VIII
The modern period
Twentieth century

The Movement of the Eighties is often regarded as the beginning of ‘modern’ literature in the Netherlands. This is not an unreasonable point of view since the writers of the eighties broke radically with the values and ideas of their predecessors. Yet if one thinks in terms of centuries, the Movement clearly belonged to the nineteenth century, if only because of its links with the French symbolists, the poetry of Shelley and Keats, and the prose of Flaubert and Zola. From this angle twentieth-century literature may be said to begin with the reactions to the Movement of the Eighties, starting in the late nineties and gathering momentum in the early years of the new century.

In 1898 Herman Gorter published a long and elaborate essay entitled Kritiek op de Litteraire Beweging van 1880 in Holland (Criticism of the Literary Movement of 1880 in Holland) in which he severely criticized the individualism of the Eighties. He had become a convinced Marxist and regarded literature as a product of economic conditions. The economic situation of society, he argued, was the primary influence on human thought. In the course of his essay he took Albert Verwey to task, accusing him of ignorance in matters of economy and therefore of false notions in matters of literature. Beauty to Gorter was no longer a purely aesthetic value outside society and morality, as it had been in the eighties, but it was ‘the movement of social development’. He regarded the Movement of the Eighties as the last phase of bourgeois art and he accused Kloos - however much he

admired his poetry - of having remained a slave of the Dutch lower middle class. He did not spare himself either and stated frankly that the author of Mei had also been a member of the petty bourgeoisie in disguise. He characterized the limitations of the work of Van Deyssel, too, as limitations of a social nature, since Van Deyssel, unlike Zola, did not draw his material from a metropolis which in addition to a bourgeoisie and a lower middle class also contained a proletariat.

In his attack on the Movement of the Eighties, Gorter did not reject all individualism, but only what he called ‘bourgeois individualism in a state of decline’, and in his creative work he always remained one of the most individualistic poets of his time. In 1903 he published Verzen (Poems), a new volume of poetry under the same title as the volume of 1890. It was a volume of socialist poetry, written as a glorification of socialism and the working class. Although it is full of socialist propaganda, full of phrases such as ‘socialism is coming’, ‘socialism lives’, ‘the stench of capital’, ‘the brotherhood of men’, and although diction and imagery are less extreme than they were in the Verzen of 1890, the book is basically a collection of individualistic poetry: it is the self-expression of a man who had found in socialism his personal happiness and inspiration. Gorter himself was not blind to the fact that the individualistic mode of Verzen (1903) contradicted his anti-individualistic theories, and in an attempt to subordinate his inborn individualism to his anti-individualistic conviction, he then moved from lyrical poetry to the epic. His first epic poem was published in 1906 under the title Een Klein Heldendicht (A Short Epic). It deals with socialism in a much more concrete way than Verzen of 1903, and describes a young man's hesitation to take part in a strike - in 1903 there had been a railway strike, the first full-scale strike in the Netherlands - and a young woman's indecision whether to join a trade union. It also deals with socialist meetings, the eight-hour working day and Marxist theory in general. In

its subject-matter and ‘engagement’ it was the complete negation of the precepts of the eighties when social consciousness, let alone political propaganda, was taboo in poetry. Six years later Gorter published a second epic, Pan , more abstract and also more symbolical than the former. It is not concerned with two specific people finding their way to socialism, but with the liberation of all mankind by the socialist revolution. In 1916 Pan was rewritten and extended to 12,000 lines which, if one disregards some medieval compilations and Cats's De Proef-steen van den Trou-ring , makes it the longest poem in Dutch. Its concept was grandiose and ambitious, so ambitious in fact that it overtaxed Gorter's talents as a poet. Twelve thousand inspired lines are rare indeed, and in Pan the lack of inspiration shows up again and again. It might best be described as a volume of excellent lyrical poems connected by long passages of versified Marxist theory. As an epic it failed, but one must concede that it was a magnificent failure.

Gorter not only made propaganda for socialism in his poetry, he also played an active part in the socialist movement. In 1897 he became a member of the three-year-old Dutch Socialist Party in which he belonged to the left-wing radicals. After the Railway Strike of 1903 tension developed between radicals and revisionists, and in 1909, following a conflict with the Labour leader, P.J. Troelstra, Gorter resigned from the party. He then became a foundation member of a new left-wing Marxist party, the Social-Democratic Party, which in 1918 changed its name to Communist Party. In those years Gorter also published political essays, the most important of which was Het Imperialisme, De Wereldoorlog en De Sociaal-Democraten (Imperialism, the Great War and Social Democrats). It became known internationally and drew the attention of Lenin who particularly appreciated Gorter's attack on Kautsky. In 1920 Gorter went to Moscow to attend the Congress of the Communist Party. There he clashed sharply with Lenin about the value of the parliamentary system.

Gorter believed in a democratic communism and rejected any form of dictatorship. He put principle above power, always adhered to his radical point of view and never made concessions to the practical politicians, whether their name was Troelstra or Lenin. His stand at the Moscow Congress of 1920 caused an unbridgeable rift between him and Lenin, and Lenin's brochure Radicalism, a Childhood Disease was mainly directed against Gorter. After his visit to Moscow, Gorter regarded the Communist Party as unprincipled, and resigned his membership in 1921. He died in 1927, leaving behind a lengthy manuscript, posthumously published as De Grote Dichters (The Great Poets), in which he discussed Aeschylus, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Vondel, Goethe and Shelley in their social and economic environments.

Gorter was not the only poet of his time to play an important part in politics. For many years he had an active supporter in Henriëtte Roland Holst (née Van der Schalk), whose political life to a certain extent ran parallel to his. She was born in 1869 and met Gorter in 1893 through Albert Verwey. They studied Marx together and joined the Socialist Party at the same time. The year before, Henriëtte Roland Holst had published her first volume of poetry, Sonnetten en Verzen in Terzinen Geschreven (Sonnets and Poems Written in Tercets), with which she immediately distinguished herself from the rather large number of poets who were still following in the wake of the Movement of the Eighties. True, the influence of Verwey is noticeable in this volume, and at a greater distance that of Dante and Spinoza, but the derivative elements shrink into insignificance when compared with the great originality At a time when no sonnet was considered successful unless its rhythm and metre were regular, she used jumpy rhythms and irregular metres which show her disdain for the ‘beautiful sound’ of the poem as preached by Kloos and the younger Gorter. Her poetry was more cerebral and at the same time more intuitive than that of the poets of the Eighties.

Her first volume was a constant exploration of the Self, and as such egoistic and individualistic, but one also finds in it the same idealism of the brotherhood of men and universal love as in Gorter's later poetry, though not yet connected with socialism. Like Gorter, she was an individualist at heart, and like Gorter again, her individualism was problematic to her. Her next volume, De Nieuwe Geboort (The New Birth), published in 1902 and written after she had become a socialist, is characterized by this dilemma of innate individualism and the ideals of a new community. The fear that the two may never be reconciled gives several poems in this volume an accent of tragedy. Gradually her poetry became more positively socialist, and in Opwaartsche Wegen (The Upward Roads, 1907) she celebrated the victory of socialism in herself and enthusiastically anticipated it for the whole world.

In the meantime, the conflict between radicals and revisionists had led to Gorter's resignation from the Socialist Party. Henriëtte Roland Holst, though in agreement with Gorter's interpretation of Socialism, did not immediately follow suit, but let loyalty to the party prevail over loyalty to the individual. For two more years she defended orthodox Marxism against revisionism, until in 1911 she also resigned. She did not join Gorter's Social-Democratic Party, but stayed outside politics for some years. Then, in 1915, she founded the Revolutionary Socialist Party which in the following year fused with the Social-Democratic Party.

