Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/24

4 a bourgeois or middle-class product, seems to me in advance of the poetry of any country with which this volume deals. For this simplicity and directness is not characteristic of Renaissance lyric poetry in Italy or the countries which caught their inspiration from Italy. Even in the case of Shakespeare's sonnets it is notoriously difficult to say how far the feeling is sincere, how far conventional. In English poetry one might say that lyrical poetry, as we have come to understand the phrase since Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley wrote, begins with Lycidas—in the personal digressions—and Milton's sonnets. But poetry of this self-revealing outspoken character abounds in the literature with which this chapter deals, and although of course in form and style Dutch poetry is not unaffected by the conventions of the century, yet only one poet, Hooft, really mastered the courtly style, and caught the tone of the Italian Petrarchians and the Pléiade. Vondel and Brederoo and Huyghens are most effective when most natural and direct, not least so when they express themselves in dialect. The natural runs easily into the commonplace, and of the commonplace there is not a little in Dutch poetry. Its apostle is Jacob Cats; yet even in Cats there is a vein of racy narrative, while in ardour and elevation there are few lyrical poets superior to Vondel.

The space at our disposal to deal even with this greatest period in Dutch literature is so limited that it is impossible to say more than a word concerning the earlier poetry. Mediæval literature is represented in the Low Countries by all