De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 52
(1937)– [tijdschrift] Nieuwe Gids, De–
Gedeeltelijk auteursrechtelijk beschermd
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[De Nieuwe Gids. Jaargang 53. Deel 8.] | |
Dutch poetry and the romantic revival by Dr. J.A. Russell.
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Holland,’ says Sir Herbert Grierson, ‘that a number of young men in the eighties made a vehement protest, declaring that poetry was not sentiment and sermons but art and passion.’Ga naar voetnoot1) England itself, he goes on to state, ‘dispeled the influence of this inferior stuff without the necessity of an active crusade and the foundation of such a periodical as De Nieuwe Gids to make the appeal effective.’ It is all part, apparently, of that wonderful English Tradition in poetry that, almost simultaneously, should arise the two giants of Victorian verse, Tennyson and Browning, so opposite in mind and art but alike in two important respects. ‘Each,’ declares Jean Stewart, ‘is a Romantic of the second generation’;Ga naar voetnoot2) and also they both carry on the English tradition of writing each his own type of poetry, undisturbed by new movements and theories, devoid of theory themselves. Later came the need to attempt to solve anew the poetic problem. But by the cunning of their art, displayed in different yet complementary ways, they were for the present amply sufficient. While, with typical independence, the English poets could go their own way, adopting certain Romantic influences and rejecting others, the continuing life of Dutch poetry was far more preca-riously poised; and, indeed, only a concentrated effort through some consciously formulated ideal could hope to save it. Hence the phenomenon of the ‘Beweging van '80’, with the origins and first fruits of which I have already tried to deal. Briefly, in this, we seem to have, for the first time since the ‘Golden Age’ of Vondel and company, an approach to a definite literary ‘school’. Yet, after fifty years, when something like a stock-taking can be attempted - when alas! so many of the first great figures have made their last bow and gone their way - we can see that Romantic Brotherhood was never so complete or homogeneous as at one time imagined. Rather than by any single common ideal as by a necessarily transitory bond of sympathy, a community of impulse, must we think of its members bound together. Above all, of course, they were Romantics, for Romanticism is necessary when traditional beliefs become outworn - it is objectionable only when the poet revolts against an attitude which he himself | |
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would admit still to be tenable. But Romanticism also carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution. Only by Romantic poetry - the poetry of the personality - can the new vocabulary be found and the old faith reasserted. But, again, just because it denies, however regretfully, all outside authority, it tends to extreme individualism; the Romantic poet is bound to exploit his personality and make his poetry that of immediate perception. Trusting, however, his emotions rather than his intellect, he is always liable, whatever his theories may be, to exaggerate the importance of his own emotions - though, paradoxically, it is only by transcending his own particular emotions that he can progress towards an attitude generally acceptable. In a certain sense, I suppose, no poet is ever utterly ‘Romantic’, since, obviously, Romantic poetry is the result of a poet's struggles against his own Romanticism; like other terms we must take it as a representing a limit, to which actual examples approximate, and the statements which we can make about the hypothetical ‘Romantic poet’ are never quite true of any individual Romantic. Of the men of the 'eighties Mr. Spanjaard would use the term ‘Individualiteit’, and not the more usual ‘Individualisme’, to describe their most marked characteristic. A little additional emphasis may thus be secured, hut the essential point is not altered - that the movement they sponsored was subjective to a degree. Thinking of the reaction largely as an attack on those successors of Bilderdijk who had abandoned serious work and contented themselves with vague emotion and slovenly expression, Professor Prinsen once went so far as to suggest that ‘de eenheid in deze groep was een negatie’, and, again: ‘Doch in hun eigen aard en persoonlijkheid openbaarde zich al spoedig een groot verschil.’Ga naar voetnoot1) Fortunately, he did not stop there, but by carrying the discussion to the narrower plane of criticism indicated the new complication that had arisen from the fact that now, for the first time in earnest, ‘de kritikus is zelf kunstenaar.’ Now criticism is a customary and vital function of literature. Even in the Elizabethan age in England there was a busy, unofficial criticism, and the great era of German literature was inaugurated by the brilliant criticism | |
