4: Literature of the Enlightenment, 1700–1800

Marleen de Vries

I. Introduction

As the historian Jonathan Israel has shown, the early Enlightenment represents the single most significant revolution in culture and philosophy since the conversion of Western Europe to Christianity in the fourth century. The last quarter of the seventeenth century and the first quarter of the eighteenth saw the transformation of a traditional society and culture still hierarchical, theocratic, and agrarian into a community that was cosmopolitan, city-oriented, secular, commercial-industrial, and scientific. In this sense the early Enlightenment marks the transition from the premodern to the modern age.

The Enlightenment was not in fact a single coherent development but rather two rival movements. There was the moderate mainstream, which managed to reconcile old and new, science and Christianity, and there was the radical Enlightenment, which rejected any possibility of compromise and therefore had to be propagated in secret. Both movements had enormous faith in the future. The people of the eighteenth century coined the term “Enlightenment” because they were convinced that increased medical, scientific, and technical knowledge would lift the darkness of previous centuries. Progress heralded a new era of modernity, in which happiness would finally come within everyone’s reach.

The nerve center from which these radical, democratic, antimonarchical, anti-aristocratic, and anti-Christian ideas flowed was not Paris or London but the network of towns centered on Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Rotterdam in the northern Netherlands, the most prosperous region of Europe at the time and the busiest hub of European trade, shipping, high finance, and publishing. The Dutch Republic was the perfect breeding ground for modern ideas, enjoying as it did a strong cultural and intellectual tradition of tolerance, republicanism, and individual freedom. The power of the church, the crown, and the aristocracy had long been curtailed here, and there was a strong publishing trade.

Freethinkers in other countries recognized, with some envy, that a climate of tolerance had brought great wealth to the republic. The French theologian Noël Aubert de Versé (1645–1714), a fierce defender of religious freedom who lived in Amsterdam from 1679 to 1687, wrote exultantly: “Amsterdam owes its splendor and opulence, admired by all nations, to this precious liberty, because there is no nationality so foreign nor any sect so outlandish that its people cannot live in peace there, provided they are good people, sincere, loyal, and upright citizens.” The Irish deist John Toland (1670–1722), who was based in Leiden from 1692 to 1693 and lived and published in The Hague from 1708 to 1711, believed that “unlimited Liberty of Conscience” guaranteed Holland’s social and economic success.

Dam Square in Amsterdam with the Town Hall, the New Church and the Weigh House. Amsterdam, Municipal Archives.

Since the late sixteenth century, Dutch society had been characterized by a climate of — albeit relative — religious tolerance. Different denominations existed side by side, and any medium-sized village would have several churches. Although Calvinism was the approved religion and only members of the Dutch Reformed Church could be employed as civil servants, no more than 40% of the population was Calvinist. Roughly another 40% was Catholic, and the remaining 20% consisted of dissenters (Lutherans, Baptists, Remonstrants, Collegiates, and Quakers) as well as Jews and non-believers. In 1685, when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes that had granted the Huguenots freedom of worship, many French, Huguenot, and ex-Catholic intellectuals sought refuge in the Dutch Republic.

The Huguenot diaspora contributed hugely to keeping the republic at the center of the Enlightenment process. It was an important factor in the creation of a critical, heterodox press, mainly in Latin and French, which helped develop an entirely new publishing infrastructure well suited to the religious, political, and cultural climate. These presses constituted an independent, neutral, scientific republic of letters that flooded the rest of Europe with livres de Hollande. The principal founders of the new Enlightenment movement were Baruch de Spinoza (1632–77) and Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). Spinoza, the son of a Portuguese-Jewish merchant, was born in the republic. Bayle fled France for Rotterdam in 1681 to escape religious persecution.

Religious tolerance, indeed tolerance in general, was the subject of much intellectual controversy in the Enlightenment period. Philosophers analyzed the concept from their own perspective as rigorous skeptics, while ordinary citizens examined it as part of a quest for individual freedom, and merchants and publishers for commercial reasons. This freedom of expression was not absolute, particularly when it came to issues that were especially sensitive within the country itself; nevertheless, there was more leeway here than anywhere else, and Dutch publishers and printers exploited their relative freedom to the full. Works forbidden in neighboring countries were routinely published in the republic and smuggled out over the border. In the closing decades of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth, this produced an extremely cosmopolitan intellectual environment.

John Locke found asylum in the republic under the assumed name of Dr. Van der Linden, and from 1683 to 1689 he belonged to a network of freethinkers, refugee intellectuals, and Enlightenment philosophers and theologians. Universities and colleges flourished as never before, attracting talented students from all over Europe. The professor of medicine Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738) taught Julien de La Mettrie and Albrecht von Haller. Voltaire attended lectures in Leiden by the physicist Willem Jacob ’s-Gravesande (1688–1742), one of the leading exponents of Newton’s ideas on the continent. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–78) obtained his doctorate in Harderwijk and chose to publish most of his work in the republic. In Delft, on his own initiative and without being affiliated with any university, the civil servant and amateur biologist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) ground his own lenses and used them to conduct experiments. He invented the microscope and went on to achieve international fame with his studies of bacteria and spermatozoids. His research results were published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London.

These and other scholars and amateur researchers published empirical studies that showed the world to be more fathomable, or at least less reliant on miracles, than previously assumed. They put “God’s miraculous works” into perspective, helping to erode the dominant position of the Christian faith. Literary works sometimes had a comparable effect. The University of Leiden had a reputation for exotic lectures on oriental cultures and religions, given by famous orientalists like the Schultens, father and son. Albert Schultens (1686–1750) found international fame with his translation of the Book of Job (1737), a work that showed Arabic, a language closely related to Hebrew, to be of use in interpreting the Old Testament. No less influential was Adrianus Relandus (1676–1718), who was based in Utrecht. His The Mohammedan Religion (De religione mohammedica, 1705), translated into Dutch in 1718 and subsequently into French, English, German, and Spanish, defended Islam, a religion usually described as cruel and tyrannical.

Until about 1720 the republic played a leading role in the propagation of European Enlightenment ideas. Then its prosperity gradually declined, along with its stability and its pioneering intellectual role, which passed to Britain and France. The rise of radical Enlightenment thinking coincided with a series of costly wars against Louis XIV. Stadtholder William III, who married Mary Stuart and became King of England in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, was the greatest of all Louis’s opponents. It was the Spanish War of Succession (1702–13), however, that ultimately put paid to the supremacy of the Dutch Republic. The Peace of Utrecht in 1713 brought home the painful realization that the Republic was no longer a major political force: the peace terms were negotiated by Britain and France alone.

The death of William III in 1702 created a power vacuum that lasted until 1747. This period, known as the second stadtholderless era (the first one, from 1650 to 1672, occurred after the death of William II), had little effect on the way the republic functioned, since the political infrastructure was already decentralized and each of the seven provinces had sovereign status. However, it was the regents of Holland and merchants of Amsterdam who were best placed to take advantage of the situation and strengthen their own positions. The vast majority of the population gained little. When French troops marched into Flanders and Brabant in 1747, drawing the republic into the Austrian War of Succession (1740–48), the people rose and demanded change. They wanted a new Prince of Orange, hoping he might bring peace. Popular uprisings grew so fierce that the governing regent class had no choice but to appoint a new stadtholder. When William IV took over in 1747 the stadtholdership was declared hereditary, but both he and William V, who succeeded him in 1766, proved insufficiently decisive. The old anti-Orangist regent factions were simply replaced by regent factions siding with the House of Orange, so on balance little changed. The country was still governed by a small and powerful clique. Both stadtholders neglected the navy, which lost them the support of the merchants who depended on the fleet for their livelihood.

The Republic suffered economically as well. England and France grew into formidable competitors, and Amsterdam’s position as a staple market, retained for almost two centuries, effectively passed to rival markets like London and Hamburg. Many countries began to circumvent staple markets altogether by importing direct from producing countries. Family capital once devoted to trade was now invested in low-risk ventures — in bonds, or abroad — transforming the republic from a dynamic trading nation into a nation of shareholders. Floods and cattle plague did the rest. A large proportion of the population was unemployed and living in poverty, and the economic decline was reflected by that of the country’s two largest trading companies. The West India Company or WIC (Westindische Compagnie), established in 1621, folded in 1791. The United East Indies Company or VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), founded in 1602, ceased to trade a few years later in 1799, by which time the Republic’s extensive international trading network had shrunk to a relatively small colonial empire, and many of her overseas trading posts had passed to Britain.

By 1770 the consequences of economic decline were only too apparent. Although some individuals continued to enrich themselves, large numbers fell into poverty. “It is impossible for anyone who is at all sensitive or who has any feeling for his fatherland to walk through the inner cities without a tear in his eye,” wrote the Leiden lawyer and publisher Elie Luzac. James Boswell recorded that in Utrecht entire alleyways were crammed with wretches subsisting on potatoes, gin, tea, and coffee, while luxury reigned in The Hague and in the houses of rich Amsterdam merchants. Patience wore thin. Dissatisfied regents, wealthy merchants, and some outspoken citizens began raising their voices. The American War of Independence encouraged yet more opposition to the stadtholder, who was making no attempt whatsoever to protect Dutch commercial interests. In fact William V and his followers sided with trade rival England, while the Amsterdam merchants, their eyes on lucrative new markets, supported rebel British colonies in America by supplying them with weapons. The British threatened to seize Dutch merchant ships unless weapons shipments ceased. In 1780 the republic responded by joining the Armed Neutrality Pact between Russia, Denmark, and Sweden, an alliance created to defend freedom of trade, whose main target was the British navy. Britain reacted by declaring war on the republic. The Fourth English War had begun.

From this point on, Dutch society politicized rapidly. The longstanding divide widened between those campaigning for a republican form of government and the Orangists, who supported the stadtholder system. The republicans called themselves Patriots and prepared for civil war by setting up armed associations known as citizens’ militias. By 1787 their power as an armed force was such that several of their number had the audacity to detain William V’s wife, Wilhelmina of Prussia, near the small village of Goejanverwellesluis in the province of South Holland. Wilhelmina had been on her way to The Hague in the hope of influencing the course of the civil war. She was held captive for several hours and then forced to return to Nijmegen, where the stadtholder’s family had been living for its own safety since 1785. In retaliation Wilhelmina encouraged the Prussians to send an army of twenty-five thousand men, which successfully quashed the Patriot rebellion in late 1787. Many Patriots fled to France after William V restored his grip on power. The remainder set about organizing clandestine resistance in private homes, coffee houses, and clubs and institutions. It was not until 1795 that the Patriots, aided by French troops, finally seized control. William V fled to England, the Batavian Republic was founded, and there was a proclamation of “The Rights of Man and of Citizens” along American lines. All religions were declared equal in law; Catholics, Dissenters, and Jews were given permission to worship in public.

Meanwhile the southern Netherlands was struggling under the weight of its own rather dispiriting history. The River Scheldt was still blockaded and the country ruled by Spain. At the end of the Spanish War of Succession (1702–13) France’s Philip V de Bourbon retained the Spanish throne but lost control of the southern Netherlands, which now fell under Austro-Hungarian rule. The Peace of Utrecht in 1713 granted the Dutch Republic military guardianship over the southern Netherlands. This did not exactly make for good relations between North and South: “Holland only that is free, / And those who are nowhere so, are we,” wrote an angry Flemish poet. In the so-called “Generality Lands,” the buffer zone between North and South, where many Dutch soldiers were billeted, there must have been close contact, but the gulf between the two only continued to widen as France came to exert an increasing influence on the southern Netherlands. Austrian rule meant that French became the language of the court and of diplomacy. The status of French and of French culture in general grew enormously during this period, and French influence increased even further during the Austrian War of Succession. For four years, 1745–48, France directly occupied the southern Netherlands, and French generals introduced a French lifestyle, including French theater, literature, and fashion.

Not until after the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 did the South enjoy better, more peaceful times. Empress Maria Theresa and Charles, Duke of Lorraine, modernized government structures and stimulated industry, mining, and trade. But Maria Theresa, universally praised as the “peacemaker,” died in 1780 and was succeeded by Emperor Joseph II, who made himself particularly unpopular by single-handedly imposing a series of reforms. This was the start of a revolutionary period in the southern provinces and the emergence of two resistance movements: the Statists, a conservative grouping led by Hendrik van der Noot (1731–1827), who aimed to preserve the privileges of the nobility, church leaders, magistrates, and local rulers; and the Vonckists, named after the lawyer Jan Frans Vonck (1743–92), who sought democratic reform. In 1789–90 the Brabant Revolution broke out. Although for a short time the democrats appeared to have gained the upper hand when they defeated an Austrian army at Turnhout, by the end of 1790 Austrian rule had been reasserted. In 1792 and 1794 French troops invaded and the southern Netherlands became part of France.

None of this violence seems to have had an adverse effect on cultural life, which flourished in both North and South. While a series of wars drained the state coffers and people went hungry, wealthier citizens ushered in a series of initiatives with far-reaching consequences. A political press emerged, created out of the need to combat a sense of crisis, convert Enlightenment ideas into action, and shape public opinion. Equally significant for the cultural infrastructure was the growing importance of the club. Since the seventeenth century there had been innumerable chambers of rhetoric in the South, whose self-declared aim was to cultivate the Dutch language and its literature. In the northern Netherlands the chambers of rhetoric were defunct, but here the concept of the club or association was revived in the second half of the eighteenth century. Within a decade or two there were hundreds of organizations regulated by their own laws and statutes. Fifty years sufficed to make this a “century of clubs,” with membership increasingly drawn from a broad public.

The Dutch Society of Sciences and Humanities (Hollandse Maatschappij der Wetenschappen), for example, founded in 1752, was a thoroughly learned institution, whereas the Society for Public Welfare (Maatschappij tot nut van ’t Algemeen), founded in 1784, was intended for ordinary citizens. The Economic Branch (Oeconomische Tak), a society established with the sole purpose of restoring economic prosperity, attracted three thousand members within a year of its founding in 1777. Cultural life existed largely within these institutions and was therefore shaped by them, whether they were Masonic lodges, learned societies, or literary clubs. They all had at least two things in common: their main purpose was the acquisition of knowledge, and the future of the nation was a standing item on the agenda.

By the second half of the eighteenth century the Dutch Enlightenment was largely a domestic concern, although the Dutch did continue to play a small role in propagating Enlightenment ideals across Europe. The Leiden bookseller Elie Luzac (1721–96) was appointed university publisher in Göttingen as late as 1753, but by then booksellers in the northern Netherlands were concentrating on the new domestic market, as they faced declining sales in the primarily French-language international book trade. Books for the Dutch market, still heavily influenced by the critical agenda of the Enlightenment, tested the limits of individual freedom, both freedom of religious and political conviction and freedom of expression. Theological dogmas came under fire, and various forms of natural religion began to replace them. The system of rank and privilege was attacked and egalitarian ideologies gained ground.

These late-Enlightenment debates took place against a background of economic decline, and participants regularly invoked notions of decay and doom. In France, Germany, and England the Enlightenment movement went hand in hand with increased international prestige, but the power of the Low Countries, North and South, was shrinking steadily. There was much speculation about the causes of economic collapse. The most popular explanation was a collective mental crisis: the people had grown feeble, effeminate, and infatuated with France, and somehow or other they had lost the morale and resolve characteristic of the old seventeenth-century fatherland.

We encounter this attitude time and again in the literature of the period, an astonishingly multifarious literature aimed at all sectors of society and written in three languages: Dutch, French, and Latin. French and Latin predominated in the southern Netherlands, where French Enlightenment ideas were consumed in the original French. The northern Netherlands developed a rich vernacular literature that gradually pushed Latin and French into the background. There was something to suit every taste, and it was in plentiful supply. Literary output doubled in a century. This was due at least in part to the rejuvenating force of the Enlightenment movement. Older genres such as dialogues with the dead, verse epistles, and imaginary travel stories were appropriated and adapted for a new era, and new genres came onto the market: encyclopedias, satirical journals, spectatorial magazines, epistolary novels, and plays written in prose. The literary landscape broadened rapidly to feature entirely new forms. There were even literary maps, such as that by Johannes Kinker in 1788, in which strenuous efforts were made to chart both the old and the new.

Above all, the literature of the Enlightenment was militant. It was intended to influence the way people thought in the hope of emancipating them. This helped to give eighteenth-century literature its chameleon character, as it adapted to changing political conditions and to the intellectual capacities of its intended readerships. The new literature was not only inventive: it might be called democratic, in the sense that it served all levels of society. Scholars, intellectuals, tradesmen, laborers, hacks, and a handful of writers from among the wealthier citizenry all contributed to it, keen as they were to unlock the truth and make the world more just and more humane.

Reflecting the struggle for political freedom, literature threw off a number of major constraints. French classicism, a literary current dominated by strict rules and a ban on religious and political subjects, inevitably fell by the wayside in this era of engagement. Slowly but steadily, classical genres such as the epic and the tragedy extricated themselves from classical rules concerning probability and decorum, the epic initially flourishing before dying an inglorious death at the end of the century. The rationalism of classical literature increasingly gave way to emotion. In the first half of the century, human passions and urges were still regarded with skepticism, but toward its close, emotions came to be valued as poetic and eventually as positive and creative powers. Horace’s concept of utile dulci was retained, as it could mean all things to all people. In fact “usefulness” became a key concept, particularly during the many debates on literary theory by clubs and societies. Elsewhere the entertainment value of literature took on increasing significance. Yet whether they were writing epistolary novels, poems for club anthologies, or sentimental literature, all writers, without exception, claimed that their work was intended as a contribution to the common good.

