De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 52

[p. 399]

[De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 53. Deel 5.]

Dutch poetry and the romantic revival by Dr. J.A. Russell.
IV. The vogue of Scott and Byron.

The romanticism of the Romantic Movement has so many meanings that it is quite impossible to define it in a sentence. One looks in vain, it would seem, for any common quality in the writings of such outstanding representatives of the various Romantic groups as Alfred de Vigny, Georges Sand, Victor Hugo in France, as Richardson, Keats, Byron in England, as Burger, Goethe, Heine in Germany, as, Feith, Beets, Perk in Holland. Yet this, far from implying disintegration, simply means that Romance has always been ‘reviving’. It is not enough to think of the later eighteenth century as Romantic above all - as some critics, including Professor Kalff, incline to do; nor is it enough to regard the ‘return to nature’ as the central doctrine - for others, like Schlegel, Coleridge, the better watch-word, undoubtedly, would be: ‘Back to Shakespeare’. The original sentimentalists - Sterne, the young Goethe, Rousseau, Post - gave way, to be sure, to other great Romantics, like Scott, like Byron. But not for everyone were even these the culminating points of the entire Movement. They were no longer so for a number of strangely enlightened contemporaries - the mature Goethe, Wordsworth, above all - for whom romanticism was not simply terror, wonder, exaggeration, or mystery, with or without the supernatural, but a recognition of the spiritual element in the human individual, a deep- rooted sense of a material world transfused with spirit. And they were certainly not so for the leaders of the ‘Nieuwe Gids-Beweging’ who, indeed, tacitly opposed Byron's empty rhetoric and

[p. 400]

Scott's shelving of the present for an imaginary past, yet looked on themselves as incontestably Romantic. And, thinking it over today, who would care to say that the sentimentalists, and not the surrealists, would not be victorious in the long run? Yet, while it lasted, the vogue of Scott and Byron was more extensive than anything so far in the course of romanticism.

The strength of the Romantic influence at the beginning of last century cannot be better gauged, I think, than by realizing that it was conjointly exerted by these two writers, in themselves so diametrically opposed in character, temperament, outlook. Scott, thus, we all know, was at his supremest when he was nearest his own country and his own people - in ‘Rob Roy’, ‘The Heart of Midlothian’, ‘Old Mortality’, ‘Guy Mannering’; Byron, on the other hand, appeared to greatest advantage when he was furthest away from his country, or at least nearest himself - as in ‘Don Juan’, ‘Childe Harold’, ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, ‘Beppo’. In their approach to history, again, as a subject for their art, no two poets could have been more fundamentally different - Byron really provided no more than picaresque stories in verse, such as ‘The Bride of Abydos’, ‘Lara’, ‘The Corsair’, ‘The Giaour’; but Scott delved with infinite resource and patience, and also the deepest personal relish, into the national story, and produced patriotic poems like ‘Marmion’, ‘The Lord of the Isles’, ‘The Lady of the Lake’. Byron, in a word, was the most subjective of authors, almost more than any other poet reflecting his own personal experiences and emotions; his master was simply - himself. But Scott was, in his methods at least, objective - at all times ‘the inquisitive historian’, paying homage to Froissart, as to a master. A self-worshipper, Byron; a hero-worshipper, Scott. But apparently the Romantic Revival could carry them both quite easily; for, though they had not the qualities of truly great poets - like Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Goethe - far more than these were they men of their age, with a far livelier and, superficially, far shrewder perception of their social environment. Conspicuously as they have lacked high intellectual endowment, they had, nevertheless, the endowment most suited to express their genius - an inexhaustible invention, a formidable memory, a gusto for the human pageant, and an immense power of application.

[p. 401]

Hence, in a word, they grew into the most popular writers of their time.