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of Lessing, But Dutch criticism had never succeeded yet in acquiring either sensibility or a standard - Bilderdijk had lived in an age of dogmatic controversy, and on the part of his Calvinistic successors there was singularly little sympathy with poetry. So criticism in Holland sank to a mixture of local patriotism and vague international sentiment, with little relation to the works criticised; and, naturally, something like consternation reigned when at last the men of the 'eighties appeared, ready to set up their new-fangled ‘Autonomie der Schoonheid’ on that most absolute of principles: ‘de schoonheid als criterium bij alle objectieve kritiek.’ Upon the elucidation of this latter doctrine, I fancy, more intellectual energy must have been expended than upon any other within the entire range of Dutch poetry. For long, indeed, the golden key seemed quite lost to students of the theory of aesthetics, and only recently, by a greater concentration of effort than ever, do I seem to find any coming near to surprising this ultimate secret of the new poetics. There is Mr. Robbers, of course, who comes down categorically against the tenability of the doctrine. ‘De waarheid is,’ he says, ‘dat volstrekte objectiviteit in de kunst natuurlijk niet bestaat.’Ga naar voetnoot1) And Mr. van Leeuwen argues quite as emphatically of today: ‘Van de objectieve kritiek die de Tachtigers eischten, zijn we afgezakt (ik noem dat zoo!) naar het uiterst subjectieve.’Ga naar voetnoot2) But the finest reading of all, I would say, is that of Mr. Max Kijzer, who expresces his opinion thus: ‘De kunstcritiek, die ik de voorkeur geef, is objectief in haar uitingsdrang en persoonlijke keur.’Ga naar voetnoot3) It is an implied recognition that, with men so individualistically inclined as these same leading ‘Tachtigers’, there was soon bound to supervene an acute crisis over the principles of criticism to which their finer sensibility to beauty inevitably gave rise. Like almost all good critics they were great imaginative writers themselves. But this very factor proved also their ‘Lorelei’, for while they were lured on by the supreme need of Beauty, and achieved great things on the creative side of Romanticism, they provided but the scantiest vesture of Romantic criticism before breaking away and taking | |
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their own individual, isolated, and unsystematized routes. They formed no ‘school’ in criticism, as they had done in poetry, in order to grasp the larger significance of their own movement by an analysis of the principles on which its appreciation was founded. It was as though the goud ship ‘Nieuwe Gids’ was rent between the ‘subjectivity’ of Scylla and the ‘objectivity’ of Charybdis and well-nigh foundered at last - at any rate, sending many of its foremost occupants violently overboard, some to the perilous depths of Naturalism, some to the bitter waters of Socialism, and one at least to the mysterious pools of Catholic morality. Perhaps, indeed, there was but one who escaped quite unscathed from the wreek, to go on presenting the new aesthetic principles in their depth and richness of meaning. At least, if we allow that Romantic criticism involves nothing less than a survey of all philosophy, then are we bound to admit that alone in the recondite constructions of Willem Kloos was its true culmination ever reached in Holland. The late Mr. Frans Erens once expressed the opinion that Kloos's prose writings transcend - in value as in beauty - his poetry; but, while not agreeing with this, I would go so far as to say that, among the ‘Tachtigers’, only his critical work -his various studies in theoretical poetics - is remarkable enough as to be in itself akin to creation; only with him did Poetry require no other substance than the visions and passions of the individual, clothed in the rhythms and images that were of the very texture of his own mind. Not in any thing like the same triumphant degree did any of his henchmen make the separate life a possibility; for, quite obviously, the aesthetic of neither Verwey, Gorter, or Van Eeden remained pure enough to allow him to effect the divorce between Poetry and Society or between Poetry and Religion. At first their art may appear to have introduced a new, revolutionary factor into the conception of poetry; but, actually, it was only an extreme, though logical, result of Romanticist individualism, of the poet's licence to create his own form, expressive at every turn of his idiosyncrasies. As Mr. Michael Roberts well puts it: ‘Each revolt egainst Romanticism shows no return to an abiding standard, but rather a fresh and more violent assertion of that individualism which is essentially romantic.’Ga naar voetnoot1) | |
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It is in Verwey above all, I would say, that we sec the Romantic ideal ‘come full circle’, as it were, in this way. His early work is of a pure and unforced Romantic order, placing the stress on energy and freedom and on powerful intensity of emotion. In this enthusiasm he declares: ‘De poëzie komt over me als een droom
Vol sterren en een liefelijke nacht
‘Van duister.’
He accepts the canon complete: ‘Ik ben een dichter en der Schoonheid zoon.’
Spontaneously the lyric measures flow: ‘Mijn ziele is in mijn zangen,
Mijn zang is in mijn ziel:
Mijn lied is 't ziet verlangen,
Dat in mijn harte viel.’
‘Waar de steen is en de zode,
Waar de bloeesem bitter is,
Bracht ik mijn bleeke doode
Met groote droefenis.’
‘De grachten van mijn deftige stad
Zie 'k weer en zie wat 'k ben geweest:
Een knaap, die in het ochtendlicht
Onder de boomen loopt en leest.’
‘Ik zit in November-misten,
Een eenzaam man, -
Zij streepen in lange risten
Mijn venster an.’
Here, indeed, I would say, we have the nearest approach in Dutch to the pure lyricism of Shelley, and I am at one with Dr. Dekker when he declares: ‘Die invloed van Keats en Shelley | |
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is bij geen van die tagtigers so direk as bij Verwey nie.’Ga naar voetnoot1) Into all the possible comparisons and suppositions on which he builds up his case we need not follow him; but, as usual, he does his job thoroughly and well, noting the epic quality imparted by a knowledge of ‘Hyperion’ to the much-disputed ‘Persephone’, his translation of the ‘Defence of Poetry’ and of poems like the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’. ‘Laat dan mijn ziel in tot uw ziel en paar
Hen beiden in éen smart en éene klacht; -
Opdat ze als tweelings-vlammen in één nacht,
Verborgen brandend, gloren naast elkaar,
In eenen stillen walm en ronden gloed.’