II. Early Enlightenment Literature, 1680–1725

The Radical Enlightenment

The radical Enlightenment, the intellectual revolution of the late seventeenth and the early decades of the eighteenth century, was first and foremost an attack on Judeo-Christian tradition and the social structures that flowed from it. Radical Enlightenment thinkers declined to submit to the power of the church. They did not believe in an all-powerful God or a social hierarchy determined by God, nor in the Devil, miracles, or reward and punishment in a life after death. Many of these radical thinkers lived and worked in the Republic, where they could write and have their works printed without too much interference. Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–51), for example, studied medicine in Leiden under Herman Boerhaave. His Man a Machine (L’homme machine, 1748), dedicated to Albrecht von Haller, another of Boerhaave’s students, was published in Leiden by Elie Luzac.

Such thinkers were often accused of Spinozism, a term referring not only to Spinoza’s ideas but to any philosophy regarded by orthodox Dutch Christians as tending towards atheism. Spinoza did of course go further than any philosopher before him. Born in Amsterdam in 1632, he was the author of Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) and the posthumous Ethica (1677). While most philosophers, including Descartes, tried to reconcile their theories and insights with their Christian faith, Spinoza refused to submit to God or to any system based on theism. For Spinoza the divine was effectively synonymous with nature, and to study and understand nature there was no need for the Bible or clergy. Reason alone would ­suffice.

Baruch de Spinoza. Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Library.

Spinoza gathered many disciples around him, some of them scholars, others ordinary citizens interested in philosophy. The Dutch translation of the Tractatus published under the title The Orthodox Theologian (Den rechtzinnigen Theologant) in 1693 carried his ideas to an even broader readership within the republic. The same decade saw the publication of The World Bewitched (De betoverde weereld, 1691–93) by the Amsterdam clergyman Balthasar Bekker (1634–98), in which Bekker maintained that witches and demons did not exist. The devil belonged to the realm of mythology too, he said, and he criticized the way the Bible had been translated into Dutch, claiming the official Dutch version, the States Bible (Statenbijbel) of 1637, contained more demonic passages than the original text. Bekker was sacked as a church minister, but his work was translated into English, French, and German; the German edition in particular provoked uproar.

Although the scientific revolution took place among a highly educated elite, it filtered through to a broad audience. While the new philosophical ideas had repercussions for literature, writers were experimenting with new literary forms. In fact, the final decades of the seventeenth century saw a remarkable parallel between the drive to experiment in philosophy and in literature. The need arose for literary genres that could accommodate thought experiments. Rather than the familiar classical genres like tragedy and the epic, which required authors to adhere to all kinds of rules, there was a move towards genres that were not, or not yet, codified and therefore allowed the writer considerable freedom: the farce, the novel, and poetry. These more trivial genres turned out to be the most appropriate vehicles for less than orthodox opinions. An anonymous farce called The Courtship of John the Cad and Kate the Bitch (De vryagie van Jan de Plug en Caat de Brakkin, c. 1691), for example, provides a defense of Balthasar Bekker’s ideas.

The novel proved to be a particularly stimulating genre. Out of nowhere, around 1680, the Dutch picaresque novel appeared, populated by scroungers, swindlers, adventurers, whores, and sex-crazed students. Titles like The Hague Libertine (De Haagsche lichtmis, 1679), The Leiden Street Ruffian (De Leidsche straatschender, 1679), The London Jilt, or, the Politick Whore (D’Openhertige juffrouw, 1680), Amsterdam Whoredom (’T Amsterdamsch hoerdom, 1681), The Dutch Rogue (Leven, op- en ondergang van den verdorven Koopman, 1682) and The Illustrious Deeds of Jan Dung (De doorluchtige daden van Jan Stront, 1684, 1696) speak for themselves. Jan Dung, especially the second volume, published in 1696, had the distinction of being the first pornographic novel ever written in Dutch. It did not travel beyond the border. The Dutch Rogue, on the other hand, was published in English as early as 1683. The London Jilt, or, the Politick Whore, published in English in 1683, proved cosmopolitan as well and was soon all the rage in both England and America; French and German translations followed. It tells the pseudo-autobiographical story of a prostitute, whose account of her survival tactics and techniques for relieving clients of their money, as she says herself, “does not have a great deal in common with the Ethics of Aristotle or however many other Ethics or works of Moral Philosophy the world may contain.”

But the “politick whore” also holds up a mirror to the reader, the suggestion being that society as a whole embraces morals that perpetuate deceit (and therefore prostitution). The fact that the unidentified author was probably a man is largely irrelevant as far as the narrative perspective goes. The author introduces a female narrator, describes the world in realistic terms, and is not afraid of psychological elaboration, so that The London Jilt, although of an entirely different caliber, stands comparison with Madame de La Fayette’s The Princess of Cleves (La Princesse de Clèves, 1678), generally regarded as the first modern European novel. Whereas the married Princess of Cleves is torn by internal conflict because of her overwhelming love for the young and elegant Duc de Nemours, the outspoken narrator of The London Jilt states baldly: “Because the things the little Misses generally try to make their menfolk believe, that they are not lustful and that, once married, they will never play the game of love unless they feel duty-bound to obey their husbands in that respect, I can assure you these are the greatest lies it is possible to conceive.”

Adventure novels like The London Jilt could hardly be described as radically enlightened in a philosophical sense. No dogmas were attacked in them, and they laid out no new philosophical systems. Nevertheless, their complete lack of morality lent them radical credentials, and they could certainly be described as shameless. There are no allusions to religious conscience or to a sense of guilt, quite astonishing in light of the overwhelmingly moralistic and religious literature of the period.

Only a decade later, in the 1690s, the time was ripe for the truly philosophical novel. The whore of The London Jilt pales beside real women of radical opinions. The writer Isabella de Moerloose (1660/61–after 1712) is one example. Born in Ghent in the southern Netherlands, she moved north to the province of Zeeland, where she married a pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church. By 1699 she was running a small school near Amsterdam, where according to parish council records she taught the children “very godless and abominable things.” That same year she was locked up in a women’s prison. She is the author of the curious 670-page Peace Treatise, Come Down from Heaven through Women’s Seed (Vrede Tractaet, gegeven van den hemel door vrouwen zaet, 1695), an autobiography in which she describes all the ignorance she has encountered in her life. The book is packed with radical ideas. De Moerloose does not believe in miracles, nor in the holy Trinity, and she doubts that Christ was the son of God. She does not read, she tells us, or only very little; all her ideas stem from conversations in intellectual circles.

Just how wide such circles were we can only guess, but they must have existed. Hendrik Wyermars (c. 1685–after 1749), for example, a simple office clerk with no academic background of any kind, was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment in 1710, at the age of twenty-five, for writing a small Spinozist volume, The Imagined Chaos, and Supposed Sophistication of the Old and Contemporary Philosophers, Countered and Laid Aside (Den ingebeelde chaos, en gewaande werels-wording der oude, en hedendaagze wysgeeren, veridelt en weerlegt).

An anonymously published Spinozist roman à clef in two parts called The Life of Philopater (Het leven van Philopater, 1691 and 1697) affords us a glimpse into radical Enlightenment circles. It is an account of the intellectual and religious path taken by the central character, a theology student in Leiden, before he finally decides to convert to Spinozism. Philopater starts out as a sensitive Pietist, but he has difficulty with the awareness of sin this requires of him. The devil so terrifies him that he almost loses his mind. He is saved by a pastor from Zeeland, Johannes de Mey, who releases him from his fear of the devil. After De Mey’s death Philopater joins the Cocceians, a freethinking Calvinist sect whose beliefs were based not on dogma but on a covenant with humanity made by God. Dissatisfied with the sect’s view of the world, he falls for the charms of millenarianism in the form of Chiliasm, a sect using the Bible to decipher the date on which Christ will return to earth to establish a thousand-year kingdom of peace. Philopater “worked night and day, sought night and day, and time and again discovered new things, with which he was as inordinately pleased as if he had discovered the true Evangelical Pearl.” But a young adherent of the sect draws Philopater’s attention to the pointlessness of all this head-scratching over prophesy and imparts to him the principles of Spinozism.

Volume 2 of the novel, which had a print run of fifteen hundred copies, devotes a great deal of space to Spinoza’s ideas. This volume was immediately banned. Volume 1 was probably written by an Amsterdam schoolmaster called Johannes Duijkerius (c. 1662–1702), but volume two was attributed to its publisher, Aart Wolsgryn (active 1682–97). In 1698 Wolsgryn was fined four thousand guilders and sentenced to eight years in prison and twenty-five years’ exile from Holland and West-Friesland, one of the harshest punishments ever imposed for publishing a book. All unsold copies were publicly burned in Rotterdam.

The Emergence of the Periodical

The hunger for knowledge, truth, and the insights of the Enlightenment, which had created the demand for novels, produced another new literary genre, the periodical. Newspapers had existed since the beginning of the seventeenth century and had been joined in mid-century by newssheets or “mercuries,” named after Mercury, the messenger of the gods. Mercuries and newspapers did not try to shape public opinion but confined themselves to reports on trade, the fortunes of European aristocratic families, and matters of war and peace. News was primarily foreign news. Mercuries sometimes dressed up their information as literature, often, though not always, satire.

Learned journals created an intellectual revolution. They emerged in seventeenth-century France and England, but the first two titles, the Journal des Sçavants and the Royal Society of London’s Philosophical Transactions, both established in 1665, met with so much opposition from church and state that no similar publications appeared until the 1680s. Learned journals provided a platform for reviews of recently published scientific works (in fact largely extracts from them), summaries of the latest scientific debates, and scientists’ obituaries. Written in Latin or French, they amounted to an international forum for intellectuals and scholars — a novelty in western Europe, as it no longer took several years for a scholar to gather the latest scientific news from abroad. The subject matter of the new periodicals, which included the latest insights in theology, philosophy, and natural science, meant they were watched extremely closely by the authorities.

From 1684 onwards the Republic’s tolerant, enlightened climate enabled it to turn out more learned journals than any other country in Europe. It was here that News from the Republic of Letters (Nouvelles de la République des lettres, 1684–89) first appeared and rapidly grew into an influential journal. It was edited by the “philosopher of Rotterdam,” the freethinking scholar Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), who came to live in the republic in 1681 when Louis XIV closed down the Protestant academy in Sedan where Bayle was a lecturer in philosophy. In Rotterdam he became the first philosophy professor at the brand new Illustrious School, not a university but a college of higher education where students could take a foundation course only. News from the Republic of Letters was devoted entirely to the exchange of knowledge and aimed not only at scientists but at a general readership. Bayle introduced a new, bitingly critical style of reporting while always staunchly advocating tolerance and the application of reason.

A competing publication nevertheless proved even more successful: the Universal and Historical Library (Bibliothèque universelle et historique, 1686–93). This was a learned journal whose Genevan editor, Jean le Clerc (1657–1736), had chosen to live in the Netherlands since 1683 because of its tolerant climate. He expected to beat off all foreign competition simply by virtue of operating out of Holland, where he could get hold of any books he wanted and treat even the most sensitive subjects “because one is living in a country of freedom.” Contributors to the Universal and Historical Library included John Locke, who had spent several years in the republic, where he became a good friend of Le Clerc. Fourteen percent of the works discussed in the Library consisted of books published in Britain. Both Bayle’s News and Le Clerc’s Library were banned in France and other Catholic countries.

Title page of European Reading Room (Boekzaal van Europa). Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Library.

The first learned journal published in Dutch did not appear until 1692. It was a bimonthly magazine called European Reading Room (Boekzaal van Europa, 1692–1702), edited by Pieter Rabus (1660–1702), deputy head of a Latin school in Rotterdam. Rabus hoped that publication in Dutch would make his magazine accessible to a non-scholarly as well as a scholarly readership. The journal continued after his death under the title Reading Room of the Learned World (Boekzaal der Geleerde Weereld).

Learned journals contributed to the Enlightenment movement in a number of ways. By highlighting the latest scientific findings, they helped shift the focus away from established authorities and the classics and toward everything that was new, innovative, and challenging. They spoke up for tolerance and intellectual objectivity and made their own contribution to both by publishing reviews that were deliberately non-partisan. They also showed there was no such thing as the truth: there were various truths, all in a constant state of flux. Learned journals helped the cause of the moderate, Christian Enlightenment by consistently trying to find a middle way.

Satirical magazines were the opposite of neutral and objective. Among the first was the Hague Mercury (Haegsche Mercurius, 1697–99), dedicated to “Lady Venus.” It was entirely the product of a lawyer in The Hague called Hendrik Doedijns (c. 1659–1700). At a breathtaking pace, in a relentlessly satirical style, Doedijns reported on a vast range of European affairs. The authors of previous newssheets had only presented bald facts, whereas Doedijns treated his audience to outspoken opinions about real people and events, in a style that was meant to entertain, because, as he put it, “A Mercury must be The Tomb of all Melancholy.” Doedijns broached thorny subjects with obvious relish: corruption at court, political abuses, Christian dogma. He made no secret of the fact that he was an ardent proponent of Cartesian methodical doubt, and in his defense of carnal pleasure he consciously posed as a libertine. Doedijns’s Enlightenment ideas provoked furious responses, published in a dozen pamphlets, and his magazine was banned in 1699. He died the following year, of unknown causes. Copies of the journal survived, and an updated reprint was published in 1735.

One enthusiastic admirer and follower of Doedijns was Jacob Campo Weyerman (1677–1747). It is hard to say which was the more adventurous, his life or his work. Weyerman initially trained as an artist and traveled the continent in that capacity. He found his way to the English court and toured Germany and France, and everywhere he went he met a remarkable array of highlife aristocrats and lowlife criminals, picking up some truly amazing stories along the way. At the age of forty-three he returned to the Netherlands, where he made his living as a journalist. Weyerman specialized in satirical weeklies, a risky enterprise since it was difficult to make satire pay, partly because there was so much competition. Hermanus van den Burg (1682–1752), author of the Amsterdam Argus (Amsterdamsche Argus, 1718–22), can hardly have been pleased to see the publication of Weyerman’s first magazine, The Rotterdam Hermes (De Rotterdamsche Hermes, 1720–21).

Portrait of Jacob Campo Weyerman by Cornelis Troost and Jakobus Houbraken. Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Library.

Weyerman had a considerable talent as a writer, sufficient to captivate his readership for decades. Between 1721 and 1735 he published one weekly after another, with titles such as The Dissector of Deficiencies (Den Ontleeder der Gebreeken, 1723–25), The Echo of the World (Den Echo des Weerelds, 1725–27), and The Merry Disciplinarian (Den Vrolyke Tuchtheer, 1729–30). Alongside his journalistic output, Weyerman wrote several important historical reference works, including History of the Papacy (Historie des Pausdoms, 1725–28) and Biographies of the Dutch Painters (Levensbeschrijvingen der Nederlandsche Konstschilders en schilderessen, 1729–69), of which the fourth and final volume was published posthumously.

The key to Weyerman’s success lay in his modern and innovative prose, which seamlessly connected one subject to the next, drawing on a wealth of metaphors. Weyerman’s unashamedly individual approach must also have contributed to his popularity, as he presented himself in and through his work more forcefully than any writer before him. He dispensed entirely with the dictates of French classicism and combined poetry and prose to produce a stream of verse, fables, fairytales, anecdotes, advertisements, and narrative prose, fictional or otherwise. He had an extensive knowledge of contemporary European literature and often included pieces from foreign spectators and satirical magazines, such as The London Spy (although without acknowledging his sources). He was the first Dutchman to translate Swift, and in 1738 he became one of the first people ever to write about freemasonry. But mostly Weyerman wrote about his own country, describing a recognizable world in stories about real-life characters. As well as publishing satirical gossip, he imparted universal truths along the lines of “Wine tempers the natural coolness of the brain, which is why poets drink themselves to the inner door of the infirmary.”

Meanwhile a new type of periodical had arrived, known as the spectator. Imported from England, it quickly became immensely popular, since it was the first-ever vehicle for conveying opinions — although political discussion remained off-limits. The spectator introduced a new narrative perspective. Whereas the voice of the satirical magazines was that of a crotchety author, here readers were introduced to the fictional Mr. Spectator, a gentleman who produced entertaining prose essays with a moralistic streak. The tone was not usually satirical but one of enlightened pedagogy, and there were few of the references to famous people typical of satirical magazines. Sketches of characters and types were the main way of getting the moral message across, and Mr. Spectator made enthusiastic use of readers’ letters to illustrate his opinions, letters he may or may not have written himself. Spectators used accessible language and presented themselves as guardians of that new Enlightenment phenomenon called public opinion, articulating the moral standpoint of the average right-thinking, responsible citizen. Their authors could no longer be dismissed as hacks; some were highly educated people, including lawyers and quite a few preachers who had adopted the beliefs of Enlightenment Christianity.

Portrait of Justus van Effen by Des Angeles. Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Library.

The first Dutch spectators were written and published, in French, by Justus van Effen (1684–1735), the man who had introduced a continental readership to modern English literature in French translation. Like Weyerman, Van Effen struggled to make a living. Forced to break off his law studies when his father died, he had to make ends meet as a tutor, private secretary, translator, and journalist. In 1713 he joined the editorial board of the respected scholarly periodical the Literary Journal (Journal Littéraire, 1713–37), which enabled him to become a member of the Royal Society in London in 1715. Van Effen traveled to England and Sweden in his capacity as tutor and private secretary. In 1721 he published a French version of The Tale of the Tub (1704), Le conte du tonneau. It was followed by a French translation of Robinson Crusoe, published in three parts in 1720 and 1721, and Bernard de Mandeville’s Free Thoughts (1720), translated as Pensées libres sur la religion, l’église et le bonheur de la nation (1722).