It has been remarked that in the history of narrative there are but two epoch-makers - Cervantes, who did the ancient and beloved art of pure story-telling to a cruel death, and Walter Scott, who brought it to a glorious resurrection. Undoubtedly, it will always count to Scott as his supreme glory that he created the English historical novel. But the author of ‘Waverley’ had himself but one genuine precursor - and that the author of ‘The Lady of the Lake’, ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’, ‘Marmion’. These works, we know, he did not rate highly, and, apropos of them, once made the remark that ‘there is nothing so bad for young people as reading bad poetry’. How completely unlike Byron he was in this respect also, for Byron had every belief in his own genius and accomplishment - though he ‘awoke one day and found himself famous’, it was probably no more than he expected to do. On Scott, however, the effect was far otherwise. He realized clearly that he was no Milton, no Wordsworth, one dedicated to poetry, but one standing near to the ‘norm’ of human nature and holding an unqualified respect for received tradition and convention. As it chanced, his renunciation of narrative writing in verse was no severe loss to poetry. Yet, when we read of his reason for doing so - because ‘Byron bet me... bet me out of the field’ - we realize more than ever how widely separated in almost every way these two great pillars of Romance during its most intense and spectacular vogue were.

Nowhere, we can say, was this vogue more complete than it was in Holland, conspired thereto by the historical circumstances which for half a century denied it the full privileges of nationality, brought the literary flow to a perilously low ebb, and made revival possible only through the medium of lome great outside force. Paramountly, of course, that force was found in the Romantic writings of Sir Walter Scott - for, though Byron had also his period of supremacy, it was much shorter and proved much less influential. In saying this, of course, we must always remember that Scott's main influence was exerted through his prose, while Byron depended wholly upon verse - including in this the romantic exigencies of his own life and character. Nor, indeed, it is

[p. 402]

always easy to separate the elements deriving from the one author and the other - for instance, the scholars who have most exhaustively treated of these respective influences, Dr. Vissink¹⁾ and Dr. Popma²⁾ cannot always keep from overlapping, as in dealing with the work of Van Lennep, Beets, Hofdijk particularly.

Bilderdijk it was, I think, who was first to realize the way the wind was blowing with regard to Scott; reflected chiefly in his study of his ‘Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border’ and in his translation of ‘The Curse of Moy Hall’ as ‘De Vloek van 't Burchtslot Moy’. Had the times and conditions been more propitious in Holland, I have even the feeling that he would have filled out his later period with historical narratives more after the fashion of Scott, than of Macpherson and of the ‘romances’ - rather than, for him, ‘ballads’ - of Bishop Percy. For Staring and Da Costa, on the other hand, the case was quite different, for though they read a great deal of English, they found little urge withal to attempt any serious study of the peculiar method and practice of Scott. So it was left to the more callow Jacob van Lennep to discover the possibilities for Dutch poetry in this new Romantic field and finally, if by dint of the most outrageous plagiarism, to establish himself as ‘the Dutch Scott’.

Like the Scottish writer, Van Lennep opend his literary account with poetic romances; and throughout all his ‘Nederlandsche Legenden in rijm’ parallels with Scott constantly suggest themselves. But here we are concerned more with the spiritual unity of the two authors than with any exact resemblances in their work merely; and when it becomes apparent how much Van Lennep lacks of the other's local colour, feeling, artistic execution, there seems little need to pursue these more tangible things very far. Briefly ‘Het Huis ter Leede’ might take rank as a Dutch equivalent of ‘The Lay of the Last Minstrel’, especially in respect of its Crusading background and its supernatural elements; historically, of course, it covers some of the same ground as ‘Ivanhoe’, the book which first attracted Van Lennep to Scott. ‘Adegild’, again, directly reproduces from ‘The Pirate’ Norna's ‘Song of the Reikennar’; the prelude to ‘Jacoba en Bertha’ is, largely a trans-

1) ‘Scott and his influence on Dutch Literature’.

2) ‘Byron en het Byronisme in de Nederlandsche Letterkunde’.

