Dutch literature

“ From 1600 to 1650 was the blossoming time in Dutch literature. During this period the names of greatest genius were first made known to the public, and the vigour and grace of literary expression reached their highest development. ”

“ About these three poets, who have in them the three principal vices of Dutch literature - to lose itself in the clouds, or to graze the earth too near, or to be caught in the net of mysticism - are grouped numbers of others, epic, comic, satiric, lyric, most of them of the seventeenth century, very few of the eighteenth; many of whom enjoy great fame in Holland, but none of whom stands out in relief from the rest sufficient to draw the attention of a foreigner. ”

“ From a few existing fragments—two incantations from the 8th century, a version of the Psalms from the 9th century, and several charters—a supposed Old Dutch language has been recognized; but Dutch literature actually commences in the 13th century, as Middle Dutch, the creation of the first national movement in Brabant, Flanders, Holland and Zealand.
From the wreck of Frankish anarchy no genuine folk-tales of Dutch antiquity have come down to us, and scarcely any echoes of German myth. On the other hand, the sagas of Charlemagne and Arthur appear immediately in Middle Dutch forms. ”

“ Criticism by stripping from Dutch history the veil of poetry with which the patriotism of writers had clothed it, has placed it on the wider and more productive plain of justice. Philological studies are held in high honor in Holland, and almost all the sciences are represented by men of European fame. These are facts of which no scholar is ignorant, and a bare mention of them is sufficient.
In pure literature the most flourishing style is the novel. ”

“ Dutch literature is from the fourteenth century onward a bourgeois literature. The Dutch poets and dramatists never enjoyed the courtly audiences whose influence did so much for the English drama in the sixteenth century, and helped the French in the seventeenth century to throw off the barbarism of Hardy's plays and the pedantry of Garnier's. It is among the highest and lowest classes of society that art is able to develop least impeded by the restrictions of practical morality. ”

“ Toward the close of the fifteenth century, the Dutch gained the ascendency over the others, which it has never since lost. This language is energetic and flexible, rich in synonyms and delicate shades, and from its fullness and strength, better adapted to history, tragedy, and odes, than to comedy and the lighter kinds of poetry. The Flemish, which still remains the literary language of the southern provinces, is inferior to the Dutch, and has been greatly corrupted by the admixture of foreign words. ”

“ In this he was curiously aided by the school of ripe and enthusiastic scholars who began to flourish at Leiden, such as Drusius, Vossius and Hugo Grotius, who themselves wrote little in Dutch, but who chastened the style of the rising generation by insisting on a pure and liberal Latinity. Out of that generation arose the greatest names in the literature of Holland—Vondel, Hooft, Cats, Huygens—in whose hands the language, so long left barbarous and neglected, took at once its highest finish and melody. ”

“ From the commencement of the last quarter of the seventeenth century, however, many causes combined to produce a decline in the literature of the Netherlands. The honors which were accorded not only by the Dutch universities, but by all Europe to their Latin writers and learned professors, were rarely bestowed on writers in the native tongue, and thus the minds of men of genius were turned to the study of the classics and the sciences. ”

“ The last years of the 18th century were marked in Holland by a general revival of intellectual force. The romantic movement in Germany made itself deeply felt in all branches of Dutch literature, and German lyricism took the place hitherto held by French classicism. ”

“ There exists, however, in Holland, at this moment, a group of young writers, most of them between thirty-five and twenty-five years of age who exhibit a violent zeal for literature, passing often into extravagance, who repudiate, sometimes with ferocity, the rather sleepy Dutch authorship of the last forty years, and who are held together, or crushed together, by the weight of antiquated taste and indifference to executive merit which they experience around them. ”

“ Their realism, then, inciting them to disdain nothing as food for the pencil, has so acted that Dutch art succeeds in representing Holland more completely than has ever been accomplished by any other school in any other country. ”

“ They became, like Switzerland, and unlike Poland and Hungary, a neutral region, which it was for the interest of Europe at large to let alone. None cared to meddle with them; and, on the other hand, they had native virtue and force enough to resist being absorbed into other peoples; the character of the Dutch is as distinct to-day as ever it had been. Their language, their literature, their art, and their personal traits, are unimpaired. They are, in their own degree, remarkably prosperous and comfortable; and they have the good sense to be content with their condition. ”

“ The peculiar character of the Dutch mind, which sees everything on the utility side, and often wishes to bend even literature to some practical purpose; a tendency the direct opposite of this, and perhaps derived from it, to soar too much above human nature in order not to graze the earth; a certain natural circumspection in their genius, which gives to reason a sovereign superiority over fancy ”

“ The Dutch are very cosmopolitan in their reading. Many children of the superior working classes learn French at the primary schools; most children of the middle class pick up English and German as well at the secondary schools, and a large proportion of them are able to talk in these three foreign languages; and as opportunities for intercourse are not over-abundant in the smaller towns, they keep up their knowledge of these languages by reading. Indeed, the five millions of Dutchmen are, relatively, the largest buyers of foreign literature in Europe. ”

“ I do not know how to suggest the poetry, the realism, the mood, the artistic craftsmanship that go with these things. They suggest a time, a country, an age, a mood, which is at once a philosophy, a system, a spirit of life. What more can art be? What more can it suggest? How, in that fortune of chance, which combines it with color-sense, temperament, craft, can it be exceeded? And all of this is what Dutch art—those seemingly minor phases, after Hals and Rembrandt—means to me.
But I was in Holland now, and not concerned so much for the moment with Dutch art as with my trunks. ”