In her volume De Vrouw in het Woud (The Woman in the Forest, 1912) she described her isolation after she had broken with the Socialist Party. Like Dante, she finds herself lost in a forest, but no Virgil or any other guide comes to her rescue: she has to be her own guide. The enthusiasm of Opwaartsche Wegen has gone, and its place has been taken by a tone of lament, of disappointment and uncertainty. The conflict in this volume is not so much the clash between inborn individualism and community ideals, but rather between Dream and Action, between the

contemplative and active sides of her personality. She is torn between the dream of the socialist state with social equality and justice, and the action, cruel action, without which it cannot be brought about. Reconciliation between the dream and the action seems impossible to her: ‘want Droom en Daad kunnen niet samen wonen’ (for Dream and Action cannot live together). More and more she became concerned with the idea of revolution and its justification: Would a revolution with all its evils and miseries be justified by the good cause? Sometimes she was inclined to answer the question in the affirmative and in this volume she wrote:

Gradually she moved away from the idea of revolution and in Verzonken Grenzen (Sunken Borders) of 1918 she stated that ‘de zachte krachten zullen zeker winnen in 't eind’ (the gentle forces will certainly win in the end). In 1923, in her volume Tusschen Twee Werelden (Between Two Worlds), she went a step further and rejected the revolution as ‘a dreadful disease, a life-and-death crisis in the body of society’. At the 1921 Congress of the Third International in Moscow she was one of the representatives of the Dutch Communist Party, but the Congress shattered her illusions about the revolution and, like Gorter the year before, she returned from the Soviet Union bitterly disappointed. Her ambivalent feelings about the revolution crystallized in the epic poem Heldensage (Heroic Saga), published in 1927, which on the one hand is a glorification of the Russian Revolution and on the other an attack on what had become of it. In the same year, also the year of Gorter's death,

she resigned from the Communist Party and published a new volume, Verworvenheden (Achievements), in which she repudiated Marxism in favour of a religious Socialism. It is a volume full of self-reproach: she deplores ever having advocated violence and is convinced that compulsion will never work. Summing up her life, she realized that little had become of all the plans and ideals of the earlier years. Verworvenheden was not her last volume - she wrote and published until shortly before her death in 1952 - but it was her final answer to the problems that she had posed in her earlier work. She also wrote some verse dramas, e.g. about Thomas More, and biographies of Rosa Luxemburg, Romain Rolland and Gandhi.

Her importance and influence in the Netherlands was great. For a long time she was the idol of the socialist section of the population and later, after the opposition between socialists and anti-socialists had lost its edge, she was venerated almost as a national figure, also by people who had never read a line of her poetry. Her work reads like a running commentary on her life. All her ideas, her hopes and desires, her disappointments and disillusionments, are reflected in it. Few poets have been so completely present in their work as Henriëtte Roland Holst was. There is no unanimity about the quality of her poetry. Some critics cannot praise it too highly, others regard the liberties that she took in rhythm and metre as chaotic and inadmissible. From a purely poetical and non-political point of view one of the main features of her work is that it represents a clear break with the tradition of the Eighties. Looking back from her work at the poetry of the Eighties, the idea of art for art's sake suddenly seems very remote indeed.

One of the original editors of De Nieuwe Gids, Albert Verwey, also turned his back on the ideas of the Eighties. He resigned his editorship in 1890 after a conflict with Kloos and from then on became more and more opposed to the extreme individualism that was cultivated by the Movement. His contributions to De Nieuwe Gids became less frequent

and after 1893 he sent a considerable amount of poetry to the Flemish journal Van Nu en Straks which was far more moderate in its espousal of individualism than De Nieuwe Gids. Verwey, however, was by nature a leader rather than a contributor, and in 1894 he set up a new magazine, Tweemaandelijksch Tijdschrift (Bi-monthly Magazine), which he needed as he wrote to his publisher, ‘in the same way as a clergyman needs a pulpit’. His co-editor was Lodewijk van Deyssel. The combination Verwey-Van Deyssel was a misalliance, as Van Deyssel realized from the beginning. After publication of the first issue he wrote to Verwey: ‘I don't feel my relation to this Magazine to be that of an active leader of a certain intellectual movement, but rather that of a director of an institute for publication’. Verwey on the other hand always felt that it was his task to give leadership, and the surer he became of himself, the stronger his leadership grew.

In the German magazine Blätter für die Kunst, Verwey, who was keen to give his magazine an international orientation, recognized a congenial spirit in the work of Stefan George. He reviewed George's Pilgerfahrten and Algabal in 1895. His review led to a meeting with George, and subsequently to several years of friendship and co-operation. They began to translate each other's work and the first fruit of their friendship matured in 1896 when Blätter für die Kunst published translations by George from the poetry of Kloos, Verwey and Gorter. The poetry which George and Verwey wrote in the late nineties gives evidence of a firm relationship between the two. George's Das Jahr der Seele (1897) shows affinity with Verwey's volume Aarde (Earth, 1896), while George's influence, specifically of his Algabal, is noticeable in Verwey's De Nieuwe Tuin (The New Garden), published in 1898. Through George, Verwey also came into contact with members of the George circle such as Friedrich Gundolf, Karl Wolfskehl, Ludwig Klages and Friedrich Wolters, so that at the beginning of the twentieth century there existed for some years a strong link between German and Dutch literature. What bound George and

Verwey together was their high appreciation of the poet's place in society, their belief in the ‘mission’ of the poet. Yet there were differences, and against George's cult of the Personality, Verwey placed his own cult of Reality. An early plan to write a book together on German and Dutch art, stranded on this disagreement. Also, Verwey continued for a while to defend naturalism - in which he had grown up, as he said - against George's fierce rejection of it. For several years their basic agreement prevailed over their differences and they continued to co-operate. In 1903 George and Gundolf published a volume of Verwey translations, and Verwey reciprocated with translations of George, Gundolf, Wolfskehl and Hofmannsthal. After that they began to drift apart and the contrast between Verwey, ‘the realist’, and George, ‘the prophet’, became more pronounced. Verwey deplored George's development towards a more and more esoteric poetry, especially after publication of Der Siebente Ring (1907) and Der Stern des Bundes (1914). When the First World War broke out, relations between George and Verwey became strained. The attempts made by George and Wolfskehl to justify the German position alienated Verwey, while Verwey's rejection of German nationalism was interpreted by George and Wolfskehl as a betrayal of their friendship. In 1929 Friedrich Wolters gave an account of the relations between George and Verwey in his Stefan George und die Blätter für die Kunst, to which Verwey replied five years later with his book Mijn Verhouding tot Stefan George (My Relation to Stefan George), which must be read as a necessary correction to Wolters's interpretation.

In the meantime Verwey had made the Tweemaandelijksch Tijdschrift into a monthly under the new title of De Twintigste Eeuw (The Twentieth Century). By 1905 the differences between him and Van Deyssel had become too great and in that year Verwey established a new magazine, characteristically entitled De Beweging (The Movement), of which he himself was the sole editor. Though the title of the new magazine referred directly to the Movement of the

Eighties, De Beweging was in fact a strong reaction against part of the heritage of the eighties. It opposed naturalism and sensitivism, it rejected the ‘art of the word’ in favour of the ‘art of the thought’ and it preferred philosophical poetry to the sensuous poetry of the Eighties. It also opposed individualism and gradually moved towards a defence of traditionalism. In 1911 and 1912 two poets belonging to the group that had formed around De Beweging, Geerten Gossaert and J.C. Bloem, even advocated a return to rhetoric, i.e. to the traditional imagery which thirty years before had been decried so loudly, also by Verwey. In an article written in 1913 and entitled De Richting van de Hedendaagsche Poëzie (The Direction of Contemporary Poetry), Verwey gave cautious approval to the demand for tradition and continuity, stating that the individual's belief that he could create everything out of himself without the support of a community was ‘beautiful but dangerous’. The attempt to re-introduce an element of rhetoric into poetry - ‘inspired rhetoric’ as Bloem called it - never grew into a strong movement and was opposed from the beginning by other poets who published in De Beweging such as Aart van der Leeuw and P.N. van Eyck; yet it was symptomatic of early twentieth-century reaction against the individualism of the Eighties. The socialist anti-individualists, Herman Gorter, for instance, and Henriëtte Roland Holst, did not support De Beweging either because they regarded it as insufficiently socialist: they published in De Nieuwe Tijd (The New Era), a socialist journal established in 1898.

In his own poetry Albert Verwey evolved from a youthful worshipper of Beauty - ‘a Calvinist visited by the fever of Beauty’, as Kloos maliciously put it - to a philosophical poet who expanded his relation with Beauty to a relation with ‘the All’ and who set himself the task of expressing the unity of the poet and ‘the world’. In the preface to the 1912 edition of his Verzamelde Gedichten (Collected Poems), he formulated the essence of poetry as ‘the creative imagination which is certainly most immediately embodied in poetry, but

which as the primary human instinct is conterminous with life itself’. In all his later volumes - the most important of which are Het Zichtbaar Geheim (The Visible Secret), De Weg van het Licht (The Way of Light), De Getilde Last (The Burden Borne), De Figuren van de Sarkofaag (The Figures of the Sarcophagus), all published between 1915 and 1930 - he wanted to give expression to what he called the Idea, a concept which he himself defined as ‘a forward pushing force which is the essence of all life and becomes visible only in its form’, and which in Simon Vestdijk's formulation is ‘something related to certain basic pantheistic principles such as the Absolute, the Will, the Unconscious’. Verwey's theoretical occupation with the Idea led to - or was perhaps a rationalization of - a strongly intellectualistic and philosophically introspective poetry, which in its terseness of diction is often reminiscent of Potgieter. This was no coincidence, for Verwey felt a strong affinity to Potgieter and recognized in his work his own ideal of ‘Dream and Discipline’, of imagination and level-headedness. In 1903 he wrote Het Leven van Potgieter (Life of Potgieter), a warmly appreciative study of his life and work showing in its very style the rapport that existed between Potgieter and Verwey.

