Haren,[1] so honourably known as diplomatists in the history of the Netherlands. Willem van Haren (1710–1768) wrote verses from his earliest youth, The brothers Van Haren.while Onno Zwier van Haren (1713–1779), strangely enough, did not begin to do so until he had passed middle life. They were friends of Voltaire, and they were both ambitious of success in epic writing, as understood in France at that period. Willem published in 1741 his Gevallen van Friso, a historical epos, and a long series of odes and solemn lyrical pieces. Onno, in a somewhat lighter strain, wrote Piet and Agnietje, or Pandora’s Box, and a long series of tragedies in the manner of Voltaire. The baroness Juliana Cornelia de Lannoy (1738–1782) was Baroness
de Lannoy.
Bellamy.a writer of considerable talent, also of the school of Voltaire; her poems were highly esteemed by Bilderdijk, and she has a neatness of touch and clearness of penetration that give vivacity to her studies of social life. Jakobus Bellamy (1757–1786) was the son of a Swiss baker at Flushing; his pompous odes (Gezangen myner Jeugd, 1782; Vaderlandsche Gezangen, 1782) struck the final note of the false taste and Gallic pedantry that had deformed Dutch literature now for a century, and were for a short time excessively admired.
The year 1777 has been mentioned as the turning-point in the history of letters in the Netherlands. It was in that year that Elizabeth (Betjen) Wolff[2] (1738–1804), a widow lady in Amsterdam, persuaded her friend Agatha (Aagjen) Deken (1741–1804), a poor but extremely intelligent governess, to throw up The ladies Wolff and Deken.her situation and live with her. For nearly thirty years these women continued together, writing in combination, and when the elder friend died on the 5th of November 1804, her companion survived her only nine days. Madam Wolff had appeared as a poetess so early as 1762, and again in 1769 and 1772, but her talent in verse was by no means very remarkable. But when the friends, in the third year of their association, published their Letters on Divers Subjects, it was plainly seen that in prose their talent was very remarkable indeed. Since the appearance of Heinsius’s Mirandor more than a century had passed without any fresh start in novel-writing being made in Holland. In 1782 the ladies Wolff and Deken, inspired partly by contemporary English writers, and partly by Goethe, published their first novel, Sara Burgerhar. In spite of the close and obvious following of Richardson, this was a masterly production, and it was enthusiastically received. Another novel, Willem Leevend, followed in 1785, and Cornelia Wildschut in 1792. The ladies were residing in France at the breaking out of the Revolution, and they escaped the guillotine with difficulty. After this they wrote no more, having secured for themselves by their three unrivalled romances a place among the foremost writers of their country.
The last years of the 18th century were marked in Holland by a general revival of intellectual force. The romantic movement in Germany made itself deeply felt in all branches of Dutch literature, and German lyricism took the place hitherto held by French classicism. Pieter NieuwlandNieuwland. (1764–1794) was a feeble forerunner of the revival, but his short life and indifferent powers gave him no chance of directing the transition that he saw to be inevitable. One volume of poems appeared in 1788, and a second, posthumously, in 1797.
The real precursor and creator of a new epoch in letters was the famous Willem Bilderdijk (1756–1831) (q.v.). This remarkable man, whose force of character was even greater than his genius, impressed his personality on his generation so indelibly that to think of a Dutchman of the beginning of the 19th century is Bilderdijk.to think of Bilderdijk. In poetry his taste was strictly national and didactic; he began as a disciple of Cats, nor could he to the end of his life tolerate what he called “the puerilities of Shakespeare.” His early love-songs, collected in 1781 and 1785, gave little promise of talent, but in his epic of Elias in 1786, he showed himself superior to all the Dutch poets since Huygens in mastery of form. For twenty years he lived a busy, eventful life, writing great quantities of verse, and then commenced his most productive period with his didactic poem of The Disease of the Learned, in 1807; in 1808 he imitated Pope’s Essay on Man, and published the tragedy of Floris V., and in 1809 commenced the work which he designed to be his masterpiece, the epic of De Ondergang der eerste Wereld (The Destruction of the First World), which he never finished, and which appeared as a fragment in 1820. To the foreign student Bilderdijk is a singularly uninviting and unpleasing figure. He unites in himself all the unlovely and provincial features which deform the worst of his countrymen. He was violent, ignorant and dull; his view of art was confined to its declamatory and least beautiful side, and perhaps no writer of equal talent has shown so complete an absence of taste and tact. Ten Brink has summed up the character of Bilderdijk’s writings in an excellent passage:—“As an artist,” he says, “he can perhaps be best described in short as the cleverest versemaker of the 18th century. His admirable erudition, his power over language, more extended and more colossal than that of any of his predecessors, enabled him to write pithy and thoroughly original verses, although the general tone of his thought and expression never rose above the ceremonious, stagy and theatrical character of the 18th century.” But in spite of his outrageous faults, and partly because these faults were the exaggeration of a marked national failing, Bilderdijk long enjoyed an unbroken and unbounded popularity in Holland. Fortunately, however, a sounder spirit has arisen in criticism, and the prestige of Bilderdijk is no longer preserved so religiously.
Bilderdijk’s scorn for the dramas of Shakespeare was almost rivalled by that he felt for the new German poetry. Notwithstanding his opposition, however, the romantic fervour found its way into Holland, and first of all in the persons of Hieronymus van Alphen (1746–1803) and Pieter Leonard van de Kastiele (1748–1810), who amused themselves by composing funeral poems of the school of Gessner and Blair. Van Alphen at one time was extolled as a writer of verses for children, but neither in this nor in the elegiac line did he possess nearly so much talent as Rhijnvis Feith (1753–1824), burgomaster of Zwolle, the very type of a prosperous and sentimental Dutchman. In his Julia (1783), a prose romance, Feith proved himself as completely the disciple of Goethe in Werther as Wolff and Deken had been of Richardson in Sara Burgerhart. In Johannes Kinker (1764–1845) a comic poet arose who, at the instigation of Bilderdijk, dedicated himself to the ridicule of Feith’s sentimentalities. The same office was performed with more dignity and less vivacity by Baron W. E. van Perponcher (1741–1819), but Feith continued to hold the popular ear, and achieved an immense success with his poem The Grave in 1792. He then produced tragedies for a while, and in 1803 published Antiquity, a didactic epic. But his popularity waned before his death, and he was troubled by the mirth of such witty scoffers as Arend Fokke Simons (1755–1812), the disciple of Klopstock, and as P. de Wacker van Zon (1758–1818), who, in a series of very readable novels issued under the pseudonym of Bruno Daalberg, sharply ridiculed the sentimental and funereal school.
Under the Batavian republic a historian of great genius arose in the person of Johannes Henricus van der Palm (1763–1840), whose brilliant and patriotic Gedenkschrift van Nederlands Herstelling (1816) has somewhat obscured his great fame as a politician and an Orientalist. The work Van der Palm.
Loots.
Helmers.commenced by Van der Palm in prose was continued in verse by Cornelis Loots (1765–1834) and Jan Frederik Helmers (1767–1813). Loots, in his Batavians of the Time of Caesar (1805), read his countrymen a lesson in patriotism, which Helmers far exceeded in originality and force by his Dutch Nation in 1812. Neither of these poets, however, had sufficient art to render their pieces classical, or, indeed, enough to protect them during their lifetime from the sneers of Bilderdijk. Other political writers, whose lyrical energies were stimulated by the struggle with France, were Maurits Cornelis van Hall (1768–1858), Samuel Iperuszoon Wiselius (1769–1845) and Jan ten Brink (1771–1839), the