Van Effen’s debut work had been a French-language spectator called The Misanthropist (Le Misanthrope, 1711). It was the first spectator published on the continent, and he followed it up with two similar magazines, The Bagatelle (La Bagatelle, 1718–19) and The New French Spectator (Le Nouveau Spectateur François, 1725–26). It was not until 20 August 1731, however, that Van Effen took the literary world by storm, when he switched to Dutch and began publishing the Dutch Spectator (Hollandsche Spectator, 1731–35).

The magazine was extremely successful right from the start, and there is no simple explanation for this. Van Effen was certainly an excellent writer, and part of his appeal must have been the way he used a fictional Mr. Spectator as a mouthpiece. For many readers, Van Effen’s dispassionate, lucid, paternal, and ironic prose was easier to digest than that of the boisterous enfant terrible Weyerman. Even more important, by around 1730 the economic decline of the republic had become visible and tangible, forcing people to think about their own sense of national identity, a task at which Van Effen excelled. This may also explain why he suddenly switched to Dutch, having published exclusively in French before starting his Dutch Spectator. Whether it was his own idea or whether the initiative came from his publisher, for purely commercial reasons, remains unclear. Van Effen died in 1735, so he did not publish in Dutch for long. We may never know the precise reasons for his decision, but his spectator set the tone for the next generation of magazine writers and for Dutch prose in general.

Lyric Poetry

The poetry of the early Enlightenment was written in three languages: Dutch, French, and Latin. Latin had the highest international status, since it enabled authors to engage with all other European countries. This was true of French to some extent, but certainly not Dutch. Many educated authors therefore chose to write poetry in Latin. Some were more successful than others, but Petrus Francius (1645–1704), Adrianus Relandus (1676–1718), and later in the century Petrus Burmannus Secundus (1713–78) gained widespread respect. The most famous Dutch Neo-Latinist of the period was Johan van Broekhuizen (1649–1707), not a scholar but a military man, famous across Europe and the first Dutch poet in history to be honored with a stone memorial. Van Broekhuizen, who wrote in both Latin and Dutch, excelled at occasional verse, a genre that was especially popular up to about 1760. His poetry in Dutch was published in Poems (Gedichten, 1677) and another collection with the same title that appeared posthumously in 1712.

Dutch and Latin vied to become the language of Dutch poetry, and around 1711 this led to a fierce literary debate known as the “Battle of the Poets” or the “Poets’ War,” a struggle that bears some resemblance to the “Querelle des anciens et des modernes” and the “Battle of the Books.” But while the French and English were ostensibly arguing about the extent of progress in all spheres, including literature, since the classics were written, the Dutch “Poets’ War” involved a number of different controversies and was largely concerned with the status of three kinds of literature: Neo-Latinist, French classical, and Dutch. At one time or another practically every well-known poet became involved in the argument, which initially arose from a difference of opinion between David van Hoogstraten and the Swiss émigré Jean le Clerc.

David van Hoogstraten (1658–1724) was deputy head of the Latin school in Amsterdam and wrote poetry in Dutch as well as Latin. Together with Pieter Rabus he published the anthology Exercises in Rhyme (Rymoeffeningen) in 1678. Another collection, Poems (Gedichten), appeared in 1697. Meanwhile he continued to study Latin poetry and to edit Latin works, including Aesop’s Fables. In his review of the Fables, Jean le Clerc railed against Neo-Latin poetry and called for poetry to be written in the vernacular. Van Hoogstraten hit back, calling Le Clerc a “French pixie, who, having washed up here penniless, has the audacity to enter into verbal disputes with all the most elevated minds of the region that feeds him, and then to curse them as pedants and pompous windbags.” The exchange marked the start of the Poets’ War. Le Clerc’s friends and pupils insisted it was old-fashioned and snobbish to go on writing poetry in Latin. Anyone with any love for his native tongue should write poems in Dutch, thereby enriching the language as Joost van den Vondel had done in the seventeenth century.

Further clashes ensued, this time about Vondel’s supposed greatness. This debate involved a completely different set of interlocutors. Those who identified with the Literary Journal, Justus van Effen being their most prominent spokesman, questioned Vondel’s stature as a poet and praised the simplicity of modern French literature with its French-classicist rules. They insisted that Corneille and Racine rather than Vondel should be seen as normative. Naturally, this prompted their opponents to speak up for Dutch literature and to criticize the many rules of French classicism. The Poets’ War did have one positive side-effect in that its many debates led readers, for the first time in history, to consider the Dutch literary canon very closely and to reflect on the value and identity of Dutch literature.

One of those who consistently sprang to the defense of Dutch literature was Jakob Zeeus (1686–1718), a painter, surveyor, and poet. Zeeus had a caustic way with words and excelled at writing satirical epigrams. In his debut collection, The Unblanketed World (De ongeblankette Waereld, 1706), which he subsequently dismissed as “the unripe fruit of my brain,” he lashed out at the hypocrisy of human society. The Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing (De wolf in ’t schaepsvel, 1711), similarly motivated by a desire “to paint hypocrisy in living color,” was an attack on the church, superstition, and the priesthood. From 1712 to 1715 he contributed to the Poets’ War with poems like “The Decline of Dutch Poetry” and “The Lyric Mountain in Danger.” Although, as these titles suggest, Zeeus was far from satisfied with the state of contemporary poetry, his admiration for Vondel and for Hooft was boundless.

Hubert Korneliszoon Poot (1689–1733), the most famous Dutch poet of the first half of the eighteenth century, also joined the battle. Although a simple farmer from the village of Abtswoud in the province of South Holland, he became a living legend. Like Vondel, Poot was a self-made man. He studied Dutch and classical literature without any tutorial guidance and went on to prove that the privileged classes did not have a monopoly on poetic talent. Anyone, even a simple farmer, could be touched by literature:

And that I was the first Dutch boer

Of all my countrymen, tell now,

Who Song’s goddesses did win o’er

To join me here beside the plough.42

In “The Poets’ War” he expressed sadness about the literary quarrel:

So help me shackle discord, pray,

And bring no grounds for hatred hither,

For Poesy must bloom alway,

Nor may her noble praise e’er wither.

Portrait of Hubert Korneliszoon Poot by P. Velyn after T. van der Wilt. Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Library.

Poot, whose talent emerged clearly from his first volume, Miscellaneous Poems (Mengeldichten, 1716), specialized in lyric verse rather than plays or epic poems. He was primarily a love poet and, like Van Broekhuizen before him, he showed great skill in capturing ordinary human emotions in lyrical language. Although he often alluded to classical mythology, he was equally capable of using a modern frame of reference to express the most intimate of emotions. Being a poet who, as he put it himself, stated “his opinion as it was, roundly and simply,” he wrote in a marvelously simple language and style. But it was his poetic sensibility, his self-expression, that guaranteed him lasting fame. He spoke “the language of his heart” and eighteenth-century readers opened their hearts to him:

Arisen at some early hour

Alone I see the fair moon ride.

Her light agleam on gable, tow’r,

She metes the blue with iv’ry stride,

And with her silver horns, serene and cold at heart,

She rends the dark apart.

Apart from the poets mentioned here, all of whom more or less conformed to commonly accepted poetic requirements and stayed within genre boundaries, there were various eccentrics. Most famous among them was Willem van Swaanenburg (1679–1728), a landscape painter, private tutor, and author of satirical weeklies and hermetic poetry. During his life Van Swaanenburg was an extremely controversial figure, and this quarrelsome reputation clung to him for the remainder of the century. On Johannes Kinker’s map of the literary landscape, published in 1788, the wayward poet is allocated his own Zwanenburg Island. The accompanying text describes the ghost of Van Swaanenburg, shouting and riding a double bass, in hot pursuit of the shade of Boileau. The image is not hard to interpret: out with French classicism! Instead of the ancient classical harp, Van Swaanenburg plays his own modern bass, forsaking the neat, credible, decorous, carefully tended garden of classicism in favor of a wild landscape dominated by the power of the imagination. The very first poem Van Swaanenburg presented to the public, in 1723, “Parnassus’s Rumble,” caused consternation among Dutch poets. Originally written to mark the wedding of a distant acquaintance of the author, its style was so exuberant it seemed as if the poet was unhinged, or at least prone to hallucinations:

That I might lift a Paradise upon my quill,

I built a bow’r of pearl and crystal; then your court

I clad in cedar planks to make an orange fort,

Through which Zephyr might drive fair Flora’s car at will.

 

I turned the ice to fire, set Summer skipping light

On ruby clogs beside a fleece of ivory,

Sent Aganippe treading over sand and sea

To wreathe you with her kisses in the whole world’s sight.

Aganippe, incidentally, is the nymph of a spring of the same name at the foot of Mount Parnassus; drinking from the spring gave poetic inspiration.

During the first half of the eighteenth century the intellectual and literary climate encouraged such experiments. There must have been a readership for this kind of poetry, because the same year saw the publication of In Praise of Gin (Lof der jenever, 1723) by Robert Hennebo (1685–1737) and the work of poets such as Hermanus van den Burg and Salomon van Rusting, who deliberately turned poetic decorum inside out. In the second half of the century, as literature increasingly became the domain of well-read, cultivated citizens, this type of humorous verse fell out of favor. Van Swaanenburg is mentioned in many subsequent treatises on literary theory, but only as a semi-psychopath, the epitome of the anti-poet, who must not be emulated.

Theater

During performances of Jan Vos’s Aran and Titus (Aran en Titus, 1641), the streets fell silent, or so Jacob Campo Weyerman writes in about 1730. He was no doubt exaggerating, but there was nothing more popular than a theatrical spectacle with plenty of blood and guts (eleven of the characters die in Vos’s play), a production that pulled out all the stops, with changes of décor, and special machines to produce wind and replicate waves. Audiences came to the theater for entertainment and to see and be seen. If the action on stage failed to enthrall them, they would peer into the private boxes, hoping to catch a glimpse of a couple kissing and cuddling. In both the northern and the southern Netherlands, going to the theater was a riotous affair. Eyewitness reports suggest drink flowed freely, accompanied by cracking of nuts, peeling of oranges, and audience participation in the form of wolf whistles and audible commentary.

For many years drama was not only the most entertaining and accessible literary medium but also the most important. In the winter months there were performances in the municipal theaters and in summer traveling theatrical companies put up tents at annual markets and fairs. More important, many citizens, especially the young, put on plays themselves. This was a particular feature of the southern Netherlands, where almost every town or village still had a chamber of rhetoric. Bruges had no less than three. Popular theaters were particularly successful during the final quarter of the eighteenth century, when the frequent theatrical contests might see the same play performed by twenty or more companies. The chambers were ideal venues for the cultivation of the Dutch language and for efforts to defend it against the powerful influence of French. This gave them a militant function both in the Dutch-speaking provinces of the southern Netherlands and in the Francophone part of Flanders. Plays written by seventeenth-century northern authors were most popular, although adaptations of classic French works were also performed. At every opportunity players flouted the rules of French classicism and put on plays that reveled in everything those rules condemned: religion, horror, and audiovisual spectacle.

Alongside the theater of rhetorical tradition were plays staged by pupils of Jesuit schools. These too strove to be as spectacular as possible, not only in order to entertain but also to make the Jesuit storylines, rendered in Latin, comprehensible to the audience. The Jesuit repertoire consisted largely of gruesome stories of Catholic martyrdom in which Christianity confronted paganism, one example being Christian Battle of the Holy and Glorious Martyr Sebastian, Roman Knight, Who Died for the Catholic Faith (Christelycken strydt van den heyligen en glorieusen martelaer Sebastiaen, Roomschen Ridder; Gestorven voor het Catholyck Gelove, 1743). No less heavily laced with torture and martyrdom were Saint Agatha (De Hl. Agatha) by Anton Flas (1650?–?), and two plays by a schoolmaster from Veurne called Jacob de Ridder (1728–ca.1783), Saint Quentin (De Hl. Quintinus, 1751) and Saint Barbara (De Hl. Barbara, 1780).

Municipal theaters were established relatively late in the southern Netherlands. Antwerp had a public theater on its main market square as early as 1660, but the Grand Théâtre on Munt Square in Brussels did not open until 1700; Ghent opened its municipal theater seven years later. At first only ballet, Italian opera, and French plays, usually in the Baroque style, were performed in Brussels. Ignaz Vitzthumb, an Austrian who became director of the Munt Square theater in 1772, managed to stage performances in Dutch, but not before the final quarter of the eighteenth century. Until then, private theater groups called “Compagnies” closely guarded their monopoly on Dutch-language plays.

The theatrical repertoire of the municipal theaters of the southern Netherlands was a mixture of Jesuit drama and adaptations of both French plays and works from the northern Netherlands. The most famous and productive poet writing for the Brussels stage, Jan Frans Cammaert (1699–1780), specialized in adapting classical plays to produce something known as “total Baroque theater.” He translated, rewrote, or adapted into verse some eighty tragedies, farces, and comedies originally in French, Latin, or Dutch. He updated Vondel’s tragedies Samson (Samson of heilige wraak, 1660) and Solomon (Salomon, 1648) and staged the same author’s Adam in Exile (Adam in Ballingschap, 1664) in Brussels a hundred years before it was first performed in the northern Netherlands. Cammaert produced only a single original work, the tragedy Punishment and Death of Balthasar (Straf ende dood van Balthassar, 1749). When rewriting plays he would always adjust them to popular taste, which meant adding plenty of spectacle, singing, and ballet.

Jan Frans Cammaert. Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Library.

Francis de la Fontaine (1672–1767) is primarily known for his Discourse on Oration, of Service to Preachers, Rhetoricians, Actors and Associations (Verhandeling over de Redenvoering, dienstig voor Predikanten, Redenaers, Tooneelspeelers en Geselschappen, 1751). It is one of the earliest theoretical discourses on the art of rhetoric in the South and includes a brief history of the theater. De la Fontaine advocates a modern style of acting, with an emphasis on naturalness and simplicity. He was modern too in his love of Voltaire, becoming the first translator of Voltaire’s work in the southern Netherlands. His Alzire, or the Americans (D’Amerikanen oft Alzire, 1739) was performed only three years after publication of the French original. Like Cammaert, De la Fontaine left only a single original tragedy, The Variable Fortunes of Garibaldus and Dagobertus (Het veranderlyk geval in Garibaldus en Dagobertus), not printed until 1739 but first performed in 1716. Another well-known author of theatrical spectacles was Johan Laurens Krafft (1694–1768), born in Brussels and writing in both French and Dutch, who produced plays bursting with action and passion. His Iphigeny or Orestes and Pylades (Iphigenie ofte Orestes en Pilades, 1722) is certainly not a classical drama but a passionate work full of love, heroism, and valiant women. Similarly action-packed was his Hildegard, Queen of Norway (Ildegerte, Koninginne van Norwegen, 1727).

Theater in the northern Netherlands was considerably less robust. Although theatrical companies had replaced the old chambers of rhetoric, these existed only in the major towns. Municipal theaters were similarly scarce; in fact at the end of the seventeenth century there were only two, one in Amsterdam and one in The Hague. However, thanks to the unsparing efforts of the playwright and actor Jacob van Rijndorp (1663–1720), two more theaters opened: a second in The Hague in 1703 and one in Leiden in 1705. To expand and modernize the theatrical repertoire, Van Rijndorp wrote six serious plays, several commemorative pieces, and more than ten farces, only one of which, The Marriage of Cloris and Rosie (De Bruiloft van Kloris en Roosje, 1727), is still remembered today. His three daughters grew up to be celebrated actresses.

Further municipal theaters were established in the course of the eighteenth century. Rotterdam acquired a permanent playhouse in 1773, and Utrecht finally followed in 1796. None of these enjoyed as much prestige as the oldest municipal theatre in the land, the Amsterdam Schouwburg. The author of any play performed there had reason to be pleased, even though his only fee was a year’s worth of complimentary tickets. Productions at the Amsterdam Schouwburg were governed by strict rules, according to the dictates of French classicism. Religious and political plays were explicitly banned, partly to avoid conflict. Performances generally took place on Mondays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, beginning at four in the afternoon. Audiences would be treated to two plays: first a tragedy or a comedy, then a comedy or a farce. There were no performances on Sundays or Christian holidays, and in times of war the theater was closed down altogether.

North and South had quite different repertoires. While the South favored religious subjects, in the Protestant North the performance of religious plays was forbidden. Church councils put pressure on the members of governing bodies of municipal theaters; to the clergy, the theater was pernicious by definition and they would have liked to see it outlawed altogether. Another factor was the influence of French classicism, which remained significant until at least 1730, especially in Amsterdam. French classicism banned religious and political subjects from theaters. Plays could feature national heroes only after they had been dead for at least two hundred years, and even then the material was sensitive. This probably explains the crisis in Dutch theater between 1730 and 1760, when hardly any new plays were written. Add to this the fact that Dutch actors, according to the Dutch Spectator in 1733, were in the habit of standing on stage yelling and gesticulating like lunatics, and the malaise of these years becomes tangible.

