Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/12

viii satire on the Dutch bourgeois, in Drystubble, is final. The coffee-broker is reduced to his ultimate nothingness, in pure humour. It is the reduction of the prosperous business man in America and England to-day, just the same, essentially the same: and it is a death-stroke.

Similarly, the Java part of the book is a satire on colonial administration, and on government altogether. It is quite direct and straightforward satire, so it is wholesome. Multatuli never quite falls down the fathomless well of his own revulsion, as Dostoevsky did, to become a lily-mouthed missionary rumbling with ventral howls of derision and dementia. At his worst, Multatuli is irritatingly sentimental, harping on pity when he is inspired by hate. Maybe he deceives himself. But never for long.

His sympathy with the Javanese is also genuine enough; there was a man in him whose bowels of compassion were moved. Whereas a great nervous genius like Dostoevsky never felt a moment of real physical sympathy in his life. But with Multatuli, the sympathy for the Javanese is rather an excuse for hating the Dutch authorities still further. It is the sympathy of a man preoccupied with other feelings.

We see this in the famous idyll of Saïdyah and Adinda, once the most beloved and most quoted part of the book. We see how bored the author to write it, after the first few pages. He us it bored him. It bored him to write sympathetically. He was by nature a satirical humourist, and it was far more exciting for him to be attacking the Dutch officials than sympathizing with the Javanese.

This is again obvious in his partiality for the old Native Prince the Regent. It is obvious that all the actual oppression of the poor Javanese came from the Javanese themselves, the native prince. It isn’t the Dutch officials who steal Saidyah’s buffalo: it is the princely Javanese. The oppression has been going on, Havelaar himself says it, since the beginning of time. Not since the coming of the Dutch. Indeed, it is the oriental idea that the prince shall