After 1830 Holland took a more prominent position in European thought than she could claim since the end of the 17th century. In scientific and religious literature her men of letters showed themselves cognizant of the newest shades 19th century influences. of opinion, and freely ventilated their ideas. The language resisted the pressure of German from the outside, and from within broke through its long stagnation and enriched itself, as a medium for literary expression, with a multitude of fresh and colloquial forms. At the same time, no very great genius arose in Holland in any branch of literature. The vast labours of Jakobus van Lennep (1802-1868) consist of innumerable translations, historical novels and national romances, which have gained for him the title of the leader of the Dutch romantic school.
The novels of Sir Walter Scott had a great influence on Dutch literature, and the period was rich in historical novels. J. van der Hage (1806-1854), who wrote under the pseudonym of Jan Frederick Oltmans, was the author of the famous novels, Castle Loevenstein in 1570 (1834), and The Shepherd (1838), both dealing with the national history. Other popular works were the antique romance Charikles and Euphorion (1831) of Petrus van Limburg-Brouwer (1795-1847), author of a history of Greek mythology; the Mejuffrouw Lèclerc (1849), and the Portretten van Joost van den Vondel (1876) of the literary historian and critic J.A.A. Alberdingk Thijm (1820-1899); the Jan Faessen (1856) of Lodewijk Mulder (b. 1822); and the Lucretia d’Este of W.P. Walters (1827-1891). Johannes Kneppelhout (1814-1885) sketched university life at Leiden in two amusing volumes of Studententypen (1841) and Studentenleven (1844). Reinier Cornelis Bakhuizen van den Brink (1810-1865) was the chief critic of the romantic movement, and Everhard Johannes Potgieter (1808-1875) its mystical philosopher and esoteric lyrical poet. The genius and influence of Potgieter were very considerable, but they were exceeded by the gifts of Nicolaes Beets (q.v.), author of the famous Camera Obscura (1836), a masterpiece of humour and character. Johannes Pieter Hasebroek (1812-1896), who has been called the Dutch Charles Lamb, wrote in 1840 an admirable collection of essays entitled Truth and Dreams. Willem Hofdijk (1816-1888) wrote a collection of ballads, Kennemerland (1849-1852), and a series of epic and dramatic poems in the romantic style. Bernard ter Haar (1806-1881), an Amsterdam pastor and, in the last year of his life, a professor at Utrecht, made a reputation as a poet by his Johannes and Theagenes, a legend of apostolic times (1838). His poems were collected in 1866 and 1879. A poet of unusual power and promise was lost in the early death of Pieter Augustus de Genestet (1803-1861). His Eve of Saint Nicholas appeared in 1849, and was followed by two volumes of verse in 1851 and 1861, the second of which contains some poems that have attained great popularity. Among the poets should not be forgotten two writers of verse for children, Jan Pieter Heije (1809-1876) and J.J.A. Gouverneur (1809-1889). Criticism was represented by W.J.A. Jonckbloet (1817-1885), author of an excellent History of Dutch Literature (1868-1870), C. Busken Huet, and Jan ten Brink (1834-1901), author of a great number of valuable works on literary history, notably of a history of Dutch literature (1897), and a series of biographies of 19th century Dutch writers (new edition, 1902). His novels were collected in 13 volumes in 1885. With Isaak da Costa (q.v.), W.J. van Zeggelen (1811-1879), and J.J.L. Ten Kate (q.v.), the domestic tendency of Cats and Bilderdijk overpowered the influence of romanticism. The romantic drama found its best exponent in H.J. Schiminel (q.v.), who found a disciple in D.F. van Heyst (b. 1831), whose George van Lalaing was produced in 1873. Hugo Beijerman (ps. Glanor) produced a good play in his Uitgaan (1873), which was followed by other successes. Rosier Faessen (b. 1833) published his dramatic works in 1883.
