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Politieke theorie en geschiedenis (1987)

Politieke theorie en geschiedenis

(1987)–E.H. Kossmann–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

The Dutch case: a national or a regional culture?*

As in relation to many other countries in sixteenth-century Europe, it is difficult to apply modern conceptions of nationhood to the situation in the Low Countries. If the difficulty seems more awkward in this area than elsewhere, it is perhaps merely because the sixteenth-century Netherlands, as we all know, developed into two distinct nations, the Northern Netherlands and Belgium. It is clearly impossible to give a convincing answer to the question whether, in politically more propitious circumstances, the Northern and the Southern Netherlands might have grown into a single nation state with one common culture. All we know is that in the north a new state was created which, in the seventeenth century, undoubtedly possessed a culture idiosyncratic enough to be described as properly Dutch. We may well call this a national culture. On the other hand, if we bear in mind, as many seventeenth-century commentators did, that the Dutch Republic was no more than a part of what had been the real Netherlands, both north and south, it would not be totally incongruous to define Dutch culture, that is the northern culture, as regional rather than national. However, if we do so, we must conclude that the national culture uniting the Southern and the Northern Netherlands, and somehow enclosing the regional cultures of Flanders and Brabant, of Holland and Zeeland, never came into existence.

Perhaps it is better, therefore, to look at the situation from another point of view. Nobody can deny that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the regions which under the ancien régime had belonged to the Dutch Republic participated in a culture feit to be national. We may then try to investigate the origin of this culture and, in so doing, we shall in all likelihood find that in the course of time the primarily regional culture of one province, the province of Holland, became the culture of the Dutch nation as a whole. With the growth of national coherence, which in the late eighteenth century was at long last confirmed by the transformation of the loosely confederated Dutch Republic into a unitary state, the culture of Holland may be seen to have spread over the other provinces and to have made them conform to the social, political, cultural, linguistic standards prevalent in Holland since the late sixteenth century. Viewed in this way the Dutch nation represents essentially an expansion of the

province of Holland. To study the origin of Dutch national consciousness we may therefore be well advised to turn to the cultural history of the province of Holland.

Although this is what I propose to do, I must first of all make it clear that in reality the situation was not as simple as it might seem from what has just been suggested. The other provinces undoubtedly exercised considerable impact on the development of some major characteristics of what we are accustomed to regard as the spirit of the Dutch civilisation - such as the practical and ethical attitude towards religion spread in the fifteenth century through the Devotio Moderna in the eastern and northern provinces by men like Wessel Gansfort and Rudolf Agricola who helped to shape Erasmian humanism.1 Moreover it is also important to note that there were moments in Dutch history when the inspiration for renewal came from the Outer Provinces rather than Holland, as for example in the late eighteenth century when the Patriot Movement, which originated outside Holland, expressed a truly nationalist enthusiasm for restoring the Republic's ancient greatness.2 Even so, whilst taking account of these qualifications, it remains the case that the central position of Holland was never really challenged, the vitality of all major initiatives in the Outer Provinces being ultimately dependent on whether Holland was prepared to adopt them.

 

There are, in early seventeenth-century literature, many passages in which Amsterdam and Holland are glorified without any clear reference to the larger federation - the Dutch Republic - of which they were but a part. Perhaps it is useful to give a number of examples of this type of regional nationalism; they illustrate at the same time the means used by Dutch men of letters of this period to give their language, their dramatic conceptions, as well as their subject matter, the best available modern forms.

In 1613 Pieter Hooft, born in 1581 in Amsterdam where his father was a well-known merchant and burgomaster, wrote what he called his ‘treurspel’, his tragedy, Geeraerdt van Velzen. From 1598 to 1601 he had travelled throughout Europe, but mainly in Italy. In a verse epistle to his friends in Holland he described a walk along the river Arno where, he told them, he had met a graceful woman, Italia herself, who had sung the praises of the great poets, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso; but, after she had disappeared, another, a darker figure, had arisen who had spoken to him in the following way - and I am quoting the translation given by Theodoor Weevers in his very fine book, Poetry of the Netherlands in its European Context:3

 
Remember me,
 
Hooft, let not what you see have over you such power
 
As the herb lotos had over Ulysses' men,
 
Who lost all their desire to see the fatherland.
 
