CONTENTS.
| PAGE | |
|---|---|
| Introduction | [ix] |
| The King’s Dream—Frederick Van Eeden | [1] |
| The Dominie—C. K. Elout | [6] |
| My Hero—Conrad van der Liede | [35] |
| Newspaper Humour | [52] |
| A Rascally Valet—Multatuli | [55] |
| Droogstoppel Introduces Himself—Multatuli | [77] |
| Droogstoppel Pays a Charitable Visit—Multatuli | [83] |
| Aphorisms—Multatuli | [90] |
| Of Self-Depreciation—Multatuli | [93] |
| Of Education, with Practical Illustrations—Multatuli | [94] |
| Going into Business—Multatuli | [112] |
| Two Parables—Multatuli | [113] |
| Thersites and Plato—Multatuli | [115] |
| Egotism—Multatuli | [115] |
| The Story of Chresos—Multatuli | [116] |
| The Fairy Tale that Fancy told Wouter—Multatuli | [119] |
| Half-an-hour at the Hair-dresser’s—Anon. | [125] |
| In the Little Republic—L. H. J. Lamberts-Hurrelbrinck | [139] |
| Newspaper Humour | [173] |
| Fiction at Sea—A. Werumeus Buning | [174] |
| Newspaper Humour | [178] |
| Farmer Gerrit’s Visit to Amsterdam—J. J. Cremer | [184] |
| No Sword—“Humoristisch Album” | [197] |
| A Student’s Lodgings Sixty Years Since—J. Van Lennep | [200] |
| A Colonial Prize-Giving—Annie Foore | [205] |
| How Mathis Knoups turned “Liberal” and then “Catholic” again—Emile Seipgens | [212] |
| Newspaper Humour | [232] |
| The Candidate—T. H. Hooijer | [252] |
| Epigrams | [257] |
| The Village on the Frontier—Van Lennep | [261] |
| Proverbs | [290] |
| A Dutch Podsnap—Gerard Keller | [293] |
| Rough Draft of a New Set of Regulations—Uilenspiegel | [346] |
| The Story of a Bouquet—Uilenspiegel | [347] |
| Unbidden Guests—Annie Foore | [351] |
| Biographical Index of Writers | [393] |
INTRODUCTION.
There appears to be an idea abroad to the effect that the “Humour of Holland” could be most satisfactorily dealt with in a chapter resembling the famous one “Of Snakes in Ireland.” As the average English reader, in the most favourable instances, knows little more of Dutch literature than a name or two (Rembrandt has introduced us to “the poet Vondel,” and if Southey were not so little read in these days Bilderdijk and Cats would not be so unfamiliar), the subject offers a free field to the constructive imagination. Yet even so, one would think it must be obvious that the nation which has produced a Teniers, a Jan Steen, and—in some of his moods—a Rembrandt, could not be entirely destitute of humour. The estimate of its quality may be a question of taste; but—though many people practically do adopt this form of logic—we cannot make the fact of our not finding it to our liking a ground for denying its existence.
Of course, before determining what the humour of a nation is like, we need to know what is that nation’s intellectual bent as a whole, and what forces have been at work to determine its character. On this point we may quote a paragraph or two from a Dutch writer, J. H. Hooijer, whom we shall meet again in the course of these pages. He is describing a village in North Holland, in the heart of the fat meadow-lands, famous for the production of Dutch cheeses.
“The same village which you find so depressing this November day,—so damp, so clammy, so dripping with water,—makes a very different impression when Spring, with full hands, has showered her blossom-snow over the orchards, or in the autumn, when the trees are hanging full of golden pears or rosy apples. Greener meadow-land is nowhere on earth, unless it be in the Emerald Isle itself. The rich green pastures have velvety lights in the sunshine, and the splendid cattle—their dappled skins smooth and shining as silk—show out to advantage against it—colour on colour. At such times there is a glow of colour in the whole landscape, which, strange as it may sound, reminds one of the South,—a glow one might almost think was stolen from the palettes of the Old Masters. Every breath you draw is perfumed with new milk and flowers, mingled with the salt smell of the sea. There is a fulness of outward life—a bubbling up and overflowing of vital juices,—for which they had an eye and a heart, those great old realists. The man who despises a rich clover pasture, speckled here and there with white-fleeced sheep; who cannot spare a look for the magnificent horned cattle that stand staring at you, with dreamy, half-sad gaze, over the fence, while Geertje’s black eyes flash at you from behind the milking-pail,—well, he need not come to North Holland. Intellects of this sort, exclusively devoted to the contemplation of the sublime, will find everything ugly in these parts. To such an one our Old Masters have nothing to say; for him, Paul Potter’s art is a mere waste of time, and many a racy bit of Vondel trivial nonsense. Happily the cheery sun is of another mind, and his smile falls well-pleased on the endless emerald plain. He nurses it, feeds it, warms it,—he sweetens the blades of grass for the palate of the pampered cow. And sometimes, just before setting, he draws along the horizon, with purple finger, broad streaks of crimson fire, and then the dykes flame out like ruby bands winding over the green velvet robe of the earth, and you wish for the power of wielding the brush, so as to throw on canvas what one might almost call these brutal effects of colour.”