The recent literature of Holland presents the interesting phenomenon of an aesthetic revolution, carefully and cleverly planned, crowned with unanticipated success, and dying away in a languor encouraged by the complete Recent developments. absence of organized resistance. It would perhaps be difficult to point to another European example so well defined of the vicissitudes which keep the history of literature varied and fresh. For the thirty or forty years preceding 1880 the course of belles-lettres in Holland was smooth and even sluggish. The Dutch writers had slipped into a conventionality of treatment and a strict limitation of form from which even the most striking talents among them could scarcely escape. In 1880 the most eminent authors of this early period were ready to pass away, and they appeared to be preparing no successors to take their place. The greatest humorist of Holland, Nicolaas Beets, had drawn his works together. The most interesting novelist, Mrs Gertrude Bosboom-Toussaint, had in her last psychological stories shown an unexpected sympathy with new ideas. M.G.L. van Loghem (b. 1849), known under the pseudonym of “Fiore delle Neve,” made a great success by his Een liefde in het Zuiden (1881), followed in 1882 by Liana, and in 1884 by Van eene Sultane. Among the novelists were Gerard Keller (b. 1829), author of From Home (1867); Johan Gram (b. 1833), of whose novels De Familie Schaffels (1870) is the best known; Hendrik de Veer (1829-1890), author of Frans Holster (1871); Justus van Maurik (b. 1846), who wrote plays and short sketches of Amsterdam life (Uit het Volk, 1879), and Arnold Buning (b. 1846), whose Marine Sketches (1880) won great popularity. The colonial novels of N. Marie C. Sloot, born in Java in 1853, are widely read in Holland and Belgium, and many of them have been translated into German. A number of them were collected (Schiedam, 1900-1902) as Romantische Werken. Adèle Opzoomer (b. 1856; pseud. A.C.S. Wallis) made her first success in 1877 with In Days of Strife. The two leading Dutch men of letters, however, besides Beets and Douwes Dekker, were critics, Conrad Busken-Huet (q.v.) and Carel Vosmaer (q.v.). In Huet the principles of the 1840-1880 period were summed up; he had been during all those years the fearless and trusty watch-dog of Dutch letters, as he understood them. He lived just long enough to become aware that a revolution was approaching, not to comprehend its character; but his accomplished fidelity to literary principle and his wide knowledge have been honoured even by the most bitter of the younger school. Vosmaer, although in certain directions more sympathetic than Huet, and himself an innovator, has not escaped so easily, because he has been charged with want of courage in accepting what he knew to be inevitable.
In November 1881 there died a youth named Jacques Perk (1860-1881), who had done no more than publish a few sonnets in the Spectator, a journal published by Vosmaer. He was no sooner dead, however, than his posthumous poems, and in particular a cycle of sonnets called Mathilde, were published (1882), and awakened extraordinary emotion. Perk had rejected all the formulas of rhetorical poetry, and had broken up the conventional rhythms. There had been heard no music like his in Holland for two hundred years. A group of young men, united in a sort of esoteric adoration of the memory of Perk, collected around his name. They joined to their band a man somewhat older than themselves, Marcellus Emants (born 1848), poet, novelist and dramatist, who had come forward in 1879 with a symbolical poem called Lilith, which had been stigmatized as audacious and meaningless; encouraged by the admiration of his juniors, Emants published in 1881 a treatise on Young Holland, in the form of a novel in which the first open attack was made on the old school. The next appearance was that of Willem Kloos (born 1857), who had been the editor and intimate friend of Perk, and who now undertook to lead the army of rebellion. His violent attacks on recognized authority in aesthetics began in 1882, and created a considerable scandal. For some time, however, the new poets and critics found a great difficulty in being heard, since all the channels of periodical literature were closed to them. But in 1883 Emants expressed his intellectual aspirations in his poem The Twilight of the Gods, and in 1884 the young school founded a review, De Nieuwe Gids, which was able to offer a direct challenge to De Gids, the ultra-respectable Dutch quarterly. In this year a new element was introduced: hitherto the influences of the young Dutch poetry had chiefly come from England; they were those of Shelley, Mrs Browning, the Rossettis. In 1884 Frans Netscher began to imitate with avidity the French naturalists. For some time, then, the new Dutch literature became a sort of mixture of Shelley and Zola, very violent, heady and bewildering. In 1885 the Persephone and other Poems of Albert Verwey (b. 1865) introduced a lyrical poet of real merit to Holland; Emants published his novel Goudakker’s Illusions. This was the great flowering moment of the new school. It was at this juncture that the principal recent writer of Holland, Louis Couperus (b. 1863), made his first definite appearance. Born in the Hague, the opening years of his boyhood were spent in Java, and he had preserved in all his nature a certain tropical magnificence. In 1884 a little volume