From first to last the culture-history of Holland illustrates clearly enough the importance of the freer political life to the life of the mind. It is in the period of independence that Holland begins to play a great part in European culture. Previously, the multitude of popular "chambers of rhetoric,"[846] and so forth, yielded no fine fruits; but in the stress of self-government the republic begins to produce scholars, thinkers, and men of science, who affect those of surrounding nations. Already in 1584, when nothing of the kind existed in France or England, a Dutch literary academy published a Dutch grammar;[847] and the republic was "the peculiarly learned State of Europe throughout the seventeenth century,"[848] producing more of original classical research and scholarly teaching in its small sphere than any other. Freedom and endowment of university teaching brought in such Germans as Gronovius and Graevius; and Leibnitz looked to little Holland as a model in many things for backward Germany.[849] Printing became one of the industries of the country; and the Elzevirs were long the great classic publishers for Europe. Free universities and a free press, indeed, were the main conditions of the Dutch classical renaissance.
The conditions of progress in belles lettres, on the other hand, being less propitious, the development was inferior. All Europe could buy Latin books printed in Holland; but few foreigners read Dutch, and the finer native literature was sustained only by the necessarily small class which had both leisure and culture. The very devotion to culture which, as was claimed by Grotius, made the well-to-do Dutch in his youth the greatest students of languages in Europe,[850] wrought rather for the importation of foreign literature than the fostering or elevation of the native. So that though the Catholic poetess Anna Bijns,[851] and later the Catholic Spreghel, "the Dutch Ennius" (1549-1612), and Hooft, "the Dutch Tacitus" (1581-1647), made worthy beginnings, there was no great florescence. In the terms of the case, the two former represent the general Catholic culture-influence; and Hooft, eminent alike as poet and historian, owed his artistic stimulus to the three youthful years he spent in Italy studying Italian literature.[852] Of the more celebrated native poets, Cats is prosaic, though to this day highly popular, suiting as he does the plane of taste developed under a strenuous commercialism; and Vondel alone, by his influence on Milton, enters into the blood of outside European literature.
Fanatical Calvinism,[853] again, was not primarily favourable to philosophic thought; and it is to the influence of Descartes, who made Holland his home for many years, that the possibility of the later great performance of Spinoza is to be ascribed. But the impulse, once given, and sustained by such an atmosphere as was set up by Bayle and other French refugees, developed a new culture-force; and in the eighteenth century the Dutch press was a disseminator of French and English rationalism, as well as of the classic erudition which still flourished. All along, though none of the supreme names in science is Dutch, scientific culture was in general higher than elsewhere.[854] Such influences made afresh for a revival of native literature, and throughout the eighteenth century it is the foreign stimulus that is seen at work. Thus Van Effen (1684-1725) read much English and wrote much French, but was also the best Dutch writer of his time; the brothers Van Haren (1710-79) were diplomatists, and friends of Voltaire; and the two lady novelists, Wolff and Deken, produced their three admired books (1782-92) under the influence of Richardson and Goethe.
But as against these debts to foreign example, the Dutch Republic in its time of flower produced a great and markedly native body of art, which to this day ranks in its kind with that of the great age in Italy. It may have been the example set in the Spanish Netherlands by the Austrian archdukes, after the severance, that gave the lead to the Dutch growth; but there is no imitation and nothing nationally second-rate in their total output. The Flemish Rubens (1577-1640) precedes by twenty-one years his pupil Vandyck and the great Spaniard Velasquez, and by nearly thirty years the Dutch Rembrandt; but no four contemporary masters were ever more individual; and the Dutch group of Rembrandt, Hals, Van der Helst, Gerard Dow, and the rest, will hold its own with the Flemish swarm headed by Rubens and Vandyck. It is worth while in this connection to note afresh how closely is art florescence bound up with economic forces. Dutch and Flemish art, like Italian, is in the first place substantially a product of economic demand, the commercial aristocracy of the Netherlands commissioning and buying pictures as did the clerical aristocracy of Italy. It has been denied that there is any economic explanation for the eventual arrest of great art in the Netherlands; but when we note the special conditions of the case the economic explanation will be found decisive.
