Pere Bohours seriously asks if a German _can be a_ BEL ESPRIT? This
concise query was answered by Kramer, in a ponderous volume which bears
for title, _Vindiciæ nominis Germanici_. This mode of refutation does
not prove that the question was _then_ so ridiculous as it was
considered. The Germans of the present day, although greatly superior to
their ancestors, there are who opine are still distant from the _acmé_
of TASTE, which characterises the finished compositions of the French
and the English authors. Nations display _genius_ before they form
_taste_.
It was the mode with English and French writers to dishonour the Germans
with the epithets of heavy, dull, and phlegmatic compilers, without
taste, spirit, or genius; genuine descendants of the ancient Boeotians,
Crassoque sub æëre nati.
Many imaginative and many philosophical performances have lately shown
that this censure has now become unjust; and much more forcibly answers
the sarcastic question of Bohours than the thick quarto of Kramer.
Churchill finely says of genius that it is independent of situation,
And may hereafter even in HOLLAND rise.
Vondel, whom, as Marchand observes, the Dutch regard as their Æschylus,
Sophocles, and Euripides, had a strange defective taste; the poet
himself knew none of these originals, but he wrote on patriotic
subjects, the sure way to obtain popularity; many of his tragedies are
also drawn from the Scriptures; all badly chosen and unhappily executed.
In his _Deliverance of the Children of Israel_, one of his principal
characters is the _Divinity_! In his _Jerusalem Destroyed_ we are
disgusted with a tedious oration by the angel Gabriel, who proves
theologically, and his proofs extend through nine closely printed pages
in quarto, that this destruction has been predicted by the prophets;
and, in the _Lucifer_ of the same author, the subject is grossly
scandalised by this haughty spirit becoming stupidly in love with Eve,
and it is for her he causes the rebellion of the evil angels, and the
fall of our first parents. Poor Vondel kept a hosier's shop, which he
left to the care of his wife, while he indulged his poetical genius.
His stocking-shop failed, and his poems produced him more chagrin than
glory; for in Holland, even a patriotic poet, if a bankrupt, would, no
doubt, be accounted by his fellow-citizens as a madman. Vondel had no
other master but his genius, which, with his uncongenial situation,
occasioned all his errors.
Another Dutch poet is even less tolerable. Having written a long
rhapsody concerning Pyramus and Thisbe, he concludes it by a ridiculous
parallel between the death of these unfortunate victims of love, and the
passion of Jesus Christ. He says:--
Om t'concluderem van onsen begrypt,
Dees Historie moraliserende,
Is in den verstande wel accorderende,
By der Passie van Christus gebenedyt.
And upon this, after having turned Pyramus into the Son of God, and
Thisbe into the Christian soul, he proceeds with a number of
comparisons; the latter always more impertinent than the former.
I believe it is well known that the actors on the Dutch theatre are
generally tradesmen, who quit their aprons at the hour of public
representation. This was the fact when I was in Holland more than forty
years ago. Their comedies are offensive by the grossness of their
buffooneries. One of their comic incidents was a miller appearing in
distress for want of wind to turn his mill; he had recourse to the novel
scheme of placing his back against it, and by certain imitative sounds
behind the scenes the mill is soon set a-going. It is hard to rival such
a depravity of taste.
I saw two of their most celebrated tragedies. The one was Gysbert Van
Amstel, by Vondel; that is Gysbrecht of Amsterdam, a warrior, who in the
civil wars preserved this city by his heroism. It is a patriotic
historical play, and never fails to crowd the theatre towards Christmas,
when it is usually performed successively. One of the acts concludes
with the scene of a convent; the sound of warlike instruments is heard;
the abbey is stormed; the nuns and fathers are slaughtered; with the aid
of "blunderbuss and thunder," every Dutchman appears sensible of the
pathos of the poet. But it does not here conclude. After this terrible
slaughter, the conquerors and the vanquished remain for _ten minutes_ on
the stage, silent and motionless, in the attitudes in which the groups
happened to fall! and this pantomimic pathos commands loud bursts of
applause.[111]
The other was the Ahasuerus of Schubart, or the Fall of Haman. In the
triumphal entry the Batavian Mordecai was mounted on a genuine Flanders
mare, that, fortunately, quietly received _her_ applause with a lumpish
majesty resembling her rider. I have seen an English ass once introduced
on our stage which did not act with this decorum. Our late actors have
frequently been beasts;--a Dutch taste![112]
Some few specimens of the best Dutch poetry which we have had, yield no
evidence in favour of the national poetical taste. The Dutch poet Katz
has a poem on the "Games of Children," where all the games are
moralised; I suspect the taste of the poet as well as his subject is
puerile. When a nation has produced no works above mediocrity, with them
a certain mediocrity is excellence, and their masterpieces, with a
people who have made a greater progress in refinement, can never be
accepted as the works of a master.