[p. 403]

lation of the Introduction to Canto III of ‘Marmion’; while the song sung at the Scottish Court by Lady Heron is also reproduced here, being put into the mouth of Bertha. Much more valuable, however, are ‘De Strijd met Vlaanderen’ and the later ‘Eduard van Gelre’, for here at last Van Lennep comes on to the altogether firmer and more familiar ground of national history that is not too remote to serve as an inspiring analogy with the fight the nation was then waging with the Belgians. At the same time these tales might be said finally to prove that Van Lennep lacked most of the essential qualities of his mentor ever to make an outstanding succes of anything in this genre. He was Romantic more by the easiness of his disposition and his shirking of serious and central issues than by any real ‘genius for history’ and searching powers of analysis. Scott himself was never above the clouds, but he was very much the humorously realistic man of the world. His ideas, too, were local, allowing for no ‘development of doctrine’, but Van Lennep's mind was not even so sturdily earth-bound as this, and its superficiality was responsible for his failure to be fed in the same way by the romantic past and the feudal tradition of his own country. In Scott the magic of his Scottish countryside was always at work - an unsurpassed knowledge of its heroic but unhappy history, its glorious but little-known geography, informs it from beginning to end. But little of that same enhancive glamour - that inspired blend of character, scene and action - comes down to us in Van Lennep. Today, in fact, it might almost be said that the chief result of his poetry is the harm which it has done the national literature. For a time it degraded the whole character of the art, fixing upon the minds of a whole generation a vague conviction that poetry was but one of the many amusements for the lighter hours of all classes. To begin with, Van Lennep, with no sort of original ability, refused to serve any real apprenticeship to the Muse. Never could he have looked upon poetry as a deep thing, a teaching thing, the most surely and wisely elevating of human things. To him, apparently, it was sufficient if he could get away with as much material of Scott's as possible without too much flagrant detection, and, of course, without ever having the intention to make it really his own. ‘We steal from the poets,’ confesses Burton freely, but Van Lennep was not

[p. 404]

speaking in that universal sense when he boasted: ‘Sedert bijna veertig jaren heb ik voornamelijk geleefd van roof en diefstal.’ Than Scott, on the other hand, no man ever possessed greater integrity of character. It stood him in excellent stead when editing his famous ‘Ministrelsy of the Scottish Border’, where his reasonably strict conscience never allowed him to play fast and loose with his texts, like Bishop Percy. One trembles to think what would have happened if Van Lennep had been placed among the same textual temptations - not, of course, that he could ever have passed off a composition of his own as an ancient ballad. But - all question of editorship apart - what an inestimable boon for him if he too could have been developed by work on this richly assorted material! In this scholarly undertaking he could not have failed to accumulate an encyclopaedic knowledge of the details of the past, upon which he could then have drawn without effort when he became an historical romancer. If the noble simplicity of the ballads, written for the people, if not always by the people, could not have exerted a wholesome influence upon his style - imparting to it something of the austere bareness of a winswept landscape - then, I am afraid, nothing could have done so. In all great art there must be this salt of the prosaic, and it should have been the aim of Van Lennep likewise to bring such true romance within hail of pedestrian lives, instead of buoying them up for a season with temporary expedients and mere surface values.

‘In his heart,’ somewhat unexpectedly writes Dr. Vissink, ‘Van Lennep perhaps remained too true to the classic principles, however much impelled towards romanticism by the general enthusiasm felt for Scott and Byron by the Dutch, and the approval bestowed by his readers upon his work.’³⁾

Rather different was the course pursued by Nicolaas Beets in his eager attempt to reflect the spirit of Scott in Dutch poetry. Definitely his imitation grew out of an intense personal admiration of the man, a boyish, uncritical yearning to seek back into the same imagined past of jousts and tuorneys, drums and trumpets. But this boundless admiration, like Peter Pan, never grew up; it remained an immature, undeveloped thing, capable only of the

3) ‘Scott and his influence on Dutch Litteratiire’, p. 218.