“ Seeing how closely nature and landscape-painting are bound up with the very existence of Dutch art, it can be no matter for surprise that, at a time of a decline such as that into which official painting in general had fallen in our country, there were painters at the beginning of the eighteenth century who had succeeded in keeping their art untouched by foreign influences and who, refusing to deny their kind or the traditions of the great centuries, looked at nature through their own eyes, through their own masters. ”

“ He, too, with his vividly-coloured existence, with this picturesque and sensuous world of Dutch art and Dutch reality all around that would fain have made him the prisoner of its colours, its genial warmth, its struggle for life, its selfish and crafty love, was but a transient perturbation of the one absolute mind; of which, indeed, all finite things whatever, time itself, the most durable achievements of nature and man, and all that seems most like independent energy, are no more than petty accidents or affections. ”

“ He is one of those painters who dare to be themselves, who place strength above feeble sentimentality, who do not consider our Dutch art of landscape-painting to be bound to any one formula and who do not object if they are called cold because of their cool expression of a fact, for the reason that they are convinced that strength and not weakness is their motive power. ”

“ The truth simply is that one goes to Dutch art for the celebration of fact without mystery or magic. In other words, Dutch painting is painting without poetry; and it is this absence of poetry which makes the romantic Frenchmen appear to be such exotics when one finds them in Holland, and why it is so pleasant in Holland now and then to taste their quality, as one may at the Stedelijk Museum and in the Mesdag Collection at The Hague. ”

“ The ordinary story is that on settling down to a period of independence and comparative peace and prosperity after the cessation of the Spanish war, the Dutch people called for good art, and good art came. But that is too simple. That a poet, a statesman or a novelist should be produced in response to a national desire is not inconceivable; for poets, statesmen and novelists find their material in the air, as we say, in the ideas of the moment. They are for the most part products of their time. But the great Dutch painters of the seventeenth century were expressing no real idea. ”

“ No painters among the old masters equal the Dutchmen in cloud-scapes and sea-pieces, in fidelity to nature and delicate touch. Similarly, there are few, if any, portraits as strong as these wonderful canvases of the Dutch school. No other artists had the genius to see the possible triumphs awaiting the brush that could counterfeit the dewdrop on a rose, the glisten of the copper stew-pan or the satin gown, or the fluffy texture of a beggar’s coat. ”

“ And it was this art which was as a revelation to the French landscape-painters, whose works, exhibited in Brussels and Paris, in their turn gave the Dutchmen an understanding of their own being and a clearer insight, which, at first, perhaps, with a suggestion of borrowed riches, led them back at length into their own domain.
It is easy to overestimate an influence. For, although the art of painting, colour and the sense of a powerful movement can be taught and learned, it is not often that a foreign tradition leads to great display of strength. ”

“ The sibyls and prophets of the Sistine may indeed serve to interpret for some that new birth of the emancipated spirit that we call the Renaissance; but what do the drunken boors and bawling peasants of Dutch art tell us about the great soul of Holland? The more abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its age. If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look at its architecture or its music. ”

“ No one need go to Holland to know the country, and if you do find yourself there you may follow out your study of its social history without going farther than its picture galleries. You may rely with absolute confidence on the realism of Dutch art, and, strange to say, the most capable artists have been as faithful as their less gifted fellows. ”

“ But this taste for conceit does not conceal the sincere, personal, natural note which distinguishes Dutch poetry, as it does Dutch art.
Even in Italy, where better than anywhere else one may study the poetry of the Renaissance in decadence,—decadence undisturbed by the emergence of new forces,—lyrical poetry still lingers. ”

“ Maes painted old Dutch housewives, and Metsu young Dutch housewives, to the life; Vermeer and Terburg immortalised Dutch ladies at their spinets; Albert Cuyp toiled to suffuse Dutch meadows and Dutch cows with a golden glow; Jan Steen glorified the humblest Dutch family scenes; Gerard Dou spent whole weeks upon the fingers of a common Dutch hand. In short, art that so long had been at the service only of the Church and the proud, became suddenly, without losing any of its divinity, a fireside friend. That is what Holland did for painting. ”

“ Such are the men who have not been unhappily described by the Hollanders as lief-hebbers, lovers or fanciers, and their collection as lief-hebbery, things of their love. The Dutch call everything for which they are impassioned lief-hebbery; but their feeling being much stronger than their delicacy, they apply the term to everything, from poesy and picture to tulips and tobacco. The term wants the melody of the languages of genius ”

“ A picturesque shadow will redeem the squalor of the meanest garret, and the subdued light of the little kitchen where the red-petticoated housewife is sweeping must contrast so delicately with the white glare of the brick yard where the neighbour stands in parley, leaning against the doorpost, that the humble life of the place is transformed and poetised. This was the ABC of Dutch art; it was the Dutchmen who first found out that with the poetising aid of light and shade the meanest and most commonplace incidents of every-day life could be made the subjects of pictures. ”

“ In short, one-third of the crowd seemed to have stepped bodily from a collection of Dutch paintings.
Everywhere could be seen tall women, and stumpy men, lively faced girls, and youths whose expression never changed from sunrise to sunset.
There seemed to be at least one specimen from every known town in Holland. There were Utrecht water bearers, Gouda cheese makers, Delft pottery-men, Schiedam distillers, Amsterdam diamond-cutters, Rotterdam merchants, dried up herring-packers, and two sleepy-eyed shepherds from Texel. Every man of them had his pipe and tobacco-pouch. ”