Here we have a fertile country, with the means of existence in plenty, but not one where it is easy to live without hard work. These rich meadow-lands have been wrung from the sea by the painful toil of centuries, and are only held by the tenure of constant vigilance. But the struggle for existence is not hard enough to exhaust the vital energies, and produce a stunted careworn race. There is abundance of rough but wholesome food, such as results in strong limbs and clear skins; there is leisure for dancing and play—rough horse-play though it may be—when work is done; that there is a recognised place in life for mere beauty and luxury, is shown in the gold head-ornaments of the women. There are no mountains to suggest the sense of remoteness and mystery; and the grey North Sea, with its sands and mud-flats, is rather a fact to be accepted, a foe to be struggled with, in a grim matter-of-course way from day to day, than the weird terror that the ocean is to more imaginative peoples. But within the narrow and well-ordered bounds of farm and homestead, there is a richness of colour to fire the painter’s eye; the skies and sunsets are the glorious ones that flame over fen and marshland, and winter brings the joy of glittering ice and ringing skates. Life is and has been less bare and hard than of old in Scotland; but on the whole, the history of the two nations is somewhat similar, and they have many points of character in common.
Both learned thrift, endurance, and foresight in a hard school; both early acquired the inconvenient habit of thinking for themselves and dispensing with any mental spectacles save those of their own choosing; and both displayed a bull-dog tenacity in holding by their hardly won rights. But after the Reformation a marked difference becomes evident. Scotland only emerged from the troubles of that epoch to encounter the religious persecution of the Stuarts. The seventeenth century was fruitful of heroism; it tried the national character as by fire, and developed its sterner and deeper elements; it was not unfavourable even to tenderness, of a rugged and undemonstrative character, but the lighter side of life was left, for the time being, entirely in abeyance. In the quieter time which succeeded the Union, reaction soon became stagnation. The fiery earnestness,—call it fanaticism, if you like,—which had been so tremendous a force in action and endurance, now became a sour harsh bigotry, lying like a leaden weight on men’s lives. It is one thing to be in such deadly earnest over an urgent crisis, that you have no time or inclination to admire a picture or laugh at a joke; it is another to forbid such enjoyment to other people, because it is inconsistent with the attitude of mind proper to the crisis that is over and past. We all have les défauts de nos qualités; and the mistakes of reformers include a tendency to regard the conclusions at which they have arrived as final, and an imperfect estimate of the relative value of means and ends—in other words, the inability to see when a truth (that is to say, any particular statement of a truth) has done its work. This general state of flatness and dulness could only be ended by a volcanic outburst,—and such a one came in with Burns.
To return to Holland. The shaking off of the Spanish yoke was followed by a period of peace and prosperity. Dutch ships had for some time past been bringing home the wealth of the Indies. Dutch admirals were finding their way into unknown seas. Colonies sprang up in the Spice Islands, and the money gained by trade turned the swamps reclaimed from the sea into flower-gardens, or covered them with stately buildings. Wealthy burghers, even of the strictest Calvinist persuasion, did not appear to find their Protestant principles an obstacle to the encouragement of painters and poets. Roemer Visscher and his daughters, though members of the defeated and unpopular church, kept open house at Amsterdam for all who loved art and letters, and assembled round them the best wits of the time. Gerbrand Bredero, painter and poet both, belonged to a respectable burgher family, who—though grieved by the excesses of his riotous youth, and sorely troubled by his contemplated marriage with Alida Jansdoter, the pretty but characterless widow who kept the Toren van Monnickendam tavern—do not appear to have mourned over his choice of a vocation, or regarded his plays as anything to disapprove of. Joost van den Vondel, the tragic poet (in whose genius some have found an excuse for belittling that of our own Milton), was a deeply religious man; and though he seems to have suffered from the aspersions of the religious, it was not so much on account of his poems, as because he was a Baptist, and they Reformed Calvinists. No doubt there was religious bigotry in Holland, but there were also elements of healthy life which kept it in check. And there was a time when thought became dull and stagnant,—when the dead-weight of the commonplace, backed by the double sanction of social and religious orthodoxy, forced all individuality into its own prepared mould,—when the Dominie looked with suspicion on every independent expression of opinion, and the “Pious” kept a watchful eye on the Dominie,—but that time was not yet. Betje Wolff, who suffered in her youth from Cornelia Slimpslamp and Brother Benjamin,—and never forgot it,—came in for part of it; but the worst was not till after she and her friend Aagje had been laid to rest side by side. That was the darkness just before the dawn; for surely there never was such a world of dead forms and petty conventions, such a stifling atmosphere of cant and artificiality, as that in which Multatuli spent his childhood.