[p. 405]

reproduction of external resemblances and the specious veneer of romanticism. Undoubtedly, with Scott the man even the later Beets could enter into sympathetic understanding, for he possessed the same type of conservative mind, holding a horror of the new democracy - one does not readily forget Mevrouw Ammers-Küller's implied picture of him in ‘The Rebel Generation’ uncompromisingly opposing women's suffrage, something like Scott's rage over the refusal of the warkers in the Border towns to oppose their own enfranchisement. In the world in which Van Lennep lived will and action were also the supreme interests, moving within and from a rigid framework of religieus creed and domestic morality; a world in which there was little room for general ideas, philosophical or psychological, and no room at all for romantic experimentation and ‘states of soul’, such as actuated the younger school of Romantics in the 'eighties. The cold truth is that only the sheer barrenness of the period enabled men of such mediocre talents - and not centrally poetic talents at all - as Van Lennep and Beets to essay the rôle of leading their countrymen at this time into the ways and wiles of Romance.

Beets, it can be admitted without demur, shows even less ability than Van Lennep to revive the past with any of the living fire of Scott. No more than his fellow disciple had he the imagination and the inspired application to steep himself in the period of which he wished to write. Scott by the ‘virtue’ he breathed into the immortal characters he created - belonging, again, almost entirely to the humbler classes, despite his own feudal and aristocratic pretentions - completely contradicted his political and social assumptions otherwise. But Beets proved abundantly that he had ploughed in a foreign field by the greater measure of success he attained when he gave his mind to the lighter study of his own day - his true vein was really reminiscent, and not historical at all. The influence of Scott upon his work is practically confined to the two poetic romances, ‘Kuser’ and ‘Ada van Holland’; but though they are the best metrical tales ever written by him, they are sadly deficient in those vast stores of historic and legendary lore and that bright personal observation which characterise the best passages of ‘Marmion’ and ‘The Lady of the Lake’ - so far, in their turn, behind the great prose romances.

[p. 406]

By comparison Beets is simply a minor poet, his emotions second hand and bookish, and one using to little advantage material, not insignificant in itself, but remaining to his untrained mind unfamiliar, and peculiarly unresponsive. For the fact that it is free from the plagiarism and the anachronisms which disfigure the work of Van Lennep we must give him credit, though this is not to say that he understood Scott better or in any higher degree. Beets' absorption with Scott began with his ‘Proeven uit de dictherlijke werken van Walter Scott’ and ended with ‘Het Eeuwfeest van Sir Walter Scott’ - typical pieces of homage both. Who will say that they were not almost the greatest contacts ever made by him with the spirit of his greatest hero of all mediaevalism - Scott himself!

It is in W.J. Hofdijk's work probably that we find the best parallel with that of the great British romancer. Hofdijk, however, made two rather serieus mistakes - in using Van Lennep so much as his intermediary, and in not from the first adopting nis own country for his setting and its proud history for his subjectmatter. Later it is true, he struck out for himself along more independent lines and, with his painter's eye, sensed the interest latent in the historical and geographical landscape of the broad Netherlands, unlike Scott, however, gradually narrowing the range of his vision and finally coming back to the beauties and traditions of his Kennemerland, making to some extent his ‘Kennemerland Balladen’, packed with history and folk-lore, a Dutch counterpart to ‘The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border’ - the work which Scott began his colossally fertile cultivation of Romance. For Holland this was a needful and noted service, but it was the kind of ‘local history’ with which Hofdijk should have begun his career, not almost ended it. A ‘Jonker van Brederode’ following this period of preparation and initiation would have been a still more complete and national piece of work, and might even have set the seal upon the whole development of Romance in Holland. But Hofdijk was never so wholly wedded to his art to achieve that, and, allowing his standards to be vitiated by too-rapid production, stifled altogether the masterpiece that was perhaps in him.