That, we can well agree, is the Shelley of ‘Epipsychidon’, just as ‘Cor Cordium’ is impregnated with the Platonic ideas of that same poem: ‘Ziel van mijn Ziel! Leven, dat in mij woont,
Veelnamige Mysterie, die ik noem
Mijn Ik, mijn Zelf, mijn Wezen...’
‘Daar leeft geen andere God! Gij zijt alleen.’
But occasionally, on application, tbc theory stubbornly refuses to fit. By all the laws of poetry ‘De Dood van een jaar’ should be an amalgam of Shelley's ‘Autumn - A Dirge’ and his ‘Ode to the West Wind’; unfortunately, it far more recalls Tennyson's ‘Death of the Old Year’. Consideration, again, of the sonnet-cycle, ‘Van de Liefde die Vriendschap heet’, leads him to Shakespeare in general conception; and I think he fails to do justice to the rhapsodical invocations and the airy rhythms of ‘Licht mijner ziel! ik zag u steeds van veer.’
‘Licht van mijn Liefde, dat nu donker werd,
Daar ge in een mist van tranen altijd weent.’
‘Lamp mijner ziel, die me in 't verborgen gloort,
Zoet wonder van 't heelal, dat niemand weet.’
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These, to me at any rate, are more Shelley-an echoes than any others in the entire range of the sonnets. Dr. Dekker, too, I think, rather misses the point when he goes out of his way to draw attention to a few odd words of resemblance in ‘The Revolt of Islam’ and ‘Bij den Dood van J.A. Alberdingk Thijm’. When two poems are so utterly different in theme, conception, form, I cannot see that anything of importance is to be gained by arguing from the particular. How infinitely more valuable would be his criticism if he could have discovered in Verwey here an actual ‘Adonais’! And would it not have repaid the trouble of going into the whole question of versification and vocabulary, besides merely pointing out the similarity of their views on the relationship of language and art? Also, is there no significance in the adoption of blank verse for both ‘Persephone’ and ‘Demeter’ - as though the faults and immaturities of an ‘Endymion’ were to be blotted out in the assured achievement of a ‘Hyperion’? Profound, undoubtedly, as was the influence of Shelley and Keats upon Verwey's early work, there is no escaping the fact that he is capable of poetry far below their very poorest level; dull unimaginative stuff, weak, banal, and tawdry by turns. Almost, in fact, there is as much to dismay as to inspire; freedom there is and buoyancy, at the best, hut at the worst - lapses from poetic taste so lamentable in themselves as to be well-nigh unpardonable. It is best, I think, to forget the loose jargon of: ‘Al liepen alle vrouwen nou
Op straat in blauwe japonnen,
Al liepen hun mannen ertusschendoor
In roode pantalonnen.’
And the sheer pedestrianism of: ‘De koopman zit op zijn kantoor en somt
Bij 't walmend licht der lamp de winst van 't jaar.’
‘Zooals ik soms zat in een kerk, de hooge
Vensters behangen met een groene flarde,
Versleten, daar een zilvren dag door sarde;
En in het ruim, de preekstoel uitgebogen.’
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Speaking of the change of mind and heart which carried him out of the ‘Nieuwe Gids’ into his own ‘Beweging’, Dr. Haantjes expresses himself thus: ‘One of these poets, however, Albert Verwey, understood at last that beauty was not everything in life. He understood that being a poet did not necessarily mean abstaining from social and cultural life, but that a higher literary attitude was possible, not based on a merely poetical constitution, but on a poetical personality.’Ga naar voetnoot1) In the new, symbolical poetry of Verwey, we see the Romantic still at work. But his gods are no longer Shelley and Keats, but Potgieter and Goethe - perhaps in that order, too, when one considers the sombre moralising of ‘Hoe vreemd dat we in onze gedachten wonen
Als in ons huis: wij hooren er omheen
Den storm, of 't volk dat stormig huilt: een steen
Rinkelt eens door de ruiten, maar wij toonen.’
Much as he might extoll Spinoza and Goethe, his sentiment remained too simple, too idyllic, for him ever to hope to reassemble their mighty cosmos of philosophy and poetry. Vagueness of thought can never be a substitute for true intellectual force and intense imaginative vision, and I confess I find many of these latter utterances singularly vapid and unconvincing. Is there much more than shallow optimism, I wonder, in this sort of thing: ‘Ik ben een mensch als gij en heb gevonden
Dat alles leeft en alles waarde heeft.’
He seems happiest as the artist, interested in the expression of a single mood, and is often at his best when this mood is dramatically conceived (here, again, he seems to follow Tennyson, or perhaps Browning, in the cultivation of the dramatic lyric); his ‘Nacht in het Alhambra’ is an excellent instance of this. Even here his most intimate note remains an echo of Romantic lyricism. His ‘philosophy’ never completely succeeds in developing the Romantic view of life; living in an age of Naturalistic novelists and ‘Parnassien’ rivals, he tries to combine far too many functions | |
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with his own basic lyric impulse. Only if he had possessed a higher order of imaginative power could he have fused such heterogeneous elements. But diversity of aim is his final undoing, in a Romantic sense, for far more of ten are we struck by beauty of technique than by any very deep note of feeling. In thinking of Verwey's fine early Romanticism, we must be given to wonder that the lyrical afflatus, so potent in his work then, did not seek to express itself in the form of song alone. Only when he is concerned with a single mood and its adequate rendering in word and image and rhythm - and less eager, therefore, to suggest ways of compromising with the age - do we feel that his art is fully consonant with the spirit of Romanticism and of the ‘Nieuwe-Gids-Beweging’. In verses like: ‘De warme zon is boven mij,
Ik wandel in de warme lucht,
Mijn voeten op de warme wei
Maken alleen, haast geen gerucht.’
