De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 52

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[De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 53. Deel 7.]

Dutch poetry and the romantic revival by Dr. J.A. Russell.
VI. Jacques Perk and Willem Kloos.

Though we may credit the founders and followers of the ‘Gids’ Movement with an authentic desire to redeem both Dutch poetry and the criticism of poetry from dullness and sophistication, there seems no overwhelming reason why we should regard them, in themselves, as other than a rather indistinguished company. What, for instance, had come of their grandiose schemes after forty years? What names among them are remembered today? A little sweetness and light, undeniably, Potgieter and Huet had managed to impart, yet neither had the first created more than a tepid interest around the middle slopes of Parnassus nor the second caused any thrones of critical authority to shake - be they of London, Paris, or Amsterdam. Perhaps Dr. Kloos' comment on the poets he was obliged to read in his schooldays contains just a little of overstatement here. ‘Ze lieten mij,’ he says, ‘zoo koud als een steen.’ But, in truth, there was little superiority of mind and spirit about them - that inspired urge towards a creative literary revolution, in a word, was not yet there. Douwes Dekker, of course! Yet, was even his a mind sufficiently disinterested, or sufficiently balanced in its conception of the totality of life, to do more than plead its own special cause, despite the heart-wrung insistence of his rich poetic-prose style?

While both Professor Prinsen and Mr. Herman Robbers allow Potgieter and Huet a certain correctional influence, and ‘Multatuli’ a liberating one from pent-up feelings and a stifling sense of repression, it is significant that they have no hesitation in allotting the main inspiration by far to foreign sources - in prose

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to the great French Naturalistic writers, Balzac, Flaubert, de Maupassant, Zola, in poetry to the great English Romantics. But only outwardly are they at one. In the inner sense they are almost discordantly apart. For Mr. Robbers the principal Dutch critics, Professors Kalff, Te Winkel, Prinsen - rather more reluctantly does he cite the last-named of these - are far too ‘facty’ - to use a word coined by Bernard Shaw to express a main quality in Mr. H.G. Well's style; they do not adopt a wide, evolutionary reading of the literary history of their country, and so much do their studies lose in consequence that it might almost be said of them that criticism only begins where history leaves off. My own comment is inclined to be that, if this is true of Kalff and Te Winkel, infinitely more so is it true of Professor Ten Brink. Throughout his mighty ‘Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Letterkunde’, it is this critic's method to divide off his subject-matter in almost water-tight compartments, making it endlessly difficult to follow the free course of the main literary stream. And nowhere is this artificial and annoying line of treatment pursued so undeviatingly as in the period under review. Conveniently but unimaginatively the poets are partitioned of f in strict chronological order and soullessly labelled: ‘Jong-Holland I’, ‘Jong-Holland II’, ‘Jong-Holland III’. That is as far as the bock gets, and for the third and last category there is - luckily perhaps - the scantiest consideration possible. In this arbitrary system only one thing seems to matter - and that is that the poet should complete his work within the limits set and should not impinge the least particle on what went before and what, apparently, comes after. I can imagine the late Mr. G.K. Chesterton waxing eloquent if he had heard of anything so ridiculous - or so comical. It always riled him when anyone spoke of a new nation - Canada, for instance - producing ‘a new literature’ - just as though that were on a par with ‘growing a moustache’. Here also the method sauvours of making poets turn out their productions to order - and at piece - work rates! Thus, ‘ons geschiedverhaal eindigt met 1880, het jaar der verschijning van jong-Holland 111’.¹⁾ Perhaps it is enough if we say that it also suggests literary history to order!

1) ‘Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Letterkunde,’ p. 669.

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The comparative failure of the French Romantic poets to grasp the new principles is astonishing, especially when one notes how alive and fruitful they were in the achievement of their great English contemporaries. Something like the same antithesis, I consider, holds good for Holland as agaiinst Germany. It had altogether failed as yet to turn to the better type of Romantic; had plunged impetuously for the heroics of ‘Ossian’, the sentimentalities of Young, the vague rhetoric of Byron, the buckram fashions of Scott. And in so doing, as has been well said, ‘it had only imitated the scenery and ignored the soul’. There was, therefore, much leeway to make up before it could possibly achieve the higher Romanticism of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats. After this long hiatus where, indeed, was it to begin? To much alas! had Holland temporized with, what Mr. Robbers has called, Potgieter's ‘soort gekunstelde romantiek’,¹⁾ too much had it dallied with Busken Huet's southern ‘Lidewijde’. And now, in some ways, it had outgrown certain important phases of the Movement. Especially, I would say, the particular phases represented by the genius of Blake and, to a lesser extent, that of Wordsworth.

It took Engluand itself, of course, about a century to appreciate Blake's deceptively simple mystical writings, and a considerable part of one to begin to understand the lofty pantheistic idealism of Wordsworth. Yet, both shared in that burst of creative activity which inspired English literature in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Why, then, unlike Scott, unlike Byron, did they go so long unhonoured and unsung? Was it, as Matthew Arnold tended to think, that that outburst had about it something premature? Or was it that they were really lyricists before they were Romantics? In many ways Wordsworth, it seems to me, escapes our definition of Romantic poetry; he lacks fire and passion in the ordinary sense; he avoids excess in expression; he himself hated the ‘degrading thirst and outrageous stimulation’ which marked the morbid Romanticism of the late eighteenth century. Of all Romantic representatives he stands apart as the most complete individualist. In Blake, on the other hand, we have probably the greatest singer of all; hut one singing unrestrainedly

1) ‘De Nederlandsche Letterkunde na 1880’, p. 9.