In Holland, too, Fame's summit can be climbed: by the steep
 
Stairs of Integrity.

Apart from his most elegant and often profound lyrical poetry, Hooft tried his hand at drama; in fact, he is considered to be the creator of Dutch Renaissance drama. I must again refer to Weevers4 for an admirably succinct and competent account of the characteristics of this development and of its dependence on classical philology: it was Seneca, through the medium of Heinsius, the famous professor at Leiden University, who gave Hooft, not his theme, but his form and his style; it was, moreover, Heinsius' own example - a political tragedy in Latin written in 1602 - that inspired Hooft to use the Senecan form to perpetuate what had already become a Dutch tradition, the drama not of individual characters but of ideas, of personified abstractions, of which Geeraerdt van Velzen is a fine example. The protagonists of the drama, which takes place in the late thirteenth century, all embody a particular idea; and, to underline the moral significance of the play, Faction, Violence, Deceit, Loyalty, Concord, Innocence appear in persona on the stage. The most extraordinary personage in the tragedy, however, makes his entry at the very end when the tragedy has run its course and all participants are, for various reasons, in deep sorrow. It is the river Vecht - a river near Amsterdam where in the seventeenth century the rich regents of Amsterdam built their comfortable and elegant country-seats. The spirit of this river arises before the eyes of a chorus of weeping Amsterdam maidens and delivers in verse a very long speech. Stop mourning, he says, for in spite of the misery in which you now find yourselves, Amsterdam will become a magnificent, wealthy and powerful city, the Crown of Europe, ruled with wisdom and moderation, free, busy, the centre of world-wide commerce. Dutch audiences loved the play and its bizarre final scene; it remained on the repertoire throughout the seventeenth century.

Four years later (1617) Hooft wrote another play, Baeto or the origin of the Hollanders, in which the prophetic words of Baeto's murdered wife appearing before him in a dream convey the same message of future happiness for Holland. For you, she tells Baeto, the gods have reserved an empty space between the rivers Maas and Rhine and the Ocean where you will found a people capable of lasting forever. Their name will be Batauwers (Batavians), and later Hollanders; and together with their neighbours they will excel in peace, in war, in everything:

 
Voor U de Goden onbelaân
 
Een leeg gelaten plek bewaren,
 
Die Maas en Rijn en Oceaan
 
Omheinen met hun fiere baren.
 
Aldaar een achtbare kroon verwacht
 
Voor Uw geslacht.
 
 
 
Daar zult gij stichten volk bekwaam
 
Om alle eeuwen door te duren.
 
Batauwers eerst zal zijn hun naam,
 
Hollanders na, met hun gebeuren.
 
Hetwelk in vreed, en in oorlog en al
 
Uitmunten zal.

‘Baeto’, writes Weevers5

was an attempt at creating a national myth. True to the ambition of Renaissance poets everywhere, Hooft sought to embody in the corporate personality of Baeto and his people some of the essential qualities of the Dutch nation.

This is perfectly true, although one may feel that it goes a bit far to say that Hooft attempted to create a national myth, the myth having been circulated well before Hooft, as Schöffer has recently shown in his careful and lively essay on the Batavian myth during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.6 Moreover, it is not certain at all, I think, that Hooft's national myth was really a Dutch myth. It was essentially a myth pertaining to one province only, to Holland.

In 1638 the first play performed in the brand-new Amsterdam theatre built by Jacob van Campen, the architect who later built the Amsterdam Town Hall, was Vondel's Gysbreght van Aemstel, without any doubt the most successful tragedy ever written in the Netherlands and, until fairly recently, produced regularly in Amsterdam. The subject matter presents a sequel to Hooft's Geeraerdt van Velzen. The play gives a further instalment of the thirteenth-century horrors described in Hooft's work. However, the Gysbreght was not written in the style of Seneca, as Hooft's Van Velzen had been. Heinsius, who had proved an inspiring example to the work of Hooft, had in the 1630s drawn the attention of the poets to Greek models, to Sophocles, and to Euripides. So had Hugo Grotius, whose early biblical dramas were purely Senecan, but who, in 1635, completed a Latin play in the style of Euripides.7 But, of course, Vondel did not really adopt Greek conceptions; he was a Christian, converted to

Catholicism soon after 1638, and his sense of tragedy differed from that of Greek drama. In many respects he may be said to have continued, after Hooft, the tradition of late medieval drama in the Netherlands, the drama of ideas.