‘Liefde is meer dan alle dingen
Die in 't daglicht lokkend staan,
Liefde is dan de erinneringen
Meer die schoonst in schemer gaan.’
‘Schoonheid: droom en klaarheid:
Waarheid die beide zijt:
Uw openbaarheid
Vervult mijn levenstijd.’
‘Waar in een volk een nieuwe schoonheid blinkt
Kan zij niet sterven,’
far more than in ‘'t Leven is in de Idee: daar staat dat heele
Stille bestaan dat uit-ons leeft zoo luide
En 't onberekenbare en onberuide
Van wisselwerking is door deelen vele.’
and: | |
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‘Bedenk hoe schoon wanneer wij zijn gestorven
De aarde zal zijn die dan naar ons niet vraagt.
Gij weet dat ze altijd eendre vreugden draagt
Als waar wijzelf ons aandeel van verworven’,
he lives today, and it is such verses that will be incorporated finally into the great body of Dutch poetry. The usual defence of Verwey's poetry is that it is lyrical, and that all poetry should be lyrical, should be as spontaneous as a song. To apply this method without modification, however, would be akin to judging all Dutch poetry by Hooft; it would overlook the definitely intellectual structure of the poetry of Vondel and Kloos - and, indeed, of much of Verwey's own verse. Applied to the work of Herman Gorter it would not be an altogether fatal thing, hut it certainly would cause a wide and serious gap by the omission of that great symbolical and philosophical poem, ‘Mei’. Perhaps I should say ‘masterpiece’, but I shall not try to settle between Mr. AE.W. Timmerman, who says that ‘hoe lang zal het duren voor men “Pan” zal leeren waardeeren als zijn grootste en schoonste werk’,Ga naar voetnoot1) and Mr. Robbers, who is as emphatic that ‘zijn “Mei”, na Vondel m.i. het schoonste gedicht van langen adem, dat de nederlandsche litteratuur heeft voortgebrach, is vol romantiek in iedere denkbare beteekenis.’Ga naar voetnoot2) For the moment it is quite enough that ‘Mei’ should be recognized as the poem by which he came to acquire a foremost position. This it did, of course, by its allegorical attempt to interpret Life and, show, incidentally, what the whole ‘Beweging van Tachtig’ wanted and wherein lay its weakness, if weakness it possessed. In concentrating on the debt owed by Gorter to Shelley and Keats, Dr. Dekker has rendered a notable service to scholarship - I am almost inclined to rank his analysis of ‘Mei’, indeed, as his penetrating piece of criticism. Here, I do think, he realizes the correct manipulation of the comparative method and achieves a striking success. To begin with, consideration of Gorter obliges him to make but one long sustained comparison with Keats - | |
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it is ‘Mei’, measured poetically and philosophically, against ‘ Endymion’ - while for Shelley, with whom actually he had a much stronger affinity in respect of his social ideals, he localises the general revolutionary outlook to ‘The Revolt of Islam’ and ‘Prometheus Unbound’ and then, through glances at poems of such ethereal colouring as ‘The Skylark’, ‘The Cloud’, ‘The Sensitive Plant’, shows how outward Nature is regarded as a moulding and hallowing power, preparing us thus for Gorter's later vision that would make of his worship of beauty hut an aspect of his worship of freedom, in the light of Socialist formulae. If, as I have indicated, ‘Mei’, artistically, marks the culminating point reached by Gorter as a ‘Nieuwe Gidser’, it must also be taken as the jumping-off ground for his plunge into Socialism. In that richly-decorated allegory Keats was his most evident precursor in Romanticism, hut, with all its ethereal colouring and musical cadences, it was as yet hut an incomplete expression of the poet's nature. It is the embodiment of the visionary quality of his genius, wrought into imaginative allegory, hut it raises anew the whole conception of his art. There is even a hint of personal disillusionment over the discovery that beauty is pre-sented only as an impalpable dream and not as the glorious vesture which familiar things wear to the imaginative eye. Shelley has come upon him, and he experiences a mood of despondent contemplation of life; so great now is his revolutionary impatience that nothing will satisfy him hut the opening up of a new vision, within or through the old. Henceforth he will seek the beauty, not of repose, hut of energy, for beauty, he had come to see, must be in some degree a negation of fixed form; it must ally itself with freedom and social justice and, indeed, be virtually inseparable from practical helpfulness; the poet's voice must become a prophetic one, uttering, not his own sorrows, hut the woes of all mankind. It was natural, I suppose, that the Romantic-cum-Socialist poet should look back on the ‘Beweging van Tachtig’ as mere ‘bourgeoiskunst’ and should look forward with avidity to the writing of beautiful romances of revolution, informed by a new and glorious sense of the potentialities of life. Yet, in practice, his | |