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the ecstasy of joy and innocence as he recaptured it in an imagin-ative interpretation of childhood. And besides, this Blake - the Blake formed by the poetry of Traherne and Milton, the chief literary influences in which he had steeped himself - there is the other Blake in whom we see the signs of mental and spiritual conflict, disturbing his power to shape and control, and finally turning his art into anarchy. It is the Blake of the ‘Songs of Innocence’ and the ‘Songs of Experience’, not of the chaotic ‘Prophetic Books’, that we remember now. But for long they were read by no one who could feel their influence and benefit by it. In Holland men like Da Costa, Beets, Potgieter, never give him a thought. And when, in the ‘eighties’, there arose keener minds capable of appreciating a finer music, his greatest successor, Shelley, had appeared as a more completely developed being, and one more likely not to put a greater strain on the lyric form than it was quite able to bear. The effect of Blake's lyric would have been to give to the Dutch a new and piercing sweetness. But to these young and eager poets - combining culture and scholarship with amazing intensity of feeling - the gamut of emotion would no longer have been wide enough, nor his personal and intuitive philosophy, so enigmatically expressed, other than unsatisfving, either intellectually or aesthetically. Time, I think, has well substantiated their verdict.

There is little doubt that it is in Keats and Shelley that we reach the culminating points of English Romanticism. In their work are found almost all the important elements that we associate with such literature - Wordsworth's passion for Nature and reverence for the dignity of individual personality, Coleridge's far-travelling mysticism and mediaevalism, Scott's historical interest, Byron's exoticism and hatred of cant. Yet, for the most part, they made little common cause with any of these contemporaries, and no one seemed to know - least of all the critics - in which direction their revolutionary theories of art were leading them. Inseparably, as it were, the names of these two great poets of the younger order of Romantics are linked together; actually, in their attitude to life and art, they differ profoundly, and though they might come to think of both Wordsworth and Coleridge as renegades of their own gospel, as expressed through the ‘Lyrical

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Ballads’, this was not a very integral matter and had no effect in bringing their own dictated paths any nearer. In both of them, certainly, there flames up afresh the old enthusiastic passion for poetry - but in each it is with a changed significance. With Shelley this idealism is caried to the point of mysticism, though, again, he was no spiritual coward taking refuge in nostalgie dreams merely; the sight of the world's chaos stung him, indeed, to ardent revolt against all the injustice and cruelty of society. Lyricism we might almost identify now with liberty, for Shelley's highest enthusiasm was his reforming zeal for the world, by which the ‘Spirit of Beauty’, which he worshipped, would ultimately triumph and effect the enfranchisement of Mankind. Against this, we have the even purer aesthetic of Keats. No less convinced of the supreme importance of poetry, he evinced no deliberate concern with any didactic aim, even one so widened and deepened as Shelley so ecstatically proclaimed in his ‘Defence of Poetry’. In him there lives again something of the Renaissance spirit, and for him it was enough to know that ‘what the imagination seizes as beauty must be Truth’. Behind that statement, of course, lies a process of self-criticsm and conscious artistic endeavour almost as severe and exacting as that to which Milton subjected himself. And the noble purpose which he pursued and, to a considerable degree, accomplished, might even be said to mark him as the one great classical artist among the Romantics - an independent, self-disci-plined classicist, of course.

If we have spoken at such length of the great men of Britain, it is because of the tremendous influence they were to exert in Holland. Like Britain itself, that country is one of those sane nations which can maintain its life comparatively well even amid a dearth of great figures. But no country can continue so indefi-nitely - and least of all in the realm of art. Not unnaturally, therefore, disquieting murmurs began to arise as the year 1880 drew near and only fourth or fifth carbon copies of Bilderdijk continued to be turned out. Then, all unexpectedly, the miracle happened: Holland found the exact source of stimulation required. Great events, of course, spring only from great causes; but in the proximate sense at least we might well say that prophecy in Doorenbos became poetry in Perk. In the ultimate sense, of course,

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we have to go back to Greece to discover Perk's literare ancestry, for with him, for the first time since Vondel, Greek poetry entered vitally into Dutch.

