Volledige werken. Deel 12. Brieven en dokumenten uit de jaren 1867-1868

[1 april 1868
Beoordeling in The British Quaterly Review]

1 april 1868

In zijn rubriek Contemporary Literature, afdeling Poetry, Fiction, and Belles Lettres publiceert The British Quaterly Review op blz. 558-559 een ongesigneerde beoordeling van de engelse Max-Havelaarvertaling. (M.M.)

[p. 738]

Max Havelaar; or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company. By Multatuli. Translated from the Original Manuscript by Baron Alphonse Nahuys. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas.

The Dutch have not succeeded in their colonising much better than the Spanish or the French. All have acquired and retained splendid foreign possessions; but the inevitable curse of a shortsighted, selfish rule, subordinating every interest of the colony to the mother country, has befallen them. Men and nations are slow to see how inseparable in the long run, the highest laws of justice and kindness are, from selfinterest. Wherever a nation rules colonies primarily for the good of the ruled, its virtue will have its reward. Grasping and tyrannous selfishness as invariably overreaches itself. It may be an apparent and is an immediate advantage for the Dutch resident in Java simply to intimate to the regent his wish for coffee plantations, and forced labour immediately covers the country with them; but this advantage is purchased at the cost of all the highest and permanent interests of both rulers and ruled. The abuses of Dutch government in Java seem to be multiplied and gross, and this book is written to expose them - it being the policy of both the Colonial and the Home governments carefully to suppress the knowledge of them. ‘Multatuli’ is a pseudonym assumed by M. Douwes Dekker, who was Assistant-President of Lebak in Java, and who, by his benevolent interest in the native population, had incurred the displeasure of the colonial government, and was dismissed from his office. Herr Dekker was a very able man - difficult to silence and dangerous to touch - and the government would have taken counsel of prudence had they examined his statements, instead of sending him home in disgrace. The result was the publication of this book, which some seven years ago, fell like a bombshell among the Hollanders, and produced a sensation analogous to that which Mrs. Strowe's ‘Uncle Tom’ produced in America. The misgovernment of the Colonies was thoroughly exposed and brought to the knowledge of the Dutch people; with what results remains yet to be seen. Like ‘Uncle Tom’, the book is a novel in form. Max Havelaar is Herr Dekker himself; and the various scenes and incidents are faithful and clever delineations of his colonial experience. The story is remarkably clever, a rollicking, eccentric, grotesque, and satirical humour overflowing on every page. It is unlike any other book that we have read; it pays but little regard to the unities; it is very digressive and incontinent, and we suspect exaggerated, and in spite of its rare ability it sometimes wearies us; but it is thoroughly well informed, unsparing

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in its exposures, and merciless in its castigation of its offenders. The hero represents himself, not untruly, as a Don Quixote, often wasting his courage upon a windmill. His narrative details his efforts to establish a just administration, and his difficulties with ‘Slymering Slimy’ the President. We cannot help suspecting that Herr Dekker often gives us caricatures for portraits, and that he was sometimes guilty of folly, and perhaps injustice, in his endeavours to rectify wrongs; while his fine imagination not unfrequently idealises facts into romance, prose into poetry. Some of the episodes - that of Saidjah for instance - in the seventeenth chapter, are not of course without a substratum of fact, but are manifest creations of an imaginative genius of no ordinary kind. Herr Dekker, unfortunately, parted with the copyright of his book, and the Dutch Government had enough influence to get it suppressed; but it has done its work in the sensation which it has produced. Herr Dekker has since published several pamphlets on the same subject, and the colonial question now engages universal attention. Let us hope that the issue of ‘Max Havelaar’ may be as triumphant as that of ‘Uncle Tom,’ its prototype.