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‘apostasy’ did not work out that way at all. Far less, indeed, was changed than might have been expected, for his Socialism, being ethical and emotional in origin, really proceeded from the heart instead of from the Gold logic of the doctrinaire. The truth is, of course, that it was grounded far more than he knew on the realistic side of the Romantic ‘Nieuwe Gids-Beweging’. Never was it possible that he could begin to subordinate his art to Left Wing propaganda, full of the usual cumbrous, semiclassical jargon - ‘zulk een socialistisch dichter is hij zeker niet,’ declares Mr. Robbers with absolute reason. When it came to a question of doctrine he was as much the man of feeling as ever, even to the belief he shared with Shelley, that he was being most practical when he was, in fact, being not a little mystical. And, much as he might wish to repudiate Romanticism, with its antecedents and its posterity, he was far too closely related to it, by temperament and manner, ever to escape its early influences and seek to wrest a meaning from facts by grappling with them at closer quarters than its lyrical flights rightly allow. If there is anything to regret in Gorter's espousal of the cause of Socialism, it should be the indifference it created in his poetry towards story-interest, which otherwise he seemed not unskilled to excite. On the other hand, it must be allowed that, if the teaching of Socialism exercised its stimulus, it failed to impose its limitations, beyond an occasional too great directness of plea, or crudity of thought or versification. Such an incongruous medley we have in: ‘Toen 't avond was,
de stad blonk flauw als een robijn,
heb ik het socialisme gekend.’
And in the nature of things nothing could be less Shelley-an than: ‘'t Kapitalisme bouwt ons de machines,
't Kapitalisme bouwt ons de fabrieken,
wij bouwen 't kapitaal, 't kapitaal bouwt
ons werkhuis -’
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Yet, there are times when it is this politically intruded note that imparts a certain unique interest to his work. There is both grandeur and simplicity, for instance, in typical lines like: ‘Gij weet het, kindren, het was de Commune.
O zacht klinke de naam zooals een bloem.’
But, impasioned student of Socialism though Gorter became, it cannot be overlooked for long that from the very outset of his career as a poet he had been a close and eager watcher of nature and that traits of natural landscape are for ever flashing upon him with a vivid and penetrating veracity of detail - the cast of his imagination had a natural affinity to his own Dutch landscape, and he had little need to turn, like Potgieter, to Italy for stimulus, or like Verwey to Spain. In the continuel neighbourhood in the actual world of visions long familiar he found ample inspiration. So he sings: ‘Mijn kamer is der stilte diepste groef
's morgens om vijf uur, als de eerste haan
nog slaapt. Stil is het vuur van 't lamplicht aan,
dat goudstralend zich in schemer begroef.’
Or it is: ‘De dag gaat open als een gouden roos;
ik sta aan 't raam en zend mijn adem uit,
het veld is stil, en nauwlijks één geluid
breekt naar het koepelblauw bij tusschenpoos.’
And always he keeps the old passion for beauty, if sometimes he does urge it too self-consciously and fails to realize Shelley's mastery of it. The English poet, we can hardly imagine, would have been capable of the inartistic bluntness of ‘De schoonheid kan nog niet zijn,
de arbeiders zijn nog niet sterk genoeg.’
Nor could he ever stumbled along as in: | |
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‘Er gaat een storm naar Eenheid, dat's de Schoonheid,
Er gaat een ontvlamming en dat's de Schoonheid.’
But when his vision is not rendered crude by the imperfect blending of his art and thought, it can dazzle and illuminate. It does so when he apostrophizes: ‘O nu te branden als een enkel licht
In den grooten gloed die naar de Eenheid brandt,
O stil te houden het zuiver gezicht
In den gloedboog die staat boven het land.’
And in: ‘Ik ben dood,
ik ben mij zelf niet meer.
Ik ben Waarheid geworden, bloot
Liefde, en daardoor Muziek teer.’
More and more, of course, the passion for beauty is identified with the passion for freedom. So it is: ‘O Schoonheid gij zijt niets
Dan de wordende Vrijheid.’
Yet, fragmentary though most of this work is, we catch in it from beginning to end the elemental symphonies of ‘Mei’ and ‘Pan’. In the 'eighties ‘een nieuwe lente en een nieuw geluid’ - the spring-time of Romance and the first sounds of reaction; and after it all the avowal of an unshaken faith: ‘Met al mijn bloed heb ik voor u geleefd,
O poëzie.’