In the last scene of Gysbreght van Aemstel the tragic ending, just as in Geeraerdt van Velzen, is made tolerable by the appearance of a new figure who in a prophecy explains the deeper meaning of all the misery suffered by the heroes of the play. In Van Velzen it was the spirit of the river Vecht; here it is the angel Raphael. Raphael advises Gysbreght, the Lord of Amsterdam, to leave the city and to go into exile. But in three hundred years, he says, the city, now ruined, will raise its crown towards heaven and explore the whole world. This will happen during the troubled times of the Revolt. And here Vondel indicates how Holland-centric his, or his audience's, view of history had become. ‘The people of Holland’, Raphael states, ‘will less than three hundred years from now strengthen themselves with the power of allies and kick the altars out of all churches.’

It would be easy enough to multiply examples of this kind. And yet it is not really satisfactory to conclude from such examples that, thanks to the cultural innovations partly or mainly introduced by classical scholarship and carried forward by poets writing in the vernacular, Holland created a culture of its own, regional in the sense that it was confined to one powerful province, a mere member of a greater whole. The greater whole to which the innovating patriots in Holland still felt themselves to belong culturally was not so much the Dutch Republic but the Netherlands in their sixteenth-century, pre-revolutionary form. In that age people did not consider it paradoxical to extol, in the most modern humanist fashion, the virtues of their own region, that is Holland, while at the same time remaining aware of the intimate links which Holland had, or had had, with other provinces either north or south of the big rivers. For men like Hooft and Vondel, and still more perhaps for the great philologists and humanists, national (or regional) pride was not a feeling estranging them from their neighbours; on the contrary, it was a sentiment shared by all really modern men everywhere in civilized Europe. To be so certain of the quality of one's nation that it did not seem incongruous to make the spirit of a river, or an angel, predict in the thirteenth century the wonder of the seventeenth, was to be truly up to date. It meant that one really belonged to the international élite.

These poets, praising Holland or Amsterdam, did not, and could not, ignore the pan-Netherlandish context in which all this had to be seen. Holland, the centre of the new state, was also the heir of much in the sixteenth century that men could be proud of. In 1628, eleven years after writing Baeto, Hooft, then forty-seven years old, began his greatest work, his history of the Revolt against Spain, written in a Tacitean style of incomparable efficiency: concise as well as rich, puritanical in its rejec-

tion of superfluous decoration as well as beautifully rhetorical in descriptions of unequalled dramatic effect, yet so complex and so singular that the book has been characterized as ‘both the most important and the most lonely prose to have come out of the 17th century’.8 In 1642 the greater part of it was published under the title Neederlandsche Histoorien. In his first page Hooft writes with great sympathy about Charles V whom he calls the ‘naamhaftigste Nederlander’,9 the most famous Netherlander, and about the people of the Netherlands generally as being brave, virtuous, kind, industrious, intelligent, well-known for their artistic and scientific achievements, not given to pride, honest, averse to war and mutiny and mainly occupied with trade.10 It is with deep sorrow that he describes the destruction of the Netherlands by Philips II, the destruction of what he obviously still feels to be a greatness in which Holland had participated. Nowhere in his book does he suggest that Holland had, for many centuries, been an independent state; there is nothing about Baeto and the Batavians in this scholarly work of the 1640s. Moreover, nowhere does the reader get the impression that the emergence of the Dutch Republic was inevitable. Hooft duly mentions the various cases which Calvinists were accustomed to consider as indications that God had chosen the Calvinist Netherlanders or Hollanders as pre-eminently suitable for spreading His message and living according to His commands, but fundamentally Hooft's story is one of contingencies, of human endeavour, of human frailty, a story in which the Spaniards obviously appear as mainly responsible for the frightful disorders, but in which the author does by no means conceal the misdeeds of the rebels. He deals at length with the despicable cruelty with which some of the rebels persecuted those among the population whom they suspected of having remained loyal to the Spanish side. His description of the torture, related in gruesome and nauseating detail, which innocent people were made to suffer at the hands of the rebels, was undoubtedly intended to show that a good cause can easily be ruined by excesses, and that right and wrong depend not only on metaphysical principles but also on ordinary human decency. One of those who perpetrated such inexcusable horrors was Lumey, the leader of the Sea Beggars. Hooft tells how, in 1573, the Prince of Orange wanted to have him tried for his crimes. However, it turned out to be impossible to condemn him. ‘The state’, Hooft writes, ‘was at that time not yet firmly enough established to allow strict discipline to be exercised’ in relation to such a popular personality.11 Thus spoke the historian Hooft in 1642; the poet Hooft, however, had in 1617 eulogized Baeto, the eponymous hero who had created the state of Holland many

