Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/105

93 LITERATURE.] version of the Bible, translated direct from the original. At his death only Genesis was found completely revised ; but in Ifi 19 the synod of Dorfc placed the unfinished work in the hands of four divines, who completed it. Joorn- In Dirck Volckertsen Coornhert (1522-1590) Holland iert - for the first time produced a writer at once eager to compose in his native tongue and to employ the weapons of human ism. Coornhert was a typical burgher of North Holland, equally interested in the progress of national emancipation and in the development of national literature. He was a native of Amsterdam, but he did not take part in the labours of the old chamber of the Eglantine, but quite early in life proceeded to Haarlem, of which place he remained a citizen until his death. He practised the art of etching, and spent all his spare time in the pursuit of classical learning. He was nearly forty years of age before he made any practical use of his attainments. In 1561 he printed his translation of the De Officiis of Cicero, and in 1562 of the De Beneficiis of Seneca. In these volumes he opposed with no less zeal than Marnix had done the bastard forms still employed in prose by the rhetoricians of Flanders and Brabant. Daring the next decade he occupied himself chiefly with plays and poems, conceived and expressed with far less freedom than his prose, and more in the approved conventional fashion of the rhetoricians ; he collected his poems in 1575. The next ten years he occupied in polemi cal writing, from the evangelical point of view, against the Calvinists. In 1585 he translated Boetius, and then gave his full attention to his original masterpiece, the Zedekunst, or Art of Ethics, a philosophical treatise in prose, in which he studied to adapt the Dutch tongue to the grace and simplicity of Montaigne s French. His humanism unites the Bible, Plutarch, and Marcus Aurelius in one grand system of ethics, and is expressed in a style remarkable for bright ness ami purity. He died in 1590 ; his works, in three . enormous folio volumes, were first collected in 1630. mster- Towards the end of the period of transition, Amsterdam im the^ became the centre of all literary enterprise in Holland. In 1585 two of the most important chambers of rhetoric in Flanders, the &quot; White Lavender &quot; and the &quot; Fig-Tree,&quot; took flight from the south, and settled themselves in Amsterdam by the side of the &quot; Eglantine.&quot; The last-named institution had already observed the new tendency of the age, and was prepared to encourage intellectual reform of every kind, and its influence spread through Holland and Zealand, In Flanders, meanwhile, crushed under the yoke of Parma, literature and native thought absolutely expired. From this time forward, and until the emancipation of the southern provinces, the domain of our inquiry is confined to the district north of the Scheldt. In the chamber of the Eglantine at Amsterdam two men took a very prominent place, more by their intelligence and modern spirit than by their original genius. Hendrick ueghel. Laurenssen Spieghel (1549-1612) was a humanist of a type more advanced and less polemical than Coornhert. He wrote a charming poem in praise of dancing ; but his chief contributions to literature were his Ttvespraeck van de Nedtrduytsche Letterkunst, a philological exhortation, in the manner of Joachim du Bellay s famous tract, urging the Dutch nation to purify and enrich its tongue at the fountains of antiquity, and a didactic epic, entitled Hertspieghd, which has been greatly praised, but which is now much more antiquated in style and more difficult to enjoy than Coornhert s prose of a similar tendency. That Spieghel was a Catholic prevented him perhaps from exer cising as much public influence as he exercised privately among his younger friends. The same may be said of the man who, in 1614, first collected SpieghePs writings, and ^emer DU Wished them in a volume with his own verses. Roemer isscher. Pieterssen Visscher (1545-1620) proceeded a step further ntre of tters. 93 than Spieghel in the cultivation of polite letters. He was deeply tinged with a spirit of classical learning that was much more genuine and nearer to the true antique than any that had previously been known in Holland. His own disciples called him the Dutch Martial, but he was at best little more than an amateur in poetry, although an amateur whose function it was to perceive and encourage the genius of professional writers. Roemer Visscher stands at the threshold of the new Renaissance literature, himself practis ing the faded arts of the rhetoricians, but pointing by his counsel and his conversation to the naturalism of the great period. It was in the salon at Amsterdam which the beautiful The Re- daughters of Roemer Visscher formed around their father nais.sanc and themselves that the new school began to take form. The republic of the United Provinces, with Amsterdam at its head, had suddenly risen to the first rank among the nations of Europe, and it was under the influence of so much new emotion and brilliant ambition that the country no less suddenly asserted itself in n great school of painting and poetry. The intellect of the whole Low Countries was concentrated in Holland and Zealand, while the six great universities, Leyden, Groningen, Utrecht, Amster dam, Harderwijk, and Franeker, were enriched by a flock of learned exiles from Flanders and Brabant. It had occurred, however, to Roemer Visscher only that the path of literary honour lay, not along the utilitarian road cut out by Maerlant and Boendale, but in the study of beauty and antiquity. In this he was curiously aided by the school of ripe and enthusiastic scholars who began to flourish at Leyden, such as Drusius, Vossius, and Hugo Grotius, who themselves wrote little in Dutch, but who chastened the style of the rising generation by insisting on a pure and liberal Latinity. Out of that generation arose the greatest names in the literature of Holland, Vondel, Hooft, Cats, Huygens, in whose hands the language, so long left barbarous and neglected, took at once its highest finish and melody. By the side of this serious and aesthetic growth there is to be noticed a quickening of the broad and farcical humour which had been characteristic of the Dutch nation from its commencement. For fifty years, and these the most glorious in the annals of Holland, these two streams of influence, one towards beauty and melody, the other towards lively comedy, ran side by side, often in the same channel, and producing a rich harvest of great works. It was in the house of the daughters of Roemer Visscher that the tragedies of Vondel and the comedies of Brederoo, the farces of Coster and the odes of Huygens, alike found their first admirers and their best critics. Of the famous daughters of Roemer, two cultivated Roemer literature with marked success. Anna (1584-1651) was Vis- ^ the author of a descriptive and didactic poem, De Roemster sc V s van den Aemstel (The Glory of the Aemstel), and of various ttTS miscellaneous writings; Tesselschade (1594-1649) wrote some lyrics which still place her at the head of the female poets of Holland, and she translated the great poem of Tasso. They were women of universal accomplishment, graceful manners, and singular beauty; and their company attracted to the house of Roemer Visscher all the most gifted youths of the time, several of whom were suitors, but in vain, for the hand of Anna or of Tesselschade, Of this Amsterdam school, the first to emerge into public Hooft. notice wns Pieter Cornelissen Hooft (1581-1647). He belonged to a patrician family, and became a member at a very early age of the chamber of the Eglantine. When he was only eighteen he produced, before this body, his tragedy of Achilles and Polyxena (1598), which displayed a pre cocious ease in the use of rhetorical artifices of style. Hi* intellectual character, however, was formed by a journev into Italy which he took in 1598, where he steeped himself