Holland's Influence on English Language and Literature

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Chapter VIII Why the Influence of England on Dutch Language and Literature is of Recent Date, While that of Holland on English Language and Literature Occurred Much Earlier and During Several Centuries.

Although not included necessarily in the plan of this little volume, yet a few words about the influence of England on Holland, and its language and literature, may find here a place, since some one who reads these pages may ask the question: Was not the influence of Holland on England a mutual one, and did not England exert as much influence on Holland as the latter did on the former? This question may be not a necessary one, it is nevertheless so closely connected with our subject that a few words of explanation may not be superfluous. It is interesting, anyhow, in connection with our subject to keep in mind at least a general outline of the whole relation through history between the two countries. Now this is in the main dominated by three circumstances:

1.	The course of general civilization from east to west;
2.	The peculiar development of civilization in England which was interrupted by several conquests; and
3.	The regular development of the Netherlands as a world-center of civilization some centuries earlier than the development of England as a world-empire.

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In the explanation and interpretation of these three observations we find the history of the relations between Holland and England.

I. Civilization took its course from East to West. It is generally accepted that in Asia is to be found the cradle of the human race. From Asia came the tribes which spread over Europe. From the eastern empires of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Persia and Palestine, civilization came to the shores of Europe. At first Greece, later the Roman empire, became the center of civilization in Europe, and from Greece and Rome it spread over the western countries of Europe under the leadership of the mediaeval Christian church. So Christian civilization soon reached the shores of the Atlantic, came to the Netherlands, and crossed the Channel to the British Isles, after the way had been prepared by the armies of heathen Rome. Holland was part of the European Continent, was most closely in contact with the rest of Europe, and became speedily the center of trade between the Baltic and the Mediterranean, between the heart of Germany and England. But England had a more isolated position, was not so closely connected with all Europe, and had not that central position which was the privilege of Holland. So the Netherlands and especially the Southern Provinces soon became a center of trade and industry, of art and literature and of all civilization, while the development of civilization in England remained far behind.

II. To this course, taken by the history of civilization, must be added the circumstance that the development of civilization in England had been interrupted several times by the most awful conquests, accompanied by wholesale devastations of every previous civilization. England has been conquered, first by the

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Romans, then by the Angles and Saxons, later by the Danes, after that time by William the Conqueror with his Normans, and especially the last conquest, and in connection with it the dreadful wars with France, followed by the war of the Roses, have exerted an influence on the civilization in England, which finally left that country during the fourteenth and fifteenth century in a condition far behind the civilization of some other parts of Europe, especially of the southern Netherlands. All these conquests, most of them depressing and influencing the whole people for a long time, and accompanied as they were by murder and devastation, by robbery and oppression, have together brought a rough, as well as a dramatic element, into English national life, a life which was full of tragic stories, noble fights and criminal performances. This may to a certain extent explain the early development of English literature, and especially of the drama, at a time when the general standard of civilization was still very low. In the dramas of Shakespeare we see the results of the whole history of England till that time; a true mirror of all its great events, all its energy, all its crimes, all its activity, all its sufferings, as well as of all its display of brute power and roughness. This peculiarly rough, but powerful, individualism, full of energy and activity was able to produce exceptions like Shakespeare, Marlowe and Spenser, in a time when the general standard of English national life was very low indeed. This is surprising, and to be explained only by the conquests of the island and the nearly perpetual oppression of a large part of the English people. Even at the present time, notwithstanding all the world-power and wealth of England, it has as its ‘poet laureate’ no better man than Robert Bridges; as its history of English literature no better

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work than that of the Frenchman Taine; as its best painter no better man than Alma Tadema, a Dutchman by birth and education; while in winning Nobel prizes it remains far behind the Netherlands of today; and in preserving mediaeval feudalism even in its institutions of learning, it is more conservative than almost any other country in the world. Yet in our time the general standard of national life in no other country is as high as in England. When in our days we look at the splendor and the wealth of the British empire, with its overwhelming position, and compare with it the modest position of the kingdom of Holland, we are inclined to believe that such may have been always the situation and we hardly imagine how entirely different it was some centuries ago. But as far as we are not blinded by the present situation, and ask just for the truth of history, we learn that some centuries ago, not England, but the Netherlands were far ahead in general civilization, and in national standard of life, and we find the cause of the backwardness of English national life in the many conquests, and nearly perpetual oppression of the people in English History.