centuries before. Undoubtedly in 1617 Hooft had been much influenced by a study by Hugo Grotius, published in 1610, about the Antiquity of the Batavian Republic in which the young scholar had attempted to prove that the state of Holland was an immensely old institution with an uninterrupted historical tradition going back to Roman times. Incidentally, Grotius was to write in a letter, dated 24 January 1643, that he no longer thought his views of 1610 to be entirely correct.

We have seen how Vondel celebrated Amsterdam's future greatness in 1638. Nine years later, in 1647, he wrote a play, Leeuwendalers, to be performed at the conclusion of the peace with Spain which was expected soon and which took place in Munster in 1648. Vondel called it a lantspel, a country play; and indeed we see the war between North and South reduced to a quarrel between two communities of peasants who, for decades, had in vain tried to placate the spirit of war - personified as the Wild Man - by sacrificing to him each year a young man chosen by lot. The plot is complicated and much too contrived to be interesting; yet the play contains charming poetry, and the purpose of the exercise is clear enough. Vondel is obviously delighted at the prospect of peace. His presentation of the case suggests that he interprets the war, now nearly ended, as ultimately a conflict between what he calls the Northern and the Southern side of one country. Peace is brought about thanks to the permission given by the prince of the Southern side to the Northern side to remain ‘een Vryheid op zichzelf’, that is, a free and independent republic. Yet this acceptance of the Dutch Republic's separateness is celebrated by Vondel as a restoration of former unity. The young representative of the North, a beautiful girl called Hageroos, finally marries the representative of the South, Adelaert, and, the chorus declaims:

 
De Zuid- en Noordzy paren
 
Zich in dit paar te hoop

just as these two, North and South unite in marriage.

Of course, this is a bizarre representation of the political facts which show nothing so idealistic. What it proves, and this is a point worth making in this context, is that regional patriotism did not prevent Vondel from looking at the Low Countries as united even in separateness - which, incidentally, is not strange in his case, for Vondel's parents were Mennonites from the Southern Netherlands who, after a stay in Cologne, where their famous son was born, had finally settled in Amsterdam.

Vondel's interpretation of the Peace of Munster was not shared by the orthodox Calvinists. In their view the peace was a mistake. They thought that the war against Spain, a crusade against popery, must go on. If this was impossible the Republic should at any rate remain constantly aware of the dangers still threatening it; for the Catholics at home and abroad

would most certainly continue their effort to destroy the Protestant state. To ward off such constant onslaughts, the Republic must be strong and united. The Union of Utrecht should be strictly kept; no province must be allowed to loosen its ties with the other six. The army should remain strong and permanently on the alert with the purpose of - as was said in a pamphlet of 1650 by a preacher from Zeeland - ‘preserving Israel, our Fatherland’. God's grace, a preacher from Utrecht was to write in 1668, had united the provinces in the Union of Utrecht which must keep ‘a sufficiently strong army of good, selected, brave heroes to defend Israel, our Fatherland, against domestic and foreign enemies’.12