Jacques Perk is well entitled to be known as the ‘Keats of Holland’. Even if he had never come to a knowledge of the work of the English poet, he would still merit the description. It is not, however, that we find a great many exact parallels in their lives; and, grievously short thought these were, the circumstances under which they were cut off were remarkably unlike also. Peculiarly enough, it is the senior of the two, the English poet, who has left most problems; Perk was fortunate in his friends and admirers - later to elucidate his brief but eventful history - but a Kloos alongside Keats would have saved us many a heartburning question ere we can ever know ‘what porridge had John Keats’. But their true affinity lies in the Pact that they were primary poets of an altogether rare order, holding among their respective countrymen the subtlest sense of beauty known within their century at least. It is not enough for a poet to be a great artist - like Dryden, like Potgieter; he will fail to be a great poet if the substance of his poetry comes to him not from the impulses of his own soul. But if Perk and Keats were born poets, they were, at the same time, made into highly artistic ones by the same diffusion of the Hellenic love of harmony and form. ‘Keats is zelf 'n Griek,’ says Dr. Dekker;¹⁾ and when Dr. Kloos tells us that ‘voelde Perk zich inwendig-eenzaam, in de literatuur van zijn tijd en zijn land,’²⁾ I think he implies almost as much.

The literature in which Perk first steeped himself, as a formative influence - his self-acknowledged masters, Dante, Petrarch, Vondel, Goethe - suggested to him the form in which to express himself. Not the songlyric, but the sonnet, was to be the field of his triumph over all his compatriots for more than two centuries. Artistically, it was an admirable choice; within ‘the sonnet's scanty plot of ground’ he was limited to the statement of a single complete though, so that as Dr. Kloos well says: ‘Ieder gedicht van dezen echten zanger is als een éénheid van gevoel.³⁾ Keats,

1) ‘Die invloed van Keats en Shelley in Nederland gedurende die Negentiende Eeu’, p. 29.

2) ‘Jacques Perk: Gedichten’, Introduction, XLV.

3) ‘Jacques Perk: Gedichten’, Introduction, XLVI.

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of course, wrote many fine sonnets, but it was in the ode that the full current of his soul, his deep sense of the beauty of nature, the significance of art and mythology as the symbols in which the human soul had sought to give expression to its adumbrations of the true values in nature and man, his impassioned sense of the basic mystery of beauty, found most free and satisfying outlet. Perk, by his adoption of the slighter and more restricted form for his verse, gains the advantage of producing almost perfect work from the start. Constant pruning and refining must have been as necessary to him as to all great poets - and especially to all great sonneteers - but there is a quite startling maturity about everything for one so incredibly youthful. Perhaps, indeed, his poems are a little too much matured by law and precept. But, considered in their totality, the criticism loses its force, for - like Petrarch, like Shakespeare, like Wordsworth - he betrays the real, subtle evolution of his mind and art - his deep sensations as a man, his keen watchfulness as a poet - by the elaboration of a poignant sonnet-sequence, ‘eene idylle uit het leven’. In this respect he differs greatly from Keats, his later idol and inspirer, for the sonnet itself conditions the subjective use of his emotional material, while the ode, built though it also is on the foundation of a strong, concentrated emotion, manages to raise a structure of independent objective beauty. But extreme subjectivity, we must remember, was the key-note of the initial ‘Nieuwe Gids’ art, and Keats himself only won very gradually to the realization that deep thought and emotion might be used in any different way.

By its very nature a thesis may often leave out more than it includes and, skilfully as Dr. Dekker handles his case, I am not prepared to admit that it is the only - or even the best - approach to the poetry of Perk. Above all, if we seek at every turn to disentangle his Platonic philosophy - inextricably though it is bound up with his Grecian aesthetic - I think we will be too apt to lose sight of his supreme qualities, as a poet essentially; and even more important than probing to its source every possible particle of influence of Keats and Shelley, it seems to me, is to understand the spiritual influence of his own thought and experience determining what it is he wants to say. ‘Iris’, his beautiful swan-song, doubtless is highly indebted to Keats and Shelley -

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to the latter's ‘Cloud’ most of all - but this is not to say that its value is inevitably increased by these tokens. Personally, in fact, it is precisely because it bears so much the impress of Shelley that I am inclined to rate it below the magnificently-sustained sonnet-sequence of ‘Mathilde’. Apropos of this very poem, by the way, it is of interest to note a remark of the late Professor W.P. Ker. ‘It is a curious fact,’ he says, ‘that the measure of the CPoud has an attraction for Dutch poets, and is used by one at least of the South African composers.’¹⁾

I am inclined to doubt very much if Perk is really so Keatsian as he is so often made out to be. He was likewise a very human creature; but his tastes were less robust, I think, his mind more mystical. Nor veere his feelings keyed up to such an unusual degree od intensity as the English poet's, while he had not his divine gift of imagination. Neither, of course, dying so young, ever reached such perfect harmony of thought and feeling as he would have wished, and this is doubtless responsible for the wistful, even at times, bitter, note that creeps into his work. But, somehow, I have the fancy that Keats's less soaring and ardent, more luxurious temperament, loving to ‘load every rift with ore’ rather than risk lapsing into abstraction and nebulosity, would have stood the test better and finally attained ‘all passion spent’, to Olympian serenity and calm.

When all is said, however, we have in Perk the most amazing phenomenon to date in Dutch Romanticism. Above all, of course, he must be honoured for having brought back beauty into Dutch - hitherto a not too conspicuous ingredient, and one that had been almost entirely overlooked since the closing years of the seventeenth century. He was the frail, yet inspired and indefatigable, champion of intellectual beauty, and it is in this regard that it is unfair to look on him merely as an off-shoot of either Shelley or Keats - or of both. For Shelley it can be said that love alone mattered, for Keats, beauty; and while Perk had not the metrical resources of the one nor the combined vision and vitality of the other; working, as it were, in a somewhat less precious metal, he still has every right to be considered apart from them altogether,

1) ‘The Art of Poetry’, p. 49.