‘De Nieuwe-Gids-idee,’ as Mr. Max Kijzer has well said, ‘is geen wijdere dan de kunstzinnige idee van Tachtig.’Ga naar voetnoot1) That is, its primary concern was not with politics, any more than it was with religion or morals. Gorter's revolt, therefore, against social injustice must have put him permanently outside the inner fold had it not been that the main effect of his seizing upon the | |
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doctrines of Marx was actually to foster his bias towards the abstract and leave him more acutely aware of the idealist's impatience of the limitating distinctions of the material world. Not so, however, with a sentimentalist like Frederik van Eeden. At no time did he have such a serene and intuitive sense of beauty that it could not be staled by custom. Far too insistently he harped on the single string of his own emotions, and apparently thought it the poet's ‘mission’ to soothe the sufferings of humanity by the relation of his own. It was Van Eeden's sad mistake that in all this he believed completely that he was interpreting the mind, the art, and the emancipating vision of Shelley, as expressed in that ‘Bible’ of the 'eighties - ‘The Defence of Poetry’. But Van Eeden interpreted far too literally and exactly. He knew little of the intellectual abstraction of the other, or his personal self-devotion; the ‘egoistic sublime’ in him rendered him incapable of seeing that to Shelley, with his gaze fixed upon the ‘Life of Life’, the individualities of the sense-world became fluent and indistinct. The truth is that his command of the springs of beauty was infinitely less wide, and by his false and foolish notion of ‘ethiek in de kunst’ he plainly revealed himself as no more than ‘a pseudo Shelley’. If the poetry of the English writer stood for anything, it stood for spiritual and artistic freedom, so that eventually the pure defiance of Prometheus resolved itself in a cosmic symphony of love. To religion he was certainly not indifferent, hut he unequivocally refused to make it identical with Christian orthodoxy: following Wordsworth in this, following Keats, following Coleridge, despite the Catholic colouring imparted to ‘The Ancient Marmer’. But Van Eeden had not anything like the same indomitable mental energies as these; and the morbility of his nature contrived to cut him off from immense tracts of rich and vital experience, preparing him, if hut half-consciously, for the confessional and the moral penance demanded in expiation of sins. In some wars Van Eeden was as fluent a writer as Shelley, hut undoubtedly his boasted versatility ran more to productivity than to depth. Only in his first phase can we say that he held the Romantic devotion to particulars and the Romantic faith in the transforming power of the passion and imagination. There- | |
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after he quickly lost his inspiration and his independente, degrading his art by simulating a morbid sensibility whch had no basis in experience - almost a reversion, in some ways, to the lachrymose sentimentality of Young, Blair, and Feith in the early exaggerated days of Romanticism. Shelley, too, has despondency in plenty, hut even when he faints and fails, when he trembles and expires, he does it so musically and lyrically - it is, in fact. a quite characteristic note of his poetry. The more we read Van Eeden, however, the more does it seem that sadness and disillusionment are all too easily allowed to gain the mastery over his lyric impulse; he shows himself an unequal artist, allowing his principles to harden into dogmas and often merely preaching - or teaching - in prosaic doggerel. The fine aesthetic ideal of the ‘Tachtigers’ makes the ultimate failure of Van Eeden all the more disappointing, for it is true that nearly all of what is supreme in his poetry - as also in his prose, of course - was written when he remained with, or near, Kloos and those other contemporaries, of whom his critical judgment led him so far astray. None of these, on the other hand, but has bestowed free and ungrudging praise upon ‘Ellen’ and his early verse, and if he were a Shelleyan - on somewhat false premises - there was as yet little to throw doubt on the genuineness of his sorrow and longing.. In a poem like ‘De Noordewind’, for instance, as in Shelley's ‘Ode to the West Wind’, there is a definite interplay of the abstract and the concrete; ideas take shape in an evershifting train of images - the objects of the external world are valued less for their own loveliness than for what they suggest: ‘Ik wil ééns vrij zijn, ééns oneindig vrij,
dat er geen liefde en lachen om mij is,
geen zoete stem, geen blik van vrienden-oogen,
geen weekheid en geen weemoed en geen lust.’
Dr. Dekker has been quick to note this trait. ‘Nes Shelley,’ he says, ‘is ook Van Eeden nie in die eerste plek kunstenaar nie.’ And again: ‘Want 'n digter as Van Eeden word meer deur die gedagte as deur die vorm beïnvloed.’ I shali not, however, try | |
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to follow him in finding complete parallels between the two Romantic poets - sometimes a mere word is enough to set our learned friend off, and not always can I agree with this monumental construction. But when I see such lines as: ‘Ik droomde 't Leeven als een groot, groen bosch,
De vogels zweegen en het loof hing stil,
De beeken vloeiden niet, geen windgerucht
Voer door de takken,’
‘O mocht ik bouwen om uw lieve ziel,
Mijn schat! voor altijd een hoog huis van vreede.’
‘God is een God van Lijden, niet van Lust.
