De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 52

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Dutch poetry and the romantic revival by Dr. J.A. Russell.
V. Potgieter and wordsworth.

Above all Romanticism, as has been implied, was an extraordinary development of imaginative sensibility. It brought a sense of wonder into life, providing a way of escape from the real world and subtly fascinating men's minds with a new potency of appeal. Yet, it was no mere world of hallucination and make-believe that the best type of Romantic sought to discover. With Wordsworth he might seek to make the supernatural natural, with Coleridge he might seek to make the natural supernatural, but always it was an avenue to the world of Romance, as disclosed by the imagination; and always it contrived to restore us to reality at some higher point. In the final analysis, therefore, it reduced the harshness, the drabness, the dragging routline of life to a matter of sense-impressions and the ‘ideas’ which reflected them, making Romanticism, of all literary movements, the one most impregnated with speculative elements.

Already by the turn of the eighteenth century the Movement had gathered so much momentum and ramified itself in so many different fashions that it is impossible to proceed further without determining the most marked phases. Obviously, not every Romantic can be included under the old ‘return to nature’ formula-Burns, Thomson, Cowper, we may, but for Wordsworth it is an undue simplification. ‘The Renascence of Wonder’, again, was a well-coined phrase to apply to the more ornate and elaborate vein of

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Keats and Coleridge, but not very aptly can it be said to denote Scott's hearty and joyous familiarity with his Romantic world, Nor, since it was through the ballad rather than the more dignified lyric, that the spirit of poetry won its way to a simpler, more poignant diction and a more plangent rhythm, will the term lyrisme, as used by the French, suffice for the more scattered and heterogeneous Romanticism of England and Holland. Likewise, to think of it mainly as an expansion of the revolutionary individualism of Rousseau is not enough, for Rousseau, though he insisted on the worth and dignity of man as man and on the power of natural scenery to respond to his needs, was still far short of perceiving the harmonies between man and man, such as was to be the finest contribution of later poets and thinkers like Goethe, Wordsworth, Shelley, who surely realized Romanticism in its ‘most exalted mood’.

So far - with Macpherson and Young, with Feith and Bilderdijk, with Scott and Byron, with Beets and Van Lennep - it might seem as if the Romantic Revival were altogether a return to old moods and old modes. Now, as the eighteenth century closed down in the tragedies and triumphs of the French Revolution, there came a quickening of the spirit - in a few poets at least. The creators of this new spirit and of a finer music were, of course, Wordsworth and Coleridge in their famous ‘Lyrical Ballads’. That name itself is very significant. It represents very clearly, I think, the real and deep cleavage between their poetical conceptions and those of Scott and the more swash-buckling order of Romantics, and shows definitely what they were aiming at or had achieved. The real Scott emerged in the romantic and historical ballads, composed confessedly in imitation of the mediaeval versions, but here there was introduced a spiritual agitation to lend a deeper note to the simple matter of the songs. ‘Ballads’ Wordsworth and Coleridge might call their poems, but the homely and familiar themes of ‘Lucy Gray’, ‘We are Seven’, ‘Simon Lee’, were far removed from the heroic style of ‘Chevy Chase’ and ‘Sir Patrick Spens’. And even the balancing term ‘lyrical’ is not used in quite the accepted sense. Coleridge, for one thing, is not to be reckoned an essentially lyrical poet at all. But even though the epithet applies more particularly to Wordsworth's share in

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the joint composition, there is not yet the singing quality in his measures found in both Blake and Shelley - the greatest of all singers among the Romanticisms. But there is something else, something of Wordsworth's own - and it is precisely his sensing of the joyous and abounding life of nature and its profound meaning for the heart ‘that watches and receives’. In Wordsworth alone is this an inspired thing, redeeming from failure poems in themselves commonplace, and sometimes even seeming to border on the ludicrous.

Poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, it is hardly needful to say after this, are bound to be differentiated from other Romantics like Macpherson, Young, and Scott. Yet, in turn, are not all these markedly dissimilar? Byron, for instance, had a name and fame in Europe when, as yet, Wordsworth and Shelley were quite unknown. The truth, of course, is that his temperament was oratorical rather than lyrical, and with what wistful appeal he paraded it to the contemporary world we have already considered. Nor did Coleridge give new effect to the ballad by making it a vehicle for a new and passionate conviction, the joy of a conversion; instead he gave to the narrative ballad - ‘The Ancient Mariner’, that is - a dramatic intensity, a beauty of imagery, and a musical subtlety and richness such as it had never known in all its history. Shelley, of course, possessed all the passion, all the intensity, of the lyical poet, yet he had little affinity with Wordsworth, and he appeared to rate him not much higher than did Byron - allowing the other's poetic genius. But both, in their far different ways, were teachers and prophets, and that alone binds them within the wide Romantic movement, however we may classify them individually.

In England itself the term ‘Lake School’ was devised by Jeffrey to circumscribe the narrow sphere of influence of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. Today when we consider the high and spacious intellectual machinery of the first two of the trio, at least the concept becomes a quite laughable one. Even Wordsworth, admittedly, had his limitations. He lacked vision for the world of man, save under certain broad and simple aspects - the patriot, the peasant, the seer, the child. He lacked vision for the past, save at certain points on which the spirit of liberty had

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laid a fiery finger. His failure to take stock of the elements of conflict and pain in Nature has not been overlooked and he has been rebuked for imposing a tame ‘Anglican’ pantheism on the terrifying multifariousness of nature - he should have visited the Tropics, says Mr. Aldous Huxley, and he would have had his eyes opened. In the splendid rhetorical verse of Byron, in the robust narrative verse of Scott (and is not the tendency now to include that as a province of his prose?), these limitations were doubtless transcended in great measure. But in other respects how greatly do they lack the originality and strength of Wordsworth, and today we can only wonder that it should ever have been possible for the critics, if they seriously considered him at all, to look on the aloof Cumbrian star as an altogether lesser light of the firmament illuminated by the authors of ‘Don Juan’ and ‘Marmion’.

The causes for the delay in establishing Wordsworth as a classic form a not unprofitable line of enquiry. Was it due simply to the ‘darkness’ of the age, as the poet himself imagined? Was the reading public repelled by the feelings of strangeness and awkwardness to which his verses gave rise, as he anticipated they would be? Undoubtedly, there are vitiating elements to be found in the poet's output - its uneveness, its oft-times extreme banality, its infiltration of theory. And the paradox even arises that Wordsworth's greatness would have been less grudgingly admitted by a busy world if he had happened to die at forty instead of living till he was eighty. For many, undoubtedly, there was a gradual eclipse or exhaustion of genius. For them Wordsworth was ‘the lost leader’;they could find little or no interest in anything he wrote after the great decade of his zenith (the period 1798-1807). Even yet, I suppose, there must be many who, while recognizing in him the prophet and the mystic, the interpreter of a high Pantheism capable of exciting a strong but vague aesthetic emotion, ae far from realizing the consistent and patient realism of his art. The fact seems to be that the sublimity and the passion of the poet at his greatest inevitably stand in the way of our appreciation of his lesser, but still valuable, gifts. Ballads, for instance, however consummate, could never be understood as adequate to the larger aims of poetry. Yet, if ever a poet was

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aware of these ‘larger aims’ it was surely William Wordsworth, and a most important category in the literature of a classic is precisely the critical power that he so abundantly possessed. More and more, then, his name stands out as one of the greatest of those great men to whom England owes the miraculous rebirth of its poetry over a century ago. We go back to him again and again. Even those who do not always love him go back to him; they cannot escape or resist him. He is, as it were, the rock of which the rest - Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Arnold, Bridges - are in large part hewn; as we know, if not always by their own admission, by the evidence of their works. More than any other man he is the shaper of the art and spirit of English poetry for the next century. He irritates, he exasperates as only the very greatest can. In his own day he provoked people, and he does so still. Tennyson and Browning and Arnold are still read with enjoyment, their power to charm is not exhausted; but in a certain sense their ‘interest’ is: we have read their riddles, we understand their limitations; whereas Wordsworth - and, we may add. Keats and Shelley - besides the poetic renown he had already won in the later nineteenth century possesses for us to day a kind of interest more living than the tranquil fame of assured classics, the interest of one who compels us to interpret him afresh.