Does this now mean that we find in such passages a clear indication of Dutch patriotism - ‘Dutch’ being used as a name for the Northern Netherlands only - as distinct both from feelings of pan-Netherlandish solidarity and from the regional nationalism of Holland? Probably not. In fact, if any group can be held responsible for the interpretation of the Republic as the core and centre of pugnacious Calvinism it is the group of Calvinists from the Southern Netherlands who, in the 1580s, left Flanders and Brabant to find refuge in Holland. It is quite obvious that they would have liked the Republic to reconquer the Southern Netherlands and to re-establish there the victorious Protestant religion. In other words, the Fatherland, the second Israel, was undoubtedly the Republic of the provinces united in the Union of Utrecht of 1579; however, it should not be forgotten that originally Flanders and Brabant, too, had been members of that Union and had only lost their place as a result of the reconquest of the South by the Duke of Parma.

To complicate matters I should like to quote one particular interpretation of the causes which brought about the split of the Netherlands. It is provided by the leading merchants and intellectuals in Holland who, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, felt greatly embarrassed by the combativeness and zeal of the Calvinist ministers, especially the refugees from the Southern Netherlands, men who were by no means unimportant personalities, for we find among them the distinguished cartographer Peter Plancius, Franciscus Gomarus, the leader of the Contra-Remonstrants, and Johannes le Maire, brother of that famous merchant Isaäc who was a legendary figure of vitality well beyond ordinary human capacity, father of 22 children. His tombstone carried the following inscription: ‘Here lies Isaäc le Maire, merchant, who was in his activities in all parts of the world blessed by God to such an extent that he lost in thirty years more than one and a half million guilders’. One of the arguments used by the somewhat less orthodox élite of Holland and Amsterdam in discussions with such men was that by their excessive orthodoxy and extreme radicalism they themselves had - as it was said in

1587 - ‘made us lose Flanders and Brabant, and, if not kept in check by our prudent government, will make us lose Holland and Zeeland also’.13 It had been their intolerance which had ruined the cause of liberty in the Southern Netherlands. This, then, was an argument levelled against emigrants from the Southern Netherlands by people in whose circle much effort was spent on the creation of a culture and a regional consciousness practically limited to Holland alone. If anything, this proves the immense complexity of the situation.

Two years after the Peace of Munster, from May 1650 to December 1651, Constantijn Huygens worked on his long poem Hofwyck. Huygens is one of the most attractive personalities of the Dutch seventeenth century. He was a Hollander by birth although his father Christiaan came from Brabant, had studied at the University of Douai, had joined a lawyer in Brussels and had served the Chancellor of Brabant. In the 1570s Christiaan had opted for William of Orange's cause and hence had served first the great prince and then his son Maurice. Thanks to this career, he had come to settle in The Hague where he married the daughter of a rich refugee family of Antwerp merchants and where Constantijn was born in 1596 - fifteen years after Hooft, nine years after Vondel. In his famous book on Dutch seventeenth-century culture, Huizinga wrote that

whoever wishes to understand the Dutch seventeenth century must keep his Huygens always at hand... This model of the art of living, witty as well as serious, playful as well as strong, the great Constantijn, was secretary to two Princes of Orange, a diplomat, a polyglot man of the world, a highly erudite connoisseur of both the ancients and the moderns, a fine musician, a deeply religious man, all this and much more besides.14

He was also profoundly interested in science, and he was a poet. Thanks to the delightful book of Rosalie Colie, Some Thankfulnesse to Constantine,15 the English reader without knowledge of Dutch can enjoy some of his work and learn about the intellectual world in which this versatile Renaissance virtuoso moved during his very long and active life. His poetry is not easy to read and was not meant to be so. Huygens was fascinated by the possibilities of the Dutch language, and he tried out the most diverse variations in form, vocabulary, metre and rhyme which resulted quite often in an effort to say the most simple things in the most obscure manner possible.

