnoot1) Such a pious and laudable intention we may certainly allow his subject to have had, but that he ever really achieved it we may beg leave to question. As a final estimate, indeed, I am much more ready to side with Ten Brink whose judgment on this occasion seems unprejudiced and soundly reliable. ‘Juist in zijne kortere lyrische gedichtjes geeft hij het beste, wat hij bezit.’Ga naar voetnoot2) In these it seems to me he actually stands closer to the old spirit of balladry than in his definite patriotic effusions, so much under the influence of the abstract doctrines of the French Revolution: ‘Vrijheid, Gelijkheid en Broederschap’. Only when the era of sentimentalism was on the wane and few besides Helmers were found to lament ‘De Dood van Ossian’ | |
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can it be said that Tollens found himself in any real sense an incarnation of the old ballad-makers. It was not that he cultivated assiduously the poetry of these ancient writers, so long consigned to oblivion. Within himself, far more than Staring, he was the poet of the people and of the fireside, shedding consolation, encouragement, and cheerfulness on all around; while, from without, came the immense stimulation of the events in the national history between 1813 and 183. Not thesee together could yet contrive to make him a great poet or keep him from lapsing into utter triteness and commonplaceness with dismaying frequency, but they at least were sufficient to render him the mouthpiece of national enthusiasm and homely contentment, making him thus a true mirror of his time. Take away the poems inspired by this dual subject-matter and his poetic content wears thin almost to disappearing point. Dr. Zijderveld's criticism in this, I think, is incontrovertible: ‘In de romantische romancen is dan ook Tollens' muze niet sterk. Den toon der vaderlandsche romance trof ze beter, ten minste naar den smaak van dien tijd.’Ga naar voetnoot1) Could he only have maintained the promise shown in his remarkably close rendering of Scott's famous song, ‘Young Lochinvar’, taken from ‘Marmion’; he might, I think, have built up a greater reputation than either Van Lennep or Beets: his lines, allowing for the liberties necessitated by furnishing a national setting for his ‘Jonker van 't Sticht,’ have all the galloping verve and stirring romantic liveliness of Scott's: ‘Geen steilten, geen grebben vertraagden zijn vaart;
Hij zwom door den Rijn, door de Waal en de beken.’
But it is not for such fragmentary successes that he will be recalled. It will be for his warmly-realized ‘Jan van Schaffelaar’, his ‘Albrecht Beiling’, his ‘Herman De Ruyter’, his splendid account of Barentz' heroic expedition to the Arctic in ‘De Overwintering op Nova Zembla’. And, alongside these, we would do best to forget that he was ever capable of such petty jingles as: ‘De wintervorst vierde zijn lusten den toom,
En vloerde met schoten het meer en den stroom.’
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And of all prosaic verbiage of the order of: ‘Gezondheid is de grootste schat
Van al wat God ons heeft gegeven.’
These wordy efforts can only serve to put us in mind of the admirable but wholly wearisome Da Costa, who with his needless return to the pieties of job and ‘Vader Cats’, the rigid didacticism of Calvinism, the conventions of the classics, proved the biggest set-back to Romance in the whole course it pursued in the historic Netherlands. It is usual, I know, to point to his partial translation of Byron's ‘Cain’, but in itself such a purely imitatory exercise proven nothing at all, and assuredly no poet was ever less equipped to spread the spectacular and revolutionary evangel of Byronism. Bogaers, too, offers little compensation, even with his best work - ‘De Togt van Heemskerck naar Gibraltar’ and ‘De Schaatsenrijder’ - and is visibly sinking below the level of tolerable native Romance as he clutches wildly,. if not entirely vainly, at Tennyson, Southey, and Campbell. The latter's ‘Soldier's Dream’, in fact, is so well done that it might have paid him to concentrate on the battlesong as written by that British master: ‘'t Werd duister. In 't kamp had de roffel geklonken.
De Zege was ons, schoon ze duur had gekost.
De duizenden beidden, ter aarde gezonken,
De rust, die herstelt, of den dood, die verlost.’
But as far bigger literary and national issues were patently involved than the mere artistic salvation of a single writer of no marked potentiality, it seems futile to delay the main pursuit any longer by speculation about the potentiality of this or that individual poet. Already these new idols of the Romantic Movement, Scott and Byron, had secured a good lead and were actually threatening to fight out the finish in a great duel between themselves; away from the far-flung battle-ground of ‘Ossian’ on to a field where the most anguished personal echoes would mingle freely with the emancipating cries of many peoples engaged in fighting their own great national causes in a new literary ‘Battle of the Nations’. (To be continued.) |
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