One of the few original minds and by far the most famous playwright of the first half of the century was Pieter Langendijk (1683–1756). He made his debut in 1711 with the comedy Don Quixote at Kamacho’s Wedding (Don Quichot op de bruiloft van Kamacho), which presents archetypal Dutch characters and chastises them for their foibles: a stupid farmer, a country yokel of a poet, a foreigner speaking incomprehensible Dutch. Langendijk targets his venom not only at declaiming peasants but at the whole genre of wedding verse, in which bride and bridegroom would be addressed in flattering but meaningless clichés. His peasant poet Jochem, however, takes a quite different approach. His poem to mark the marriage of Kamacho is not inspired by the lives of those involved but driven by the demands of the rhyme and by the poet’s own imagination:

JOCHEM sings:

And then he gave to her a ring,

And quoth, “My soul, who comfort bring,

I love her true, my clarty-fowl,43

My life in troth, my ape, my owl.”

CAMACHO: My ape? My owl? I nivver wooed her wi’ such stuff.

JOCHEM: It rhymes, though, perfectly.

CAMACHO: By t’ deuce, thou’st rhymed enough!

JOCHEM sings:

And then the maid spake up uncowed,

Her shift it draggled while she bowed,

And said, “My husband you will be,

For you can woo so prettily.”

CAMACHO: Her shift it draggled? But she didn’t even bow.

JOCHEM: It rhymes, though, perfectly.

CAMACHO: It rhymes like a drunken sow.44

 

JOCHEM sings:

“Why, thanks”, quoth he, “Young maid so sweet,

There’s one more wish which I entreat,

You know what I will say, and more,

My dillydown, my dove, my whore.”

CAMACHO: My whore? How dar’st thou, driveller? Explain —
and quick!

JOCHEM: It rhymes, though, perfectly.

CAMACHO: I’ll crack thy nob wi’ my stick!

This and other plays by Langendijk — The Mutual Marriage Deceit (Het wederzijds huwelijksbedrog, 1714), The Mathemartists, or the Young Lady Who Fled (De Wiskunstenaars, of ’t gevluchte Juffertje, 1715), and Mirror of Dutch Merchants (Spiegel der vaderlandschen Kooplieden, 1760) — could be described as comedies of manners. They criticize contemporary Dutch mores, largely for entertainment purposes. Cornelis Troost (1697–1750), an actor and famous eighteenth-century painter, immortalized several scenes from Langendijk’s plays.

The year 1760 marked the start of a theatrical revival and the appearance of alternatives to the classical tragedy. Marten Corver (1727–94), director of the Rotterdam Schouwburg and an extremely popular actor, tried to reform the theater by introducing a more naturalistic style. The most important innovation was the updating of traditional (classical) tragedy, a trend that took its lead from Voltaire, who advocated combining the lofty decorousness of French classical theater, exemplified by Corneille, with the lively plotting of Shakespeare. One of the authors who helped to create an audience for this kind of theater was Jan Nomsz (1738–1803), known as the Dutch Voltaire. He wrote fifty-three works for the stage, making him one of the most prolific writers of the second half of the eighteenth century.

Other modernizing tendencies in the theater were for poetry to give way to prose and for ordinary citizens to replace aristocratic characters. The most important criterion here was truth. People wanted to be shown a recognizable world with everyday problems. It was a style that slowly gained ground, first in comedy, which had a less exalted status than tragedy, and later in tragic drama as well. One of its foremost proponents, Cornelius van Engelen (1726–93), hoped to influence the theatrical climate by publishing a Spectatorial Theater (Spectatoriaale Schouwburg), a series of translated prose works for the stage. Another theatrical trend, supported most prominently by Willem Bilderdijk, advocated a return to the origins of theater: classical tragedy.

III. Classical Poetry and Modern Prose, 1725–1760

The Peak and Decline of the Epic

The genre in which classical rules survived longest was the heroic poem, or epic. This is hardly surprising, since in the classical hierarchy the epic was the most exalted and prestigious literary form and therefore the most tightly regulated. Only highly talented poets tried their hands at it, and they were few in number even in the eighteenth century, when more poets were writing epics than ever before, as the genre allowed the detailed exploration of the Enlightenment ideals of patriotism and religious faith. In qualitative terms the epic reached a peak in the years prior to 1780, and Vondel’s John the Baptist (Joannes de Boetgezant, 1662), the first Dutch biblical epic, set the tone. The biblical epic was particularly popular in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, although the influence of French classicism, which forbade the portrayal of miraculous events or “merveilleux,” limited its readability considerably. Since poets in the Calvinist Dutch Republic were not expected to make the Bible more palatable by adding anecdotes of their own invention, most epics were essentially little more than glorified biographies.

Not until Abraham the Patriarch (Abraham de aartsvader, 1728) by Arnold Hoogvliet (1687–1763) would the biblical epic return in all its splendor. The work was immediately recognized as a masterpiece and was in its eleventh printing by 1792. Like Vondel and Poot, Hoogvliet was a self-made poet. He began work at the age of twelve in a public notary’s office, later taking a job at a moneylender’s in Dordrecht. After friends introduced him to poetry, he translated Ovid’s Fasti as a way of improving his Latin. When his dying father begged him to choose a biblical theme, he began work on a life of Abraham. The task so exhausted him that he was forced to rest for a period during the early stages of writing the tenth volume. The final result was praised as “a perfect Epic,” partly because Hoogvliet had the courage to exploit his poetic license to the full and refused to yield to the rules of French classicism: “I did not wish to bend the truth to fit foreign laws . . . / but have preserved it in its natural state.”

Miracles, forbidden by Boileau, return in full glory with Hoogvliet, who was also happy to pepper biblical accounts with details of his own invention. In volume 9 Abraham is seen personally educating his son Isaac, although there is no biblical evidence that he did so. More audaciously, in volume 2 Hoogvliet depicts the council of heaven as a gathering of all God’s qualities personified. Hoogvliet armed himself against potential critics in his preface, but there was no lack of criticism. One critic qualified his praise with the consideration that the work “conflicts with the truth of our religion and is altogether too bold.” He was also displeased with Hoogvliet’s account of the introduction of circumcision, which he thought “low and disgusting and, no matter how elevated by the command of our God, no subject for Poetry.”

Title page of Abraham the Patriarch (Abraham de Aartsvader, 1728). Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Library.

Another highlight of Dutch epic literature was the publication in 1733 of Telemachus by the poet Sybrand Feitama (1694–1758). It was a verse translation of François Fénelon’s secular prose epic Télémaque (1699), and this, many contemporaries felt, brought the Dutch Telemachus closer to perfection than the French Télémaque. The first secular epic to be written in Dutch was by the Frisian nobleman Willem van Haren (1710–68). The Adventures of Friso (Gevallen van Friso, 1741) is a fictional account of the origins and history of his home province of Friesland, describing how the heroic Frisian people liberated themselves from Roman rule. Friso is born in India, the son of a king. His many adventures eventually bring him to the North Sea and some time later he settles down beside one of the branches of the Rhine delta, where he establishes Friesland. One feature betrays Enlightenment thinking: a brother of Friso’s father imparts to him the secrets of Persian monotheism, which allows Van Haren to describe Friso in pre-Christian times as professing a faith strongly resembling the modern, rational Christianity of his day.

Another masterpiece of the genre was David (1767), by the most famous woman poet of the century, Lucretia Wilhelmina van Merken (1721–89), a biblical epic telling how the shepherd boy David, secretly anointed king by the prophet Samuel, eventually succeeds King Saul to the throne despite Saul’s jealousy and opposition. Van Merken chose this particular story to demonstrate that unlimited faith in divine providence would be rewarded. Not everyone was happy with her choice of hero. Willem Ockers, a critical freethinker, responded with a satirical poem called “The True Hero” (1768), which throws a very different light on David’s reputation by presenting him as a bloodthirsty murderer, guilty of crimes against humanity. After all, David had expanded his empire at the cost of many human lives.

After 1780 the epic gradually disappeared from Dutch literature. Classicism, its value eroded over the decades, was of little use to modern authors. Journals, epistolary novels, and plays written in prose gave writers more freedom to propagate their ideas and ideals. Besides, from 1780 both literature and society began to be markedly politicized and, since there was no place for politics within the system known as French classicism, the decline of the classical epic seems inevitable.

Colonial Literature

Colonial literature was a product of the northern Netherlands alone. The southern Netherlands had no colonies, and its trade with the East and West Indies was sporadic, whereas the Republic had developed a worldwide commercial empire, the main source of its prosperity, by the seventeenth century. Two large trading companies ruled the seas: the United East Indies Company or VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie), founded in 1602, which traded everywhere from the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa to the small island of Deshima in Japan, and the West India Company (WIC; Westindische Compagnie), established in 1621 for trade in West Africa and the Americas. Pepper, spices, indigo, saltpeter, porcelain, silk, copper, and opium were imported from the East, while sugar, coffee, and tobacco came from the West. The route to the West Indies took ships along the west coast of Africa, where slaves were purchased for onward sale to plantation owners in Surinam and Guyana.

Ever since the late sixteenth century, Dutch travelers to the East Indies had written detailed accounts of the republic’s successful struggle for hegemony in international waters. Their stories of spellbinding adventures, along with detailed descriptions of exotic places, guaranteed the success of a new genre, the travel story, informative for those who stayed at home and all the more so for seamen preparing to venture into the unknown. Many of these travelogues were based on ships’ logs and therefore little more than factual, day-to-day accounts of life on board, but it was not unusual for writers to incorporate fictional elements — shipwrecks, encounters with monsters — to spice up their stories. Most successful of all proved Bontekoe’s Memorable Description (Journael ofte gedenckwaerdige beschryvinghe) of 1646, which had gone through at least seventy printings by 1800.

Along with these travelers’ tales, hundreds of songs about the East Indies have come down to us. Their literary significance is minimal, but they are invaluable as source material. Like travel stories, they are primarily informative and steer clear of literary embellishment. Journeys to distant lands, signing up for the voyage, discharge when it was over — sailors sang about every aspect, to familiar tunes. Many songs were intended as propaganda, helping to persuade new sailors to sign up with the companies by holding out the gratifying prospect of money, trade goods, and exotic women. Nevertheless, the songs give an unvarnished impression of the hard life on board ship. A sailor would sign up for five years’ service in the East Indies, but since the outward and return voyages each took an average of nine months, he would actually be away for some seven years, all told. The diet on board was meager: ship’s biscuit and water. Most men who joined up as sailors for the VOC did so out of either necessity or despair; few were motivated by a spirit of adventure. It seems there may have been some cultural activity on board, since to pass time at sea the men told each other stories, sang songs, or even put on plays. However, little trace remains of this on-board oral culture.

Although the VOC and WIC were trading companies, their directors were not averse to colonization and warfare in support of their commercial interests and against those of their competitors, Spain, Portugal, and Britain. Along their supply routes in both West and East, trade settlements were established that accommodated some cultural and literary activities. Prior to about 1800 these remained incidental in character and very unstructured, partly because the mobility of VOC officials and their high mortality rate were not conducive to literary activity of a durable kind. Nevertheless, there were bookshops, theaters, and the odd library in both West and East. Paramaribo, the capital of Surinam, had a number of theatrical societies and, from 1775 onwards, its own municipal theater. From 1772 the colony also boasted a newspaper, the Weekly Wednesday Surinamese Courant (Weeklyksche Woendaagsche [sic] Surinaamse Courant).

In the colonies as well as back home, clubs and societies proved extremely popular, ranging from Masonic lodges to scholarly and literary associations, and social clubs. All were elitist institutions, created for the cream of the European communities. Although the Dutch Republic was relatively late to develop clubs at home, abroad it managed to take the lead in at least one respect: the first ever European learned society overseas was a Dutch initiative by the name of the Batavian Society for the Arts and Sciences (Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenschappen), founded in 1778 in Batavia (today’s Jakarta) and affiliated to the Dutch Society of Sciences and Humanities (Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen) in Haarlem. One of its priorities was Christian evangelism, but members also carried out research in the hope of improving agriculture, commerce, and general prosperity in the colonies. Native cultures were investigated as well. Pastor Josua van Iperen spent some time studying a “white Negress” (the latter term being applied to any non-white person at the time):

She is a little deaf, but her deafness turns out to be nothing more than a long drawn out contemplation to make sure she has properly and fully understood something before she is able or dares to answer. People call this, although often in a different sense, “East-Indies deafness,” and I notice that the Javanese, the Chinese, and other Oriental nations often present a similar suggestion of deafness.

Masonic lodges did particularly well overseas. As early as 1759 a lodge called Solomon was established in Bengal. Paramaribo got its own lodge in 1761, the first in South America, and Batavia had three: The Chosen (La Choisie), True Sincerity (La Fidèle Sincérité), and The Virtuous (La Vertueuse). In Ceylon, 1770 saw the founding of a lodge called Steadfastness (De Getrouwigheid), followed in 1772 by Sincerity (D’Opregtheid). The Good Hope (De Goede Hoop) was founded on the Cape of Good Hope in 1772. There was no shortage of literary institutions, either. By 1799 Paramaribo boasted four theatrical societies. Its literary society, Surinamese Friends of Letters (Surinaamsche Lettervrinden), was established in about 1785, and one of its members, the merchant and planter Paul François Roos (1751–1805), achieved a degree of fame as a poet. His first published collection, Literary Recreations (Letterkundige uitspanningen, 1785), bore the dedication:

To ev’ry honest friend of Man,

Who cares for virtue, wisdom, art

And words of wit in lines which scan,

Whose heart is charmed by words from th’ heart,

Who trips to music’s instrument,

This book of verses I present.

Most colonial literature was published back in the motherland, after the colonists returned home. Memories of colonial life generally took the form of occasional poetry in praise of specific people, places, and things. After twenty years in the service of the VOC, Jan de Marre (1696–1763) put his experiences to verse in Batavia, Covered in Six Volumes (Batavia, begrepen in zes boeken, 1740). De Marre, who became director of the Amsterdam Schouwburg on his return and wrote plays in the classical style, praised Batavia as a Dutch town overseas where, more or less incidentally, there happened to be a lot of Asian foreigners.

O fair Batavia, how you enchant me e’er:

You show the prospect of your proud-arched town hall there!

And how delightfully is your estate arrayed!

Your broad canals, with waters cool and verdant shade,

Unto no Netherlandish city need defer.

Among those writing about events in the western hemisphere was Jan Jacob Mauricius (1692–1768), appointed governor-general of Surinam in 1742, in his three-part Poetry-Loving Recreations (Dichtlievende uitspanningen, 1753–62). He also translated Molière and wrote tragedies and comedies.

Trade with the West Indies would have been impossible without slavery and the slave trade. This too was the subject of literature. The German-Dutch poet Isaac Sunderman (1661–1723) was among those who put the European sense of superiority into words in his Parnassus’s Art Collection, or a Selection of Unparalleled Poetic Materials (Parnassus kunstkabinet, of verzameling van weergadelooze dichtstoffen, 1755). The standard interpretation of the biblical story of Noah and his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, convinced Sunderman that the blessed descendants of Japheth lived in Europe, while the dark-skinned peoples were descendants of the cursed offspring of Ham. Bible in hand, writers like Sunderman pointed to Genesis 9:25, which states that the offspring of Ham’s son Canaan will become “servants of servants,” in other words slaves. Christian consciences were soothed by the claim that a lack of physical freedom did not necessarily lessen spiritual freedom.

Rather more sympathetic toward the slaves was Elisabeth Maria Post (1755–1812), who never set foot on colonial soil herself, but whose brother did. In her epistolary novel Reinhart, or Nature and Religion (Reinhart, of natuur en godsdienst, 1791–92) she advocated the humane treatment of slaves. On arriving in South America, Reinhart is greatly shocked by the lot of the slaves: “You, sensitive human being, should you ever set foot there, weep for the fate of your brothers or, rather, consider the means to set them free!” Nevertheless, after wrestling briefly with his conscience, Reinhart accepts twelve slaves as a gift that will allow him to set up his own plantation. To salve his conscience, he resolves to treat them well.

True abolitionists were few. They included Dirk van Hogendorp (1761–1822), who spent sixteen years in the East Indies before returning to the republic in 1799. In his play Kraspoekol, or Slavery (Kraspoekol, of de slavernij, 1800) he lashed out at those who supported slavery and the slave trade, and also at corrupt VOC administrators. Never before had colonial policy been so powerfully and unambiguously criticized in literature.

And, oh my fatherland! My compatriots! Batavians! Will you not in your territories, in your colonies, abolish this dishonorable and accursed trade? These are our fellow humans, our brothers! Their tears, their blood pours down upon our heads if we, forsaking our principles, do not destroy the slave trade for ever.

This remained a minority view. When the play was performed in the municipal theater in The Hague in 1801, feelings ran so high — as evidenced by catcalls, whistling, and fighting in the stalls — that the performance had to be abandoned after the first act.

Even more radical, perhaps, was Jacob Haafner (1755–1809), whose life story reads like an adventure novel. Born in Germany, he moved to Amsterdam with his parents at the age of about eight, when his father took a job as a ship’s physician with the VOC. At the age of eleven, Jacob accompanied his father on a voyage. On the way to the East Indies the elder Haafner died and the child was put ashore at Cape Town, where he was taken in by a foster family. Two years later young Haafner continued his journey as a cabin boy. After many digressions he found himself in southern India at the age of eighteen. There he worked as a clerk and accountant for nine years before accumulating some capital as a merchant in Calcutta. When he fell in love with a dancer called Mamia he decided to stay in India for the rest of his life, but fate intervened, his sweetheart died, and he returned to Amsterdam in 1787, at the age of thirty-two. He then traveled widely in Europe, started a family, failed to secure a job in government service and, in need of money, began to publish accounts of his experiences. His first book appeared in 1806, Adventures on a Journey from Madras via Tranquebar to the Island of Ceylon (Lotgevallen op eene reize van Madras over Tranquebaar naar het eiland Ceilon), followed in 1808 by Travels in a Palanquin (Reize in eenen Palanquin) in which Haafner describes his tempestuous love affair with Mamia.