Though a poet of considerable importance, Verwey, like Potgieter again, exercized his greatest influence as a critic. In his criticism, collected in ten volumes Proza (Prose), his ultimate criteria for evaluating a work of literature were intellectual and moral, not aesthetic. The intellectual content, the philosophical background, the moral implications, they were the aspects of the work on which he based his final judgment. As a critic therefore he became the antipode of his erstwhile collaborator Lodewijk van Deyssel who always adhered to the purely aesthetic approach. Verwey was also a student of the history of literature and was the first to rediscover the work of Jan van der Noot after his eclipse of three centuries. Besides his studies of Potgieter and Van der Noot Verwey published books on Hendrick Spiegel, on Ritme

en Metrum (Rhythm and Metre), and on the poetry of Vondel. In 1924 he was appointed professor of Dutch literature at the University of Leiden. He died in 1937, while working on a new edition of Vondel.

At the time when Albert Verwey, Henriëtte Roland Holst, Herman Gorter and several other writers were in full revolt against the principles of the Eighties, and in theory and practice were trying to steer literature in a new direction, there were also poets who remained true to the individualism and subjectivism of the Eighties. This continuing line of the Eighties is most clearly exemplified by J.H. Leopold and P.C. Boutens in the Netherlands, and by Karel van de Woestijne in Belgium.

Jan Hendrik Leopold was born in 1865, studied classics at Leiden and taught at a grammar school in Rotterdam until his death in 1925. In comparison with the poets of the Eighties, who on the whole began to publish when they were still in their teens, Leopold made his debut rather late. His first poems appeared in De Nieuwe Gids in 1893, in the same issue that carried the first poems of Henriëtte Roland Holst. His comparatively late debut is indicative of the reserve and shyness so characteristic of Leopold's personality. He was a lonely man whose inborn tendency towards isolation and aloofness was aggravated by progressive deafness. His life was as outwardly uneventful as that of Mallarmé with whom he has more traits in common. Leopold was probably the purest symbolist poet in Dutch literature and his metaphorical treatment of the poet's creativity and the strongly evocative character of his poetry show a close relationship with the poetry of Mallarmé. Yet if any poet was ever his own man, it was Leopold. It may not be difficult to point out some instances of influence, by Gorter, for example, but it would be impossible to confuse a poem of Leopold's with one of Gorter's or anyone else's. Leopold's poetry is immediately recognizable by its muted tone, its soft humming, as against the trumpet sound of Gorter's verse. When in 1912 the poet Boutens saw Leopold's first volume

Verzen (Poems) through the press - half against Leopold's own wishes - he wrote a short preface to the book in which he characterized the murmuring diction of Leopold as ‘audible musing’ and ‘near silence’. In contrast to the blue and gold that Gorter used so much, Leopold's poems exist in a world of greys, ‘half shadow and half twilight glow’ as he said in his poem Voor 5 December (For the Fifth of December). Even when he wrote about the splendour of a flower-garden, as in Albumblad II (Album Leaf II), he seemed to be developing a colour film in an emulsion that was only capable of reproducing shades of grey. Also, whereas much of Gorter's poetry was written out of abundance, out of an almost ecstatic mood, the dominant mood of Leopold's poetry is often that of loss and fear.

Like Gorter, Verwey and several other writers of those years, Leopold was strongly attracted to Spinozist philosophy. The notion of the interrelation of all things, of man being part of universal nature, offered a solution to the problem of the individual and the community. In one of his major poems, Oinou Hena Stalagmon (One Drop of Wine), published in 1910, Leopold described in elaborate images how one drop of wine permeates all oceans, and how the fall of an apple influences the balance of the universe; in the same way our thinking affects all seemingly separate lives and is in turn affected by them. At the same time it is a poem about poetry, symbolizing the creative and receptive functions of the poet.

Four years later Leopold resumed these themes in a long poem Cheops. It is one of his least accessible poems, and its hermetic character has caused lack of unanimity among the critics. The one aspect of the poem that all critics agree upon is Leopold's objectification of his own solitude in the Pharao Cheops. In image upon image the poem describes the journey through the cosmos which Cheops made after his death. He is shown as part of the procession of those who had ‘immaculately arisen’, as part of a community in which he, the former absolute monarch, has to conform to others

and suppress his own will. In the second part of the poem Cheops turns away from the others and returns to the loneliness of his own pyramid and sarcophagus where he is ‘captured by the symbols of the past’. Some critics read the poem as a eulogy of the poet's creativity, others regard it as Leopold's final recognition of the isolation of the individual. The latter interpretation is the more convincing one, particularly in the context of Leopold's other work which after Cheops became more and more concerned with this isolation. A good illustration of his development is to be found in his adaptations of Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, which he came to know in 1903 in the translation of E.H. Whinfield.

The discovery of the Rubaiyat meant a great deal to Leopold. He recognized much of himself in Omar Khayyam's philosophy of life, his fatalism, his melancholy enjoyment of life, his occasional bitterness and rebelliousness. In Leopold's first series of quatrains, published under the title of Oostersch I (Oriental), the accent lay chiefly on the transitoriness of human life:

Leopold identified himself with Omar Khayyam and there was undoubtedly a natural affinity between the two, as there was between Omar and Edward FitzGerald whose translations were also used by Leopold. On the other hand, Leopold's quatrains were more than just a faithful rendering of the Rubaiyat. In general one tends to emphasize what strikes one most, and in his subsequent translations from Omar Khayyam and other Persian poets - always from the

English or French editions - Leopold more and more accentuated the bitterness, the futility of life and the aversion to human contact:

Leopold's translations are as much original poems as they are translations. They are ‘original poems on Persian motifs and in the Persian stanza-form’, as Theodoor Weevers rightly says.

Though translation of the Rubaiyat never became quite as popular in the Netherlands as it did in England after FitzGerald's edition of 1859, there were several poets who followed Leopold's example. None of their translations, however bears comparison with Leopold's and no other poet showed the same mastery in handling the quatrain form aaba or succeeded as Leopold did in giving the poems the unmistakable stamp of an original creation. The poet who came closest to Leopold's achievement was Pieter Cornelis Boutens, who translated FitzGerald's Rubaiyat - not Whinfield's as Leopold did - and also a number of quatrains from a French edition of Persian poetry which had also been used by Leopold. The Oud-Perzische Kwatrijnen (Old Persian Quatrains) of Boutens and the quatrains which Leopold published under the title of Soefisch (Suphic) go back to the same French source and throw some light on the differences between the two poets who were each other's next of kin in literature. To Leopold the dominant theme of the Persian quatrains was the renunciation of the world, whereas Boutens gave preference to the poems that dealt with mystic contemplation. Their approach to the Persian poems was so different, in fact, that their selections have only three quatrains in common.

When Boutens published his Rubaiyat in 1913 - the

Oud-Perzische Kwatrijnen were not published until 1930 - he was already known as the author of several volumes of poetry such as Verzen (Poems, 1889), Praeludiën (Preludes, 1902), Stemmen (Voices, 1907), Carmina (Songs, 1912), and a modern adaptation of the medieval poem Beatrijs (1908) which became his only really popular work. Born in 1870, he was five years younger than Leopold and, like him, firmly rooted in the individualist and subjectivist tradition of the Eighties. He shared Leopold's admiration for Gorter and in his early work was considerably influenced by Gorter's sensitivism. Next to Gorter, it was Leopold for whose work he felt most, and when in 1912, at the age of 47, Leopold had not yet published a volume of poetry, Boutens prevailed on Leopold to let him bring out a collection of the poems that had so far been published in literary journals. It seems that Leopold agreed at first, but later, unsuccessfully, withdrew his permission. Literary ambition, desire for fame or gain were entirely foreign to Leopold's nature. When later he was asked why he had washed his hands of this first publication, he referred with disgust to Boutens: ‘That man spoke of money’. Boutens was different and lacked Leopold's aristocratic disdain of material things. Yet realistic though he may have been in his approach to daily life, in his poetry he was an idealist, steeped in Platonic philosophy and always concerned with the reality that lies behind the outward appearance. Boutens gradually developed from lyrical spontaneity to a more philosophical and cerebral verse, but always retained his staggering technical virtuosity which enabled him to write poems of a cool marble-like beauty even when his ‘heart’ was not in it.

Both Leopold and Boutens held university degrees in classics and taught Latin and Greek in secondary schools, Boutens for a short while only, Leopold for many years. It is curious to note that whereas before the 1880s the study of theology seemed almost a pre-requisite for a place in Dutch literature, the eighties and nineties saw several classical scholars come to the fore. Beets was a minister of the church

and later a professor of theology, Busken Huet was a minister before he turned to journalism, Bakhuizen van den Brink, Drost, Van Lennep and a score of lesser known writers had all at some time studied theology. After 1880 the theologians receded into the background and their place was taken by the classicists: Kloos, Gorter, Leopold, Boutens. They did away with the moralist poetry of the theologians and devoted themselves to the cult of Beauty. Aestheticism reigned supreme, until poets such as Verwey, Henriëtte Roland Holst and the later Gorter began to challenge it.