Amazing as it may seem, we must emphatically allow that it was the derided ‘Lake School’ - not even Blake or Cowper - that recreated English poetry. And Wordsworth above all; for it was he who, freeing himself alike from the doubts which paralysed the poetic faculty in the transitional period and from the easy certainty which killed it in the age of reason, found a new gospel which was at once a faith for every day and a poetic inspiration: for him life and poetry could be one, as they had been for no poet during the century before him. It is true that, when he wrote, for a hundred years and more something had been lacking. A realm of possible emotion had been lost to the poet. And lost not only to the poet, but to mankind at large. His very poetic scheme Wordsworth was forced to create - a scheme in which no symbols should stand between him and the outer world.

Wordsworth, in point of fact, more than any poet, more than Shelley himself, raises the issue of what poetry really is. It is

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this that makes him both difficult and worth while, for the fact remains that the only poets who live are those who concern themselves with life, feeling it to be a thing of tremendous issues, and know how to re-create their sense of it and give to that sense a bodily shape in the form of a work of art. This, undoubtedly, or something like it, is what the calling of a poet meant for Wordsworth, what it meant for Keats, for Shelley.

Surveying Holland now at this time can it be said that there was any poet who revealed in anything like this fashion the depth of the emotional nature of man, of all men? Was there anyone who had this unique power of penetrating into the universal heart, penetrating with ease and certainty behind all veils of rough exterior or rude manners? Who at this time seriously endowed ‘rocks and stones and trees’ with sentient existence? What poets saw it as their business to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things? Was there in Holland a ‘Lake School’ - even on the most limited application of the term? In the search for an answer there is alas! a long and all too ominous pause. We look in vain for anyone ‘striding the narrow world like a Colossus’.

Professor Prinsen¹⁾ maks an excellent point when he suggests that for the Dutch poets the influence of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey would have been much more suitable than that of Byron, under which they fell so readily. By their complete lack of discernment of these new and enlightened forces they deferred the day of recognition of the later and greater English Romantics for half a century. Of this needless wait for a less spontaneous and more technically inspired revolution Professor Prinsen is decidedly impatient. ‘Welk een slap figuur maakt heel onze letterkundige kunst voor '8O,’ he writes,²⁾ ‘tegenover die wereld van krachtige, frissche schoonheid. Wat is Borger's Rijn in 1820 tegenover het werk van Coleridge, Byron, Shelley van dien zelfden tijd!’ Yet, is he not somewhat hypercritical in adumbrating thus against his countrymen? That Bilderdijk, against the persistence of French neo-classical forces, should have touched on Romanticism at all was surely an accomplishment of some magnitude. then

1) ‘Geïllustreerde Nederlandsche Letterkunde’, p. 204.

2) Ibid., p. 205.

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Beets' child-like simplicity, his detachement from the Jeep and awesome problems of human life a sort of dull decensy! But against this what a woeful Jack of what we must still call ‘ideas’. Men like Da Costa and Beets would have been absurdly frightened by Wordsworth's charter of intellectual freedom. The set ‘didactic poem’ was as far as they allowed themselves to go, and even though Wordsworth himself too often put a ‘moral purpose’ in the forefront of his work, he never carried it out in the spirit of that weary, heavy-footed didacticism that drags down to earth and prose the very conception which it was meant to exalt. With such a standpoint Romanticism admitted no truce, but in its profoundest creative poetry was instinct with implicit ‘criticism of life’.

Again, the peculiar paradox arises that, though the people of Holland had of necessity a closer connection with Revolutionary France than had England, there came for no individual poet such a simultaneous immersion in its tumultuous idealism as was experienced by Wordsworth. And along with this we have the ecstasy of his passion for Annette Vallon. Little wonder after that that the philosophic lyric was his choice, causing his emotion to result in an intellectual attitude towards the problems besetting our journey through life! And what makes his influence so difficult to trace is that it is spiritual rather than formal and his style really inimitable.

