This is saying all that the wit of man can suggest in favour of obscurity! Many, however, will agree with an observation made by Gravina on the over-refinement of modern composition, that "we do not think we have attained genius, till others must possess as much themselves to understand us." Fontenelle, in France, followed by Marivaux, Thomas, and others, first introduced that subtilised manner of writing, which tastes more natural and simple reject; one source of such bitter complaints of obscurity.
LITERARY DUTCH.
Pere Bohours seriously asks if a German can be a BEL ESPRIT? This concise query was answered by Kramer, in a ponderous volume which bears for title, Vindiciæ nominis Germanici. This mode of refutation does not prove that the question was then so ridiculous as it was considered. The Germans of the present day, although greatly superior to their ancestors, there are who opine are still distant from the acmé of TASTE, which characterises the finished compositions of the French and the English authors. Nations display genius before they form taste.
It was the mode with English and French writers to dishonour the Germans with the epithets of heavy, dull, and phlegmatic compilers, without taste, spirit, or genius; genuine descendants of the ancient Bœotians,
Crassoque sub æëre nati.
Many imaginative and many philosophical performances have lately shown that this censure has now become unjust; and much more forcibly answers the sarcastic question of Bohours than the thick quarto of Kramer.
Churchill finely says of genius that it is independent of situation,
And may hereafter even in Holland rise.
Vondel, whom, as Marchand observes, the Dutch regard as their Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, had a strange defective taste; the poet himself knew none of these originals, but he wrote on patriotic subjects, the sure way to obtain popularity; many of his tragedies are also drawn from the Scriptures; all badly chosen and unhappily executed. In his Deliverance of the Children of Israel, one of his principal characters is the Divinity! In his Jerusalem Destroyed we are disgusted with a tedious oration by the angel Gabriel, who proves theologically, and his proofs extend through nine closely printed pages in quarto, that this destruction has been predicted by the prophets; and, in the Lucifer of the same author, the subject is grossly scandalised by this haughty spirit becoming stupidly in love with Eve, and it is for her he causes the rebellion of the evil angels, and the fall of our first parents. Poor Vondel kept a hosier's shop, which he left to the care of his wife, while he indulged his poetical genius. His stocking-shop failed, and his poems produced him more chagrin than glory; for in Holland, even a patriotic poet, if a bankrupt, would, no doubt, be accounted by his fellow-citizens as a madman. Vondel had no other master but his genius, which, with his uncongenial situation, occasioned all his errors.