His travel stories — three more books appeared after his death — are major works of autobiographical writing. Haafner raised the travel story to a new level with his unprejudiced view of Indian society, his original and unconventional way of thinking, and his criticism of Europeans. A man of the Enlightenment in every sense, he believed that ideals like emancipation, freedom, and equality should be striven for not only at home but in Dutch trading areas overseas as well. His most radical work, written for a society contest, was Discussion of the Usefulness of Missionaries and Missionary Societies (Verhandeling over het Nut van Zendelingen en Zendelings-Genootschappen, 1807), an appeal for the abolition of missionaries, missions, and every other form of European cultural domination. Instead of insisting the native inhabitants of the colonies needed converting, he declared, European colonists should behave in a rather more Christian manner. In Adventures on a Journey from Madras via Tranquebar to the Island of Ceylon he wrote:

I regard all people, whatever their color, nation, and religion, as my fellow men and brothers; anyone who thinks like me will not be alarmed but on the contrary pleased to see that I defend and speak up for the innocent and oppressed Indians and seek to heap shame on their tyrants.

Haafner, who spoke Tamil as well as Hindi, was the first to translate the Indian epic Ramayana into Dutch, making him a pioneer of oriental studies. Some of his works were translated into French, German, English, Swedish, and Danish.

Imaginary Voyages and Novels of Adventure

The oldest European desert island story is of Dutch provenance. Published eleven years before Robinson Crusoe (1719), Description of the Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes (Beschryvinge van het magtig Koningryk Krinke Kesmes, 1708) was written by Hendrik Smeeks (died 1721), a physician from Zwolle in the province of Overijssel. Krinke Kesmes (an anagram of the author’s name) is a hybrid work, a mixture of novel, imaginary travel story, and utopian vision, permeated with the Enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality, and fraternity. The main character is Juan de Posos, a Dutch merchant, son of a Spaniard, who trades with Spain and South America. On one of his trading voyages he is shipwrecked and washed ashore in the undiscovered kingdom of Krinke Kesmes, part of the mysterious Southland. The modern ethics and customs he encounters there are utterly different from those of Europe. With centuries of religious strife behind them, the people of Krinke Kesmes have renounced religion and devoted themselves to philosophy instead. Men and women are equal. Both sexes are encouraged to study, although they do so on separate islands because of their different philosophical outlooks. The men adhere to a Cartesian view of the world, while the women embrace empiricism. In chapter 6 De Posos meets a man called El-ho, who recounts the remarkable story of his life, the story of a twelve-year-old boy who finds himself on an uninhabited island and survives there, partly through an unshakable faith in God. There are various striking parallels with the adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The possibility that Smeeks’s story was among Defoe’s direct sources of inspiration has been ruled out, even though Defoe did spend some time in the Netherlands as a spy and had a Dutch grammar in his library.

Hendrik Smeeks, Description of the Mighty Kingdom of Krinke Kesmes (Beschryvinge van het magtig Koningryk Krinke Kesmes, 1708). Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Library.

Smeeks may not have needed too much imagination to think up his desert island story. The VOC avoided publicizing such incidents, but there were regular instances of VOC sailors, for whatever reason, being left behind on islands. The fact is, readers loved imaginary travel stories involving shipwrecks. After the success of Smeeks’s novel and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, many similar books followed in which shipwrecked characters were sorely tested but survived through optimism, discipline, and faith in a religion based on natural law that made clerics and clergy superfluous.

One factor common to all these novels was that western vices either were unknown in the freshly discovered territories or had been eliminated long ago. Novelists presented idealized images of primitive nature as a source of wisdom and insight, as a counterpart to the corrupt European society. In The Dutch Robinson (De Hollandsche Robinson, 1743), for instance, the protagonist spends twenty-eight years on an uninhabited island before being rescued. There follows a short but instructive stay with a tribe of native Indians in California before he returns to the Netherlands. In The Robinson from Walcheren (De Walchersche Robinson, 1752), Robinson survives his adventure on a desert island because he is guarded and cared for by a lion. Finally, in Robinson of The Hague (De Haagsche Robinson, 1758), a man from The Hague, Alexander, finds himself on an island called Tirevas, an anagram of “veritas,” Latin for truth. This island too is portrayed as an ideal society. Neither a person’s wealth nor his origins matter, and the inhabitants acknowledge only one God, without any hint of religious controversy.

It is easy to understand why imaginary travel stories like these were so popular in the eighteenth century. Aside from being greatly entertaining, they are full of idealism and an optimistic faith in progress, making readers aware of the possibility of creating a better, more egalitarian society, with or without room for religion. Most stories advocate some form of natural religion based not on dogma but on observation of the natural world. There is no inequality between the sexes and no political oppression. In fact, imaginary travel stories were no less effective than learned journals in casting a new light on existing social relationships. Although aimed at different readerships, both were vehicles for the criticism of social and political mores. They demonstrated that there are no absolute values or truths and portrayed the world as not only immensely diverse but malleable as well.

Portrait of Gerrit Paape by M. d’Sallieth (1788). Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Library.

A huge amount of utopian travel writing appeared during the revolutionary period, which was nothing if not a time of transition. Gerrit Paape, a Patriot, was a master of the genre. Under the pseudonym Dr. Schasz he wrote Journey Through Monkeyland (Reize door het Aapenland, 1788), a book we shall return to shortly, The Happy Emigrants or the Small Colonial Settlement of the South (De gelukkige emigranten of de kleine volksplanting van het Zuiden, 1788), and Journey Through the Land of Volunteer Slaves (Reize door het land der vrywillige slaaven, 1790). Around 1800, when the Dutch felt they had achieved their goal of democratic freedom, which therefore needed no further defense, the genre abruptly died out.

Other highly successful commercial prose genres were the adventure novel and the criminal biography. A criminal biography would describe the life of a notorious criminal up to the moment of his capture or execution. The criminal’s unhappy fate must have been meant as a deterrent, but the demand for sensation was probably more to the point, and quite a few criminal biographies became lucrative bestsellers. Many popular authors tried their hand at the genre, one being Jan Willem Claus van Laar (1697/98–1769), a former brewer, who achieved commercial success in 1737 with his fictional life of the Jewish financier Aaron Abrahams. According to the author, more than ten thousand copies were sold of the two volumes The Deceiver Deceived or Smous is Caught (Den Bedrieger Bedroogen of den Gevangen Smous, 1737) and The Deceiver Punished, or Smous in the Clink (Den gestraften Bedrieger, of den Smous in het Rasphuis, 1737).

Foremost among authors of adventure novels were the brothers Petrus and Franciscus Lievens Kersteman. Little is known about Petrus Lievens Kersteman (1730–1804), who was briefly a private secretary and from 1784 director of the Rotterdam municipal theater, but writing seems to have been his main source of income. At least thirteen adventure novels have been attributed to him. Most of his books tell of a young woman holding her own in a man’s world by disguising herself as a man. His best-known novel is The Dutch Marianne, or Struggling Virtue (De Hollandsche Marianne, of de worstelende deugd, 1760), the story of an abandoned child who eventually manages to track down her well-to-do parents, but not without first being forced to defend her honor repeatedly against men ravenous for sex. The Female Lackey or the Life of Clorimena (De vrouwelyke lakei, of het leven van Clorimena, 1756) tells of an orphaned child who, while seeking her fortune, has the most astonishing and often erotic adventures. Clorimena disguises herself as a male servant, voluntarily enters a convent, then becomes a servant again, but in the end still manages to find a good husband.

Franciscus Lievens Kersteman (1728–after 1792), a lawyer, swindler, astrologer, and hack, has more than forty works to his name, many of them written during the twenty-two years he spent in prison. A failed law student, he embarked on a less than successful military career. After swindling a jeweler in The Hague he was sent to a military penal institution in Breda. There he met fellow prisoner Maria van Antwerpen, a woman who had spent six years of her life disguised as a soldier under the name Jan van Ant. In 1748 she married a sergeant’s daughter, only to be exposed and arrested in 1751. The commercial potential of her remarkable story inspired Kersteman to write The Heroine of Breda (De Bredasche heldinne, 1751), a combination of adventure story, cross-dressing novel, and criminal biography. The book did rather well, and he decided to specialize in writing biographies of famous people. In Strange Events in the Life of J. C. Weyerman (Zeldzaame levens-gevallen van J. C. Weyerman, 1756), the author Weyerman is described as a fearless writer-adventurer of the rough diamond variety, in other words as a con man, freethinker, charlatan, and shady character. This portrayal went virtually unchallenged until well into the twentieth century. Another target was a German quack doctor called Johan Christoforus Ludeman, who had made a great deal of money in Amsterdam. When the doctor died, Kersteman published Mirror of the World (Spiegel der Weereld, 1758), an astrological-medical work purportedly written by Ludeman himself; it sold over two thousand copies in four months. Kersteman later added a Memorable Biography of . . . Johan Christoforus Ludeman (Gedenk-waardige Levens-beschryving van . . . Johan Christoforus Ludeman, 1784).

Meanwhile Kersteman graduated in law at the University of Harderwijk and acquired by devious means the title “honorary professor” without ever acting as such. His legal books sold well and he made extra money by drawing up horoscopes. Not enough, apparently, since he was imprisoned again, for forging a bill of exchange, and this time the sentence was eleven years. On his release he published a less than reliable autobiography, The Life of F. L. Kersteman, Honorary Professor and Doctor of Roman and Canonical Law (Het leven van F. L. Kersteman, Professor Honorair en Doctor der beide rechten, 1792). At this point he vanishes from the historical record.

The Dutch Grub Street

Writers like the Kersteman brothers fall into a category of commercial authorship that has been largely ignored over the years. It is usually assumed that the small Dutch market afforded little room for hacks. In that case, however, why did Johannes Kinker reserve a special place for them on his eighteenth-century poetry map? He puts them in Devil’s Corner, a far corner of the map and the name of a low-life district of Amsterdam. Little research has been made into the commercial writing of the period, but it seems the Republic had its own equivalent of Grub Street. Commercial authors were essential to the book business. They helped fill those innumerable eighteenth-century periodicals, translated books into Dutch from French, German, and English, and chronicled radical ideas. A large proportion of the huge corpus of eighteenth-century pamphlets, novels, and magazines can be attributed only to these mostly anonymous hacks.

It was a profession held in low esteem. Justus van Effen defines the hack in the Dutch Spectator as someone “to whom it matters not at all what he writes about, or how; truth and lies are of equal value to him.” Voltaire regarded the hack writer as lower than a prostitute, and the taboo on writing for money persists to this day. A hack is not only someone who writes a lot, because he is paid by the page, but an opportunist ready to trim his sails for a fee. His integrity is always questionable. Indeed, plenty of authors, their eyes fixed on the money, abandoned any attempt at political consistency. The playwright Jan Nomsz veered between Orangism and Patriotism, depending on the political allegiance of his sponsors at the time. Claus van Laar was no less willing to hire out his pen to the Patriots than to the Orangists, and the same went for Willem Ockers (1741–82), responsible for at least three hundred works, including pamphlets, occasional poetry, and periodicals.

Hacks came in all shapes and sizes. Some were born writers like Jacob Campo Weyerman, Hubert Korneliszoon Poot, Elisabeth Wolff, and Gerrit Paape, who all tried to live by the pen. There were rather lesser figures like Cornelis van der Gon (1660–1731), staking their fortunes on magazines like the Schiedam Saturn (Schiedamse Saturnus, 1713–14). Then there were citizens with humble desk jobs who tried to earn a little extra cash by writing on commission. One such was John Holtrop, clerk at a merchant’s office, private tutor in several modern languages, but first and foremost a professional writer who translated, wrote, and adapted books for several publishers and booksellers.

Whereas John Holtrop refused to call himself a commercial writer, as that would have sullied his good name, truly talented authors quickly overcame the taboo on writing for money. With obvious glee, Hendrik Doedijns announced that he was writing not for honor’s sake but for “the coins.” Weyerman admitted that The Amsterdam Hermes arose from a need “to exchange written Copy for stamped Coin and the said Coin for the pleasures of life.” In his autobiography Paape asserts defiantly that he will never be such a prolific writer as his great role model, the seventeenth-century commercial writer Simon de Vries, whose complete oeuvre he could not even lift off the ground as a boy. And Nicolaas François Hoefnagel (1735–84), an author with a hundred or more publications to his name, including spectators, several novels, and innumerable pamphlets, began a spectator called Dutch Echo (Neerlandsch Echo) “for the sake of those lovely, beguiling coins, alias Money, the great and powerful Goddess.”

However laconically and elegantly these authors describe their profession, life for most commercial writers was a grind. It took a cast-iron constitution and mental resilience to produce the acres of text needed to make a living. For all his talent, Poot’s efforts to live by his writing failed miserably. He could not resist the temptations of the city, took to drink, and returned ingloriously to his village of Abtswoud. Cornelis van der Gon could only sit and watch as the market was flooded with illegal copies of a magazine he had financed out of his own pocket. Even the talented J. C. Weyerman was no better off than most commercial authors. There were times when poverty made him resort to blackmail, along the lines of “I won’t write about you if you pay me not to.” It eventually landed him in prison.

Such little other evidence as we have only reinforces the impression that it was a difficult existence. P. J. Kasteleijn (1746–94), society poet, one-time apothecary, and a professional writer since losing an eye in a workshop accident, explained to his friends that he expected to die young because he had “already written too much and sat too long.” John Holtrop died “of the effects of the weakening of his powers, probably caused by intense study, especially in composing Dictionaries, Grammars etc.” Many commercial authors tackled subversive subjects and opposed the prevailing political and religious opinions of the day, which can only have exacerbated the stress of their existence.

The hack writer was an important propagator of Enlightenment ideals, since his low social status meant he was bound to be politically aware. He used his most effective weapon, language, to spread revolutionary ideas or to crush those who disagreed with him. Pamphleteers had always lived off libel and were not above concocting obscene and humiliating stories, which guaranteed them a broad readership. But they also provided serious coverage of matters of national interest. Willem Ockers, for example, editor of a spectator called The Merchant (De Koopman, 1766–76), appealed for government intervention in the nation’s economy, investment at home rather than abroad, and equality in law for all religious faiths. The revolutionary period was highly profitable for commercial writers, as there was a greater call for information than ever before. Thousands of pamphlets and hundreds of periodicals came onto the market, and they probably had a greater influence on ordinary people, fanning the flames of revolution, than sober literary tracts and plays by established literary names.

We may know little about Devil’s Corner, but clearly some of its authors were women. In the revolutionary period at least, female authors were able to live by the pen and they produced political essays. Women like Catharina Heybeek (1763–after 1805), Maria Muller van den Bos (born 1761), and Petronella Moens (1762–1843) were in effect the first Dutch women journalists. All three worked for daily and weekly papers. From her prison cell Heybeek edited the National Batavian Courant of Lieve van Ollefen and Catharina Heybeek (Nationaale Bataafsche Courant van Lieve van Ollefen en Catharina Heybeek, 1797), and Moens was coeditor of The Philanthropist (De Menschenvriend, 1793–97), with Bernardus Bosch, as well as sole author of the Patriotic periodical Female Friend of the Nation (Vriendin van’t vaderland, 1798–99).

IV. The Shaping of a National Literature, 1760–1800

Language, Literature, and National Identity

“It is not a polite language, ’tis true, except in the mouth of a handsome woman. I must make this exception, for I well remember when I have heard a pretty lady say ‘O hemel!’ I thought it musical.” This was Boswell’s father’s assessment of the Dutch language, in a letter received by Boswell during a stay in the Netherlands. It was not uncommon for keen travelers, arriving from abroad, to complain about the language. Dutch had indeed been neglected, especially in comparison with vernaculars in neighboring countries. There were no Dutch dictionaries and no standard spelling, so various spelling conventions were in common use simultaneously. Neither the southern nor the northern Netherlands had a normative linguistic authority like the Académie française, established in Paris in 1635.

In the South the Dutch language suffered from French encroachment, while in the North the biggest threat came from the enlightened, cosmopolitanism cultural climate itself. Dutch was in use all over the globe as a colonial language and a language of trade, but its status as an intellectual vehicle was low. It was a spoken tongue rather than a written language, even though the achievements of authors like Weyerman and Van Effen suggested otherwise. Little attention was paid to the mother tongue in elementary schools, while secondary education at the Latin and French schools was of course in Latin or French. As a result, the very people who had received the best education barely knew how to spell, being better schooled in languages other than their own.