‘Poetry,’ it has been said, ‘is philosophy, and philosophy is poetry.’ And, thinking of Goethe, Wordsworth, Shelley, we can well agree. Coleridge, we know, looked to his friend Wordsworth to write ‘the first philosophical poem in existence’; the celebrated ‘Tintern Abbey’ lines probably owe something to their early conversations about Spinoza, while in ‘The Prelude’ he wrote his own inner history - the greatest work of poetical introspection to be found in any language. As a philosopher, of course, we are bound to view Wordsworth much more indulgently than we would view Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, Schopenhauer. In thinking of him thus we mean that he possessed a certain metaphysical faith, but a faith held, not logically, but irrationally; in other words, his Pantheism was the product of immediate experience. For Coleridge, on the other hand, Nature was not experience, it was

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concept, and it is his tragedy that, while he had a glimpse of something important, he could not speak simply about it, but was condemned to lose himself in a maze of verbosity, of parentheses and interminable notes. ‘An archangel a little damaged,’ Lamb called him, and there his reputation seems to rest.

Of the Dutch poets of the early nineteenth century it cannot be said that, beneath their masses of verbiage, they seemed to be getting at something true and important or were ever likely to give expression to a dominating philosophy. Definitely they made their poetry a medium for the expression of concepts merely, and when that happens it is often scarcely to be distinguished from prose. True poetry is the medium in which the concept becomes something different from itself. What this change which overtakes the concept may be is, of course, the great problem of poetical criticism; but what Holland lacked more even than great poets perhaps was a great critic or two. Porfessor Garrod, combining these functions, even lays it down that ‘the critic of poetry must be a poet, but not a very good one’: we think of Dryden, of Dr. Johnson. But, conversely, we think also of Wordsworth. of Coleridge, of Shelley, who, though they were before all else poets, yet, each of them, before he was a poet, was really a professor of poetry, seeking to write to, and from, theory. Sometimes, I know, it is held that they were singularly poor critics, but with that judgment I cannot agree - thinking of Wordsworth's famous Preface to the ‘Lyrical Ballads’, of Shelley's ‘Defence of Poetry’, of the critical help given by Coleridge to Southey, to Scott, and to Wordsworth himself.

In poets like Beets, Bogaers, Van der Hoop, Van Lennep, we find an incurable lack of self-criticism. They had no clear or passionate idea as to the nature of their mission. Not one of them ever properly grasped the principles of his art; ‘custom,’ we may say, ‘lies upon it like a weight.’ When we read them we have assuredly not the sensation of being in contact with the serious creative intelligence of a great nation. The quality of the thought above all seems immeasurably inferior to that which now goes to the making of a high-class review of letters. There is little, I would say, to recall the impressive intellectual and moral traditions of Hooft and Vondel. And the poverty of this poetry I am inclined

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to ascribe to the fact that its writers put on record incredibly little thinking about poetry. Nine-tenths of our aesthetic theory, I suppose, derives from Germany, but has Holland no contribution at all? Where are its poetics? One thinks, of course, of the efforts of Bellamy and Van Alphen in a former age. Their efforts may seem puny beside the achievement of the Schlegels and Schelling, but they worked on commendable enough lines, had the times been ripe for them. Now, however, the critics seemed to have vanished into thin air, and aesthetes like Van Alphen would have been a godsend to current poetry. There was Wordsworth, of course, hut even among his own folk as we have seen, he was but little appreciated, and how should one expect foreigners to master his somewhat abstruse critical theories, conflicting so often with his actual practice of them? In the end, therefore, there seemed but one native thinker whose canons of poetic taste could he made to serve as the basis of any new conception of the art in Holland - and that, it hardly needs saying, was Willem Bilderdijk.

Few poets there are today who would give even nominal subscription to the dictates of this feverishly-working writer who dissipated his talents in far too many forms of composition. In this respect he was like his English friend Southey, the one of the ‘Lake School’ who had any sort of vogue in Holland. The fact that Bilderdijk's verdicts are no longer endorsed need, not, of course, blind us to their evolutionary value. He was still in harmony with the pseudo-classical poetic taste of the age as it filtered through the channel of French literature. His position seems somewhat akin to that occupied by Dr. Johnson in England - a man of amazing learning and personality, but one almost constitutionally incapable of writing a line of real poetry or of recognizing it when it was written by others. Potgieter in promoting the ‘Gids’ movement turned largely to Bilderdijk, because he himself possessed something of the same rigidity of mind, the same moral habit of thought, the same didactic conception of art. Even in the personal expression of ideas he remained singularly indebted to his compatriot, for he shared his view that feeling was the mainspring of poetry. On the strength of this it has been contended that the ‘Gids’ movement was a pointer to the ‘Nieuwe Gids-Beweging’ itself. But only on the most slender

