Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/78

58 in his own genius and that of his people, but perhaps also in another circumstance which explains a good deal in the history of Dutch drama and poetry. Dutch literature is from the fourteenth century onward a bourgeois literature. The Dutch poets and dramatists never enjoyed the courtly audiences whose influence did so much for the English drama in the sixteenth century, and helped the French in the seventeenth century to throw off the barbarism of Hardy's plays and the pedantry of Garnier's. It is among the highest and lowest classes of society that art is able to develop least impeded by the restrictions of practical morality. That freedom Dutch literature obtained in farce and popular song, never completely in higher and more serious literature, which accordingly retained to the end something of the bourgeois and didactic tone it acquired with Maerlant.

The servants and peasants in Brederoo's comedies are drawn to the life. Coarse humour, racy description, proverbial wisdom, jest, and sarcasm flow from their lips in a rich stream of "Amsterdamsch" dialect. The three farces are also little masterpieces—the traditional themes of the "Sotternien" handled with the verve and range of expression of a man of genius. A peasant is tricked into selling his own cow by the thief who has "lifted" it the night before, and that for the sole benefit of the thief. The miller artfully cuckolds himself. The morality is on a level with that of the Miller's and the Reeve's tale, but so is the