The classical training of Kloos, Leopold, Gorter and Boutens was noticeable in a number of formal characteristics that were introduced during the eighties, such as the Homeric similes to be found in Kloos's sonnets and especially in Gorter's Mei , or the personifications of dawn, day and moon, so prevalent in the poetry of Boutens, or the crowding of participle constructions which gives Leopold's poetry its curiously open-ended character. This is not to say that the similarity of background led to a uniform poetry. Gorter, Leopold and Boutens were undeniably related, but their differences were just as marked as their similarities, especially in their approach to traditional language and form. Gorter, in his sensitivist period, made a complete break with traditional syntax. Boutens, on the other hand, accepted it, refined it, polished it and worked new miracles with it. Leopold took up a position in the middle: his syntax and his word-formation were more idiosyncratic than Boutens's, but less revolutionary than Gorter's. The same may be said of traditional form: Gorter for several years discarded it, Boutens went back to it and Leopold stood in between, employing some extremely strict forms, poems in which every syllable, every sound and every pause were accounted for, alongside the freer form of Cheops with blank verse and lines of unequal length.

Though considerably younger than Leopold and Boutens, the Flemish poet Karel van de Woestijne, born in Ghent in 1878, really belonged to their generation of writers. He did

not have their classical background, but studied Germanic languages and was professor of Dutch literature at the University of Ghent from 1921 until his death in 1929. Yet despite his lack of a formal education in the classics, he was almost as steeped in Greek and Latin literature as Leopold and Boutens. His poetry has strong links with both impressionism and symbolism, showing the impressionist's preoccupation with sensory perception, and the symbolist's introspection and devotion to the sound of the poem. At the same time he was a traditionalist who found in Renaissance poetry, particularly in the work of Hooft, the strict verse-form he was looking for. In this respect he was very much like Jean Moréas, the Graeco-French poet who after having been one of the original symbolists and the man who gave symbolism its name, moved away from it at the beginning of the century to advocate a return to the simplicity and the regular poetic forms of the Renaissance. Van de Woestijne held Moréas in high regard - after the latter's death in 1910 he wrote several in memoriam poems - and supported his program of a new classicism. In an interview given in 1913, he stated that ‘through individualism we come to a neo-classicism, a new classical period, a period of people who are totally conscious and who express themselves with complete sincerity, but who disregard anything that in their particular situation might be too personal, too idiosyncratic’.

Van de Woestijne's combination of impressionism and symbolism, together with his adherence to the new classicism of Jean Moréas, made his work into a unique synthesis of the various streams of European poetry. He owed a debt to many: to the poets of the Eighties (in the first place to Kloos), to Van Nu en Straks, to the French-writing poets of La Jeune Belgique (in particular Emile Verhaeren and Maurice Maeterlinck), to Baudelaire, Henri de Régnier, Jules Laforgue and Jean Moréas. Yet his poetry was by no means a hotchpotch of influences and reminiscences. The many names with which his work can be linked are not indications

of a derivative poetry, but rather of a very complex personality. His poetry, which he himself termed ‘a poetic and symbolic biography’, is a constant reflection of his attempts to establish harmony between the conflicting elements of his nature. The inability to achieve this harmony gives his work its singularly tragic tone. Locked up in himself, introverted to a very high degree, he sought and glorified solitude, while at the same time he hankered after communication and understanding, and stormed at his very loneliness. His work is pervaded by an intense sensuality to which he often abandoned himself, though never without a feeling of guilt. He longed for a purity which always seemed to elude him, contaminated as it was by his sensuality: ‘de reinste dag is zwaar van avond-zwoel begeeren’ (the purest day is heavy with sultry-evening desire). His loathing of his own sensuality and lack of purity extended to a revulsion to his entire nature, and gave a good deal of his poetry the character of a painful confession. Both the consciousness and the sincerity of which he spoke in the interview of 1913 are present throughout his work. Introverted though he may have been, on paper he exposed himself and in complete frankness poured forth all his hopes and frustrations, his desires and disappointments, sometimes with a cool but cutting honesty, at other times in lacrymose self-pity.

All this applies in a larger measure to his early volumes such as Het Vader-Huis (My Father's House, 1903), De Boom-Gaard der Vogelen en der Vruchten (The Orchard of Birds and Fruits, 1905) and De Gulden Schaduw (The Golden Shadow, 1910) than to his later volumes De Modderen Man (Man of Mud, 1920), God aan Zee (God at the Sea-side, 1926) and Het Berg-Meer (The Mountain Lake, 1928). The troubled sensuality and morbidity never entirely disappeared from his work, but they were gradually conquered by, or sublimated to, religious sentiments tinged by mysticism. It would be an overstatement to say that Van de Woestijne's tormented mind found its equilibrium in this mysticism, but much of the bitterness of the earlier volumes

slowly made way for a tone of serenity and resignation. At the same time the style of his poetry underwent a change. Characteristic of his early poetry was its sonority. Van de Woestijne employed all the tricks of the trade to build up the sound of the poem: assonances, alliterations, internal rhymes were used even more frequently than in the poetry of Perk and Kloos. Though he regarded Hooft as the supreme poet of the Dutch Renaissance, his own style of writing was closer to the baroque loftiness of Vondel. In musical terms, the sound of Van de Woestijne's poetry was not that of a Renaissance harpsichord but that of an organ, and again, not the transparent sound of a Baroque organ but that of a full-bodied Romantic one. The later poems were syntactically simpler and more subdued in sound, though they always retained their character of organ music, only the swell-box was not quite so fully open.

Van de Woestijne's interest in classical literature showed itself in a number of epic poems written between 1910 and 1914, and dealing with Orpheus, Hercules, Penthesilea, Chronos, Hebe and Helena. Quantitatively they constitute a considerable part of his poetic output, qualitatively they do not come up to the level of his lyrical poetry. To Van de Woestijne himself, they were Interludiën (Interludes), published in 1912 and 1914, and something which, in his own words, ‘happened to him’ in between his lyrical poetry. In the same years he wrote a number of prose stories, also often on classical themes (Gyges, Circe, Kandaules, Hercules), and like his poetry, symbolizing his own situation.

In 1915 he began to write an epistolary novel with his friend Herman Teirlinck. The novel was to be called De Leemen Torens (Towers of Clay), for, as Van de Woestijne jotted down in his diary, ‘We build the tower: it is made of clay, and as we raise it, it crumbles away below’. His pessimistic view was omnipresent, in his novel as well as in his poetry. His interest in plot, action, dramatics was slight, his interest in character was lively, his interest in himself predominant, which made the novel, like all his other work,

a searching essay in self-analysis. The book was published chapter by chapter in De Gids , but it was never properly finished. Van de Woestijne and Teirlinck intended to describe the impact which the war and the German occupation made on two sets of characters, one in Ghent and one in Brussels, but the atmosphere of the occupation drained them of their enthusiasm. Also, from the beginning there was a certain discrepancy of intention, and Teirlinck who set more store by a well-constructed novel than Van de Woestijne did, was the first to give up. In 1927 Van de Woestijne wrote a final chapter to round off what had already been written, and in 1928 De Leemen Torens appeared for the first time in book-form. Though the novel always remained a torso, it is valuable as a double self-portrait of two important writers, and also as a remarkable attempt to revive the epistolary novel which had gone out of fashion after the eighteenth century. De Leemen Torens was one of the last published works of Van de Woestijne. He died in the middle of the following year.

Herman Teirlinck was a year younger than Van de Woestijne and belonged originally to the writers of Van Nu en Straks. At the time of his collaboration with Van den Woestijne he was already well known as the author of a volume of poetry, some volumes of short stories and several novels, the most important of which were Mijnheer J.B. Serjanszoon, Orator Didacticus, published in 1908, and Het Ivoren Aapje (The Ivory Monkey, 1909). The former, written in a highly-wrought and very mannered style, portrays the life of an eighteenth-century hedonist. It is a book full of irony and at the same time full of appreciation of the epicurism which Mr. Serjanszoon has made into an art. It is undoubtedly a piece of virtuoso writing, but Mr. Serjanszoon's oratory is the kind of eloquence that hides more than it reveals, and in the last analysis the novel has little to say. At the time of writing it may have seemed to offer a promising alternative to the naturalist novel - a genre which Teirlinck had also practised - but its arti-

ficiality, preciousness and ambivalent point of view have caused it to date rather badly. In Het Ivoren Aapje Teirlinck moved closer to reality again, depicting the life of the upper middle-class in a semi-realistic Brussels, without, however, sacrificing his mannered style.

