Het poëtisch programma van Tachtig

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Summary

The international literary movement labeled Symbolism (the French version of which was the most influential one) manifested itself in various Western countries between 1880 and 1900 as a richly variegated literary revival, mainly of poetry.

More than once, the new poets themselves defended their aims by writing essays on poetry some of which became national, and in some instances even international, classics of literary criticism. Though individual expressions which subsequently became part of the national tradition these writings, nevertheless, substantially and formally transcend the national situation. As a rule there is no need to presume that they are the result of borrowings and importations. By comparing critical essays of this kind the international bearings of the new thinking on poetry as well as the national ones can be elucidated.

In this study I analyse a Dutch text - which from 1882 onward figured for many years as the program of the new poetry writing in the Netherlands - from the point of view that, in its own way, it is part and parcel of the new criticism of the time. In doing so I aim at a better understanding of both this classic of the low countries' literary history and Western criticism of poetry at the end of the nineteenth century.

During the renaissance which at the time took place in Dutch literature the introduction written in 1882 by the young Willem Kloos to the verses of his late fellow-poet Jacques Perk functioned as the manifesto of the new movement and directed for many years the writing of poetry. Chiefly the first part of this introduction (see pp. 78-86) is the object of my analysis, since iu it Kloos formulated the basic principles of his thinking on poetry, applying them, in the second part, to his criticism of the poems left by Jacques Perk. By the combination of intuitive insights, metaphorical language, stray remarks and, nevertheless, fixity of purpose that marks the true character of an essay as conceived and executed by a poet those few pages under consideration breathe a poetic air.

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The literary criticism of young Willem Kloos as found in ‘The Manifesto of the Eighties’ is to be situated between the positivistic thought of the time and certain new notions about the nature and function of poetry. To him, as to nearly all of his contemporaries, literary history runs a cyclic course determined by lasting laws. Kloos, however, did not stick to the usual metaphors inspired by biology neither did he stress the importance of the milieu. This cyclic movement of literary history he considered to be determined by the principle of the unity of form and content, i.e. he thought of periods of decay in which this unity was broken up, alternating with periods of great achievements during which the unity was restored again. Thus in this view of literary history one of the principal postulates of literary Symbolism was given primarily an evolutive function.

The positivistic aspects of his literary criticism are rather marked, but they are mitigated by the fact that he did not show any affinity to the Tainian tradition. He was one of those young critics in the eighties who stressed the importance of psychology for literary criticism. Although this fact seems to have put him on the same track with critics as Emile Hennequin, who deviated from the school of Taine just by their belief in ‘new’ sciences like sociology and psychology, it had in the criticism of the Dutch poet a bearing of its own, as a comparison of his essay with Hennequin's La Critique scientifique can show. For the French critic, as for many of his colleagues, literary criticism as a science was a way of finding the truth about something outside of literature by means of studying literary texts, e.g. conditions generating literary phenomena, or the psychological type of the author and his devoted reader (the ‘esthopsychology’ of Hennequin). Criticism of this kind did not in the least aim at literary evaluation. It has nothing to do with the business of the reviewer. Evaluation was only the rendering of a personal impression received from the text, and not at all the work of the ‘scientist of literature’.

Young Willem Kloos, however, writing in 1882 about literary criticism as a science and calling for the help of psychology in behalf of it, pointed to the possibility of literary evaluation as an experimental science, because, according to him, the poem was a verbal token of the poet's soul and as such the expression of the

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ineffable. Its value would be the effect produced by the subtle verbal and prosodic elements on the soul of the reader. Poetry, thus conceived, was for a few delicate souls a means of communicating, an esoteric affair. In order to effectuate it, the reader must have experienced the pleasure of creating, since only by his co-activity could the poem reach its full existence. Kloos, therefore, rejected the reproach, so often directed against the Symbolists, that the new poetry was obscure. It is the reader's lack of imagination, he said, which accounts for that misunderstanding. According to Jacques Perk, as well as to the great theoreticians of Symbolism, Teodor de Wyzewa and Albert Mockel, to read was to join in the act of creating the poem.

Willem Kloos could not but admit that as long as psychology was unable to provide methods to measure the effect of the poetic elements on the reader, scientific literary evaluation would be impossible. In the meantime literary criticism had to be an art, he said, the expression of the individual, a sensitive report of emotions experienced during the reading of the poem. On this point Willem Kloos was in due accordance with critics like (among others) Walter Pater, Anatole France, Swinburne and Allard Pierson.

The core of ‘The Manifesto of the Eighties’ is a ‘proclamation’ on the nature of poetry. To Willem Kloos poetry, in a general as well as in a specific sense, was ‘imaginative passion’ (he quotes this definition of poetry given by Leigh Hunt); it was a faculty of the soul to imagine the finest vibrations of inner life. In his glorification of the imagination as the Alpha and Omega of poetry Willem Kloos enthusiastically referred to the English Romantic poets, especially to Shelley (A Defence of Poetry) and Hunt (‘What is Poetry?’). Like elsewhere in Europe, Romanticism here contributes to the genesis of the new poetry at the end of the nineteenth century, this time by means of its important postulate of the creative imagination.

This relation of the new poetry to the literature of the past, however, is of interest only in so far we can see its function. To say that those new poets and critics were belated Romanticists would be an over-simplification. In the case of Willem Kloos and his fellow-poets, one notes that in their experience of the ‘new’

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the poetry of Shelley and Keats functioned ‘catalytically’, since the works of those poets enabled the Dutch men of the Eighties to grow conscious of themselves, i.e. to make verses which were rhythmical streams of images symbolizing their emotions. As for their criticism of poetry, so strongly influenced by that of Willem Kloos, it is his interpretation of Romantic thinking on the imagination that informs us of the ‘new’ he aspired at. To him the idea of the creative imagination being the essence of poetry had no idealistic bearing; it was not concerned with dreams and visions of a social, universal or eschatological kind but exclusively related to the self of the poet, his emotions and sensations. The much-admired Shelley wanted to symbolize ideality; Willem Kloos, on the other hand, aimed at writing poems which by their rhythm, melody and images were symbols of his soul. In this respect he differed from new poets like Albert Mockel to whom poetry was a source of knowledge about the truth, that is, an intuitive comprehension of the essential and the poem a point wherein all glimpses of the ideal converged. Furthermore ‘The Manifesto of the Eighties’ showed not the slightest interest in any mutual relation between poetry and society, so dear to Shelley; on the contrary, true escapism triumphed since poetry was declared to be a way to liberate oneself from worldly concerns. Poetry was an ‘experience savoured in solitude’ (Edmund Wilson on the Symbolists).

Kloos' essay did not offer an elaborated literary theory. Although at first sight it seems as if much is said ‘by the way’, the inner coherence of the scattered remarks on form and content, poem and reader, poem and language, and cognate subjects is nonetheless evident. To Willem Kloos poetry was the imagination of the poet's soul and as such of the fulness of life. The poem, according to him, was a verbal symbol of the emotions, the language of which was only to be grasped by the initiated. To the poet, as Kloos saw it, poetry ought to be the only and true good; to the reader it ought to be the means for experiencing the pleasures of beauty.