Page:Religious Thought in Holland during the Nineteenth Century James Hutton Mackay.djvu/19

 8 THE REVOLUTION

of the Dutch is, I think, an intense national consciousness. Their writers take a kind of artistic delight in portraying their spiritual physiognomy. The subject seems to have an irresistible fasdnation for them, and neither poet, novelist, nor divine can keep from it. We Dutch are this, and that, and not something else, is an ever-recurring formula in Dutch literature. The idea of a popular or collective consciousness which is much in vogue at the present day among a school of French psychologists—an idea that the French editor of the younger Chantepie de la Saussaye’s llzlrlory of Religions describes as “obscure, ill-deﬁned, but exceedingly fertile ”——is one on which Dutch literature might throw some light. The Dutch are a realistic people, and paint the shadows as well as the lights in their national character, and the former. I have sometimes th0ught, with even more gusto and with a curious subtlety. It is an article of a Dutchman’s creed that this character can only be appreciated by a genuine Dutchman. La Saussaye belonged to a. family that had been Settled for several generations in Holland, and