In the period between the two wars Teirlinck devoted much of his time and energy to the stage. For many years he was the central figure in the modernization of Flemish theatre, particularly after 1920 when he discovered the potentialities of expressionist drama. Apart from taking an active interest in play production and the training of professional actors, he wrote several plays, among which De Vertraagde Film (The Slow-motion Film), a play in which two lovers re-live their life and watch themselves as actors in a film, Ik Dien (I Serve), a stage adaptation of the medieval Beatrijs , and De Ekster op de Galg (The Magpie on the Gallows), a drama about the ravages of old age. His novel-writing took a back-seat during those years, until in 1940 he published Maria Speermalie . It is a novel of lust and passion - the association evoked by the name of the main character is no accident - but like the earlier novels it suffers from over-ornateness of style and lacks the power to convince. Most novels of Teirlinck fail to carry conviction because of a certain ambivalence, if not indifference of the author with regard to his characters. This also applies to the book that is usually regarded as his masterpiece, Het Gevecht met de Engel (The Battle with the Angel), which was published in 1952 when Teirlinck was seventy-three. It is his most ambitious novel, ranging from the Middle Ages to the present day and describing the struggle between two families of which the one symbolizes ‘nature’ and the other ‘culture’. One cannot deny the book's imaginative force nor its narrative power, but structurally it shows serious defects and it is basically as non-committal as the other novels. A stronger claim for the honorific title of masterpiece can be made for the novel which Teirlinck published in 1956 under the title of Zelfportret of Het

Galgemaal (Self-portrait or The Last Meal), a novel in which a seventy-year old banker analyses his own life. He is outwardly successful and respected, but gradually he begins to realize that he is a deceiver, a poseur, a hypocrite, and that the entire façade of his life is phony. It is not a book with a cheerfully heroic ending. The banker in his newly-found self-knowledge does not throw away the mask of insincerity that he has worn so long, for the simple reason that he has worn it so long. The courage and energy needed for a radical break with his past life fail him: ‘You have got under way. You step onto the stage’. Teirlinck presents the story without moralizations, he neither condemns nor defends. Whether the title of Self-portrait has to be taken literally, i.e. as referring to the author himself, is a debatable point. In any case, it is not of any great importance to the reader. The main thing is that Teirlinck in this novel was much more involved in the inner life of one of his characters than in any previous book, and that this time he was writing about a man whom he knew inside out. Though Teirlinck remained active and kept writing until shortly before his death in 1967, Zelfportret still stands as by far his most convincing book.

Teirlinck was too intellectual a writer to gain widespread popularity, and it was Stijn Streuvels, a nephew of the poet Guido Gezelle, who became the most popular prose-writer of his generation. Streuvels, whose real name was Frank Lateur, was born in 1871. He did not have the erudition of either Teirlinck or Van de Woestijne, or their intellectual background and feel for life in the big city. He grew up in a small town in West Flanders and in the early years earned his living as a baker. His first stories attracted the attention of the writers of Van Nu en Straks who asked him through Karel van de Woestijne to contribute to their journal. Once introduced into the literary world, Streuvels developed in a short time into a very prolific and widely-read author.

The work of Streuvels has little in common with that of Teirlinck. For one thing, his world is much smaller. His

territory is confined to the countryside of West Flanders. The cities which so fascinated Teirlinck and Van de Woestijne are of no consequence to him. He does not attack or deride city-life, he ignores it. His characters are the peasants whom he saw in the fields and to whom he ascribed uncomplicated, but often violent passions and desires. There is no room in his work for sophisticated psychological nuances, nor is there room for subtle ramifications of plot. His psychology is only concerned with basic emotions and motivations, his plots are simple and straightforward and can usually be summarized in two or three lines. Life is reduced to its essentials: food-production, love, death. In much of his work the focal point is nature rather than man. His human beings live in direct and constant confrontation with nature which is sometimes benevolent, but more often hostile, and which has the power to strike man down with the inescapable force of fate. A man may spend his whole life fighting back, if nature is against him he will end up crushed like Jan Vindeveughel in Langs de Wegen (Along the Roads), Streuvels's first full-scale novel which appeared in 1902. In Langs de Wegen Streuvels set out to depict, in his own words, ‘a man with everything that surrounds him and with the sky that overhangs it all’. The plot develops slowly in circular fashion: Jan works as a groom on a prosperous farm, he gets married, struggles desperately to support his wife and children on a small plot of land, until finally, beaten by nature and forsaken by his children, he returns to the farm where he is now received as a tramp.

In Streuvels's best-known novel, De Vlaschaard (The Flax Field, 1907), man is no longer entirely dominated by nature. Fatalism is still present, and the main characters, the flax-growers, are still harshly dealt with by nature, but they are given a modicum of freedom, initiative and success. At the same time, Streuvels gave fuller treatment to the human conflicts that existed between the characters, in particular to the enmity between the farmer Vermeulen and his son which leads to the tragical climax of the book.

Even though De Vlaschaard was a great advance on Langs de Wegen, plot and development of character were never to become Streuvels's forte. He was at his best in his short stories and novellas in which the characters remained static and in which the slow epic progression of the narrative combined more satisfactorily with the lyrical descriptions of nature than in the novels. The earlier stories, collected in such volumes as Lenteleven (Life in Spring), Zomerland (Summer Country), and Zonnetij (Sun Tide), all published between 1896 and 1898, suffer on the whole from over-descriptiveness. In the later volumes, especially in Werkmenschen (Working People) of 1926, he succeeded in striking a much better balance between the lyrical and the epic elements. Werkmenschen contains what is without doubt Streuvels's best story, Het Leven en de Dood in de Ast (Life and Death in the Oast-House), a masterpiece disputed by few and envied by many. Against the background of a violent rain-storm across the fields, the story focuses on a small group of labourers who work in a chicory drying-house. The work is hard, monotonous and soul-destroying. At intervals they talk about their lives, they reminisce about the past and build up illusory futures. When night falls, the fragments of conversation merge with their dreams; reality and imagination, past, present and future flow together. An old man enters and lies down to sleep. His snoring haunts the others and causes them to draw him into their fantasies. They are only dimly aware that he is dying. When the body is found in the morning, the men return to work, feeling vaguely that the hallucinations of the night were as much reality as their waking hours.

The psychological insight and the hallucinatory atmosphere of this story are an exception in the work of Streuvels. Generally speaking his strength lies in the sharp observation of country-life and in his ability to make the countryside visible. It is sometimes said that Streuvels is to Flanders what Knut Hamsun is to Norway. True, both forced the attention of their readers away from the cities and back to the ‘soil’, but there the similarity begins and ends. Streuvels is a realist,

not a romanticist of the Hamsun-type. Hamsun worships nature and glorifies the simple life of the countryside in a decidedly naive manner. Streuvels may be naive in many ways, but he does not romanticize. He is open to the grandeur of nature, to its exuberance and splendour, but equally to its hostility and threat. He is not an enthusiast, not a preacher like Hamsun, but a fatalist. He observes and records, but he does not try to influence. And, one must add, with all his interest in the land and the soil, he never fell victim to the blood-and-soil mystique in the way Hamsun did.

Streuvels was a prolific author, and when he died in 1969, at the age of 98, his oeuvre consisted of well over fifty volumes of original prose, not counting the numerous volumes of translations and adaptations. His own work was also extensively translated, especially into German.

In the Netherlands there was no-one like Streuvels nor did any of his contemporaries try to follow in his footsteps. Only in the generation that came after him does one find some regional novelists who show his influence in their style and choice of subject-matter. The northern writers of his generation were of a different persuasion. On the whole one can say that they were moving away from realism. Some of them - those who are usually grouped together under the heading of neo-romanticism - tried to revive the historical novel which for many years had been eclipsed by the naturalism of the Movement of the Eighties. The naturalist writers took little interest in historical material and dealt mainly with contemporary themes. The neo-romantics, who began to publish in the nineties, returned to the past and often to the Middle Ages. One of the first to do so was Adriaan van Oordt in his novels Irmenlo and Warhold , published in 1896 and 1906 respectively. These books can only be called neo-romantic because of their medieval setting; the impressionistic, ornate and mannered style makes them very much part and parcel of the aftermath of the Eighties, as does Van Oordt's preoccupation with a very naturalist-looking fatalism. Arij Prins, who had made his debut with a volume of

naturalist prose pieces Uit het Leven (From Life), followed suit in 1897 with Een Koning (A King), a collection of stories, some vaguely historical, others purely fantastic, but all rather reminiscent of the work of Joris-Karl Huysmans who was a personal friend of his. Prins's best-known work, the novel De Heilige Tocht (The Holy Journey), was published in 1912. Its main subject is a medieval knight who takes part in a crusade and who, after many adventures, is killed by the Turks. The fame, or rather the notoriety of the book is not based on its plot or the presentation of character, but on its style. Not since the days of Hooft had so many liberties been taken with the conventional patterns of Dutch prose. Prins was a painter at heart, and for the visions that he wanted to describe he developed a style that had little in common with everyday syntax. Groups of words followed one another according to what the eye took in rather than to the demands of syntax: what was seen first, took pride of place in the sentence. Words were coupled in extravagant fashion, or unexpectedly split down the middle, the finite verb was often dropped in order to reduce the action and intensify the pictorial aspect. Unfortunately, Prins did not really have a great deal to say, with the result that his work now stands in Dutch literature as a rather forlorn and very dated monument of eccentricity.