If Van Lennpe was a greater - or at least more prolific -

[p. 407]

follower of Scott than was Beets, the position is reversed when we come to consider the influence of Byron. Properly to understand this influence we must link it up, beyond the writers concerned in leaving some literary trace of their enthusiasm, with the strange social phenomenon of ‘Byronism’. A century ago in Holland this was very common, quite the fashionable pose. To understand this somewhat excessive zeal we must, in turn, realize the state of affairs which prevailed at that time, and how luckily Byron arrived to satisfy so many thwarted aspirations and emotions. In spite of the ‘Pre-Romantics’, the Dutch classical movement had been kept going, officially, long after it was dead. But now the events of the French invasion and the artificial union with Belgium had created a feeling of nervous excitement and an appetite for strong emotion, which Bilderdijk, Staring, and Da Costa were quite inadequate to satisfy. Suddenly the long wars were over and the need for restraint removed. One can imagine the effect of Byron's strong, satisfying, if somewhat theatrical, romanticism. No doubt Byron did not create Dutch romanticism, but he created the Romantic type. Numerous young posers of not always intelligent imitations which were the ‘best sellers’ of their time at once claimed his as master.

In drawing a distinction between Byron and Byronism, it must be acknowledged that all great writers suffer from their partisans. But in this respect Byron was particularly unfortunate - speaking now, not only for Holland, for most parts of Europe which feit his influence. It is right that the poet himself, with his constant attudinising, should be made to bear some responsibility for this state of matters, yet it is rather unfair to use the worse aspects of Byronism as a method of discrediting Byron's writings. The truth is that many of the writers who were most influenced by the English poet were people of littie consequence, and also that, by a curious perversity of criticism, it is upon them that attention is too often made to turn, with the moral: ‘Behold what Byron led to.’

It is clear that various forms of Byronism persisted. In Holland numerous translations and parallels of texts show how extensive was his influence. What is much more doubtful is how far these might be said to represent a real understanding of

[p. 408]

Byron's bitter genius, such as, for instance, Alfred de Vigny, came to possess. Were minds so stereotyped, so little melodramatic, so lacking in passion, so little given over to scepticism, as those of Van Lennep, Beets, and Hofdijk, likely to be able to soak themselves utterly in uneasy, declamatoty works like ‘Manfred’ and ‘Cain’, in ethically skittish ones like ‘Don Juan’ and ‘Beppo’? Personally, I am quite sure they were not, though, on the other hand, I cannot doubt that they were the best that Holland could do at this rather lean period. But their real conception of poetry was not learned from him - or even radically altered by their contact - and there was never any question of that really potent influence converting any of them into a Lamartine, a de Vigny, a de Musset.

Of the three main Dutch followers, Beets was the most considerable. During his student days his imagination was fired with enthusiasm for the Englishman's verse, and he immediately began a long list of translations - including ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’, ‘Hebrew Helodies’, ‘Mazeppa’; in many ways the least characteristic poems he could have chosen. As Dr. Popma comments: ‘Wij missen The Giaour, The Corsair, Lara.’⁴⁾ The type of these he reproduced less directly, however, in his first metrical tale, his ‘José’: ‘Hier,’ again remarks Dr. Popma, ‘is de overanderlijke held van Byron's Muze; wij herkennen het bleeke en droefgeestige gelaat, de donkere blikken, den verachtelijken glimlach om den mond.’⁵⁾ The sunny south evidently fascinated Beets as much as it did the roving Englishman, for in his ‘Maskerade’ he returns to Spain and, though representing the entry of Ferdinand and Isabella into Granada in 1492, manages to introduce some of the humorous touches of ‘Don Juan’ as well as a number of its more fantastic rhymes. ‘Kuser’ shows a lessening influence after this and with ‘Gwy de Vlaming’ it may be said that Beets parted company altogether with this master whom latterly he had shared with Scott. While this vogue lasted he was carried out of himself; he never saw Byron from the inside - and certainly never in himself; he had no ‘complexes’ of mother-hatred and sister-love, no conflict

4) ‘Byron en het Bylronisme in de Nederlandsche Letterkunde’, p. 172.