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and as a permanent addition to the ranks of the very greatest poets of his own country. As a new type of Romantic, of course, it was natural that he would meet with eager acclamation from a nation starved for poetry. But the fact that, in his own country, his faim endures today, equally with that of the two great English Romantics in theirs, is surely the most significant recognition that in him poetry was at last become the profoundest source of intuition about all life. For Bilderdijk it had been largely an intellectual exercise, for Potgieter a social art, not a vatic one. But now a youth - no more than grown-up himself - had shown that Dutch poetry, after many growing-pains, had grown up too, that henceforth Beets, Da Costa, Van Lennep, Tollens, must be put away with childish things. No man before him had so made literary history, nor one at his youthful years ever uttered such profundities of thought in the same felicitous way. Throughout all his work we are haunted by an almost anguishing sense of beauty; great images, cry out to us from almost every single page:

‘De maan blinkt door den zwarten bouwval henen
En laat haar zilver glijden langs de duin,
Door de Ourthe omkabbeld en gekroond met puin:
Getrotste grootheid in bemoste steenen.’

‘De hemel is mijn hart, en met den voet
Druk ik loodzwaar den schemel mijner aard',
En, nederblikkend, is mijn grimlach zoet.’

‘Een hooge liefde zal uw hart doordringen.’
‘Een gouden waterval van zonnestralen.’

What new voice is it that we have heard? It is like no other in Dutch poetry. Sometimes we catch a note of Wordsworth, of Hooft, sometimes of Vondel; sometimes of Loots or other quite minor bard. Always, of course, we are supposed to hear the accents of John Keats; but while Perk might well have corroborated all the famous dicta of the author of the ‘Ode to Autumn’ about poetry, in practice only the most general resemblance is apparent,

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to me, in their work. In fact, I can just as easily get an anticipation of Rupert Brook's:

‘Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill’

in ‘Lig daar, mijn wandelstaf! Hier is de top’, as I can discover an echo of ‘Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art’ or ‘On first looking into Chapman's Homer’ or ‘Ailsa Craig’, in any single one of his sonnets.

Had Perk lived there is no doubt that he must have achieved, with the aid of his imaginative power, a fusion of the somewhat dissociated elements of Romanticism which so hurriedly he was called upon to assimilate. And, also, he might have laid the taint of that faintly morbid self-consciousness which is the corruption of Romantic individualism. He would have perfected then the sonnet form of Hooft, attained a Vondelian mellowness of touch, become really like Keats by making the visionary scheme more concrete and vivid, raised himself to the musical genius of Shelley by a lighter handling of the lyric in the more genuine song. But all that it was left to his young successors to do; he himself had ‘outsoared the shadow of our night’; and, historically and aesthetically the ‘Keats of Holland’, done enough equally to merit the immortal words of Shelley:

‘To that high Capital where kingly Death

Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay

He came; and bought, with price of purest breath,

A grave among the eternal.’

How different, we reflect, would have been his reception and his influence fifty years earlier! A dreamer, a romantic poet of idealism, he would have been quite beyond the powers of anyone of his age to appreciate; he would have been, like Keats himself, a voice crying in the wilderness; and oblivion might well have been his lot. In the early 'eighties he still seemed like a spiritual being; yet one enthroned, nevertheless, in the hearts of his fellows - or in the hearts of those who mattered at this still somewhat precarious stage of literary development. It is unlikely, of course, that he ever persuaded himself that the manner of his writing in the slender volume of the ‘Mathilde’ sonnets would inaugurate

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a completely new order of poetry in Holland, yet incontrovertibly his noble method of composition sounded the awakening of a new fresh youth. Later, in the Naturalists who followed Zola, we detect at once ‘the voice of maturity speaking to maturity’. But here all the time it is the voice of youth, speaking in tones of boundless hope, high courage and resolve. Never, I think, can there ever have been a Movement so completely inspired and consummated by youth as that of the 'Eighties: Chatterton, ‘the marvellous boy’, is seen no longer as an isolated phenomenon.

It is to easy to maintain that this ebullition of youthful enthusiasm was but a passing example of the type of vicissitude by which the history of literature is kept fresh and varied. But such an explanation will not suffice. The whole Movement was far too cleverly planned, too assuredly - in the case of Van Deyssel we might almost say combatively - urged and directed - to be disposed of so superficially. In a word, it was the great glory of these young daring innovators that it could be, in their own persons, both critical and creative. Freedom was their watch-word, hut for them this was no mere abstract or Platonic truth - is it not the case that those who love freedom platonically at twenty are the very same who will cry for authority and lean back on a traditional revelation when they are forty? By the establishment of ‘De Nieuwe Gids’ as their critical organ they demonstrated clearly that something more than a counterblast to the ultrarespectable ‘Gids’ was intended, something that would guide Dutch poetry and art into new and hitherto unexplored channels.