Great art, it is true, always tends to set up a convention, which is the stoppage of greatness; but even great art can so arrest progress only when the economic and social sphere is curtailed; and the Dutch economic sphere, as we have seen, was practically non-expansive after the disaster of 1672, which date also begins a new period of ruinous war for Flanders. Rembrandt died in 1664. He and his contemporaries and their pupils had produced a body of painting immense in quantity; and the later and poorer generations, having such a body of classic work passed on to them, naturally and necessarily rested on their treasure. The population of the United Provinces, estimated to have reached a million-and-a-half in the Middle Ages,[855] had risen in the great period to three or three-and-a-half millions.[856] From this figure it positively fell away in the eighteenth century.[857] Here then was a shrinking population, loaded with old and new debt and overwhelmed with taxes, consciously growing poorer, with no prospect of recovery, and already stocked with a multitude of pictures[858] by great masters. That it should go on commissioning new pictures with the old munificence was impossible: it was more concerned to sell than to buy; and what demand had elicited lack of demand arrested. There is no clearer sociological case in history.
After all that has come and gone, it is important to realise, in correction of the megalomaniac view of things, that Holland is to-day literally larger,[859] more populated,[860] and more productive than she was in the "palmy days"; and that her colonial "empire," now administered on just principles, includes a population of over 30,000,000. Over sixty years ago M'Culloch wrote that "though their commerce be much decayed, the Dutch, even at this moment, are the richest and most comfortable people of Europe."[861] The latter part of the statement would not be very far out to-day, though popular comfort perhaps does not now keep pace with population. Otherwise it no longer holds. In the latter half of the nineteenth century there began a vigorous revival of Dutch commerce and industry, Holland becoming once more expansive. From 1872 to 1906 Dutch exports, measured by weight, increased ninefold, imports sixfold, and transit trade over threefold; and the expansion steadily continues; the value of the transit trade rising from 9,392 million guilders in 1906 to 12,684 millions in 1910; while imports increased by nearly 30 per cent and exports by 26 per cent. Much of this expansion appears to be due to the advantages accruing to Holland as a free-trade country alongside of protectionist Germany, whose far greater natural resources redound largely to the gain of the free-trading neighbour.
In detail, the commercial situation of to-day is curiously like the old at many points. The debt is still relatively great—about £97,000,000 sterling;[862] and about a fourth of the whole expenditure is interest; another fourth going for "defence." Always making the best of their soil, alike with roots and cereals, the people go on increasing the area under cultivation and the yield per hectare.[863] Still, as of old, much food and raw material is imported to be exported again[864]—in large part to Germany. Fishing now employs only 20,000 men with over 5,300[865] boats; the annual product is valued at under £1,000,000; and of over 10,800 clearances of vessels from Dutch ports in 1910 only 4,533 were Dutch, representing a total mercantile navy of only 764.[866] But of Dutch vessels engaged in the carrying trade between foreign ports there were 4,383 in 1909,[867] with more than seven times the tonnage of the home navy. Thus the nation still subsists largely by playing middleman, partly by manufactures, partly by dairy and other produce, little by fishing,[868] but still largely by freightage. Java does not figure as a source of revenue for Holland, being administered in its own interest,[869] with less taxation of the people than goes on in British India.
Of the conditions which in Holland tell against increase of well-being, the most notable is the large birth-rate resulting there as elsewhere from the rapid modern expansion of industry. With a population less by 1,580,000 than that of Belgium, Holland has annually a larger surplus of births over deaths. It may be interesting to compare Dutch statistics with those of Portugal and Sweden, which have nearly the same population, as regards birth-rate and emigration. Each of the three States at 1895 had slightly over or under 5,000,000 inhabitants; and in 1909 slightly over or under 6,000,000. Their marriages and their emigration were:—