From the early eighteenth century onwards there were calls for change, and eventually the language became the subject of intensive study in both North and South. Several grammars were published in quick succession and found an avid readership. Two of the more important linguistic studies were the Introduction to the Knowledge of the Elevated Form of the Dutch Tongue (Aenleiding tot de kennisse van het verheven deel der Nederduytsche Sprake, 1723) by Lambert ten Kate (1674–1731) and Critical Notes on Language and Poetry; in Candid Remarks on Vondel’s Translated Re-Creations of Ovid (Proeve van taal- en dichtkunde; in vrijmoedige aanmerkingen op Vondels vertaalde Herscheppingen van Ovidius, 1730), a critical study of Vondel’s translation of Metamorphoses by the linguist and poet Balthasar Huydecoper (1695–1778). The work was acknowledged as hugely erudite. Huydecoper referred to over six hundred sources, demonstrating that the Dutch language and its literature were certainly worthy of study. His book was recommended reading for any aspiring poet.

A genuine language movement only emerged with the arrival of language societies, which emerged in the northern Netherlands in the late 1750s. They bore Latin names like Dulces Ante Omnia Musae (“the muses are sweet above all things”), Minima Crescunt (“even the smallest can grow”) and Magna Molimur Parvi (“effort makes small things great”). Members tackled spelling controversies and grammatical problems in a spirit of scientific and literary curiosity combined with injured national pride and international competitiveness. They aimed to create a truly Dutch poetic language. Did “nijt” and “tyt” rhyme with “-heid” and “-leid” or not? And what about case endings? Should they be abandoned or preserved?

As well as collecting and comparing the rules and prescriptions found in existing grammars, members immersed themselves in the language, or rather its literature. They liked to think that poets wrote the purest Dutch of all, and they found seventeenth-century poetry particularly inspiring. Vondel and Hooft were still held to be the greatest of Dutch poets. Research by language societies was published in the country’s first literary magazine, Linguistic and Poetic Contributions (Tael- en dichtkundige by-dragen, 1758–62), later renamed New Contributions to the Advancement of the Nation’s Literature (Nieuwe bydragen tot opbouw der vaderlandsche letterkunde, 1763–66). Out of these language societies grew the first nationwide literary society, founded in 1766, the Society for Dutch Literature (Maatschappij der Nederlandse letterkunde), which still exists today. The emergence of literary societies meant that questions of cultural identity were discussed at a national level for the first time, the Dutch language being held to be inseparable from Dutch cultural history and national identity. This identity needed to be re-evaluated, because the country was no longer a dominant force in the world. This quest for identity drew on enemy stereotypes: France was one target, as were German-speaking migrant workers, robbing the Dutch of already scarce jobs. After the outbreak of war in 1780, England joined the ranks of the enemy.

In the South, chambers of rhetoric kept the Dutch language alive, but for many years there was no sign of an organized campaign for reform, as the French influence was simply too powerful. The first nationwide learned society, the Imperial and Royal Academy of Science and Literature (Académie impériale et royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres) in Brussels, set up by the empress Maria Theresa in 1772, also operated in French. It held over four hundred public readings, but only one was in Dutch, a speech given in 1774 about “various habits, lifestyles, conceits, clothing etc. of Dutch women” by F. du Rondeau, a Brussels physician. Still, some competitions accepted answers written in Dutch. The most successful entrant was the cloth merchant and playwright Willem F. G. Verhoeven (1738–1809), best known for his Judicious Treatise on the Necessity of Preserving the Dutch Language and the Reforms Required in Schools (Oordeelkundige Verhandelingen op de noodzakelijkheid van het behouden der nederduijtsche taele, en de noodige hervormingen in de schoolen, 1780), the most important early appeal for the renewed use of Dutch for intellectual discourse. Although the manuscript remained unpublished, it demonstrates that by around 1780 people in the South were starting to reconsider the status of the language.

Another sign was the appearance in 1779 of the first Dutch-language cultural weekly in the South, the Flemish Indicator (Vlaemschen indicateur, 1779–87). A combination of newssheet, spectator, and cultural journal, it was deliberately written in the language of ordinary Flemish people “for whom until now no one has been minded to bring out such a newspaper.” Remarkably, it also included political reporting in a section headed “Letters from Holland.” Readers were offered a wide range of literary fare, including coverage of modern prose and humorous poetry, and plenty of English and German literature in translation. Possibly inspired by the Flemish Indicator, two more Dutch-language spectators came onto the market the following year, The Damsels’ Conversation Bench, or Entertainment at the Tea Table (De Klap-bank der Juffers, ofte het Vermaek aen de Thé-tafel, 1780) and The Gentlemen’s Conversation Bench, or Entertainment in the Coffee House (De Klap-bank der Heeren, ofte het Vermaek in het Caffé-huys, 1780). Both were written by Jozef de Wolf (born 1748), a priest from Ghent and the author of an Enlightenment work called The Spirit of Reason (Den geest der reden, 1777), which had been blacklisted for its attacks on religious faith. De Wolf ridiculed his country’s French ways and the coquetry, vanity, and frivolous lifestyles of ladies and gentlemen. He disappears from the historical record in 1781.

The most important early manifesto of the movement to reinstate Dutch as an intellectual language in the South, the Treatise on the Neglect of the Mother Tongue in the Low Countries (Verhandeling op d’onacht der moederlijke tael in de Nederlanden) by Jan Baptist Chrysostomus Verlooy (1746–97), was also written in 1780 but not published until 1788. To improve the status of Dutch in the South, Verlooy argued, the southern and northern Netherlands needed to cooperate more closely. “Therefore let us, fellow Netherlanders, although of separate states, regard ourselves, at least in the arts, as compatriots and brothers.” It was probably not until 1788 that Verlooy had enough money to publish his treatise; even then it was printed clandestinely, without the author’s name on the cover. The extent to which the Dutch language was emancipated in the South during the revolutionary period is illustrated by the founding in Ghent in 1787 of a Society for the Promotion of Dutch Literature (Genootschap ter bevorde­ring der Nederduitse letterkunde).

Title page of J. B. C. Verlooy’s Treatise on the Neglect of the Mother-Tongue in the Low Countries (Verhandeling op d’onacht der moederlijke tael in de Nederlanden, 1788). Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Library.

In the North a growing sense of nationhood inspired a number of rather contrived literary standpoints. There were those who, keen to prove that Dutch literature was more than a match for both classical and contemporary foreign literature, constantly drew comparisons. This irritated Rijklof Michaël van Goens (1748–1810), generally regarded as a child prodigy, and a professor of Greek, rhetoric, and history by the age of eighteen. Under the pseudonym “Philosophe sans fard” (unadorned philosopher) Van Goens published several much-discussed lectures in New Contributions (Nieuwe bydragen), attacking the tendency to compare Dutch literature with that of other languages. The practice of randomly matching classical and modern quotations and drawing general conclusions from them was unsound, anachronistic, and downright silly, Van Goens believed. He argued instead for a scholarly method that would take the historical context into account. His polemic fell on deaf ears. For the rest of the century, literary comparison remained a popular way of testing the merits of Dutch literature.

The appeal for a modern theory of literature did produce results, however. In 1778 and 1780 Hieronymus van Alphen (1746–1803), a brother-in-law of Van Goens and strongly influenced by him, published a two-volume Theory of the Fine Arts and Sciences (Theorie der schone kunsten en wetenschappen), adapted from a 1767 book by the German theorist Friedrich Justus Riedel. For Van Alphen, the beauty of a poem was to be judged not by its resemblance to classical works but by the authenticity of its poetic sensibility. To his own regret, he was forced to admit that Dutch poetry was underdeveloped compared to that of neighboring countries. “What is the reason the Dutch are some way behind in this respect? Is it the climate, the form of government, the mercantile mentality, or something else that oppresses the spirit of poetry? Or is genius generally less common in the Netherlands than in other countries?” No, said Van Alphen, the reason lies in “the lack of a philosophical study of the fine arts and sciences.” A fervent reader of works on aesthetic theory from abroad, he determined to put things right by introducing the Dutch to the latest poetic insights concerning individuality and authenticity.

The Pedagogical Enlightenment

Hubert Korneliszoon Poot attended elementary school at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a time when education was far from child-friendly. “Ah, on the wayside grass how many tears I shed! / My teacher was not harsh, but learning I did dread,” he mused afterwards. There were virtually no textbooks or children’s readers, and in the interests of order and discipline a thrashing with a strap or rod was common practice. Poot remarked that hitting children was pointless: “If a warning does not work, then neither will a blow.” This was an insight that would be fully appreciated only in the second half of the eighteenth century, like the discovery that children were best spoken to in a child’s own language. These modern ideas, expressed by John Locke in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), translated into French in 1695 and into Dutch in 1698 and 1753, gradually broadened in influence. The result was yet another new genre: children’s literature.

Practically the first children’s periodical available to Dutch readers, translated from the French with the title Children’s Magazine (Magazijn der kinderen, 1757), shows precisely what was lacking. It came too late for Poot, but no doubt he would have agreed with the author, the extremely popular French educationalist Jeanne Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–80), that “the dislike that so many children have of reading comes from the nature of the books we put into their hands.” Children often learned to read by studying the Bible. Leprince de Beaumont, creator of the fairytale Beauty and the Beast, chose dialogue form, and this soon became the usual means of conveying information to eighteenth-century children.

Children had previously used all manner of chapbooks as both readers and textbooks. Often stories were altered to make them easier for children to understand. Biblical chapbooks were particularly popular, as were adaptations of medieval prose romances and simplified versions of travel stories and adventure novels. One of the first proper children’s books was Mother Goose (Contes de ma mère l’oye, 1697) by Charles Perrault, translated into Dutch in 1754. It included famous fairytales like “Sleeping Beauty,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Tom Thumb.”

More attention began to be paid to childrearing in the eighteenth century, as a direct consequence of the Enlightenment idea that society was malleable to the point of perfection and that the welfare of a nation depended on the virtues of its citizens. As early as 1708 Hendrik Smeeks had written that “a good Education of Children is the cornerstone of good Citizenship, and of the welfare of Countries and States.” If children were brought up properly, said Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we could close down the prisons. In his epistolary novel Emile (Emile, ou de l’éducation, 1762), inspired by the more literary of the desert island stories, Rousseau describes a utopian upbringing in which Emile grows to adulthood far removed from human society.

In the Netherlands, however, Rousseau’s writings were less influential than German ideas about education developed by the so-called philanthropist movement, which was the first to experiment with new forms of education, in the mid-1770s, and which helped to expand the market for children’s books as the decade went on. Christian Gotthilf Salzmann and Johan Bernhard Basedow, the two most prominent representatives of philanthropism, called for a child’s upbringing to be characterized by harmony. Children should be offered examples to follow, both their intellectual and emotional capacities should be developed, and they should be taught a form of natural religion, independent of any specific church, because every child should be free to decide later on which particular denomination to join. Hitting children was to be replaced with a subtle system of rewards and punishments.

One of the authors most strongly influenced by the philanthropists was Hieronymus van Alphen, responsible for the Dutch edition of Theory of the Fine Arts and Sciences (Theorie der schoone kunsten en wetenschappen, 1778, 1780). The average Dutch person today has never heard of this title, but few will be unfamiliar with the first line of “The Plum Tree,” which goes “Johnny saw some fine plums hanging” (Jantje zag eens pruimen hangen). The poem was printed in Poetry for Children (Proeve van Kleine Gedigten voor Kinderen, 1778), the first modern children’s book in Dutch, which became an instant bestseller and was widely translated; an English version was published in 1856. Van Alphen went on to publish two sequels. The verses in Poetry for Children are a product of the Enlightenment in every sense: written specifically for children, in accessible language, they deliver a message in a lighthearted manner. Van Alphen tested his verse on his three young sons, whose upbringing had fallen entirely to him since the death of his wife: “The author has tested it on all, and he can state with confidence that his oldest little boy, a child of five, understood much of it, on the first or second reading; and therefore he is confident that all these little pieces can be used for children over five years old and under ten.”

Illustration to accompany the poem “The Corpse” in Hieronymus van Alphen’s Poetry for Children (Proeve van kleine Gedigten voor Kinderen, 1778). Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Library.

Van Alphen’s poems describe an ideal relationship between children and parents. To that extent his collections were as instructive for adults as for children. With a gentle touch, in a playful fashion wherever possible, children were to be molded into virtuous, disciplined citizens. Each of Van Alphen’s poems features a Lockean, circumspect adult trying to instill essential social virtues into a child in its own home environment, without resorting to threats, intimidation, or force. Van Alphen avoided religious dogma in his poetry, concentrating instead on a generic form of faith that presented God as a loving father, as in “The Corpse”:

My dearest children, why afraid

Of corpses in their coffin laid,

Why shrink with fear and wonder?

This pale cold man who dead appears,

Who neither feels, nor sees, nor hears,

Lives in that bright sky yonder. . . .

 

And though consigned to earth’s dark cleft,

The soul hath now the body left,

Why feel such agitation?

Believe in faith the sacred word,

These crumbling bones by God’s breath stirred

Shall leave their habitation.45

By the end of the century the new pedagogical ideals had become established among the elite, so much so that eleven-year-old Otto van Eck was furious when, on a walk from Delft to The Hague on 28 September 1791, he saw a woman hitting one of her children. He noted in his diary, “It made the child angry and it cried all the way along the road and if the woman had treated it gently it would have been quiet and obedient.”

The pedagogical Enlightenment in the Netherlands was a moderate movement that managed to reconcile “reason and revelation” and incorporate God. Combined with the new discoveries in physics, this led to a tendency known as “natural theology,” which used the new scientific knowledge about the wonders of nature to confirm the existence of God. Among those who did most to popularize this way of thinking was a preacher from Zutphen called Johannes Florentius Martinet (1729–95), an amateur biologist who investigated extremely diverse phenomena. He managed to tame a stork and tried to persuade it to swallow a fish backwards, tail first, but the bird refused. Martinet’s Catechism of Nature (Katechismus der natuur, 1777–79), intended as an eternal hymn of praise to the Creator, was one of the most popular children’s books of its time. While out walking, a schoolmaster teaches his pupil about natural phenomena in a game of question and answer. He touches on every aspect of creation: the universe, the air, the earth, man, the soul, hills and dunes, fire and water. Each element of creation has a purpose. Why, for example, were lice created? Answer: to force lazy people into action to wash and take care of themselves. A simplified version of the Catechism became a bestseller, combining all four parts into one small and therefore cheap volume entitled The Catechism of Nature: For the Use of Children (Kleine katechismus der Natuur: Voor kinderen). The English translation was reprinted several times. The book was intended, as Martinet made clear, to be used for oral tests: by learning the questions and answers by rote, children would increase their general knowledge.

Elisabeth Wolff (1738–1804) was another author to benefit from the new market. Although, as she was only too well aware, Betje Wolff was a childless widow and therefore arguably in no position to give advice on family matters, she showed no hesitation in addressing mothers directly in her Notes on Upbringing, Addressed to Dutch Mothers (Proeve over de opvoeding aan de Nederlandsche moeders, 1779). “We, dear Ladies, are all women together!” she wrote, and she knew precisely what mothers should do: they must not turn their children into “curiosities” but into “reasonable” creatures. Wolff’s most important contribution to the pedagogical Enlightenment was her defense of the mother’s territory. Up until then most pedagogical books and poems had seen a child’s upbringing as primarily a father’s responsibility. After all, fathers are generally not as close to their children as mothers, so they can be far stricter. Wolff dismissed this notion. Mothers are certainly able to bring up girls and “boys too, at least until they can usefully begin attending school.”

Popular eighteenth-century genres such as the periodical and the epistolary novel were now marketed to children as well. The first children’s magazine written in Dutch, the Children’s Library (Bibliotheek der kinderen) by the professional author Lieve van Ollefen (1749–1816), appeared in 1780. One of the best-known children’s authors was Maria Geertruida de Cambon-van der Werken (1734–after 1796), who specialized in epistolary novels like Young Grandison (De kleine Grandisson of de gehoorzame zoon, 1782, 86), Adeline (Adeline, 1783–84), Young Clarissa (De kleine Klarissa, 1790), and Maria and Carolina (Maria en Carolina, 1800). The first of these, Young Grandison, became an international bestseller and was translated into English in 1790; Mary Wollstonecraft had a hand in it. The book was meant for boys and tells the story of thirteen-year-old Charles Grandison, a model child who shows solidarity with the people around him in every conceivable situation. In Young Clarissa, aimed at little girls, the central character behaves like an angel, whereas her sister Charlotte is heartless and conceited. Charlotte goes down with smallpox and is permanently disfigured. Otto van Eck read both books as a child. On 28 July 1791 he noted in his diary:

Took the eight o’clock boat to The Hague early this morning and walked back with Papa at half past twelve, talking about the new book by Mrs. Cambon, Young Clarissa, which we received as a present. Like Charles in Young Grandison, Clarissa is the main character, the personification of all virtue, and the book was given to us so that we might emulate her.

The Century of Women Writers

Diderot was fascinated by the subject of feminine beauty in the Dutch Republic, in the sense that he could find none, or almost none. Dutch women, he wrote, “are very stocky with ugly teeth and flabby flesh, just like the women in paintings by Rubens.” Beautiful or not, some eighteenth-century Dutch women were undoubtedly talented and emancipated, and they were particularly active in literature. In fact one of the best-loved of all eighteenth-century writers was a woman, Lucretia Wilhelmina van Merken (1721–89), and although today she is utterly forgotten, for many years, beginning in about 1760, she was the most famous, most successful, and most admired of all eighteenth-century authors. Publishers fought over her manuscripts, Willem Bilderdijk judged her on a par with Vondel and Poot, and Elisabeth Wolff remembers reading her verse at the tender age of ten. She is unknown today simply because she worked exclusively within classical genres such as tragedy, epic verse, and didactic poetry. She did not produce a single epistolary novel. So what was the secret of her success? Bilderdijk attributed it to her eye for detail and her talent for versification. Wolff was impressed by the “softness” of Van Merken’s language and her “sweet fluency.”