It was the great misfortune of the earlier ‘Gids’ Movement that it was not backed bv men of feeling as well as intelligente, for however logically theory may be built up and expounded it must, in the last resort, give place to the superior profundity of intuitions and visions. Dr. Walch notes as the basic difference between the two ‘revolutions’ that the second - and infinitely more boundingly successful one - pursued an exclusively aesthetic ideal, based, of course, upon the abiding principle of beauty. With Potgieter, supported by a ponderous style and full of learned allusions, it is as though we were set a series of academie exercises from a professorial chair - with Huet the chair becomes almost a pontifical throne. ‘Vooral in de kritiek,’ says Professor Prinsen,

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‘openbaarde zich een groot verschil met de generatie van '37.’¹⁾ And when he goes on to declare that ‘de intellectueele kritiek van Potgieter en Huet moest plaats maken voor de gevoelskritiek,’ he comes very near the heart of the whole matter. The only poets who live are those who concern themselves with life; and a philosophy of life can only be based on aesthetic values when the poet has first learned in the rough and tumble of experience to reconcile spontaneity and reverence. For his technically ingenious exercises Potgieter claimed the name of art, but it was merely the display of a cleverness and virtuosity that had little real bearing upon life; and it was infinitely removed from the direct contemplation bestowed in the 'eighties. The whole truth is that in '37 we were given for leader a man with talent and ability - Potgieter himself - now, however, we were entitled to claim a man with genius and a ‘daimoon’ - Willem Kloos.

Dr. Kloos has long been established as a classic beyond challenge. This means, I suppose, that his poetic output has been winnowed and is known today in the anthologies by every Dutch schoolboy of eighteen. But it also means that he himself will be described, discussed, appreciated, in a perpetual stream of books, pamphlets and articles, until the day when Dutch - or may I say here Anglo-Dutch - culture perishes. In the ‘literature’ of a classic three main categories are to be noted - first, the texts themselves, the actul words of the artist, then the work of scholarship, editorial and historical, and finally criticism. I intend here to deal largely with the first - and surely most important - category, for do not scholarly publications tend to be relegated sooner or later to shelves of infrequent reference, and does not even sound, perceptive criticism - except in so far as it is original, the arresting expression of an unusually interesting mind - soon become out of date?

The contents of the first category, it is idle to deny, are themselves of different degrees of intrinsic value, from the masterpieces of poetry which are the verg sources and perennial fount of our interest in the whole subject to the merest scrap of a letter which derives its value solely from its relevante to the study of the poet. But whatever its intrinsic value, all of this category is permanent.

1) ‘Geïllustreerde Nederlandsche Letterkunde’, p. 252.

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Happily, Dr. Kloos, the father of modern Dutch Romanticism, remains with us - his sentiments still warm, his ideals intact, his practised brain an engine of tough reasoning; and if his potential development both as poet and as leader of thought has been frustrated at all, it has not been so much by the gradual subduing of personal passion, the suppression of temperamental idiosyncrasies, the planting of the tanker of doubt and despair in his own heart, as by the absence of organized resistance to his amazingly successful Movement, the natural wearing down of its initial momentum (and perhaps also to a slight weakness in its aesthetic doctrine of the beautiful). And how could it be otherwise, I ask? Though a poet starts off by being in conscious and bitter revolt against almost all that has gone before in the name of poetry, it is not to be seriously expected that he can remain in continuous insurrection against the current thinking (which of necessity must bear so much the stamp of his own mind). So we are brought back to the stable category of the original texts and the original poetic doctrine. The portrait of the poet and the effect of his poetry wil always be subject to the shifting lights and shadows of this world's passing show. But the main lineaments of his character and genius are already far too deeply imprinted on his works and too faithfully recorded by highly perceptive and intimate witnesses to be mistaken by unsophisticated readers.

It will always, I think, be the crowning triumph of Kloos that, more than any other poet of his country, he has raised the issue of what poetry really is. For the first time he taught his fellowpoets to think - not vaguely and verbosely like Bilderdijk and Potgieter, not sententiously like Feith and Van Alphen. Rightly he demands that an artist should assume a conscious attitude to his work. Sublimity there may be in the moralising of Bilderdijk, the sermonising of Da Costa; hut we cannot imagine there is a less sublimity in the single-minded devotion of the artist to his technique. An attitude that was admirable enough in the eighteenth century may be quite futile in the nineteenth; and even the critical severity of Kloos rings like a refreshing peal of bells in a decidedly sultry age. ‘Poetry,’ said Wordsworth, ‘is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.’ Not only is the age-long question correctly posed for the benefit of Holland, but probably, too, it is

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more correctly answered than at any other time in its literary development.