Arij Prins's attempts to turn the language into a painter's medium were not characteristic of the neo-romanticists in general. On the contrary, most of them were in full agreement with Verwey and the poets of De Beweging that ‘the art of the word’ had had its day and ‘the art of the thought’ should take its place. The accent should no longer fall on the individual word, but on the sentence as a whole, not only in poetry, but also in prose. At the same time, the call for ‘the art of the thought’ also meant that problems of a philosophical nature, which had been excluded from the naturalist novel, would be admitted again. So Augusta de Wit broached the question of the relation between eastern and western civilization in her novel Orpheus in de Dessa (Orpheus in the Dessa), published

in 1903. Aart van der Leeuw, a poet and novelist who in 1909 made his debut in De Beweging, gave the fatalism of the naturalists a neo-romantic twist in his novel Ik en mijn Speelman (I and my Minstrel) of 1928. Though not a historical novel in the strict sense of the word, the book is set in the eighteenth century and broadly speaking follows from a distance the plot of Marivaux's Le Jeu de l'amour et du hasard, the message being that man cannot escape his fate, and that this fate may turn out to be rather more pleasant than anticipated.

The most serious attempt to revive the historical novel was made by P.H. van Moerkerken, born in 1877 and for many years Director of the State Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam. After having written poetry, drama and a satirical novel De Ondergang van het Dorp (The Downfall of the Village), he published in 1914 De Bevrijders (The Liberators), his first historical novel. The book was written immediately after the celebrations of 1913 which commemorated the centenary of Napoleon's defeat and the liberation of the Netherlands. It was a very ironic contribution to the general festivities. Van Moerkerken's satirical bent - which apart from his first novel had also expressed itself in his doctoral dissertation on satire in medieval art - made the novel into an entertaining, but nevertheless hard-hitting attack on pseudo-courage and pious falsification of history. A few years later he began to write a series of historical novels under the collective title of De Gedachte der Tijden (The Thought of the Times), published between 1918 and 1924. The central theme, which makes these books into a cycle, is man's aspiration to freedom and happiness throughout the ages. The first volume, Het Nieuwe Jeruzalem (The New Jerusalem), centres on the Anabaptist movement of the sixteenth century, De Verwildering (The Lawlessness) describes the beginning of the Eighty Years' War, and In de Lusthof Arkadië (The Pleasure-garden of Arcady) the religious squabbles of the seventeenth century. The fourth volume, De Vraag zonder Antwoord (Question without Answer) ranges from the second half of

the seventeenth century to the French Revolution. The question that was asked implicitly throughout all the volumes is finally expressed at the end of this book: Why cannot the new world come without bloodshed and misery? It was followed by Het Demonische Eiland (The Demonic Island) which dealt with the Paris Commune of 1870. The last volume, Het Lange Leven van Habhabalgo (Habhabalgo's Long Life), recapitulated all preceding volumes in a kind of bird's-eye view of history. It was presented in the form of a series of lectures given by an old professor who at the end of the course finds that his audience has dwindled to one yawning student. The irony of the situation is emphasized by Van Moerkerken in the last sentence of the book: ‘Perhaps it might have been better if his words had also blown away on the cold wind of the lonely evening’. An ironic conclusion indeed, coming at the end of a series of six novels.

De Gedachte der Tijden is an impressive work and the most ambitious project of neo-romanticism in the Netherlands. The very ambitiousness of the plan was something that was part of the period. De Beweging had called upon the writers to think beyond the one poem or the one novel, and to aim at an oeuvre that consisted of larger and interrelated units. Verwey himself always thought of his poetry as made up of ‘series’ rather than of individual poems or volumes. In the field of the novel, Van Moerkerken was the first to put the idea of the cycle into practice. He was likewise one of the first to make the novel again into a forum for intellectual discussion. His work was a considerable achievement and a milestone in the history of the Dutch novel, but whether it was entirely successful artistically is another matter. In his reaction against naturalism, and his endeavour to inject the novel again with intellectual and philosophical content, Van Moerkerken now and then went too far. His characters are continually carrying on decisive discussions, solving religious and social problems, fighting over the solutions. They are always in the thick of things, whether they live in the sixteenth or in the eighteenth century. The ordinary, colourless man,

who stays at home and keeps out of strife is nowhere to be seen, however panoramic the books may be otherwise. Everything is intense, highly coloured and highly charged, as if Van Moerkerken was going to show once and for all that people were not as drab as the naturalists - the Dutch naturalists, at any rate - would have us believe. Moreover. Van Moerkerken's world is rather small. His characters keep meeting each other by accident and in unexpected and often unlikely places. It is a world that may be described as a microcosm seen through a magnifying glass. The quality of his writing is generally high. His straightforward, quiet and yet imaginative style has the effect of a breath of fresh air after the accumulation of detail of the later naturalists or the syntactical idiosyncrasies of Arij Prins. Van Moerkerken's work may not be flawless, it deserves attention as one of the more interesting experiments with the novel after the naturalist period, even if it eventually proved to be a dead end.

The honour of having written the very first neo-romantic novel in Dutch is due to Arthur van Schendel who was to develop into one of the major novelists of the Netherlands. He was born in 1874, which made him Van Moerkerken's senior by three years, and he published his first novel Drogon in 1896. True, this was the same year in which Adriaan van Oordt's Irmenlo appeared, but Drogon was written in 1894 or 1895, well before Van Schendel could have read Van Oordt's book. Van Schendel's romanticism was an even more conscious reaction against naturalism, or realism as he called it, than Van Moerkerken's. In a letter to Frederik van Eeden, written in 1897, he stated: ‘As a result of materialism, a conception of life holds sway, let us stand by the word realism, which rests on barren soil. Only the poets have had the good fortune to maintain a beautiful balance, but the prose writers of this century have lost this blessing because of their exclusive attention to the perceptible world.’ When he wrote this he had already published Drogon, a very personal reaction against ‘realism’, and a book for which he seems to have followed no model or example. Some have suggested that his

romanticism was of English origin and have mentioned Horace Walpole, Rossetti and Burne-Jones as his masters; others the work of Ludwig Tieck and Ricarda Huch. It is very unlikely, however, that any of these writers in any way influenced the writing of Drogon. It is far more likely that the young Van Schendel, steeped as he was in the poetry of Perk, Kloos and Gorter, harks back to these poets, and that he transformed the lyrical romanticism of their poetry into prose, bypassing the realist novelists of his own day such as Van Deyssel, Emants and Couperus. The reference which he made to the poets in his letter to Van Eeden supports this point of view. Van Schendel's early novels certainly show a greater affinity with the poetry of the Eighties than with the work of any prose writer, either English, Dutch or German.

Drogon, therefore, was the work of a young man of 20 or 21, who was striking out in a new direction, and the book undeniably bears the mark of this. There is an air of laboriousness about it, and it suffers from an unevenness of tone and style, very uncharacteristic of the later Van Schendel. Weak though it may be, it should not be ignored as it already contains much of the thematic material of Van Schendel's later novels. The dominant theme of all his work, that of Fate, makes its appearance in the first pages of the book when Drogon, a medieval knight, is tormented by ‘the riddle that was thumping in his heart, the riddle of Ill Fortune, understood by no mortal’. A few pages later, the second major theme is announced. Drogon's brother suggests that they join a crusade, but Drogon declines saying that another ‘longing’ prevents him from going: he intends to set out on a quest for a ring which contains a drop of Christ's blood. At the same time he is consumed by a desire for his brother's wife. These two desires, the one romantic-idealistic, the other earthy and sensual, are constantly at war in Drogon's mind and determine all his actions, until Fate finally strikes him down.