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evidences would one say that this was so. Granted that it was still early to discover the real value and worth of Keats and Shelley, this hardly excuses Potgieter for putting them altogether aside and finding in Bilderdijk an infinitely higher guide and authority. It was a fatal lapse of judgment on the part of a critic - almost as bad as Jeffrey's unmerited castigations of Wordsworth - and certainly did not enable the ‘Gids’ to establish itself freely for the propagation of ideas reared on a dizzy pinnacle of beauty; Holland was still a long way off from distrusting the kind of poetry that has a palpable design upon the reader.

Failing acceptance of the less conspicuous revolution of Shelley and Keats, there was Wordsworth waiting for acclamation and the recognition of professed disciples. Potgieter began with translations, just as he had translated from Burns, from Scott, from Longfellow; and admittedly he makes a very good job of his rendering of the jingling, yet typically poignant, poem, ‘The Reverie of Poor Susan’. Under the title of ‘Arme Geerte’ he begins

‘Op den hoek van den Dam, bij het dagen in 't Oost',
Zingt een lijster, sinds jaren haar kooi er getroost;
De arme Geert moest er langs om uit schomm'len te gaan,
Leende 't oor aan het lied, en bleef peinzende staan.’

Much more important is the case for Wordsworthian influence Professor Kalff¹⁾ seeks to make out, chiefly through the references to ‘The Excursion’ which occur in various of his ‘Kritische Studiën’. But the groundwork of belief is too frail for serious opinionating, and against it we have the restrictions of Potgieter's own mind, his almost incredible rejection of Keats and Shelley, his setting up of the ‘Gids’ as the Dutch equivalent of ‘The Edinburgh Review’ with Bilderdijk as its fountain and figurehead. Only if he had devoted himself zealously to taking the Pull implications of the work of a major poet like Wordsworth could he, I think, have performed the highest service to Dutch poetry and prepared it for an easy fusion with its real reconstructors forty years later. And, naturally, the best proof - or disproof - of that, is an examination of his own verse.

1) ‘Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Letterkunde’, p. 744.

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The early poetry of Potgieter certainly gives little promise that he was a man gifted with more than ordinary organic sensibility. And it is not solely because he is haunted by a spirit of didacticism. He may present us with pictures of domestic felicity, elucidating the moral tendencies of the age, hut that seems something wholly consonant with his character - unlike Bilderdijk when he forces himself to work in the same vein. In this respect Potgieter may even be said to show a good deal of the robustness of the earlier and simpler phase of Romanticism. But often, as though attempting some greater moral hit still - something in the manner of Vondel himself - he returns ‘naar de kracht en grootheid der gouden eeuw.¹⁾ And, then, though we may allow his work certain sober beauties of language and construction, we are aware how conscious is the display of art behind it. Only if Potgieter had been able to seize what was best in the lyrical gifts of Vondel and Hooft would this two-centuries reversion have justified itself. But such was not the principal effect. Instead it confirmed him in his reactionary theory of ‘uplift’, so consistently asserted and holding in the end only disappointment and disillusionment, and making the aesthetic revolution all the more furiously radical when it did come. And, failing to capture from these original and powerful writers the secret of their vindication of the senses in verse - hardly needing to go, for lyrical purposes, beyond eyes and ears - he really made the long-continued domination of the reason a substitute for the exercise of ‘the primary imagination’. Only when Vondel's style descends to the specific and the contemporary does Potgieter's move freely in line with it - which is criticism of the former rather than praise of the latter. We see it a little in:

‘Een wonder is de Nieuwe Beurs!
Al zevenmaal, Jan Salie!
Joost Vondel zong het koopgeluk
Van 't achtste wereldwonderstuk;
Kees Loots vertroostte 't in zijn druk: -
Een lof, die als hun lof verrukk';
Faalt de uwe nog, Jan Salie!’