Hij is de Smarteman, en wien Hij kust,
Moet bloeden uit veel wonden, diep en wreed,’
‘Maar daar is Lijden schooner dan de Dood,’
‘Al mooye dingen verminderen
En verlaten mij nu -
Mijn lieve zinne-kinderen
Haten mij nu,’
I am more aware that the style is subjective - through the poet's interpretation of nature in terms of his own feelings - and Romantic - because of the plaintive, intimate note adopted and the general mistiness of content - than that it is strictly Shelley-an. Indeed, since the ecstasy that quickens these lyrics is not joy but sorrow and bitterness, I am as often reminded of Swinburne and Thomson (the second of that ilk). ‘Ellen’ is certainly the greatest of these sustained lyrics of Van Eeden's, and Dr. Dekker does well to compare it in parts with ‘Epipsychidion’, with ‘Julian and Maddalo’, with ‘The Skylark’; yet, in a general direction, it is just here that the two poets exhibit their unlikeness most pointedly. Each finds something amiss in the nature of things, but only Shelley is great enough to persist in an individualist idealism, refusing to accept ordinary human values | |
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or make contact with reality, knowing that in his poetry he is free to refashion the world on the pattern of his dream. But with Van Eeden it is far otherwise. His spirit is still earth-bound enough to demand some final vividnes of vision, and in the absence of that the strains of his music gradually die away; for him this apparently vital new current of poetry leads round to the quiet backwater of the Catholic Church, with its exotic beauty and its heavy atmosphere. I stop here; though there is no finis to art, no end to the poet's endeavour to interpret phenomena to man. But the ‘Beweging van Tachtig’, as I see it, marks a final stage in the process begun a hundred years earlier, when Holland discovered - or, better perhaps, revived - the Romantic viewpoint. To discover, even before the end of the nineteenth century, an unmistakable drift towards altogether new horizons is not a difficult task. Dr. Haantjes, paraphrasing Dirk Coster, may remark off-handedly: ‘Before the War we were all romantic.’ But to that, in turn, it is easy to rejoin that there are still only romantics - the romance of Adama van Scheltema and Henriette Roland Holst themselves, for example, is Dutch Democracy. But such cloudy considerations cannot be allowed to alter the fact that in the work of the first ‘Nieuwe Gidsers’ - Kloos, Verwey, Gorter, Van Eeden - we do witness the gradual and, I think, final subsidence of that great and indubitably Romantic wave which had traversed the century - and more. Now, it seems, we are faced with the dislimning of the special ideals, hopes, dreams, illusions which had inspired the many tones and moods of their poetry; and with this change of theme and tone we must also note a change in the form, the technique. The spirit of the poetry of the ‘Tachtigers’ was romantic through and through. Against the existing fashion, it sought along the dangerous road; it tended, undoubtedly, to stress certain aspects of creation to the detriment of others; it mistrusted restraint and order: it valued intensity of experience for its own sake. These are the essential features of all Romantic art; and the qualities and defects common to it are but the natural result of a new-found freedom and indiscipline. Beyond this it seems futile to pursue resemblances between particular poets, to go on | |
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attributing a common purpose to such marked individualists: even in the alluring 'eighties, let us not forget, such skilled and sympathetic versifiers as Hélène Swarth and Louis Couperus preferred to keep alongside, without actually being drawn into the ‘movement’ (to use a hackneyed term, with all its regrettable associations). In each case the development of life was bound to lead to a poetical impasse. ‘Pure poetry,’ thus, wilted in Kloos himself to some extent when his mind was confronted at last with the insolubility of life's problems. He did not surrender, of course, for at heart he is a metaphysical poet, inspired at once by his vivid sense of life and nature and by the interpretation of their interrelation, derived on the one hand from experience and on the other from his reading of the great philosophical systems of the world; instead, he sought escape, not like others into the morass of sentimentality into which Romanticism was slipping or into the materialism of the age, but through a sort of tentative Classicism back to the serenity and sanity of the Greek spirit. Additionally, Kloos and Gorter raise the problem of how far a poet's opinions, political or philosophical, must be understood before his poetry can be fully enjoyed. In Van Eeden, obviously, it was the preponderance of the religious element that caused the breakdown. I do not know that he ever found any considerable connection between poetry and religion - rather was it that, failing to do so, he reversed Matthew Arnold's notion of poetry as in some sense a substitute for religion and made religion a substitute for poetry. From the fact that the ‘Nieuwe Gids’ Romantic poets failed to settle the paramount problem - the relation of art to life - it might be thought that the end had been lamentable. Nothing could be further from the truth. Only, indeed, if the aestheticism of Kloos and his fellows in the 'eighties had been a pose could that have happened. But, as we know, it was a very definite Movement - created as well as planned. And its greatest vindication was just this - that it did not quickly peter out in such ‘decadence’ as surrounded the compilers of the ‘Yellow Book’ a decade later. In the France of the period, it is admitted, realism and naturalism could, for the most part, be looked on as ‘degenerate romanticism’. But in Holland, it can be stated emphatically, | |