I do not propose here to go tiresomely and exhaustively into the origins of Kloos' literary genius - be they in Platen, in Keats, in Shelley, or in anv other. Much - perhaps too much - has been already said on that particular score, and amid these mazes of critical theories there is a serious danger of the poet's native abilities and inspirational powers being given much less than justice. With Perk I have already dealt, and I would only add that, deeply involved through the two young innovators were by their mutual friendship and their endowment as poets, a large element of speculation must necesarily remain about the matter of their inter-relationship. The enigma of the Perk that mighthave-been is one over which many may linger hut bevond which non can pass; hut assuredly, I think, it does not entitle us to be little the triumph of Kloos - unanticipated though it was - by fancying that in himl we have merely a Jacques Perk grown to fame. No one wishes for a moment to deny the particular and definite influence he exerted, hut I say with all deliberation that. even without contact with him, Kloos would stilt count as the unrivalled leader, in his own right, of the new Dutch Romantic poetry. Both had a striking genius for poetical performance, and both were a young and unformed; there, in my opinion, the resem-blance between them begins and ends. Perk, though endowed with the same exquisite sensibility, had not, beneath it, a prose mind just as sensible, nor those sturdy qualities of leadership and courageous acceptance of the formidable task of regeneration; I even doubt if, by himself, he could have risen above mild protest ever to proceed to radical revolt. In the age of Zola he preferred to go back to Hooft and the Greeks; quite unlike Kloos, who in body belonged to the century of Goethe, Darwin and Haeckel but in spirit re-created it as a new Vondelian age of song.

Even the penetrating Dr. Dekker, I am relieved to find, can divulge no great degree of parallelism between the work of Kloos and that of Keats; he seems to me, indeed, to make out no particularly strong case at all and adduces hut fragmentary possible resemblances, of little value in themselves against the primary, all-absorbing creed:

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‘Confederate to one golden end -

 

Beauty - the vision whereunto.

 

In joy; with pantings, from afar,

 

Though sound and odour, form and hue,

 

And mind and clay, and worm and star -

 

Now touching goal, now backward hurled,

 

Toils the indomitable world.’

‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ is surely not markedly different from: ‘God is de hoogste schoonheid.’

It is much more difficult to overstate and exaggerate the influence of Shelley, since, being backed by that great critique, ‘The Defence of Poetry’, it was so apparently objective and irrefutable. Dr. Dekker is, doubtless, quite correct in saying that ‘in Kloos se eerste en beste kritiese werk is ook sterk invloed van Hhelley se “Defense” te bespeure.’¹⁾ But two things we must not overlook in this respect: first, that it is the natural tendency of youth to see in Shelley a dazzling luminary that nothing can dim, and second, that the criticism of fifty years ago was also liable to share in this unbalanced hero-worship. How different from the immoderation, in the opposite direction, of Mr. T.S. Eliot, who is almost contemptuous of the measures of ‘The Skylark’, and finds Shelley himself repellent, ‘sometimes almost a blackguard’!

Even Dr. Kloos himself, I suppose, would hardly care to subscribe to all his former adulation, but would, I am sure, by overcoming some part of the magie thrown over us by this ‘beautiful and ineffectual angel’, see him as he is - as, for instance, Mr. Maurois in his delightful study, ‘Ariel’, contrives to do. Nor need it be any discredit to his later verse to say that it speaks for itself, regardless of whether or not it satisfies the critical formulae of '85.

Great as was the influence of Shelley's ‘Defence of Poetry’ upon the early mind of Kloos, I am inclined to think that Dr. Dekker overstates its importance in relation to the development of his art. Actually, if it was so all-powerfull as he tries to

1) ‘Die invloed van Keats en Shelley in Nederland gedurende die Negentiende Eeu’, p. 113.

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make out, then we may say: the less poet he. Personally, with the best will in the world, I cannot see that ‘Shelley is vir hom die maatstaf waarnaar hij meet.’¹⁾ Mr. Khouw Bian Tie, I consider, is on far surer ground here in noting the inconsistency of Shelley himself. ‘Niemand,’ he says, ‘zal durven beweren, dat Shelley's kunst op grond van zijn opvatting over de poëzie uitsluitend zich bezig gehouden heeft met eigen Ik.’²⁾ This at least allows for the exercise of judgment and the infiltration of other ideas. And these, as it happens, are readily forthcoming, far bevond the ‘Defence of Poetry’ - in Emants' ‘Lilith’, in Coleridge's ‘Biographia Literaria’, in Wordsworth's famous ‘Preface’, in the Greek theory of ‘Kunst om de Kunst’. Besides, to follow the single track that Dr. Dekker directs us into is surely to ignore the poet's own contribution, if we are to regard the ‘Nieuwe Gids-Beweging’ as in any sense one of radical consequences, and not a mere ‘throw-back’ to an ephemeral romantic cult. Not that at this time of day we can expect any poetic dicta to be wholly new and original; but undoubtedly it was through his positing of them with characteristic Dutch force and directness that his description of poetry as ‘de allerindividueelstee expressie van de allerindivi-dueelste emotie’ and his perceptien that ‘Vorm en Inhoud zijn een’ became basic canons in the establishment of a new art of poetry. That they all go back to the time when he was swayed bv Shelley is too apt, however, to make us attribute them to that brilliant English expositor of Romanticism. In this respect Khouw Bian Tie again hits it off very well indeed when he says: ‘Altijd door is hij blijven handhaven, hetgeen hij eenmaal in zijn jeugd en met name zoo schoon verkondigd heeft in zijn klassiek geworden en beroemd geschrift: De Inleiding tot de gedichten van Jacques Perk. Men kan gerust zeggen, dat al zijn later werk bestaat in een gestaêg doordenken en steeds verdere verfijning van de leerstellingen, zoo vroeg reeds en waarschijnlijk meer door geniale intuitie dan door moeizame, logische redeneeringen gevonden.’³⁾

The fact is that Kloos is altogether far less formed in the image of Shelley than some present-day critics care to allow. Dr. Dekker,

1) ‘Die invloed van Keats en Shelley in Nederland gedurende die Negentiende Eeu’, p. 111.