The themes of Drogon were resumed more successfully in Een Zwerver Verliefd (A Wanderer in Love, 1904). Tamalone, the main character, is like Drogon a man of loneliness -

his name may be an echo of ‘I am alone’ - and his life, too, is ruled by two desires, a romantic indeterminate longing, nameless and not directed at anything concrete, and an erotic desire for the wife of his best friend. As in Drogon, the erotic desire is ‘fatal’, i.e. it becomes the instrument through which Fate strikes: Tamalone kills his friend and indirectly causes the death of his wife. Fate, in other words, acts as a moral corrective. In contrast to Drogon, however, Tamalone himself is not destroyed by Fate, and in the sequel to the book, Een Zwerver Verdwaald (A Wanderer Lost), Tamalone even finds a certain peace of mind. The strength of these books lies in the evocation of mood and atmosphere, not in the presentation or analysis of character. Tamalone, driven by a longing which he himself cannot define, remains vague, as does Drogon, as does Merona in Merona, een Edelman (Merona, a Nobleman), published in 1927. In their dualist longing and in their living under the doom of Fate, the three are closely related. Also, they are all dreamers who prefer musing and pondering to action. When they act, they do so impulsively rather than as a result of a conscious decision. In this respect Van Schendel's neo-romantic novels provide a strong contrast to those of Van Moerkerken, whose gentle dreamers were not averse to action. Van Moerkerken showed that gentle dreaming can lead to cruel action, Van Schendel showed that corruption of the dream invokes the revenge of Fate. Though less ambitious than Van Moerkerken, the novels of Van Schendel are artistically more convincing. Yet even the talents of Van Schendel were not able to do much for neo-romanticism. It always remained an artificial flower, and Van Schendel's claim that realism rested on barren soil could more truthfully be applied to neo-romanticism. Neither Van Moerkerken's novel of ideas nor Van Schendel's novel of atmosphere could ensure its viability, and it was not long before realism asserted itself again.

Around 1930 Van Schendel turned away from neo-romanticism. In that year Het Fregatschip Johanna Maria (The Frigate Johanna Maria) appeared, to be followed in subse-

quent years by a number of novels in which the medieval and southern-European setting of the earlier books was replaced by that of contemporary or near-contemporary Holland. In these novels Van Schendel's style lost its poetic flavour and became more sober and matter-of-fact. The old themes were retained in essence, but they were tightened up, condensed and intensified. The vaguely idealistic longing of the neo-romantic novels became more concrete, and at the same time less idealistic, the erotic desire was relegated to the background or entirely eliminated, Fate grew more important and more destructive. In Het Fregatschip Johanna Maria the romantic longing hardened into the very concrete desire of Jacob Brouwer, the sailmaker, to own the ship in which he had sailed for so long. Brouwer's desire is also a good deal more intense than that of Drogon or Tamalone. In fact, desire and longing are no longer the words with which to describe Brouwer's feelings: passion or even fanaticism are closer to the mark. Fate holds off for a long time and only intervenes after Brouwer has realized his dream. When it does strike, its impact is greater than in the earlier novels, for although Brouwer's life had not been entirely irreproachable, he was in a moral sense less guilty than Drogon and Tamalone. Fate by losing its character of being a moral corrective, becomes blinder and more savage.

The theme of the man and his ship is echoed in De Waterman (The Waterman, 1933). Maarten Rossaert is wedded to his barge as Brouwer was to his frigate, but whereas to Brouwer possession of the ship was the very aim of his existence, to Rossaert the ship is only a means to an end, the means to become free from his own fears and from the narrow-mindedness around him. He breaks away from his environment, repelled by its hard-line Calvinism and intolerance. He joins a utopian religious community, the New Lights of Zwijndrecht - the book is set in the early nineteenth century - and uses his barge to give financial support to the brethren. But there is no escape from Fate, and the water claims his mother, his sister and his son. In the end, Rossaert himself is

also drowned. It is not a cheerful book, but its solid construction, its clear-cut delineation of character and its powerful evocation of the Dutch landscape, the rivers and polders and sombre skies, make it Van Schendel's best.

De Waterman was followed by three novels which are often regarded as his most significant novels of fate: Een Hollands Drama (A Dutch Tragedy), De Rijke Man (The Rich Man) and De Grauwe Vogels (The Grey Birds), published in successive years between 1935 and 1937. All three are tragedies. De Rijke Man is the tragedy of a rich young man who, touched by the story in the Bible, gives away all his possessions and dies in utter loneliness, forsaken and despised by everyone. The other two novels may be called tragedies of responsibility. In the former a grocer ruins his life by paying back a large sum of money which his brother-in-law had stolen, and by undertaking to bring up his brother-in-law's son. In the latter novel, a market-gardener brings about his own downfall by assuming responsibility for his invalid half-brother. The three novels are set in the contemporary Dutch middle class and their characters are all ‘grey birds’, those ordinary men and women whom the naturalists had placed in the centre of their work and whom the neo-romantics had ignored. It seems that in these books Van Schendel was drawing a little closer to the naturalist tradition from which he had always kept aloof. He devoted more attention to the influence of milieu and upbringing of his characters than before, and, particularly in Een Hollands Drama, he made heredity into a factor of considerable importance. It is, in fact, more meaningful to regard the doom that lies over the main characters of this novel as due to heredity than to fate, unless one wants to equate the two. Similarly, Kompaan in De Rijke Man is the victim of a delusion rather than the victim of fate. Only Kaspar Valk in De Grauwe Vogels is so relentlessly dogged by misfortunes that the word fate seems fully justified.

The five novels from Het Fregatschip to De Grauwe Vogels are undoubtedly Van Schendel's best work. They are ex-

traordinarily well-constructed novels, written with an unswerving fixity of purpose. The style is robust and even, unembellished yet evocative, unpoetic yet strongly rhythmic. It is a style that is fitted to perfection to capture the sombre grandeur of the landscape in De Waterman or the dour Calvinism in Een Hollands Drama. After De Grauwe Vogels Van Schendel did not continue in the same direction. He changed course as he had done in 1934. His next book, De Wereld een Dansfeest (The World, a Dance, 1938), was written in a more lighthearted vein than the preceding books, though it was still a tragedy, in spite of the title and the whimsy of the theme. Whimsical humour became an important element in Van Schendel's later novels and stories. Yet he was much more at home in tragedy than in comedy, and although he kept writing until his death in 1946 he was never able to surpass the five great books of the years from 1930 to 1937.

In the early years of the twentieth century, when Van Schendel was writing his neo-romantic novels, Verwey's De Beweging was the leading literary journal. It welcomed neo-romanticism as a healthy reaction to naturalism, and Verwey gave unqualified praise to Van Schendel's ‘power of imagination’. Neo-romantic poetry, too, was supported by De Beweging, but not to the exclusion of other streams. De Beweging explored all directions which gave promise of leading away from the extreme individualism of the Eighties. Neo-romanticism was one of these directions, but it turned out to be a cul-de-sac, in poetry as well as in prose. Neo-classicism proved to be more creative. Yet, outside neo-romanticism, and neo-classicism, the poet who came closest to Verwey's ideal of intellectual and philosophical poetry was J.A. dèr Mouw, a poet who belonged to Verwey's own generation.

Johan Andreas dèr Mouw was born in 1863, two years before Verwey, but although he had written poetry for many years, he did not publish any until he was 54. Then, in 1918, his work suddenly began to appear almost simultaneously in De Beweging, De Nieuwe Gids and the weekly paper De Amster-

dammer. Like several other poets of his generation, he was a classicist, and also a philosopher of repute, with an extensive knowledge of mathematics and science. As a philosopher he was strongly opposed to Hegel, and especially to the neo-Hegelians. It was in fact, his dislike of Hegel's system-building which led him, without turning away from European philosophy, to become more and more immersed in the systemless Indian philosophy of the Upanishads. There he found the expression of the unity of the Cosmos and the Self which was to become the mainspring of his poetry. Unity is the key-word of his work, and Brahman the symbol of the unity: that which comprises everything without forcing it into a system. He published his poetry, the two volumes Brahman I and Brahman II (1919 and 1921) under the Sanskrit name of Adwaita, that is ‘he who has overcome duality’.

Dèr Mouw was a mystic whose main poetic theme was that of the ‘unio mystica’. But as a mystic he was a class apart. His poetry was sometimes ecstatic, but always remained well-reasoned, very precise and nearly always cast in the strict form of the sonnet; it was deeply serious and at the same time humorous; it was philosophical, making considerable demands on its readers, but it was also couched in a most unexpected everyday language. The traditional hierarchy of values, which assumed that elevated thought was best expressed in elevated language, held no meaning for him. One of his best-known sonnets in Brahman I begins with the line: ‘K ben Brahman. Maar we zitten zonder meid’ (I am Brahman. But we are without a maid), and ends:

In 1919 this was too unconventional to find much response outside the small circle of Verwey, Kloos and Van Eeden. After his death in 1919 he was soon forgotten, and was only

rediscovered several years later by the writers of the Forum group. The poetry of Dèr Mouw was the crown of the ‘poetry of the thought’ which was so close to Verwey's heart, but it also marked its conclusion. It was almost symbolical that De Beweging ceased publication in 1919, the year of Dèr Mouw's death.