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few of the grosser products of Naturalism came to fruition; the early violences of Emants and Van Deyssel, we can now plainly see, were precisely the kind of excesses to be expected of strong Romantic natures; intense and suffering spirits they were - now like Zola, now like Baudelaire - but experience of life never filled them with such horror and disgust that they could not exploit it in a creative way - otherwise it could never have been said of Van Deyssel that ‘he has written critiques of Zola which are like lyric-prose songs’. The sentiments of Naturalism, of course, are long out of fashion, in any case; but, likewise, must we recognize that the great collective impulse known as Romanticism has given place to new mottoes and tendencies, differing considerably one from another. Once more we stand at a transition-stage in movement of the poetical mind; and if poetry has not followed religion into bankduptcy there is no gainsaying the fact that both it and the criticism of poetry have in recent years fallen upon sophistication - we quarrel about everything save poetry, and then, not about its substance, but about some accident of it. At present our poets seem divided between pessimism and a weakly Platonism - there are few positive philosophies, even if life is conceived only by a Hardy or a Housman as ‘a long fool's errand to the grave’. Poetry, in a word, has become less ‘poetical’ - more recondite, difficult, cynical, intellectual, more suited to the modern disillusioned world. Only an odd poet here and there still writes in the old manner - like Hélène Swarth, for instance, almost the last of the Romantics in Holland; for while the joyous, intimate note of much of Bouten's poetry is an echo of Romantic lyricism, he has not, like many contemporaries, neglected to his cost the lessons of discipline and artistry, and by the level dignity and polish of his work is in many ways entitled to be called a great Classical writer, unburdened by the mental agony of the post-Romantic generation. Romanticism in Holland has run its course; as it has elsewhere. For a full century its impulse persisted - a dominating literary force, its ways and aims revived alike by those who truckled to their age's civilisation and those who rejected it. It is certainly a far cry back from Kloos and his intransigeant ‘Nieuwe Gidsers’ to those mild rebels, Van Alphen and Nieuwland. Before the Roman- | |
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tic Revival poetry in Holland admitted little variance from a tradition of aristocratic culture that traced itself back to Latin origins and, though the achievement of Vondel and Hooft, as I have sought to show, influenced all Dutch poetry that followed, whether lyrical or dramatic, it could in the nature of things only partially help to form the genius of Perk and Kloos and Gorter - in these, as in their greatest predecessors, the lyric tradition lives on, but lives on in perpetual change. No more is the lyric written with the same natural, thoughtless grace - it now expresses the richness and complexity of experience as it is known to the self-perusing mind. At first, however, in poets like Bilderdijk and Feith we find a treatment that, inevitably, is a little romantic in the bad sense; they may admire Vondel and seek to imitate him, but they were no longer writing in an age when a high standard of poetic performance existed, and through the very poorness of their technique were ever descending to what was false in feeling and style; in a word, their poetry was not an art, as it was with Vondel and Hooft, and religious dogma and moral formulism prevented them from passing on to a higher plane of Romanticism and producing opposite numbers to Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. Until the closing quarter of the nineteenth century the Dutch poets remained substantially ignorant of these great English contemporaries, as also did Huet, the Sainte-Beuve of these days in Holland; the next step for them in Romanticism was fully represented by the forceful measures of Scott and the theatrically glamorous stanzas of Byron, which seemed to them, in fact, the nec plus ultra of the entire Movement. In almost every way the poets of the third, final, and most vital phase of Romanticism - the phase of subjectivism, beauty worship, mystical Pantheism, and social idealism - were bound to be in conscious and bitter revolt against all that had gone before in these more abortive phases. For the stoical classicism of Bilderdijk they found no use at all - at best he was for them an old balladist Calvinised; Feith, they saw, had dreamed darkly in church-yards because he could not live realities in the free, open air; Van Lennep and Beets they regarded as mere virtuosoes in verse. Their necessity was for something entirely otherwise - for a vigorous living poetry, which would release their own | |
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pent-up inner energy and turn it to new ends, providing them with finer adjustments and enabling them to harmonise a greater range of experience. So they became students of poetry - of English poetry especially, and of the transforming idealism of Shelley and the exaltation of Keats in particular. Naturally, as a humble compatriot of these, it is with the deepest gratification that I have followed their influence in this. Not since the sixteenth century had Holland made such a rapturous response to the loveliness of the universe. A wonderful age, truly, in all respects. In its interpretation I have not always in these columns agreed with the critics. But now at the last I must concur entirely wih Dr. Dekker when he says that ‘Jacques Perk was vir Nederland in nog groter mate wat Keats vir Engeland was’ and with Mr. Robbers when he declares that ‘het is met Kloos en Gorter, met Verwey en Van Eeden, ja en ook met Hélène Swarth en Hein Boeken dat een nieuw bloeitijdperk voor onze lyriek werd ingeluid.’ It may be, as Dr. Haantjes suggests, that Holland ‘is not at its literary zenith now.’ Yet, this surely does not invalidate the fact that it was the ‘Beweging van Tachtig’, which might, under less skilful guidance, have degenerated into sheer anarchy, that opened up all the ways for future development. Without it modern Dutch poetry, I make bold to say, would be nothing at all. With it it has managed to cling the traditions of the national Muse in so far as these are natural and fundamental, and not arbitrary; but it has dove much more besides: it has added a wealth of passionate thinking about life, about nature, about love, and about beauty. And now how utterly fitting that, of that great race of poets, he who uttered with more unqualified boldness than any of them the faith that was implicit in them all, should still sway the destinies of this same historic ‘Nieuwe Gids’. My only wish can be that, ‘the third among the sons of light’, long be he spared yet to do so! (Concluded.) |
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