Hofwyck, the long poem carefully composed in 1650 and 1651, was written in difficult circumstances. In 1647 Stadholder Frederick Henry,

whose secretary Huygens had been since 1625, died. He was succeeded by his son William II who was forced to resign himself to the Peace of Munster being concluded much against his wishes. Huygens served the young prince loyally. The political situation was tense. William II came into conflict with Holland, but then died suddenly in 1650; William III was born eight days later. Until 1672 the House of Orange was not allowed to wield political power. Huygens, used to living in the very centre of European affairs, was suddenly pushed aside. Some of his best friends had recently died: Hooft, Barlaeus, Descartes. Moreover, his relations with Frederick Henry's widow, who ruled the affairs of the dynasty after her son's death and in whose service he remained, were very strained. To find repose Huygens turned to his country house near The Hague, characteristically called ‘Hofwyck’, that is, a place in which to find refuge after dealing with the daily business of the stadholder's court. He describes in his poem the design and the meaning of his garden and of his house. In one passage he tells his readers about his trees and he warns his children, his grand-children and their descendants against felling them. This is allowed in only three cases: when the family needs money badly; when the trees are very old; and, finally, if the Fatherland ever suffers again at the hands of Spain the misery it experienced in the sixteenth century. If ever God decrees that Holland should no longer exist; if ever Spain tries again to enslave Holland; if ever the country is burnt again, is ever tortured again, or is ever again a prey to treason, then he declares his last will to be invalid. If the ship sinks, its cargo must sink too.

This is uncomplicated patriotism. Huygens' Fatherland was Holland; it was neither the Dutch Republic nor the Seventeen Netherlands, it was Holland only. True enough, both Huygens' parents originated from the Southern Netherlands; the Princes of Orange, whom he served and revered, were constantly trying to strengthen the power of the generality with the purpose of reducing the overwhelming might of Holland; and Huygens himself was an erudite cosmopolitan, much travelled, able to write fluently in Latin, French, Italian and other languages. Yet Holland was his Fatherland and should Holland be ruined, then so also should his own precious possession, although designed by him to last and grow for centuries.

I have up till now mentioned some material which indicates two things. In the first place it is obviously true to say that in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Holland possessed a regional culture. However, this was not a regional culture in what is, I presume, the usual sense of the term. It is not one of those traditional cultures which perhaps survive for some time even after the modern nation state, with its improved means of communication, enables the culture developed at the centre to penetrate into far-off regions; or one which perhaps makes a

considerable contribution to that national culture; or one which may be doomed to disappear. In Holland we find the opposite. Here we see a group of people attempting to create a culture in many respects new, a Renaissance culture dominated by literary studies and classical models. Its success was great. The Northern Netherlands remained loyal to the Renaissance, its literary style and its language, well into the nineteenth century. For centuries to come Humanism, as developed in Holland and at the University of Leiden, was to be the tissue of Dutch national existence. Nevertheless, and this is the second conclusion to be drawn from my material, there was in all this a measure of ambiguity. What Holland was trying to do was to create a sort of cultural nationalism, although it was neither a nation nor an independent state. Is it then surprising that the success was never complete, and that Dutch national and cultural identity remained for a long time less clearly outlined than the French or the English?

 

I should now like to use the rest of my time for an entirely different approach. My subject is Dutch culture and its regional roots; the period discussed is the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Dutch achieved in the seventeenth century a civilization so rich that this limitation of the subject is amply justified. At the same time the picture of Dutch culture does vary according to the angle from which it is viewed. The smaller countries in Europe share the curious destiny of being only partially known abroad. Seen from abroad the culture of the Netherlands becomes visible in three different periods: in the twelfth century when it produced in the Maas area its Romanesque art; in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when Burgundian art and the Flemish primitives, who were neither Flemish not primitive, flourished, and, finally, during the first three quarters of the seventeenth century. The culture of the Netherlands is no permanent presence; it enters the stage only intermittently.

Seen from inside the Netherlands, the situation is of course different. In the first place, it is not so exclusively art and architecture which then dominate the image; in the second place, this civilization presents itself as a continuity, the story of successive generations living in roughly the same area, speaking roughly the same language, occupying themselves with roughly the same matters and endeavouring to give meaning to their existence and to the reality which they find at their birth by studying it, analysing it, reforming it and embellishing it. In this perspective the three golden centuries mentioned are but episodes which it is difficult to isolate from the long development in which they have their place. This means that, seen from the inside, periods of cultural impotence, such as the Dutch eighteenth century is usually held to be, are no less vital than periods of great cultural activity.