2) ‘Willem Kloos en de Dichtkunst’, p. 90.

3) ‘Willem Kloos en de Dichtkunst’, p. 2.

[p. 17]

however, is not one who is so blinded by the need to sustain his thesis as to fail to detect these differences - in many ways as great as the resemblances, and as important in any true under-standing of their respective minds and art. In the deepest poetic sense, of course, he realizes their close affinity - a concession that would be even more welcome in the case of Keats than any number of similar-seeming lines and phrases. But the proof he finds, not in the totality of their vision, but as usual in this or that adventitious instance. But with altogether amazing abandon he at the same time proceeds to show how little kindred the two poets really were, despite their possession of similar noble and exalted natures. For one thing, he notes of Kloos: ‘Sy poësie is slegs 'n poësie van stemminge.’¹⁾ That is very true. Here we must not expect to find, in the same way, the Barnest and perplexed citizen of the actual world; he is under no Messianic delusion to become the great emancipators of the people; for him it is not the artist's function to help and improve mankind, confronting to that end the problems which have baffled metaphysicians and sociologists alike.

Shelley, of course, suffered from hallucinations; corresponding to the trance-like states of Coleridge, ‘the divine somnambulist’. Even in what he called love, for example, there was much more of the love of the ideal (if that is rightly to be called love at all) than of the love of another person. Admittedly, it was the existence of such abnormality in him that was the verg provocation of his genius, increasing his awareness of normality and enabling him to see with waking eyes what others see only in their sleep. Kloos, however, is not to be embraced within such a category; he is not to be thought of as ‘an archangel a little damaged’ or ‘a beautiful, ineffectual angel’. He is altogether a more robust and substantial type, standing nearer to the norm of his countrymen. Not less individualistic, he is less dreamy, less idealistic, less given over to the allied defects of vagueness and verbosity. Shelley's lines:

‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity,’

1) ‘Die invloed van Keats en Shelley in Nederland gedurende die Negentiende Eeu’, p. 124.

[p. 18]

sound magnificent; hut somewhat less so when we hear the cooler, calmer voice of Kloos declaring:

‘De Dichtkunst mag geen zeuren over oude abstracties zijn.’

It indicates surely a sharper, more precise, more egocentric order of mind; a nature at once more warm and personal, more passionate, perhaps also more sensuous in some respects. Speaking of him in the days of his youth Verwey has told us that ‘hij is dan toch maar de hartstochtelijkste mensch van Nederland’. It seems a thoroughly apt description, for as the conscious artist striving for beauty he finds it ready to hand in the formula, ‘Kunst is passie’, that great critical tenet of the 'eighties. Spiritally, this enables us to note the main stages through which Kloos's life has accomplished itself - first, the sufferer, then the combatant, and now the enthusiast; whereas, were we to attempt the same sort of thing for Shelley, the order would have to be revised to read - the enthusiast, the combatant, the sufferer. It is an illuminating distinction I think, and indicates the process of their poetry more than has perhaps been realized.

As I have said, I do not consider that Dr. Dekker's case for a Kloos overrun by Shelley is a particularly inviolable one. ‘In diepste kern het hulle iets gemeen’ are the words he applies to one of his many comparisons. But I would much rather accept this dictum for the totality of their poetry, and find here and there no more than co-incidental resemblances. Truthfully to speak, I do not find this overwhelming similarity even in the early work of Kloos, to which at the moment we shall confine ourselves; nor do I consider that most of the parallel passages adduced by Dr. Dekker are at all conclusive. Thus, in the quatrain of the famous sonnet:

‘Ik ben de Zoeker naar het Nooit-Behaalde,

Ik ben de Strever naar het Ware Zijn,

Ik ben de dronkene van 's Levens Wijn,

Die wonderlijk-krachtig mijn spieren staalde.

‘Wen ik, als onverschrokken duiker, daalde

Tot in de krochten van het Diepste Zijn,

Waar ik dan uit meebracht een luttel grein

Waarheid, die, klaar gelijk juweelen, straalde,’

[p. 19]

there is an authentic Shelleyan ring, undoubtedly: but to me it is as much the Shelley of ‘Prometheus Unbound’, ‘The Revolt of Islam’, even ‘The Cloud’, as the carefully specified ‘Wedded Souls’. And even when we do come across words almost identical, the image is never sustained for more than a line or two; and it would indeed be foolish to build up any large correspondence of universal thought on a foundation so narrow. After all, is it really such an important thing if, momently, such a line in Shelley as ‘My soul is an enchanted bost’ is handled by Kloos as ‘Mijn ziel is als een bootje’, when neither the form nor the content of the particular poems otherwise is at all related? In any case, where the sea is concerned, may not Amsterdam or the North Sea dunes count as much to a Dutchman as a foreign poet?