1) Prinsen, ‘Geïllustreerde Nederlandsche Letterkunde’, p. 234.

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And who will gainsay that in poems like ‘Oranjelied’, ‘Aan 't Vensterke van Elzemoer’, ‘Cornput's Profeetsij’, the influence at vork might easily be that of Tollens, Bogaers, or Hofdijk!

Above all things, is seems strange to reflect, Potgieter detested the banal. Actually, his poetry is full of banality. For a writer of supposedly critical temper, it is surprisingly devoid of intellectual content; it lacks comprehensiveness of view. Never do we witness ‘that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith’. We long to shake the poet out of his tranquillity in order that he may take part in a passionate act of poetic creation, may let his imagination work on its own. It is not that he has even a diluted belief in the supernatural; he is ‘of the earth, earthy’, and can never for a moment be induced to sacrifice the verisimilar to the marvellous in life. So we have the competent, well-turned lines of ‘Jacob Willemsz’:

‘De Heere gaf - Hij heeft genomen,
De naam des Heeren zij geloofd!’

But how much further Coleridge got by not trying to solve any ‘problems’ of human life!

At first glance it might appear that there is a fair degree of rapprochement between Wordsworth and Potgieter. The latter, in fact, seems even to have something of the human and dramatic imagination which the English poet lacked. In dealing with homely subjects he rarely falls to the levels of sheer bathos that dismay us in ‘Simon Lee’, ‘Peter Bell’, ‘The Idiot Boy’, ‘The Thorn’. and many another poem, hacknayed in theme and oversimplified in style and diction. And yet the paradox arises that the very banalities of Wordsworth are informed by an enthusiastic and meditative imagination, while Potgieter is less addicted to the representation of vulgar manners in vulgar language - with all its attendant artistic dangers - simply because he is more concerned to preserse correctness and uniformity than attempt the enunciation of a cosmic philosophy, for which such a language of heightened and imaginative prose might, in the main, be better suited.

In nothing is the different composition of the two poets brought

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out so much as in their attitude to Nature. Potgieter has many descriptions of external nature:

‘'t Was zomer tot op Hollands duinen;
't Was middag, enkel licht en vreê;
Geen windje voerde van hun kruinen
Het blinkend zand ter vlakte meê;
Geen koeltje rimpelde de zee.’

‘Al deinsde 't landschap voor een vlugt
Van vlokjes, dwarlende uit de lucht;
Al viel het bosch, al viel het ijs
Der weem'ling van de jagtsneeuw prijs.’

But he ‘externalises’ only. Never does his poetry pass from straightforward description to inner reflection, though surely the native landscape lent itself, as much as the landscape of the Quantock country at least, to those gentle surprises of pleasure which were enough of stimulation for the feelings and imagination of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Plainly, Potgieter had not this ‘gift of the senses’; there is no imaginative blending of himself with the landscape in ‘a wise passiveness’; he establishes no relationship between sight and insight; he reads no transcendental significance into ‘the meanest flower that blows’; in a word, external nature does not offer to him the solution of life's primary problems.

Nor can it be said that he ever solved the dualism between spirit and matter in any other way - and certainly not by any Romantic derivative of the religion and the science of the eighteenth century. How weak and orthodox, for instance, is the climax of

‘Hoe het schuim om 't bootje krulde,

Dat ter brik mij droeg!

Hoe de wind de zeilen vulde,

Daar 't genot uit sloeg!

Stad en werf, - paleis en toren,

Dook ten waterrand,

Alles scheen in 't zwerk verloren:

Goeden nacht, mijn Land!’

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compared with the liberation of the ‘total being’ that comes out in:

‘This city now doth like a garment wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never feit, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!’

And ‘dull would he be of soul’ indeed who would make the mere cities, Amsterdam and London, responsible for the differing reactions!