of lyrics, and in 1886 the more important Orchids, showed in Couperus a poet whose sympathies were at first entirely with the new school. But he was destined to be a novelist, and his earliest story, Eline Vere (1889), already took him out of the ranks of his contemporaries. In 1890 he published Destiny (known as Footsteps of Fate in the English version), and in 1892 Ecstasy. This was followed in 1894 by Majesty, in 1896 by World-wide Peace, in 1898 by Metamorphosis, a delicate study of character, in 1899 by Fidessa, in 1901 by Quiet Force, and in 1902 by the first volume of a tetralogy called The Books of Small Souls. Of all these later books, some of which have been translated into English, by Couperus, it is perhaps Ecstasy in which the peculiar quality of his work is seen at present to the greatest advantage. This is an extreme sensitiveness to psychological phenomena, expressed in terms of singular delicacy and beauty. The talent of Couperus is like a rich but simple tropical flower laden with colour and odour. He separated himself, as he developed, from the more fanatical members of the group, and addressed himself to the wider public. Another writer, of a totally different class, resembling Couperus only in his defiance of the ruling system of aesthetics, is the prominent Ultramontane politician and bishop, E.J.A.M. Schaepmann (born 1844), whose poem of Aja Sofia originally appeared in 1886. Recent novelists of some polemical vigour are H. Borel and van Hulzen. A very delightful talent was revealed by Frederick van Eeden in Little Johnny (1887), a prose fairy-tale; in Ellen (1891), a cycle of mysterious and musical elegies; and in From the Cold Pools of Death (1901), a very melancholy novel. Another poet of less refinement of spirit, but even greater sumptuousness of form, appeared in Helène Swarth-Lapidoth (born 1859), whose Pictures and Voices belongs to 1887. In that year also, in which Dutch literature reached its height of fecundity, was published the powerful and scandalous naturalistic novel, A Love, by L. van Deyssel (K.J.L. Alberdingk Thijm) who had hitherto been known chiefly as a most uncompromising critic. After 1887 the condition of modern Dutch literature remained comparatively stationary, and within the last decade of the 19th century was definitely declining. In 1889, it is true, a new poet Herman Gorter, made his appearance with a volume of strange verses called May, eccentric both in prosody and in treatment. He held his own without any marked advance towards lucidity or variety. Since the recognition of Gorter, however, no really remarkable talent has made itself prominent in Dutch poetry, unless we except P.C. Boutens, whose Verses in 1898 were received with great respect. Willem Kloos, still the acute and somewhat turbulent leader of the school, collected his poems in 1894 and his critical essays in 1896. L. van Deyssel, though an effective reviewer, continued to lack the erudition which years should have brought to him. Gorter remained tenebrous, Helène Swarth-Lapidoth still gorgeous; the others, with the exception of Couperus, showed symptoms of sinking into silence. The entire school, now that the struggle for recognition is over, and its members are accepted as little classics and the tyrants of taste, rests on its triumphs and seems to limit itself to a repetition of its old experiments. The leading dramatist of the close of the century was Hermann Heijermans (b. 1864), a Jew of strong realistic and socialistic tendencies, and the author of innumerable gloomy plays. His Ghetto (1898) and Ora et Labora (1901) particularly display his peculiar talent. Other notable products of drama are those of de Koo, whose Tobias Bolderman (1900) and Vier Ton (1901) are effective comedies. Dutch literature presented features of remarkable interest between 1882 and 1888, but since that time the general heightening of the average of merit, the abandonment of the old dry conventions, and a recognition of the artistic value of words and forms, are more evident to a foreign observer than any very important single expression of the national genius in literary art. An exception should be made in favour of the powerful peasant-stories of Steijn Streuvels (Frank Lateur), a young baker by trade, whose Summer Land (1901) was a most promising production.
Authorities.—Dr W.J.A. Jonckbloet, Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Letterkunde (4th ed., 1889-1892); Dr J. ten Brink, Kleine Geschiedenis der Nederlandschen Letteren (Haarlem, 1877); and the same author’s Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Letterkunde (1897), with elaborate illustrations, facsimiles of MSS. and title pages, &c.; Dr J. van Vloten, Schets van de Geschiedenis der Nederlandschen Letteren (1879); L. Schneider, Geschichte der niederländischen Literatur (Leipzig, 1887); G. Kalff, Literatuur en tooneel te Amsterdam in de zeventiende Eeuw (Haarlem, 1895).
Interesting observations on the development of the new school in Dutch literature will be found in Willem Kloos, Veertien Jaar Literatuur-Geschiedenis (2 vols., 1880-1896), and in L. van Deyssel, Verzamelde Opstelen (4 vols., 1890-1897), and in the series of monographs and bibliographies by Prof. J. ten Brink, Geschiedenis der Noord-Nederlandsche Letteren in de XIXe Eeuw (Rotterdam, new ed. 1902, &c.).
(E. G.)
[1] Edited by J.F. Willems (Brussels, 1836).
[2] Edited by C.P. Serrure and Ph. Blommaert (Ghent, 1852-1854).