5) Idem, p. 175.

[p. 409]

with false forms of social organization, no fundamental dissonance of character. His own marks and expressions of temperament were remarkably placid and untroubled, and, seemingly, to be a truly Byronesque figure you had to have - or find - excuses for ‘letting off steam’. Nevertheless, I do not wish to belittle the worth of these translations made by Beets. When the subject is descriptive, or not too intolerable personal or dangerously subversive of order and the accepted conventions, he is generally at his best, and reaches, I think, high-light with his sonnet, ‘Aan Chillon’, and ‘De Gevangene van Chillon’; the latter splendidly wrought out from the opening lines:

‘Diep is 't meer Leman: duizend voet
Zonk 't peillood, dat het sterk kasteel
Liet dalen van zijn wit rondeel
En nederzinken in den vloed,
Die 't insluit van rondsom;
En onder 't waterpas der kom
Was 't wulf, waar 'k met mijn broeder lag,
Door dikke muren, diepe golven
Als levende in dit graf bedolven.’

Translation is at best but an imperfect medium through which to convey the essential characteristics of any writer, and that being the way by which the Dutch poets - Beets in some slight measure apart - interpreted Byron, it cannot be said that their work has any particular interest or value for criticism. The influence of the English poet was palpable enough thereby, but it was not really preponderating. It did not serve to provide great national themes, it did not teach the Dutch poets to exalt the sterner appearances of nature and sing of solitude, and it certainly did not impress them with any very savage melancholy, or perhaps even imbue them with any stronger notions of liberty and independence. None of the things for which Byron stood most predominantly found a resting-place in Dutch poetry at all, and therefore his influence must be thought of as quite adventitious and decidedly transitory. If fact, it would be no exaggeration to say that in a frantic and perverse, though sensitive, mind like Baudelaire's his influence would be found most of all to

[p. 410]

persist; though there was scarcely any conscious effect to allow it to infiltrate and work its will-‘Byrons’, like poets in general, are born, not made. For Holland the most Byronesque order of mind that I can think of is Multatuli: had he elected to write in verse I can well imagine that there would then have been forth-coming a ‘Manfred’ or a ‘Cain’ in every sense Dutch: a real gesture of defiance from a repressed and misunderstood nature.

The accepted Dutch Byronists were conspicuously lacking in personal idiosyncrasy, as originality, to soar into the Empyrean with high flights of Romantic lyricism, full of sublime disquietude and moving despair. What we now value in their work is simply the evidence of competent skill in versifying, of happy turns of phrase and image, of occasional moments of poetical vision. In these respects, for instance, Van Lennep's quatrain is quite memorable:

‘Spreek mij nooit van een naam, dien het nageslacht noem';
Slechts de dagen der jonkheid zijn dagen van roem.
Voor de mirt en de roos, die haar slapen omzwieren,
Ruil ik willig uw bundels van palm en laurieren.’

But, candidly, there is far too much that, viewed from any angle, is tamely pedestrian and even inaccurate. Van Lennep can sink just as easily as any Dutch writer into Byron's own ‘fatal facility’. So Dr. Popma, showing his false rendering of:

‘Know you the land where the cypress and the myrtle
Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime?’

as

‘Is het land u bekend waar cypres en waar mirt
Ons de daden des landaards vertoonen?’

justly remarks: ‘Vergelijkt men deze verzen met de oorspronkelijke, dan valt terstond op hoeveel van het poëtische in Byron's aanhef bij Ven Lennep gemist wordt’.⁶⁾ Still, let us not forget, how often the original itself was weak, loose, and alliterative, making the labour of perpetuating bad poetry in another language surely the most preposterous, as it was the most redundant, of tasks.

(To be continued.)

6) ‘Byron en het Byronisme in de Nederlandsche Letterkunde’, p. 356.