Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/104

92 92 HOLLAND [LITERATURE. encouraged the composition of songs, but with very little success ; they produced no lyrical genius more considerable than Matthijs de Casteleyn (1488-1550), the founder of the Flemish chamber of &quot; Pax Vobiscum &quot; at Oudenarde, a personage whose influence as a fashioner of language would have been more healthy if his astounding metrical feats and harlequin tours-de-force had not been performed in a dialect debased with all the worst bastard phrases of the Burgundian period. In the middlw of the 16th century a group of rhetoricians in Brabant and Flanders attempted to put a little new life into the stereotyped forms of the preceding age by intro ducing in original composition the new-found branches of Latin and Greek poetry. The leader of these men was Hou- Jean Baptista Houwaert (1533-1599), a personage of con- waert. siderable political influence in his generation. He con sidered himself a devout disciple of Matthijs de Casteleyn, but his great characteristic was his unbounded love of classical and mythological fancy. His didactic poems are composed in a wonderfully rococo style, and swarm with misplaced Latinities. In his bastard Burgundian tongue he boasted of having &quot; poetelijck geinventeert ende rlieto- rijckelijck ghecomponeert &quot; for the Brussels chamber such dramas as ^Eneas and Dido, Mars and Venus, Narcissus and Echo, or Leander and Hero. But of all his writings Pegasides Pleyn, or the Palace of Maidens, is the most remarkable ; this is a didactic poem in sixteen books, dedicated to a discussion of the variety of earthly love. Houwaert s contemporaries nicknamed him &quot; the Homer of Brabant ;&quot; later criticism has preferred to see in him an important link in that chain of homely didactic Dutch which ends in Cats. His writings are composed in a Burgundian so base that they hardly belong to Flemish literature at all. Into the s.une miserable dialect Cornelis van Ghistele of Antwerp translated, between 1555 and 1583, pirts of Terence, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, while the painter Karel van Mander (1547-1609) put a French version of the Iliad and of the Eclogues of Virgil into an equally ill fitting Flemish dress. In no country of Europe did the humanism of the 16th century at first affect the national literature so slightly or to so little purpose. Psalms The stir and revival of intellectual life that arrived with an(i the Reformation fo ind its first expression in the composi- hymns. ^ Qn o f p sa i ms r |&quot;i ie efu -li e st printed collection appeared at Antwerp in 1540, under the title of Souter-Liedekenx, and was dedicated to a Dutch nobleman, Willem van Zuylen van Nieuvelt, by whose name it is usually known. This collection, however, was made before the Reformation in Holland really set in. For the Prote=tant congregations Jan Utenhove printed a volume of Psalms in London in 1566 ; Lucas de Heere, and immediately after him, with much greater success, Petrus Datheen (1531-1590), trans lated the hymns of Clement Marot. For printing this last volume, in 1567, Herman Schinkel of Delft was burned to deith in 1568. Datheen was not a rhetorician, but a person of humble origin, who wrote in the vulgar tongue, and his hymns spread far and wide among the psople. Until 1773 they were in constant use in the state church of Holland. But the great events of the period of reforma tion are not marked by psalms only in Dutch literature. Two collections of hymn? and lyrical pieces, printed in 1562 and 1569, perpetuate the fervour and despair of the martyrs of the Mennonite Church. Similar utterances of the persecuted Protestants were published at Haarlem and Leeuwarden, at Ghent and at Bruges. Very different in Battle- tone were the battle-songs of liberty and triumph sung a songs, generation later by the victorious Reformers or &quot; Geuzen.&quot; The famous song-book of 1588, the Geusen Lieden Boecxken, was full of ardent and heroic sentiment, expressed often in marvellously brilliant phrases. In this collection appeared for the first time such classical snatches of Dutch song as the Ballad of Heiligerlee, the Ballad of Egmond and Horn, and the song of the Storm of Leyden. The political ballads, with their ridicule of the Spanish leaders, form a section of the Boecxken which has proved of inestimable value to historians. All these lyrics, however, whether of victory or of martyrdom, are still very rough in form and language. The first writer who used the Dutch tongue with grace Anna and precision of style was a woman and a professed Bi J D s, opponent of Lutheranism and reformed thought. Modern Dutch literature practically begins with Anna Bijns. Against the crowd of rhetoricians and psalm-makers of the early part of the 16th csntury she stands out in relief as the one poet of real genius. The language, oscillating before her time between French and German, formless, corrupt, and invertebrate, took shape and comeliness, which none of the male pedants could give it, from the impas sioned hands of a woman. Anna Bijns, who is believed to have been born at Antwerp in 1494, was a schoolmistress at that city in her middle life, and in old age she still &quot;instructed youth in the Catholic religion.&quot; Hendrik Peppinck, a Franciscan, who edited her third volume of poems when she was an old woman in 1567, speaks of her as &quot; a maiden small of descent, but great of understanding, and godly of life.&quot; Her first known volume bears the date 1528, and displays her as already deeply versed in the mysteries of religion. We gather from all this that she was a lay nun, and she certainly occupied a position of great honour and influence at Antwerp. She was named &quot; the Sappho of Brabant &quot; and the &quot;Princess of all Rhetori cians.&quot; She bent the powerful weapon of her verse against the faith and character of Luther. In her volume of 1528 the Lutherans are scarcely mentioned; in that of 1540 every page is occupied with invectives against them ; while the third volume of 1567 is the voice of one from whom her age has passed. All the poems of Anna Bijns which we possess are called refereinen or refrains. Her mastery over verse-form was extremely remarkable, and these refrains are really modified chants-royal. The writings of Anna Bijns offer many points of interest to the philologist, In her the period of Middle Dutch closes, and the modern Dutch begins. In a few grammatical peculiarities such as the formation of the genitive by some verbs which now govern the accusative, and the use of ghe before the infinitive her language still belongs to Middle Dutch ; but these exceptions are rare, and she really initiated that modern speech which Filips van Maruix adopted and made classical in the next generation. In Filips van Marnix, lord of St Aldegonde (1538- Marm&amp;gt; 1598), a much greater personage came forward in the ranks of liberty and reform. He began life as a disciple of Calvin and Beza in the schools of Geneva. It was as a defender of the Dutch iconoclasts that he first appeared in print, with his tract on The Images throivn doivn in H-ofland in August 1566. He soon became one of the leading spirits in the war of Dutch independence, the inti mate friend of the prince of Orange, and the author of the glorious Willtelmudied. It was in the autumn of 1568 that Marnix composed this, the national hymn of Dutch liberty and Protestantism. In 1509 he completed a no less important and celebrated prose work, the Ittencorf or Beehive of the Romish Church. In this satire he was inspired in a great measure by Rabelais, of whom he was an intelligent disciple. It is written in prose that may be said to mark an epoch in the language and literature of Holland. Overwhelmed with the press of public business, Marnix wrote little more until in 1580 he published his Psalms of David newly translated out of the Helreiv Tongue. He occupied the last years of his life in preparing a Dutch