III. On the contrary the national life in the Netherlands since the crusades developed very fast and regularly. Modern democracy arose in the cities of Flanders sooner, and more splendidly, than in any other country in the world. Charles V (1500-1558) himself born at Bruges in the same Southern Netherlands, where once, at Herstal, stood the cradle of the great Carolingians - Charles V, the Emperor of Germany, the King of Spain, the Lord of the Netherlands, on whose empire the sun did not set, the man of the world-empire of his time, got two-fifths of all his income from the Netherlands, where learning and

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civilization had their headquarters, where luxury and wealth was accumulated by trade and industry. And at the same time England under the Tudors was so far behind in national civilization, that we are astonished when reading what the best historians tell us about it. At the time when Elizabeth (1558-1603), ‘the good queen Beth,’ came to the throne, England's trade was little, and its industry did not amount to anything; the best citizens were put to death, or fled from the country to escape the persecutions of Bloody Mary; most of the land belonged to the lords of the castles, and nearly all the revenues of the country had to come from the wool it produced, as being in the main a pastoral land, so that the ‘woolsac’ is even today taken for the symbol of the origin of England's wealth.

At this time, when in the Netherlands, according to the Italian historian Guiciardini, everybody knew how to write, and to read, in England many even of the Peers of the land could neither write nor read.

At a time when in the Netherlands, in one city (Antwerp), five hundred marble palaces of the wealthy merchants were destroyed by one conquest, and the ladies dressed like princesses, so that the French queen one time in the year 1301 at a banquet at Brughes exclaimed: ‘I thought that I was the only queen here, but I see that all ladies are queens,’¹ - at that time and even two centuries later the houses of the upper classes in England were described by Erasmus (otherwise full of admiration for the English people) in these words: ‘The floors are commonly of clay, strewed with rushes, which are only lifted at long

1 Groen van Prinsterer, Textbook of Dutch History, p. 17. Incredible, says Groen, was the welfare of the Flemish cities Ghent, Ypres and Brughes. Ghent alone had 80,000 citizens able to go to war. This was in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

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intervals, and under which lies unmolested, an ancient collection of beer, grease, bones, spittle and every nameless abomination.¹ In Skikton Castle, belonging to the earl of Cumberland, and built in the year 1572, as one of the most splendid castles of Northern England according to Hallam ‘none of the chambers had chairs, window glass or carpets.’² Even Queen Elizabeth did not know the use of the fork and ate her meat with her fingers; her perpetual habit of swearing like a common soldier everybody knows; and historians like Froude and Hallam tell us that the standard of morality at that time in England was not higher than the standard of elegance in English homes, and in the English way of living. No wonder that a good many of the English soldiers, who at that time came to the Netherlands, were looked at like ‘half naked barbarians,’ worse than even the Spaniards in roughness and cruelty.

The Dutch skilled laborers and farmers, who settled in England's eastern and south-eastern districts, found there easily a living, while on the contrary the Pilgrim fathers at Leyden could hardly make a living, because their standard of education and skill was lower than that of their Dutch competitors.

The simple historical truth is, that at that period the undeveloped energy of the English people was still waiting for the time of its glorious unfolding, and that, notwithstanding the exceptional examples of Spenser, Shakespeare and some other individuals, the general standard of English civilization was very low, while at the same time that of the Netherlands was ahead of all Europe.

1 Marcus Dods, Erasmus and other Essays, p. 13. Other descriptions of English houses in Douglas Campbell, The Puritans, I, 326, v.v. and the authors quoted there.

2 Hallam, Middle Ages, quoted by Campbell, I, 327.

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The glorious time for England, as a whole, came in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That of the Netherlands was in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is not in the least in favor of the Netherlands, neither a disgrace to England, but merely a chronological fact, that the development of civilization, of wealth, and power in the Netherlands came some centuries earlier than in England. But the consequence of this historical fact is, that during the centuries of higher civilization, Holland exerted permanently its influence on England, on English language and literature; and, on the contrary, that the time in which England exerted some considerable influence on Holland is to be sought especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in our present time.

Nearly all the words of English origin in the Dutch language are of very recent date, and never in history have so many English books been translated into Dutch as in our present time. On the contrary nearly all the words of Dutch origin in the English language are from earlier ages, and the influence of Holland exerted on English literature dates from those centuries when Holland was in its glorious days, and when civilization in the Netherlands was at a higher development and more general than in any other country in the world. And while at present Holland cannot be said to have any influence whatever on England in general, including English language and literature - except in South Africa - it is a matter of fact that every year English words are creeping into the Dutch language, and that English literature exerts an influence on Dutch literature which nobody can deny.

All history proves that whenever two countries, by

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their natural situation, have permanent and frequent intercourse with each other, either one or the other will exert a more dominant and prevailing influence, and which one shall dominate depends at any time upon the question in which of the two countries civilization, power and wealth are more prominent.

The predominance of the Netherlands we find as far back as the time in which William the Conqueror brought Flemish soldiers, and Flemish weavers, to England, and married a Flemish princess, but is to be found especially from the fourteenth till the eighteenth centuries, while that of England begins in the eighteenth century and has been working in its full power through the whole nineteenth century till our present time.

Yet England's influence on Holland never could be so very important, for the simple reason that France as well as Germany are in more close contact with Holland than England.