Lucretia Wilhelmina van Merken. Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Library.

Although Van Merken debuted in 1745 with the tragedy Artemines, she really made her name with the publication of a book of comfort called The Uses of Adversity (Het nut der tegenspoeden, 1762), a didactic poem in three parts with almost nine hundred verses. The poetess, who had recently watched her father, mother, and sister die, sublimated her grief with an unshakeable faith in the expediency of earthly suffering. No matter what disaster a person might meet with in life, the author declared, it always has some kind of purpose:

No: he who has not known disasters and distress,

When fate smiles cannot taste the greatest happiness.

How much the less each happy spring would us entice,

Were not her green begotten out of winter’s ice.

Suffering was best eased by faith in God’s providence, while the life of Christ and his torments would also provide comfort. Literary scholars claimed this didactic work was so poetic and so convincing that many people were indeed greatly comforted by reading it. Van Merken gained an even greater reputation with the biblical epic David (1767) and the patriotic Germanicus (1779), volumes of epic verse regarded by many as masterpieces. After Van Merken died in 1789 she was celebrated by literary societies as the “mother” of Dutch poetry.

Another star, and a contemporary of Van Merken, was Christina Leonora de Neufville (1713–81), who was catapulted to fame in 1741 by her philosophical work Speculations Presented in Poetic Letters (Bespiegelingen voorgesteld in dichtmaatige brieven), which was reissued in 1762. There must be a link between the popularity of the work and De Neufville’s campaign against rising materialism. Drawing on the ideas of the German philosopher Christian Wolff (1679–1754) she attempted to show, on entirely rational grounds, that the soul was incorporeal and immortal. De Neufville was another of those female poets whose example inspired the young Elisabeth Wolff, for in spite of Enlightenment ideals women writers were frequently the target of ridicule and were repeatedly forced to defend themselves.

Elisabeth Wolff was determined to make her name as an author. At first she wrote within the confines of traditional genres, laboring away in vain at an epic and publishing several volumes of poetry before discovering her true strengths. By writing pamphlets and translating Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1771) and Essay on Man (1783), as well as contributing to various spectators, she became an accomplished writer of prose.

Wolff’s talent for polemic was remarkable and soon became widely feared. She made a particular impact in 1772, when she put herself forward as an enlightened and tolerant thinker in three polemical pamphlets. Moral Song to the Love of Mankind (Zedenzang aan de Menschenliefde) was written after a fire at the Amsterdam Schouwburg in which several people died. Wolff refused to interpret this as divine punishment. In The Minuet and the Minister’s Wig (De menuet en de domineespruik) she attacked the hypocrisy of Dutch clergymen who forbade dancing on Sundays, and in The Santhorst Creed (De Santhorstsche Geloofsbelijdenis) she laid out her political and social articles of faith, which amounted to a plea for freedom, tolerance, and friendship.

It was not until she was widowed in 1777, set up house with Agatha Deken (1741–1804), known as Aagje Deken, and entered into a writing partnership with her, that Wolff really came into her own as a writer. She shed some of her venom, and instead of sniping from the sidelines she now deliberately placed her literary talents at the service of the Enlightenment. Whether writing their own epistolary novels and folksongs or translating books by other writers, the two women aimed primarily to educate their readers, as is clear from titles such as Cornelia Wildschut, or the Results of an Upbringing (Cornelia Wildschut, of, de gevolgen der opvoeding, 1793–96). This epistolary novel, like The History of Miss Sara Burgerhart (Historie van mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart, 1782), which we will shortly discuss at greater length, explicitly targeted a new female readership. Works like Domestic Songs (Economische liedjes, 1781) and Songs for the Peasantry (Liederen voor den Boerenstand, 1804), the latter written solely by Deken, were aimed at an even broader audience. Commercial considerations undoubtedly applied. The two women may have had a number of bequests and an inheritance, but they had to supplement their income by writing, especially after they returned to the Netherlands from eight years in political exile to find only a small proportion of their modest capital left. They expressed their longing for radical social change in Poems and Songs for the Nation (Gedichten en liedjens voor het vaderland, 1798) and a periodical — which never made it into print — called the Political Diverter (Politieke Afleider, 1798). It is not clear exactly how their writing partnership worked. However, the contribution of Aagje Deken, the rather more timid of the two but a poet of considerable merit, should certainly not be underestimated. Deken herself claims she was responsible for half their output.

Another famous female poet was Juliana Cornelia de Lannoy (1738–82), who described herself as a woman with a “manly heart.” At the age of twenty-five she decided to pursue the writing life, composed tragedies and satirical verse, and won several of the contests held by literary societies. Her debut poem “To My Mind” (1766), a dialogue between the protagonist and her “mind,” defined her position in a male-dominated world. Vitriolic and ironic, the poem asserted that women are the intellectual equals of men. De Lannoy provided plenty of evidence for this in the tragedies Leo the Great (Leo de Groote, 1768), The Siege of Haarlem (De Belegering van Haerlem, 1770), and Cleopatra, Queen of Syria (Cleopatra, Koningin van Syriën, 1776), three historical plays that were praised by reviewers for their “manly Poetry.”

Better known outside the Low Countries than at home was the aristocratic Belle van Zuylen (1740–1805), who grew up amid great luxury but found life at Zuylen Castle suffocating. At the age of thirty-one she entered into a marriage of convenience and moved to Switzerland with her husband. Her acuity and independence of mind were praised by her admirers and correspondents, who included James Boswell, Constant d’Hermenches, and his nephew Benjamin Constant. Van Zuylen published novels, plays, pamphlets, and an opera, all exclusively in French. Her debut novella, The Noble (Le noble, 1763), painted such a shocking picture of the Dutch aristocracy that her parents bought up the entire print run. Her greatest success was Caliste, or the Continuation of Letters Written in Lausanne (Caliste, ou continuation des lettres écrites de Lausanne, 1787), an epistolary novel set in England, where Van Zuylen lived for six months in 1767. William, the narrator, is in love with Caliste, an independent woman who has already been through a relationship without marrying. William’s father condemns such immoral behavior and refuses to let his son marry her. William lacks the backbone to defy his father, so he throws away his chance of happiness with Caliste by abandoning her for a safe social position in respectable society.

Literary Societies

While the language societies we discussed in a previous section were concerned specifically with language policy, the poetic and contemplative societies concentrated on poetry and oratory respectively. Amsterdam could boast three contemplative societies. Diligentiae Omnia (“everything can be obtained through diligence”) specialized in the discussion of poetic theory and was headed by a well-known Amsterdam society figure and man of letters called Johannes Lublink (1736–1816). More than eighty handwritten speeches were delivered at the society’s meetings, although only a few were published. In 1772 the society generated controversy when it erected a memorial, designed and financed by members, next to the grave of the “national poet” Joost van den Vondel in the New Church in Amsterdam; the monument can be seen there to this day. Vondel had not only converted from Protestantism to Catholicism in his lifetime but a century later, in 1772, had become a political symbol for all those opposed to the stadtholder. There was therefore a political aspect to the society’s decision to memorialize him as a national poet.

Concordia et Libertate (“concord and liberty”) and the literary department of Felix Meritis (“happiness through virtue”) brought together important men of letters, lawyers, physicians, merchants, and the odd publisher. Every week a member would give an address on a subject of his choice. Serious matters were tackled, such as the immortality of the soul, the role of the arts and sciences, Hooft’s merits as a poet, patriotism as a true virtue, or Kantian philosophy. One man who thrived in this environment was the lawyer, philosopher, and man of letters Johannes Kinker (1764–1845). He was a versatile character, a poet, scholar, popularizer of Kant, and editor of several literary magazines, including The Helicon Mail (De Post van de Helicon, 1788). Kinker was a member of at least twenty clubs and associations. In Felix Meritis, founded in 1777 and the most prestigious society in Amsterdam, he spoke on subjects including poetic genius, time, and eternity. As a member of the governing body he advocated admitting Jews and women as members, but his plea was ignored. On 21 March 1800 Kinker was the main speaker at a memorial service for George Washington, to many the ideal statesman, who had led a revolution without emerging as a dictator, and who had selflessly placed all his talents at the service of his country — in short, a man of a kind Holland sadly lacked. Hence Kinker ended his “Elegy” with these words:

Eternal one! How virtue soars in feeling unto you!

O Washington’s form! Set their example before our eyes!

And let their actions fire us! Let them meet us, too;

And in their grandeur’s light, show where our duty lies!

Poetry societies were of immense importance in the formation of a truly national republic of letters. Because they had members across the length and breadth of the country, poets could get to know each other, wherever they lived. Johannes van Dijk, for example, a preacher based in the southern province of Limburg, joined a club based in The Hague called Love of Art Spares No Effort (Kunstliefde spaart geen vlijt) in the hope “of thus bringing more of the knowledge of Parnas to my Thomos [i.e. Tomis, Ovid’s place of exile], through the friendly exchange of letters with some of your Members.”

Inauguration of Felix Meritis (Inwijding van Felix Meritis, 1788), drawing by Reinier Vinkeles and Jakobus Buys. Amsterdam, Municipal Archives.

Love of Art Spares No Effort, founded in 1772, introduced a number of organizational devices that were to bring unprecedented popularity to the whole concept of the poetry society. A new membership category was invented, that of honorary members, who were released from their obligation to contribute their own poetic works on payment of twice the usual membership fee. The society also published an annual poetry collection and, perhaps most important, held an annual competition on a social issue. This in particular inspired many to join. Other societies quickly adopted a similar organizational structure and grew into sizeable institutions.

Members eagerly anticipated the annual meetings at which awards were presented. The young poet Anthony Christiaan Winand Staring (1767–1840), then living in Harderwijk, attended the annual meeting of Love of Art Spares No Effort in The Hague in 1785, hoping to meet his mentor, the famous poet Rhijnvis Feith of Zwolle. “This was one of the primary reasons for my coming to the province of Holland! Alas, sir, you were not there!” Fortunately there would be another meeting the next year. Young rising stars like Staring found exactly what they were looking for in literary societies. The annual competitions represented their best chance of acceptance into literary circles. All poems were entered anonymously, so organizing committees were not influenced by either name and fame or the lack thereof. Winners were awarded a gold or silver medal, but far more important, their poems were published under their own names in society anthologies, which were given extensive publicity in newspapers and magazines.

Poets like Bilderdijk and Feith, who were to mature into the most important writers of the republic later in the century, began their careers in poetry societies. The young Willem Bilderdijk (1756–1831) was particularly assiduous. In 1776 he was awarded a gold medal by the society Art Is Attained Through Work for “The Influence of Poetry on National Government.” In 1777 he won both a silver and a gold medal from the same club for “The True Love for the Fatherland” and in 1781 gold again for “Our Forefathers at the Foundation of the Commonwealth” in a competition held by Love of Art Spares No Effort. Poetry societies loved competitions on patriotic subjects like these, other favorites being biblical, religious, and moralistic poetry, all of it meant to be socially useful. Society rules actually banned members from sending in poems that marked purely personal occasions. The eighteenth century was awash with wedding verse, birthday poems, and elegies, but the poetry societies condemned this sort of occasional verse; they also recommended replacing mythological with Christian imagery. Practically every society anthology began with biblical and moralistic verse, followed by miscellaneous poems and competition entries, so that as time went on a standard cultural language emerged which, although not uniform in its spelling, was thematically uniform.

Literary societies had an enduring attachment to poetry, thanks to a general conviction that no other genre had comparable communicative power. Poetry was seen as going straight to the heart, penetrating human consciousness and prompting people to act. The more dramatic and emotional a poem was, the better. Much use was made of the monologue as a means of affecting readers’ emotions. Poets would try to imagine what Jonah might have been thinking in the whale’s belly, how Judas reacted to his own treachery, or how Jesus felt during his crucifixion. At the time of the Patriots a similar empathy was applied to national history. Heroic figures from the past would be shown in dramatic situations — Oldenbarneveld taking leave of his family before being led to the gallows, for example. Consequently, emotion became an important aspect of literature from the 1770s onwards. By about 1780 it was quite normal to think of a poet primarily as a writer articulating emotions rather than one who imitated nature.

Although from the 1780s onwards the intellectual elite became increasingly irritated by the fact that poetry societies had dominated developments in poetry for an entire decade, by this time the societies had become national sounding-boards for socially aware citizens. Individual citizens had few means of communication, and poetry societies offered an excellent new way of broadcasting personal opinions. Moreover, unlike other clubs, poetry societies admitted female members. Women triumphed as a result of the competitions. Juliana Cornelia de Lannoy and the much less famous Maria Petronella Elter-Woesthoven (1760–1830) both walked off with large numbers of medals. By the 1780s more women than ever, if still not very many, were joining poetry societies. Most clubs churned out large amounts of patriotic propaganda, and in the battle for public opinion talented women writers were welcome. Between 1781 and 1790 the number of lady members grew to double that of the 1770s. Of the fifty or so women who joined, as against a total of around fifteen hundred men, more than half were active contributors to society anthologies. Petronella Moens (1762–1843) and Adriana van Overstraten (1756–1828) both became honorary members of the Patriot society Studium Scientiarum Genitrix in Rotterdam, in 1783 and 1785 respectively. They went on to become seasoned club members, joining another seven poetry societies.

By writing about Christian, classical, and national heroes and heroines who had either been victims of unfair treatment or emerged victorious from their battles for justice, male and female poets could arouse patriotic feeling, express moral outrage, and help shape public opinion. They could do so in relative safety thanks to the societies’ literary character. Although members were banned from insulting the government in power, the ambiguity of literature allowed all manner of indirect criticism, for instance by writing about a parallel situation in the past. Thus the poets recounted, perhaps reinvented, national and classical history to illustrate their idea of true heroism, patriotism, and love of freedom. The seventeenth-century naval hero Michiel de Ruyter was held up as a paragon of heroism and patriotic loyalty. The Dutch owed their freedom to forefathers like him, and if anything typified Dutch identity it was this hunger for freedom. Readers closely followed the careers of the Corsican freedom fighter Pascal Paöli and of the freedom fighters in America. After the Batavian Revolution of 1795, many active club members abandoned their club activities to take up posts in the new municipal and national governments.

The Epistolary Novel and the Sentimental Novel

In the final quarter of the eighteenth century the novel was reinvented once more, and in such a way that even established literary critics ceased to be hostile. Whereas the entire genre had previously been vilified for the immoral character of many adventure novels, the new novel won praise for its ethical nature. This was the epistolary novel, entirely different in form and character from existing popular prose. The experiences of ordinary, decent citizens became the main subject of the epistolary novel, and exciting plots were of secondary concern. The thoughts, feelings, and psychological make-up of the characters came to the fore, and the letter-writing format meant they could be described in exhaustive detail. This shift from adventure to psychology enabled the new novel to develop into a pedagogical instrument.

Dutch readers, like readers elsewhere in Europe, discovered the epistolary novel through the work of Samuel Richardson. Pamela (1740–41) was translated immediately, in 1741, and reviews appeared in French periodicals published in the Netherlands. Clarissa (1748) followed in 1752–53, translated by the Baptist minister Joannes Stinstra, who added an enthusiastic preface to each volume. At the end of the eighteenth century, in a preface to the 1797 second edition of the translation of Charles Grandison (1753–54), it was Johannes Lublink’s turn to write admiringly, “Each letter is a spectatorial expostulation upon itself. What wealth of insights into human nature, of invention, of judgment, can we not sense here?”

The message communicated by most epistolary novels can be summed up in the simple phrase “think before you act.” This meant seeking an equilibrium between reason and emotion and stressing the importance of a well-balanced upbringing. In most epistolary novels the protagonist had been denied such an upbringing. Like other popular prose, these novels introduced orphans or semi-orphans to demonstrate that the lack of a proper upbringing was one of the reasons people might go astray as adults.

How better to demonstrate such a derailment than through a love story? Here, more than anywhere else in literature, emotions were given free rein. Infatuation could place young men and women in unpleasant situations. Take Sara, the central character in the first and best-known Dutch epistolary novel, The History of Miss Sara Burgerhart (De Historie van mejuffrouw Sara Burgerhart, 1782) by Elisabeth Wolff and Agatha Deken. After the death of her parents, Sara finds herself in the hidebound milieu of her aunt, Miss Zuzanna Hofland, a narrow-minded, bigoted woman who has allied herself to a conservative current within Protestantism called “the fine,” a movement with a generally bleak outlook on life that set great store by inner religious experience. Sara is young, cheerful, and determined to enjoy herself. The two characters inevitably collide. After a ferocious argument Sara runs away, is offered bed and board by the jolly widow Mrs. Spilgoed, and abandons herself to luxury and pleasure. This is the mood in which she meets Mr. R., a rake. A naive girl, Sara initially responds to his advances but comes to her senses in time to escape a planned rape and preserve her chastity. She has learned a valuable lesson and goes on to marry the admittedly less exciting but entirely respectable Hendrik Edeling. This heartrending story could be the story of Elisabeth Wolff herself, who eloped with a young officer cadet in 1755 and paid for her folly with great unhappiness: “With a heart torn to the root, whose wound after ten years of lamentation still sometimes cannot help but bleed, I have paid for the ecstasies of a youthful love.” At the age of twenty-one, Betje married the clergyman Adriaan Wolff, thirty years her senior.

