Psalms. The earliest printed collection appeared at Antwerp in 1540, under the title of Souter-Liedekens, and was dedicated to a Dutch nobleman, Willem van Zuylen van Nieuvelt, by whose name it is usually known. Psalms and hymns.This collection, however, was made before the Reformation in Holland really set in. For the Protestant congregations Jan Utenhove printed a volume of Psalms in London in 1566; Lucas de Heere (1534–1585), and immediately after him, with much greater success, Petrus Datheen (1531–1590), translated the hymns of Clément Marot. For printing this last volume, in 1567, Herman Schinkel of Delft was burned to death in 1568. Datheen was not a rhetorician, but a person of humble origin, who wrote in the vulgar tongue, and his hymns spread far and wide among the people. Until 1773 they were in constant use in the state church of Holland. But the great events of the period of reformation are not marked by psalms only in Dutch literature. Two collections of hymns and lyrical pieces, printed in 1562 and 1569, perpetuate the fervour and despair of the martyrs of the Mennonite Church. Similar utterances of the persecuted Protestants were published at Haarlem and Leeuwarden, at Ghent and at Bruges. Very different in tone were Battle-songs.the battle-songs of liberty and triumph sung a generation later by the victorious Reformers, the “Geuzen” or “Gueux” (q.v.). The famous song-book of 1588, the Geusen Lieden Boecxken, was full of ardent and heroic sentiment, expressed often in marvellously brilliant phrases. In this collection appeared for the first time such classical snatches of Dutch song as the Ballad of Heiligerlee, the Ballad of Egmond and Horn, and the song of the Storm of Leiden. The political ballads, with their ridicule of the Spanish leaders, form a section of the Boecxken which has proved of inestimable value to historians. All these lyrics, however, whether of victory or of martyrdom, are still very rough in form and language.
The first writer who used the Dutch tongue with grace and precision of style was a woman and a professed opponent of Lutheranism and reformed thought. Modern Dutch literature practically begins with Anna Bijns (c. 1494–1575). Against the crowd of rhetoricians and psalm-makers of the early part of the 16th century Anna Bijns.she stands out in relief as the one poet of real genius. The language, oscillating before her time between French and German, formless, corrupt and invertebrate, took shape and comeliness, which none of the male pedants could give it, from the impassioned hands of a woman. Anna Bijns, who is believed to have been born at Antwerp in 1494, was a schoolmistress at that city in her middle life, and in old age she still “instructed youth in the Catholic religion.” She died on the 10th of April 1575. Hendrik Peppinck, a Franciscan, who edited her third volume of poems when she was an old woman in 1567, speaks of her as “a maiden small of descent, but great of understanding, and godly of life.” Her first known volume bears the date 1528, and displays her as already deeply versed in the mysteries of religion. We gather from all this that she was a lay nun, and she certainly occupied a position of great honour and influence at Antwerp. She was named “the Sappho of Brabant” and the “Princess of all Rhetoricians.” She bent the powerful weapon of her verse against the faith and character of Luther. In her volume of 1528 the Lutherans are scarcely mentioned; in that of 1538 every page is occupied with invectives against them; while the third volume of 1567 is the voice of one from whom her age has passed. All the poems of Anna Bijns which we possess are called refereinen or refrains.[1] Her mastery over verse-form was extremely remarkable, and these refrains are really modified chants-royal. The writings of Anna Bijns offer many points of interest to the philologist. In her the period of Middle Dutch closes, and the modern Dutch begins. In a few grammatical peculiarities—such as the formation of the genitive by some verbs which now govern the accusative, and the use of ghe before the infinitive—her language still belongs to Middle Dutch; but these exceptions are rare, and she really initiated that modern speech which Filips van Marnix adopted and made classical in the next generation.
In Filips van Marnix, lord of St Aldegonde (1538–1598), a much greater personage came forward in the ranks of liberty and reform. He was born at Brussels in 1538, and began life as a disciple of Calvin and Beza in the schools of Geneva. It was as a defender of the Dutch iconoclasts that he first appeared in print, with his tract on Marnix.The Images thrown down in Holland in August 1566. He soon became one of the leading spirits in the war of Dutch independence, the intimate friend of the prince of Orange, and the author of the glorious Wilhelmuslied. It was in the autumn of 1568 that Marnix composed this, the national hymn of Dutch liberty and Protestantism. In 1569 he completed a no less important and celebrated prose work, the Biencorf or Beehive of the Romish Church. In this satire he was inspired in a great measure by Rabelais, of whom he was an intelligent disciple. It is written in prose that may be said to mark an epoch in the language and literature of Holland. Overwhelmed with the press of public business, Marnix wrote little more until in 1580 he published his Psalms of David newly translated out of the Hebrew Tongue. He occupied the last years of his life in preparing a Dutch version of the Bible, translated direct from the original. At his death only Genesis was found completely revised; but in 1619 the synod of Dort placed the unfinished work in the hands of four divines, who completed it.
In Dirck Volckertsen Coornhert[2] (1522–1590) Holland for the first time produced a writer at once eager to compose in his native tongue and to employ the weapons of humanism. Coornhert was a typical burgher of North Holland, equally interested in the progress of national emancipation and in the development of Coornhert.national literature. He was a native of Amsterdam, but he did not take part in the labours of the old chamber of the Eglantine, but quite early in life proceeded to Haarlem, and was notary, secretary and finally pensionary of the town. In 1566 he was imprisoned for his support of the Reformers, and in 1572 he became secretary to the states of Holland. He practised the art of etching, and spent all his spare time in the pursuit of classical learning. He was nearly forty years of age before he made any practical use of his attainments. In 1561 he printed his translation of the De officiis of Cicero, and in 1562 of the De beneficiis of Seneca. In these volumes he opposed with no less zeal than Marnix had done the bastard forms still employed in prose by the rhetoricians of Flanders and Brabant. During the next decade he occupied himself chiefly with plays and poems, conceived and expressed with far less freedom than his prose, and more in the approved conventional fashion of the rhetoricians; he collected his poems in 1575. The next ten years he occupied in polemical writing, from the evangelical point of view, against the Calvinists. In 1585 he translated Boethius, and then gave his full attention to his original masterpiece, the Zedekunst (1586), or Art of Ethics, a philosophical treatise in prose, in which he studied to adapt the Dutch tongue to the grace and simplicity of Montaigne’s French. His humanism unites the Bible, Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius in one grand system of ethics, and is expressed in a style remarkable for brightness and purity. He died at Gouda on the 29th of October 1590; his works, in three enormous folio volumes, were first collected in 1630.
Towards the end of the period of transition, Amsterdam became the centre of all literary enterprise in Holland. In 1585 two of the most important chambers of rhetoric in Flanders, the “White Lavender” and the “Fig Tree,” took flight from the south, and settled themselves in Amsterdam by the side of the “Eglantine.” Amsterdam the centre
of letters.The last-named institution had already observed the new tendency of the age, and was prepared to encourage intellectual reform of every kind, and its influence spread through Holland and Zealand. In Flanders, meanwhile, crushed under the yoke of Parma, literature and native thought absolutely expired. From this time forward, and until the emancipation of the