Before Dèr Mouw began publishing, the neo-classicism of Geerten Gossaert (pseudonym of F.C. Gerretson) and J.C. Bloem for some time put its mark on the poetry of the De Beweging group. In 1910 Gossaert published a long essay on Swinburne, who had died the year before. In this essay he broke a lance for ‘rhetorical poetry’, by which he meant poetry with traditional form and imagery. The next year Bloem supported him in a review article on the French neo-classicist poet Henri de Régnier, in which he, too, stood up for ‘rhetorical poetry’, though he modified Gossaert's phrase to ‘inspired rhetoric’. ‘In the Stances of Jean Moréas’, he wrote, ‘we have been able to observe how one can write genuine and original poetry with the most often used and the most well-known images, and in the most ordinary form. De Régnier's book is another example of this’. Other poets of De Beweging - Aart van der Leeuw, for instance, and P.N. van Eyck - questioned the soundness of the theory of Gossaert and Bloem, and pointed out the dangers that were inherent in a conscious return to rhetoric. Van Eyck, a poet in the mould of Verwey and later his successor as professor of Dutch literature at Leiden, was the most forceful opponent of the new rhetoric. Without rejecting traditionalism, he denied that the term ‘rhetorical poetry’ had any meaning and he opposed the idea that the poet should use ready-made imagery. As was stated before, Verwey gave qualified approval to the theory and tried to steer a middle course. History has proved the opponents right: rhetoric, inspired or not inspired, did not have much future as a poetic principle. The best example of it is Gossaert's own volume of poetry Experimenten (Experiments, 1911). It is an extraordinary volume, linked to the rhetoric of Bilderdijk and Da Costa, with reminiscences of

medieval and seventeenth-century poetry, occasionally influenced by Swinburne and Baudelaire, full of archaic words and phrases, and, not surprisingly, full of traditional imagery. Gossaert's own contribution to all this was a tremendous mastery of poetic technique, a great interest in metrical and rhythmical variations, passion and sensuousness, erudition and intellect. Experimenten remained a lonely experiment, and although it had considerable success and went through twelve editions, it was not the beginning of a new era in Dutch poetry. Before long it was overshadowed by the poetry of Bloem which proved of greater value, both intrinsically and historically.

Born in 1887, Bloem was twenty-four when he made his plea for traditionalism and coined the phrase of ‘inspired rhetoric’. In the same year 1911 he published his first poems, also in De Beweging. In their solemn tone, slightly archaic choice of words and elaborate structure, his early poems were closely related to those of his contemporaries Gossaert and Van Eyck. They were firmly rooted in tradition and were perhaps the best examples of the neo-classicism that was asserting itself in those days. At the same time the emotional basis of these poems was romantic. Just as in the early novels of Van Schendel, the recurrent theme was ‘longing’. In 1915 Bloem wrote a short essay in De Beweging under the title of Het Verlangen (Longing) in which he stated that it was longing which separated ‘poetic man’ from ‘a-poetic man’. Longing to him was not dissatisfaction, but a ‘divine unfulfilledness’ which makes one break through the banal confines of life. Since the longing was nameless and not directed at a specific object, as in the case of Van Schendel's Tamalone, it could not be fulfilled, and since it was not to be equated with dissatisfaction, its necessary complement was resignation. In his first volume, also entitled Het Verlangen and published in 1921, the resignation was hoped for and sometimes anticipated, but not attained. The next volume, Media Vita (1931), was characterized by a tone of disillusionment. The longing could not be fulfilled, but instead of leading to ‘life’, as

Bloem had intimated in his essay, or to the resignation he had hoped for in his first volume, it forced him more and more towards contemplation of death. The title, derived from the medieval antiphon Media Vita in Morte Sumus (In the Middle of Life we are in Death), hints strongly at his preoccupation with death. In De Nederlaag (Defeat), his third volume which was published in 1937, the disillusionment was complete and bitterer than in the previous volume. Love, which had held promise of at least temporarily filling the emptiness, failed and became meaningless. All that was left was loneliness and death. The opening poem of Sintels (Cinders), a small volume published in 1945, throws doubt even on the meaning of writing poetry which had always been the centre of his existence:

Some twenty years before, in an essay on Baudelaire, Bloem had quoted with approval a poem of Baudelaire's which answered this same question in the affirmative. Now Bloem's disenchantment with life and himself was so great that he even denied himself the satisfaction that was to be derived from poetic achievement.

It has rightly been suggested that when Bloem proclaimed ‘inspired rhetoric’ as the essential element of the ‘tradition française’, this French tradition for him was first and foremost represented by Baudelaire. Baudelaire meant a great deal to the generation of Bloem, Gossaert and Van Eyck, and in Bloem's early poetry one can certainly find traces of his influence. Bloem himself, in an autobiographical essay of 1954, mentioned Leopardi, Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman as the poets who were closest to him. Several parallels between the poetry of Housman and Bloem can be quoted, and Housman's ‘they say my verse is sad’ is echoed by more than one poem of Bloem's, perhaps even by the title of one of his later

volumes Quiet Though Sad (1946). Housman, he says in the essay, is decidedly a minor poet, but when four years later he compared him with Jean Moréas, and noted that neither of them displayed much variety in his poetry, with admirable disdain for the term ‘minor poet’ he declared both to be very great poets. One could not better characterize Bloem than with a similarly paradoxical phrase as a very great minor poet. His thematic range was limited, but he turned this limitation into a virtue by making even the simplest poem into a perfect work of art. His poetry was essentially modest, its tone was one of understatement, his style of writing, after the first somewhat solemn and grandiloquent poems, was like Housman's, direct and often colloquial.

Bloem's counterpart in Belgium was Jan van Nijlen, born in 1884. His poetry, too, ranged over a limited field, and developed from the solemn diction of Verzen (Poems, 1906) to a very simple and direct style in Het Aangezicht der Aarde (The Face of the Earth, 1923), De Vogel Phoenix (The Bird Phoenix, 1928) and especially in his last volume Het Oude Kind (The Old Child, 1938). Much in the same way as Bloem's, his work is concerned with disappointment and an uneasy resignation. Disillusionment is also the dominant mood, but, more often than in the poetry of Bloem, it is occasionally tempered by an ironic turn of phrase, by a shrug of the shoulder. The similarities between the poetry of Bloem and Van Nijlen are striking; the differences are mainly differences of degree. Van Nijlen lamented the loss of his youth, as did Bloem, but the memory of the past was less obsessive to him and less painful. There are several poems in which memory is not presented as pain but as a source of joy. Like Bloem, Van Nijlen recorded the passing of the seasons with feelings of sorrow for the passing of time, but on the whole his poetry was not quite as autumnal as the poetry of Bloem, nor was his view of nature as negative. To Bloem, nature meant little. The opening line of one of his best sonnets, De Dapperstraat (Dapper Street), reads: ‘Natuur is voor tevredenen of legen’ (Nature is for the contented or the empty),

and in the course of the poem he expresses his preference for the city, even on a miserable morning, walking in drizzling rain, in a street as depressing as Dapper Street in Amsterdam. Van Nijlen, on the contrary, often wrote appreciatively of nature and landscape, and stated in his poem De Stad: ‘Ik kan alleen maar houden van de stad / in lente en zomer, in de lauwe nachten’ (I can only love the city in spring and summer, in the warm nights).

Both Bloem and Van Nijlen began writing from a common basis of traditional and rather elevated poetry. In the early stages, their styles were influenced respectively by Gossaert and Van Eyck, and by Karel van de Woestijne. Gradually both poets moved away from the formality of their early work, and without breaking away from tradition, evolved a style of writing which stood much closer to everyday language and which paved the way for the colloquial style of later poets such as Martinus Nijhoff. From this point of view Bloem and Van Nijlen were traditional figures, linking the poetry of the mandarins to what Stephen Spender called ‘the poetry of the voices in the street’. Poetry in these years was developing towards a parlando style, a style that avoided any deliberate poetic idiom and employed as much as possible the vocabulary, syntax and rhythm of everyday speech. It was a development common to Western European literature in general. In France it led to the poetry of Jules Laforgue, in England to the Prufrock poems of T.S. Eliot, in the Netherlands to the poetry of Nijhoff. When Bloem and Van Nijlen were writing, the days of the mandarins and high priests were numbered, but not quite over. In the Netherlands, Adriaan Roland Holst (born in 1888) may be regarded as the last of the poets in the grand manner, the last of the prophetic poets. Roland Holst, one may say, related to Yeats as Nijhoff does to the early Eliot.

As in the case of Bloem and Van Nijlen, the basis of Roland Holst's poetry was romantic, but his romanticism was of a different order from theirs. Everything was on a larger scale: his longing, his disillusionment, his alienation from

contemporary reality. When Bloem and Van Nijlen spoke of the past, they spoke of their own past, of memories which were sometimes happy, but mostly burdensome. To Roland Holst the past is a mythical period that lies aeons before our time. It is a world not yet affected by the vulgarity and degeneration of the present day, a world in which man was ‘lonelier and more beautiful’ than he is now. This world often takes the shape of the