Illustration from Sara Burgerhart (1782) by Elisabeth Wolff and Agatha Deken. Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Library.

Sara Burgerhart was reprinted after only a few months. Its success owes a great deal to the virtuosity of the writing duo in bringing all twenty-four characters to life in one hundred and seventy-five letters. Each character speaks in his or her own voice, in language very close to everyday speech, attuned to “the Meridian of Domestic lives”; as the preface also puts it: “We paint Dutch characters for you, people who are actually to be found in our Country.” Just as important was the undisguised nationalism that permeates the book. The authors emphasized that they had written an “original National Novel.” The reader should not expect any great adventures, though: “In the whole work not one Duel is fought. True, there is one instance of a person being slapped. There are neither elopements nor drinking of poison. Our good sense has not flirted with anything miraculous. Everything remains within the bounds of the natural.” The same went for their other epistolary novels The History of Mr Willem Leevend (De historie van den heer Willem Leevend, 1784–85) and Cornelia Wildschut (1793–96), although in the latter the main character does elope, causing considerable misfortune.

Much less “natural,” that is to say realistic, were the so-called sentimental novels that emerged in the same period. Sentimentalism, too, arrived from abroad, exemplified by Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1768), which was translated into Dutch in 1778. Its rise was accelerated by Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, 1774), translated in 1776. While English sentimentalism focused on anything that could stimulate the emotions, Goethe’s novel emphasized the torment we call love; young Werther commits suicide because his passion for a married woman is unrequited.

In the Netherlands, too, love played its part in the sentimental novel, but love of Christianity was cultivated even more ardently, and this gave a specifically Dutch slant to sentimentalism. In the most famous exemplar of the genre, the short novel Julia, written by Rhijnvis Feith (1753–1824) and published in 1783, the two main characters are Julia and Edward, who fall in love at first sight. “Our trembling eyes met — silently our hearts began the most tender conversation.” Julia’s father refuses them permission to marry, and so begins their suffering. The two lovers desire each other to the point of madness but do not surrender to their lustful feelings because young Christians cannot have sex before marriage. They train themselves to have self-control and faith in providence. When Julia’s father does finally agree to their marriage, fate intervenes and Julia dies. Edward is inconsolable, but remains convinced they will see each other again in the life to come.

Illustration from Julia (1783) by Rhijnvis Feith. Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Library.

This simple plot is secondary to the emotions evoked in the book. Instead of a busy urban background, which would only distract the reader, unspecific natural settings, including a forest, a churchyard, and a rock, form the décor in which the characters find the peace of mind necessary to love each other and to strengthen their faith in God. The plot of Julia is far from complex, especially compared to a novel like Sara Burgerhart, and Feith does not attempt any experiments with the epistolary format. No letters are lost or even exchanged. In fact the letters are not really letters at all, but more like diary entries describing the emotions of the main characters. Whereas Sara Burgerhart aimed to show why excessive passion and impetuosity were evil, in Julia the feelings experienced and evoked drive the entire book. The sentimental person emerges as a delicate, sensitive, perhaps hypersensitive creature, who falls silent or bursts into tears when upset. Edward cries out:

No! I sense it, there is not yet any language to express the feeling — unless it be tears — the blessed tears — yes! they are the means — they at least relieve my crushed breast — they come to the aid of my feeble words and everything becomes expression! — JULIA!

Novels like Julia demonstrate the degree to which feelings rose in value in the final decades of the eighteenth century. They sought to liberate the emotional life by claiming that a person’s strength might in fact lie in his emotions, assuming they are put to proper use — their proper use being the moral civilization of humanity, still the main aim of the Dutch Enlightenment.

Among the new, sensitive eighteenth-century writers was Elisabeth Maria Post, author of the epistolary novels Reinhart (1791–92) and The Land (Het land, 1788), as well as a collection of unprecedentedly frank poems called Songs of Love (Gezangen der Liefde, 1794), dedicated to her fiancé, who was eight years her junior. The Land, in particular, was highly successful. Two highly-strung friends, the city-girl Eufrosyne, and Emilia, who lives in the countryside, write to each other: “Oh! What an extraordinary mixture of passions transports me! I feel nature! I feel friendship! How powerfully they work together to thrill my soul!” One of the things Feith had merely implied, that spending time in natural surroundings promotes human tranquility, is made explicit in Post’s book, in which peace, sensitivity, and sincere religious feelings can only flourish in a rural setting.

Criticism of sentimental literature was not long in coming. On his literary map Johannes Kinker showed the sentimental route leading to the madhouse. Church ministers objected as well. Surely characters who spent all their time attending to their own emotions were egotistical and unsocial. “Sensitivity is one of the most damaging sicknesses of the human soul,” wrote Jan Konijnenburg, a clergyman, in 1791. “It weakens the original and healthy power of thought, makes us far too weak for the world we live in, softens and poisons our imaginations, and carries the sensuality of our nature beyond its proper limits.”

Revolutionary Literature

Politics provided men and women of letters with subject matter throughout the century. Stadtholder William IV’s accession in 1748 and William V’s in 1766 occasioned streams of pamphlets from supporters and opponents. At the time of the Patriots, after the Fourth English War had broken out in 1780, this kind of writing reached a peak, in all the genres now available to the eighteenth-century author. Nowhere is the inventiveness and creativity of eighteenth-century writers so much in evidence as in the revolutionary literature of the years between 1781 and 1800.

Pornographic elements, as in the farce William V’s Disturbed Bout of Bonking (Het gestoorde naaipartijtje van Willem de Vde, 1786), were often included to help interest the reader in the political message. Ordinary people were addressed in simple dialogue, in a language and idiom they could understand, in periodicals like the Patriotic The Political Prattler (De politieke praatvaar, 1784–86) and the Orangist The Political Prattleress (De politieke praatmoer, 1784–85). Both publications were banned.

Even school books and children’s literature became politicized. In a variation on the work of Van Alphen, Lieve van Ollefen published A Sampler of Patriotic Poems for Children (Proeve van vaderlandsche gedichtjes voor kinderen, 1786), a collection with undisguised Patriot sympathies. Following the outbreak of the Fourth English War, the New Mirror of Youth, or French Tyranny (Nieuwe Spiegel der Jeugd, Of Franse Tiranny, 1674), which included reports of the French invasion in the catastrophic year 1672, was superseded by The English Tyranny (De Engelsche tyran­nije). The Patriotic ABC for Dutch Youth (Vaderlandsche A.B.-Boek voor de Nederlandsche Jeugd, 1781) by Johan Hendrik Swildens could not have been more explicit. Under B for “burgher” is a picture of a company of citizen soldiers marching across Dam Square in the center of Amsterdam. The accompanying text reads:

Burgher, you protect the City. Honour’s your reward.

This must ev’ry Burgher do, be he the greatest Lord.

The pamphlet had traditionally been the main weapon in the battle for public opinion. Highly variable in size — they were usually short but could run to hundreds of pages — pamphlets swiftly responded to current affairs. It was one of the most “democratic” media of the eighteenth century, since authors from all levels of society loved and made use of it: scholars, ordinary citizens, and hacks. Pamphlet production peaked in the closing decades of the century. Rough estimates suggest that between 1784 and 1792 around five thousand appeared in the South; in the North, where there was a greater supply of political periodicals, around three and a half thousand were published between 1776 and 1795. Southern authors fulminated in Latin, French, and to a lesser degree Dutch. In the North the majority of pamphlets were written in Dutch. The vitriolic manner in which personal scores were settled seems astonishing today. Fictional epitaphs, wills, letters from hell — no instrument was too crude. Dialogues with the dead were particularly popular, filling entire periodicals but also selling well in pamphlet form.

The best known of all the revolutionary pamphlets of the Republic, To the People of the Netherlands (Aan het volk van Nederland, 1781), was distributed right across the country in a single night, a remarkable logistical feat. Over the next few years it was reprinted twelve times, and its total print run must have exceeded ten thousand copies. The author was not named, but his name soon became common knowledge: Baron Johan Derck van der Capellen tot den Pol. He was one of a number of aristocrats who refused to tolerate the stadtholder’s abuses of power and deeply resented the stupidity and corruption of the regents. He fervently wished for a drastic change to the Dutch political system:

Believe me! Deception and pretense comes as naturally to our rulers as their incessant striving for more and greater power. There is no freedom and there can be no freedom in a country where a single person inherits the command of a great army.

Van der Capellen was intelligent as well as critical. He had visited America and met George Washington. He corresponded with the pro-American Englishman Richard Price and translated the latter’s Observations on Civil Liberty (1776) as Aenmerkingen over den Aart der Burgerlicke Vrijheid, published in the same year as the original.

J. D. van der Capellen tot den Pol. Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Library.

The year 1781, when Van der Capellen first resorted to the time-honored pamphlet, also saw the launch of the first political magazine of the Dutch Republic, the Lower Rhine Mail (Post van den Neder-rhijn, 1781–87), brainchild of the journalist Pieter ’t Hoen (1744–1828). Until 1787, when William V was restored to power, the Mail was the most powerful magazine of the Patriot movement. Dozens of similar periodicals followed. The political press had arrived.

In the southern Netherlands, purely political periodicals were slower to emerge. However, some critical commentary can be found in the Historical and Literary Journal (Journal historique et littéraire), published from 1773 onwards by the Jesuit F. X. de Feller (1735–1802), who started to write when the Jesuit order was officially abolished in that same year. In the 1780s De Feller became an anti-Josephist and published one clandestine essay after another, full of rancor at church reforms implemented by Joseph II. In 1788 the Journal was banned. Following occupation by France, Karel Broeckaert (1767–1826), a member of a chamber of rhetoric in Ghent, attacked the French régime in 1795 with a spectator called The Saucepan, or the Tavern of the Elders (De sysse-panne ofte den estaminé der ouderlingen, 1795–98; the saucepan of the title is a reference to a person who tells the truth or “gives his sauce.”) In lively dialogue he presents readers with three character types: the intellectual and moderate republican Bitterman, the radical revolutionary Sound Heart, and Gijsken, who remains loyal to the old system of government and to conservative ideals. Liberally quoting Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Adam Smith, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Richard Steele, and Thomas Hobbes, Broeckaert leaves no room for doubt about his own political loyalties.

Few writers in the southern Netherlands avoided adopting a political stance. The publisher and rhetorician J. F. Vander Schueren (1751–1804) joined the battle by writing a tragedy called The Triumph of Valor or the Siege of New York (De zegepraal der heldhaftigheid of het beleg van New-York, 1792), a hymn to the American War of Independence. Jan Antoon Frans Pauwels (1747–1823), a poet from Antwerp who published more than fifty volumes of poetry, wrote denunciations of Joseph II in verse and mocked the Austrian régime in Solemn Mass of Thanks . . . [for] the Conquest of the Capital City of Flanders (Solemnele Misse van dankbaerheyd . . . [om] de verovering der Hoofdstad van Vlaenderen, 1789). Simon Michiel Coninckx (1750–1839), canon at St. Truiden, a refuge for political exiles, was another writer advocating religious tolerance and social egalitarianism: “Nobles are a monstrous thing in a republic where every man should be equal before the law.” Coninckx, who wrote in Dutch, French, and Latin, admired Rousseau and Voltaire. His Christian Poems (Christelyke gedichten, 1781), a translation of some of the Psalms of David, are considered the best Dutch poetry of his time. In 1787 he joined the ongoing political unrest with his Peaceable Observations of a Parish Priest Addressed to the Bishop of Pistoia and Prato (Observations pacifiques d’un curé à Monsieur l’Evêque de Pistoie et de Prato), an anti-Josephist essay.

Cornelius Martinus Spanoghe (1758–1829) on the other hand, a former theologian, printer, and bookseller, was among the supporters of Joseph II. He too published in both French and Dutch. He wrote an account of the Brabant Revolution that was regarded as scandalous at the time, Biography of the Dutch Ex-Sovereign Bloodhounds and their Supporters (Levensbeschryving der Nederlandsche ex-souvereyne bloedhonden en van des zelfs aenhang, 1791–92), a series of thirty-six letters defending Joseph II’s policies. Spanoghe also edited and published the newspaper Daily and General European Mercury (Dagelyksche en algemeyne Europische Mercurius, 1789), another staunchly pro-Austrian publication. This resulted in the destruction of Spanoghe’s presses. He describes his political, philosophical, and Deist convictions exhaustively in The Netherlands Delivered (Het verlost Nederland, 1791).

In the northern Netherlands, Wolff and Deken gradually became Patriots, as did Rhijnvis Feith. One of the Patriots who caught the public imagination most effectively was Jacobus Bellamy (1757–86), a poor baker’s boy with a considerable poetic talent and an acerbic style. His Poetic Spectator (Poëtische spectator, 1784) introduced a new kind of book review, in which some works are utterly demolished. The book that brought him to the attention of the general public, however, was his collection of Patriotic Songs (Vaderlandsche Gezangen), written under the pseudonym Zelandus and published in 1783, at the height of the Fourth English War. It sold out within a few days.

Fatherland, my earthly heaven!

thee I honour in my song!

Freedom’s throne and heroes’ cradle,

grown in strife to manhood strong:

Fatherland, thou guard’st this ever

since oppression fled thy soil! [. . .]

Yet, my Fatherland — how doleful!

What ill fate besets thee now!

Maddened Britons, bastard offspring,

rage at thee with furrow’d brow!

Bellamy died from a neglected cold in 1786, at the age of 28, and was thus spared seeing the Patriots defeated in 1787.

One writer who did witness the defeat was Gerrit Paape (1752–1803). Like Bellamy, Paape came from a humble background, initially earning his living as a painter in a factory making delftware, but his passion was literature. Also like Bellamy, he was first recognized as a talented author by Love of Art Spares No Effort, the literary society based in The Hague, where he became a “fosterling” in 1775. And again like Bellamy, he felt enormous anger at the political situation, joined the Patriots, and expressed his indignation through literature. In 1787 he became one of many Patriots to leave the Netherlands for France. Wolff and Deken had already moved to Bourgogne. Paape settled in Dunkirk, where he attempted to make a living by writing and bombarded the republic with anti-Orangist works and an autobiography, My Cheerful Philosophy during My Exile (Mijne vrolijke wijsgeerte in mijne ballingschap, 1792).

In 1788, under the pseudonym Dr. Schasz, Paape published an imaginary travel story, Journey Through Monkeyland (Reize door het Aapenland), a wildly comic novel in the style of Laurence Sterne, in which he denounced the absurdity of contemporary political scheming, the specious arguments, the many revolutionary committees and commissions, and above all the irrationality of political decision-making. In Monkeyland, two parties are fighting over the question of how to transform monkeys into human beings. One side advocates a gradual process of spiritual and ethical development, but the more radical party wants to promote monkeys to human status at a single stroke by hacking off each monkey’s tail. The tail dispute provokes uproar throughout the country, and all kinds of rumors begin to spread. One interpretation doing the rounds is that chopping off a monkey’s tail really means amputating the male sexual organ. This leads to panic among female monkeys, who form their own committee advocating the introduction of double male sexual organs. Both sides then use every means available to win over the female monkeys.

Paape continued to write wonderful satirical prose for many years. 1797 saw the publication of Merry Character Sketches (Vrolijke Caracterschetsen), in which the political culture of the Dutch Revolution is mercilessly ridiculed. In the sequel, The Grumbler and the Philanthropist (De Knorrepot en de Menschenvriend, 1797), two bosom friends, Jasper and Julfert, set out on a walking tour of the Batavian Republic, which gives the author a chance to draw attention to all kinds of abuses. Even as a translator, Paape found ways to support the Patriot cause. His version of Andrew Becket’s (anonymously published) A Trip to Holland, Containing Sketches of Characters: Together with Cursory Observations on the Manners and Customs of the Dutch (1786), which appeared in 1796 under the title Vrolijke reis van een Engelschman door Holland, was more an adaptation than a translation, since he had no compunction at all about replacing references to the stadtholder and his wife with republican anecdotes.

Meanwhile poetry societies continued to hold competitions on political subjects like “The Free Seas” (1781), “The War” (1782), or “George Washington” (1784). Entries for this last competition were supposed to describe Washington not only as a victor but as someone who fought for his country rather than for personal gain. The two winning entries were bound in purple velvet and sent to George Washington in 1789; he responded with a amiable letter of thanks.

After the Batavian Republic was founded, many writers continued to comment on the new political situation in magazines. They included Johannes Kinker, Petrus de Wacker van Zon, and Pieter van Woensel (1747–1808). Van Woensel published an almanac called The Lantern (De Lantaarn, 1792–1801) under the Oriental pseudonym Mr. Aramuth, Chief Physician. The fake masthead “At Amsterdam, in the New Light” (no such printer or publisher existed) indicated to readers that the almanac would shed light into the darkness of a benighted Dutch society. In a spirit of satire, Van Woensel tackled subjects such as revolution, divorce, contraception, life in the tropics, and the question of whether the Netherlands were in fact suited to a democratic system. The Lantern was banned in 1800, presumably because the most recent issue included pieces critical of Napoleon Bonaparte. Van Woensel, who illustrated the almanac himself, added to the title page a dramatic drawing of an overturned lantern, as if the Enlightenment had been toppled once and for all.

— Translated by Liz Waters

 

42 Unless indicated otherwise, the verse translations in this chapter are by Francis R. Jones.

43 clarty: muddy, dirty (Northern English dialect).

44 a drunken sow: compare “as drunk as a sow” (sixteenth- to nineteenth-century idiom).

45 Translation F. J. Millard.