Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/10

vi lands government is also said to have done something in Java, for the poor Javanese, on the strength of Multatuli’s book. So that Max Havelaar became a back number.

So far so good. If by writing tract-novels you can move governments to improve matters, then write tract-novels by all means. If the government, however, plays up, and does its bit, then the tract-novel has served its purpose, and descends from the stage like a political orator who has made his point.

This is all in the course of nature. And because this is the course of nature, many educated Hollanders to-day become impatient when they hear educated Germans or English or Americans referring to Max Havelaar as “the one Dutch classic.” So Americans would feel if they heard Uncle Tom’s Cabin referred to as “the one American classic.” Uncle Tom is a back number in the English-speaking world, and Max Havelaar is, to the Dutch-speaking world, another.

If you ask a Hollander for a really good Dutch novelist he refers you to the man who wrote: Old People and Things That Pass (Louis Couperus)—or else to somebody you know nothing about.

As regards the Dutch somebody I know nothing about, I am speechless. But as regards Old People and Things That Pass, I still think Max Havelaar a far more real book. And since Old People etc. is quite a good contemporary novel, one needs to find out why Max Havelaar is better.

I have not tried to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin since I was a boy, and wept. I will try again, when I come across a copy. But I am afraid it will pall. I know I shan’t weep.

Then why doesn’t Max Havelaar pall? Why can one still read every word of it? As far as composition goes, it is the greatest mess possible. How the reviewers of to-day would tear it across and throw it in the w.p.b.! But the reviewers of to-day, like the clergy, feel that they must justify God to man, and when they find they can’t do it, when the book or the Almighty seems really unjustifiable, in the sight of common men, they apply the w.p.b.