These were reflections which came to my mind when I studied the book published in 1974 by Dr J.L. Price, Culture and Society in the Dutch

Republic during the 17th century. This is the best general book on the subject in any language since Huizinga's essay of 1941 to which I have referred already. The author knows his subject extremely well and he has really important things to say about it. In some respects it may be seen as an expansion of Huizinga's study, modernized, of course, and firmly supported by the author's original research and interpretations. First he states that Dutch culture in the seventeenth century was essentially the culture of Holland. ‘The Holland towns,’ he writes, ‘were more dominant culturally than economically, economically than politically...’16 Another fundamental question he considers is that of the place of this civilization in the broader European context, and in dealing with it he reaches a conclusion roughly identical with Huizinga's suggestions. According to these authors the success of Dutch culture was largely due to its remaining outside the main stream of the European Baroque. This was, Price argues, particularly true for painting, but less so for literature, which helps us to understand why we tend to appreciate Dutch painting as more original than Dutch literature. Price attempts to explain this in sociological terms. The poet belonged to an élite; he was an artist aware of European fashion and anxious to translate it into Dutch forms. He did not write to earn money; his reward was prestige, an entry into the social élite, and consideration by his fellow artists. In painting, the situation was quite different. Painters did not belong to the higher classes; they were craftsmen working for the market; their products had to conform to the taste of the public, and that public was large and by no means limited to the higher bourgeoisie. Thus, whereas the poets won prestige by adopting international norms, the painters earned money by working in a style more congenial to the taste of broader sections of the population, which preferred being able to recognize reality to being elevated into the higher realms of baroque imagery and heroism. Remaining so much nearer to reality the painters were able to draw on the pictorial traditions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and to preserve the most original qualities of the Dutch artistic genius.

By the end of the seventeenth century the situation had changed. The ‘development of a really independent culture’, Dr Price writes, ‘was a difficult task and was only partially achieved outside painting, and its preservation in the later seventeenth century was much more problematical than the preservation of political independence’.17 In the last decades of the seventeenth century Dutch cultural identity was swamped by French importation. The Republic, impotent in politics, had lost its cultural originality by adopting the European style and thus severing itself from its peculiar tradition.

Summarizing an intricate argument running through a whole book and sustained with much detail one runs the risk of presenting it in much too dogmatic a manner. Yet I hope that I have not distorted it, for the argument is relevant to the present discussion. If Dr Price's interpretation is acceptable we find in Dutch seventeenth-century civilization a regional culture ruined by European fashion to such an extent that it hardly had the opportunity of growing into a continuous national culture.

There are a number of comments to make upon this. The first, I think, is that the thesis is perfectly justified if Dutch culture is looked upon from the outside. Seen from the inside, it does perhaps lose some of its appeal. It is obvious that the quality of Dutch achievement deteriorated very substantially after the astounding climax reached in the early seventeenth century. However, life went on in much the same manner; the philologists, the poets, the painters, the printers, the journalists, the actors, all continued their work which was enjoyed by a public certainly not smaller than in the previous century. No doubt, little of all this was useful or even known abroad, being either too dependent on French models or too old-fashioned to be thought worth studying outside the Netherlands. Even the Germans who, in the seventeenth century, as is well known, relied so much on Holland to develop a modern literature of their own, became deeply disillusioned, and ridiculed the Hollanders for their pompous and dull pedantry. Outside the Netherlands its civilization disappeared. But inside, it continued and, in spite of its lack of originality, it developed its own forms, expressed itself in its own language, speculated in selfabsorbed introspection about its own values.

My final point is this. If Dr Price, in the company of so immensely distinguished an historian as Huizinga, sees in Dutch seventeenth-century painting the only totally successful expression of the Dutch national identity, and in the dominating influence of French classicism of the later seventeenth century, to quote Huizinga,18 ‘the illness which on more than one point was to deprive Dutch civilization of its genuinely national character’, he may be leading us into a somewhat paradoxical argument. Dutch national consciousness owed little to painting and much to humanist literary innovation. Why should we say that Dutch painting expresses the Dutch national character so much better than the efforts of the humanist élite and the philologists? Is it perhaps merely because we like it so much better?


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