We must bend a long, unwieldy bow if we are going to make so much in the general poetry of Shelley count as positive hits in the early writings of Kloos. It is not the way I prefer to associate them; and I shall continue to be satisfied with less tangible effects than that; a youthful note of pessimism and despair here and there, a decidedly romantic absorption with death and decay, an intimation of personal fears, a sense of unfulfilment, and occasionally of defeat, and also the pure lyric cry in all the ecstasy of personal joy and sorrow, unhampered by logic or narrative; making us feel again that all poetry is in essence lyrical.

At one time it is:

‘Nu huilt de winter in mijn hart.’

As another:

‘Ik kan niet lachen, ik kan niet weenen,

Ik ben zoo vreemd te moe;

De zomer-pracht gaat henen, -

Ik doe mijn oogen toe.’

Or it is:

‘Nu kan ik niets meer zingen

Dan dat ik sterven moet.’

And, be it whispered, it is also possible for Kloos's raptures, like Shelley's, to give place to prosaic preachifying; too much

[p. 20]

altogether there is of Potgieter and the past in sententious lines like:

‘Ieder mensch heeft eene sfeer wonderbaar.’
‘Elk mensch heeft eenen rechten weg door 't leven.’
‘Kan ik het helpen, dat ik verzen maak
Van de Eenig-Ware, Zuivre, Goede en Schoone?’

But what of genuine nature songs and sonnets of the type of: ‘Stads-Avond’, ‘Hoog uit de lucht de witte Winter nadert’, ‘De Winter heeft zijn rijk weer ingenomen’, ‘De zon komt in de wereld’? It may be, of course, that these, in general, are as interesting as musical utterances of the poet's own dreams and desires as they are as transcripts of nature, hut they must not on that account be denied their due place in the strong if belated ‘terug tot de natuur’ claims of the ‘Tachtigers’. ‘Pure Shelley’ is what we often feel like exclaiming when we encounter ecstatic yet somewhat empty lyrics of the type of: ‘De rassen dezer aarde zijn als droomen’, ‘De zoete nacht, die langzaam gaat’, ‘O, mijn gedachten vliegen heen en weder’, ‘De mensch moet leven als een plant’. But I confess my fondness rather for those lyrics which can be said to be saturated with Kloos's own personality and in which the concentration is not on an art, rich and starry, and not always as sensitively introspective as the lyric warrants. Ambitious declamation, the idea of a ‘mission’, has certainly no place in the lovely description and verbal music of: ‘O, leven, zoet leven’, ‘De zee, de zee klotst voort in eindelooze deining’, ‘Al liefde is als een spel van lucht en water’, ‘O, laat mij tot uw voeten komen’, ‘O, ik ben zoo vroolijk’, ‘O, ik kan het niet helpen’, ‘Licht van mijn leven’, ‘De teerheid uwer ziel is als een wijde’, ‘Uw ziel, Lief, is als een diep-breede oceaan’, ‘Uw ziel was als een bleeke zon’, ‘De breede corridor verleedner tijden’. Truly of all such melodious pieces has the poet the right to say:

‘Mijn verzen volgen 't kloppen van mijn bloed
En gaan zacht-mijmrend of met dansers-spoed.’

These have their place with: ‘Swiftly walk over the Western wave’, ‘Life of Life! they lips enkindle’, ‘On a poet's lips I slept’,

[p. 21]

‘I arise from dreams of thee’; whether or not the industrious researcher can always fit them to the exact pattern of Shelley.

The later poetry of Kloos it is not my intention to discuss here. With tbc influence of Shelley dwindled gradually away, the Keatsian elements of ‘Okeanos’ left far behind, it might seem that he ‘is niet meer wat de man van '85 was’ (perhaps not even a Romantic at all). To a certain extent that is rue. So deep-feeling; deep-thinking, a writer as Kloos was bound to assure himself of an ever-flowing and increasing inspiration; and today, therefore, we hear much of ‘De metaphysische achtergrond van Kloos' Binnengedachten’, a truly amazing amalgam of Oriental wisdom, the theosophical learning of India, the philosophical systems of Spinoza, Berkeley, and Kant, the monistic theories of Schopenhauer and Hardy, invariably set forth in short fourteen-lined poems - but in lines so long and complicated as to be admissible neither as sonnet nor lyric proper. It is, as it were, on the ‘quadrilateral’ of pantheism, mysticism, humanism, and, withal, a little scepticism, that he builds the imposing temple of his cosmic thought; and quite inadequate for his fresh purposes at those times seems the former ‘triangle’ of passion, beauty, and art. Intellectually and spiritually the Goethe, the Wordsworth, of Holland, the noblest Laureate of his land, he has in the end come nigh to fulfilling himself. Yet, if I may conclude on a prophetic note, my reading is that he will live on finally, not so much as the mazy, mvstifying philosopher, but as the lyricist, the clear and buoyant singer - and especially the singer of the ‘Beweging van Tachtig’, that supreme ‘Romance’ of Dutch Literature, when:

‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive;
But to be young was very heaven.’

(To be concluded.)