‘Zijn kunst,’ says Professor Prinsen of our poet, ‘verdiept en verrijkt zich steeds meer en hij komt tot de voltooiing van “Gedroomd Paardrijden” en “Florence.”’¹⁾ Up to a point we may agree. Age, experience, travel, the friendship of Huet, could not but add to his already abundant knowledge and technical skill in versification. But the sovereign poet must be not merely a singer; he must also be a sage. It is Potgieter's great fault that he does not extend in width as in height; in the end he becomes the historical, nostalgic dreamer, instead of firmly rooting himself in the hard earth as he spreads widely and mounts freely towards the sky. This, of course, is not to say that his strange inconclusiveness is for a moment that of the comfortable sceptic. Potgieter was above all a moral nature, and his greatest need was to discover a system in which his well-wishing mind could find repose. But if such a system can be said to exist ready-made, it is certain that he quite failed to find it. Why, then, was this? Did he misread life's purposes? Did he work too much from the experiences of other men - of Dante, of Shakespeare, of Vondel? Was his philosophical curiosity, his metaphysical hunger, ever

1) ‘Geïllustreerde Nederlandsche Letterkunde’, p. 234.

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great enough for him to throw his whole being into the struggle?

Mr. J.B. Meerkerk, I think, came near the heart of the matter when he wrote: ‘Potgieter was in zekeren zin agnosticus, in Socratischen zin mocht ik zeggen.’¹⁾ It is this that makes him proceed with such caution; it is this that reveals in his slow indirect argument a tinge of anxiety. Ethically, he was the slave of conscience, hut the distinction he drew between conscience and religious feeling was more speculative than ever he would have cared to admit. But he would have been a greater, a happier, a more complete, personality could he have realized - not alone in the moral sense - that the Christian faith remained for him unshaken. His own ethical creed was not far off being a gospel of love and compassion for the human race, and he failed to find proper endorsement for it precisely because he lacked some solid object of worship to which his genial and kindly nature could attach itself. It is not my desire to represent Potgieter as decorous and respectable in religious matters. But I sec little reason why he should not have been so, since even a philosophical, Spinozistic thinker like Goethe recognized that Christianity satisfied certain real human needs. Indeed, by so unmotivatedly keeping morality and spirituality apart, he was kept from any true, passionate declaration of himself as a poet.

Psychologically, ‘Gedroomd Paardrijden’ should have been Potgieter's ‘testament of faith’, his ‘Prelude’. But not in all its hundreds of stans does he contrive to achieve any sort of spiritual unity. And chiefly because he fails to realize that personal faith counts above all in the great historical process. The greatest poets are always seeking a philosophy of life - like Goethe, like Shelley, for instance - or a theology of Nature - like Wordsworth, above all. But Potgieter seems not to imagine that there might be some considerable connection between poetry and religion. And, essentially moral though he was, he was also essentially irreligious; due largely to his lack of poetic imagination. Imagination it is that enables one to achieve true spiritual unity and partake oneself in ‘the eternal act of creation’. But of these matters it was not in Potgieter's nature to understand much, least of all that poetry

1) ‘Gedroomd Paardrijden’, Introduction, p. 4.

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might in some sort be a substitute for religion. That was not Bilderdijk's idea, and to the authority of that writer he gave an almost pedantic submission, using his gifts in the service of a system of criticism and poetry that could not, in the end, assure him of salvation hut only force him into an ‘agnostic’ position. Few positive philosophies may stir the poets of our own day, no longer able to fuse the world of science and the world of religion by the mediation of metaphysics. But what a commentary on the Age of Wordsworth! ‘Agnostic’; as against ‘that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith’! The solution of Reason; hut Bilderdijk's Reason, not Reason that could become ‘imagination in her most exalted mood’!

In the critical writings of Potgieter we do not meet a mind of the highest order, any more than we do in his poetry. Subtle enough and involved enough in some ways it was - after the manner of the executively competent. Still, even in its scepticism, it reflected one not sufficiently disinterested to search for ultimate Truth, hut one able to live equably in ignorance of first principles. Potgieter's place, then, is not a foremost one. Poetically, he left the full implications of his craft still to be taken; and, critically, despite his admiration for the earlier Dutch poets, he is not so clearly entitled to be considered a leader as Huet who, despite his indifference to his predecessors in art, definitely assisted by his large French and Oriental sympathies and by his more caustic utterance towards the creation of a new kind of poetry in Holland itself.

(To be continued.)