Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/106

94 94 HOLLAND [LITEEATURE. for three years in the best Italian literature, both prose and verse, He returned to Holland in 1601, with his head full of schemes for the creation of a Dutch school of belles lettres. In 1G05 he produced his pastoral drama of Granida, in which he proved himself a pupil of Guarini. During the remainder of his life he dedicated himself chiefly to history and tragedy. In the latter field he produced Baeto and Geraad van Velsen ; in history he published in 1G26 his Life of Henry the Great, while from 1628 to 1G42 he was engaged upon his master- work, the History of Holland. Hooft desired to be a severe purist in style, and to a great extent he succeeded, but, like most of the writers of his age, he permitted himself too many Latinisms. In his poetry, especially in the lyrical and pastoral verse of his youth, he is full of Italian reminiscences both of style and matter ; in his noble prose work he has set himself to be a disciple of Tacitus. Mr Motley has spoken of Hooft as one of the greatest historians, not merely of Holland, but of Europe. His influence in purifying the language of his country, and in enlarging its sphere of experience, can hardly be overrated. Bfrederoo. Very different from the long and prosperous career of Hooft was the brief, painful life of the greatest comic dramatist that Holland has produced. Gerbrand Adriaanssen Lrederoo (1585-1618) was the son of an Amsterdam shoe maker. He knew no Latin ; he had no taste for humanism ; he was a simple growth of the rich humour of the people. His life was embittered by a hopeless love for Tesselschade, to whom he dedicated his dramas, and whose beauty he celebrated in a whole cycle of love songs. His ideas on the subject of drama were at first a mere development of the mediaeval &quot; Abelespelen.&quot; He commenced by dramatiz ing the romance of Roderick and Alphonsus, in 1611, and Griane in 1GJ2, but in the latter year he struck out a new and more characteristic path in his Farce of the Cow. From this time until his death he continued to pour out comedies, farces, and romantic dramas, in all of which he displayed a coarse, rough genius not unlike that of Ben Jonson, whose immediate contemporary he was. His last and best piece was Jerolimo, the Spanish Brabanter, a satire upon the exiles from the south who filled the halls of the Amsterdam chambers of rhetoric with their pompous speeches and pre posterous Burgundian phraseology. Brederoo was closely allied in genius to the dramatists of the Shakespearian age, but he founded no school, and stands almost as a solitary figure in the literature of Holland. Coster. The only individual at all clearly connected with Brederoo in talent was Dr Samuel Coster, whose dates of birth and death are unknown. He is chiefly remembered for having been the first to take advantage of the growing dissension in the body of the old chamber of the Eglantine to form a new institution. In 1G17 Coster founded what he called the &quot; First Dutch Academy.&quot; This was in fact a theatre, where, for the first time, dramas could be publicly acted under the patronage of no chamber of rhetoric. Coster himself had come before the world in 1612 with his farce of Teuivis the Boor, and lie continued this order of composi tion in direct emulation of Brederc&quot;&amp;gt;o, but with less talent. In 1615 he began a series of &quot; blood-and-thunder&quot; tragedies with his horrible Itys, and he continued this coarse style of tragic writing for several years. He survived at least until after 1648 as a supreme authority in Amsterdam upon all dramatic matters. Vondel. The greatest of all Dutch writers, Joost van dcr Yondel (1587-1679), was born at Cologne on the 17th of November 1587. In 1612 he brought out his first work, Het Pascha, a tragedy or tragi-comedy on the exodus of the children of Israel, written, like all his succeeding dramas, on the recog nized Dutch plan, in alexandrines, in five acts, and with choral interludes between the acts. There is comparatively little promise in Het Fascha. It was much inferior drama tically to the plays just being produced by Brederoo, and metrically to the clear and eloquent tragedies and pastorals of Hooft ; but it secured the young poet a position inferior only to theirs. Yet for a number of years he made no attempt to emphasize the impression he had produced on the public, but contented himself during the years that are the most fertile in a poet s life with translating and imitat ing portions of Du Bartas s popular epic. The short and brilliant life of Brederoo, his immediate contemporary and greatest rival, burned itself out in a succession of dramatic victories, and it was not until two years after the death of that great poet that Vondel appeared before the public with a second tragedy, the Jerusalem laid Desolate. Five years later, in 1625, he published what seemed an innocent study from the antique, his tragedy of Palamedes, or Murdered Innocence. All Amsterdam discovered, with smothered delight, that under the name of the hero was thinly con cealed the figure of Barneveldt, whose execution in 1618 had been a triumph of the hated Calvinists. Thus, at the age of forty-one, the obscure Vondel became in a week the most famous writer in Holland. For the next twelve years, and till the accession of Prince Frederick Hendrick, Vondel had to maintain a hand-to-hand combat with the &quot; Saints of Dort.&quot; This was the period of his most resolute and stinging satires ; Cats took up the cudgels on behalf of the counter-Remonstrants, and there raged a war of pamphlets in verse. A purely fortuitous circumstance led to the next great triumph in Voudel s slowly developing career. The Dutch Academy, founded in 1617 almost wholly as a dramatic guild, had become so inadequately provided with stage accommodation that in 1638, having coalesced with the two chambers of the &quot; Eglantine &quot; and the &quot; White Lavender,&quot; it ventured on the erection of a large public theatre, the first in Amsterdam. Vondel, as the greatest poet of the day, was invited to write a piece for the first night ; on the 3d of January 1638 the theatre was opened with the performance of a new tragedy out of early Dutch history, the famous Gysbreght van Aemstel. The next ten years were rich in dramatic work from Vondel s hand ; he supplied the theatre with heroic Scriptural pieces, of which the general reader will obtain the best idea if we point to the Athalie of Racine. In 1654, having already attained an age at which poetical production is usually discontinued by the most energetic of poets, lie brought out the most exalted and sublime of all his works, the tragedy of Lucifer. Very late in life, through no fault of his own, financial ruin fell on the aged poet, and from 1658 to 1668 that is, from his seventieth to his eightieth year this venerable and illustrious person, the main literary glory of Holland through her whole history, was forced to earn his bread as a common clerk in a bank, miserably paid, and accused of wasting his masters time by the writing of verses. The city released him at last from this wretched bondage by a pension, and the wonderful old man went on writing odes and tragedies almost to his ninetieth year. He died at last in 1679, of no disease, having outlived all his contempo raries and almost all his friends, but calm, sane, and good- humoured to the last, serenely conscious of the legacy he left to a not too grateful country. Vondel is the typical example of Dutch intelligence and imagination at their highest development. Not merely is he to Holland all that Camoens is to Portugal and Michiewicz to Poland, but he stands on a level with these men in the positive value of his writings. Lyrical art was represented on its more spontaneous side Startei by the songs and ballads of Jan Janssen Starter (b. 1594), an Englishman by birth, who was brought to Amsterdam in his thirteenth year. Very early in life he was made a member of the &quot; Eglantine,&quot; and he worked beside