Footsteps of Fate Part 1

Footsteps of Fate.

by Louis Couperus.

INTRODUCTION.

_THE DUTCH SENSITIVISTS._

In the intellectual history of all countries we find the same phenomenon incessantly recurring. New writers, new artists, new composers arise in revolt against what has delighted their grandfathers and satisfied their fathers. These young men, pressed together at first, by external opposition, into a serried phalanx, gradually win their way, become themselves the delight and then the satisfaction of their contemporaries, and, falling apart as success is secured to them, come to seem lax, effete and obsolete to a new race of youths, who effect a fresh esthetic revolution. In small communities, these movements are often to be observed more precisely than in larger ones. But they are very tardily perceived by foreigners, the established authorities in art and literature retaining their exclusive place in dictionaries and handbooks long after the claim of their juniors to be observed with attention has been practically conceded at home.

For this reason, partly, and partly also because the mental life of Holland receives little attention in this country, no account has yet been taken of the revolution in Dutch taste which has occupied the last six or seven years. I believe that the present occasion is the first on which it has been brought to the notice of any English-speaking public.

There exists, however, in Holland, at this moment, a group of young writers, most of them between thirty-five and twenty-five years of age who exhibit a violent zeal for literature, pa.s.sing often into extravagance, who repudiate, sometimes with ferocity, the rather sleepy Dutch authors.h.i.+p of the last forty years, and who are held together, or crushed together, by the weight of antiquated taste and indifference to executive merit which they experience around them. Certain facts seem to be undeniable; first, that every young man of letters in Holland, whose work is really promising, has joined the camp; and secondly, that, with all the ferment and crudity inseparable from prose and verse composed in direct opposition to existing canons of taste, the poems and the stories of these young Dutchmen are often full of beauty and delicacy.

They have read much in their boyhood; they have imitated Rossetti and Keats; they have been fascinated by certain Frenchmen, by Flaubert, by Goncourt, particularly by Huysmans, who is a far-away kinsman of their own; they have studied the disquieting stories of Edgar Poe. But these exotic influences are pa.s.sing away, and those who know something of current Dutch _belles-lettres_ can realise best how imperatively a ploughing up of the phlegmatic tradition of Dutch thought was required before a new crop of imagination could spring up.

Rejecting the conventional aspects of contemporary Dutch literature, I will now attempt to give some sketch of the present situation as it appears to a foreign critic observing the field without prejudice. The latest novelist of great importance was Madame Gertrude Bosboom-Toussaint, who was born in 1821. After having written a long series of historical romances for nearly forty years, this intelligent woman and careful writer broke with her own a.s.sured public, and took up the discussion of psychological questions. She treated the problem of Socialism in _Raymond de Schrijnwerker_ and the status of woman in _Majoor Frans_. Madame Bosboom-Toussaint died in 1886, just too early to welcome the new school of writers, with whom she would probably have had more sympathy than any of her contemporaries. Her place in popular esteem was taken for a short time by Miss Opzomer (A.S.C. Wallis), whose long novels have been translated into English, _In dagen van strijd_ ("In Troubled Times") and _Vorstengunst_ ("Royal Favour"). She had genuine talent, but her style was heavy and tedious. After the new wind began to blow, although she was still young, she married, went to Hungary, and gave up writing novels.

Three authors of importance, each, by a curious coincidence, born in the year 1826, fill up the interval between the old and new generation.

These are Dekker, Busken-Huet, and Vosmaer. Edward Douwes Dekker, whose novel of _Max Havelaar_ dates from 1858, was a man of exceptional genius. Bred in the interior of Java, he observed the social conditions of life in the Dutch Indies as no one else had done, but his one great book remained a solitary one. He died in 1887 without having justified the very high hopes awakened by that extraordinary and revolutionary work. The career of Konrad Busken-Huet was very different. The princ.i.p.al literary critic of Holland in his generation, he aimed at being the Sainte Beuve of the Dutch, and in his early days, as the dreaded "Thrasybulus" of journalism, he did much to awaken thought. His volumes of criticism are extremely numerous, and exercised a wholesome influence during his own time. He died in Paris in April 1886. These two writers have had a strong effect on the prose style of the younger school of essayists and novelists. They lived long enough to observe the dawn of the new literature, and their relations with the latest writers were cordial if somewhat reserved.

What Douwes Dekker and Busken-Huet did in prose, was effected in poetry by Carel Vosmaer. This estimable man, who died in 1888, was well known throughout Europe as an art-critic and an authority on Rembrandt. In Holland he was pre-eminent as the soul of a literary newspaper, the _Nederlandsche Spectator_, which took an independent line in literary criticism, and affected to lead public taste in directions less provincial and old-fas.h.i.+oned than the rest of the Dutch press. Vosmaer wrote also several volumes of more or less fantastic poetry, a translation of Homer into alexandrines, and an antiquarian novel, _Amazone_,1881. But Vosmaer's position was, above all, that of a precursor. He, and he alone, saw that a new thing must be made in Dutch poetical literature. He, and he alone, was not satisfied with the stereotyped Batavian tradition. At the same time Vosmaer was not, it may be admitted, strong enough himself to found a new school; perhaps even, in his later days, the Olympian calm which he affected, and a certain elegant indolence which overcame him, may have made him unsympathetic to the ardent and the juvenile. At all events, this singular phenomenon has occurred. He who of all living Dutchmen was, ten or fifteen years ago, fretting under the poverty of thought and imagination in his fatherland and longing for the new era to arrive, is at this moment the one man of the last generation who is most exposed to that unseemly _ferocite des jeunes_ which is the ugliest feature of these esthetic revolutions. I have just been reading, with real pain, the violent attack on Vosmaer and his influence which has been published by that very clever young poet, Mr. Willem Kloos (_De Nieuwe Gids_, December 1890). All that cheers me is to know that the whirligig of time will not forget its revenges, and that, if Mr. Kloos only lives long enough, he will find somebody, now unborn, to call _him_ a "bloodless puppet."

Of one other representative of the transitional period, Marcellus Emants, I need say little. He wrote a poem, _Lilith_, and several short stories. Much was expected of him, but I know not what has been the result.

The inaugurator of the new school was Jacques Perk, a young poet of indubitable genius, who was influenced to some degree by Sh.e.l.ley, and by the _Florence_ of the Dutch Browning, Potgieter. He wrote in 1880 a _Mathilde_, for which he could find no publisher, presently died, and began to be famous on the posthumous issue of his poems, edited by Vosmaer and Kloos, in 1883.

The sonnets of Perk, like those of Bowles with us a hundred years ago, were the heralds of a whole new poetic literature. The resistance made to the young writers who now began to express themselves, and their experience that all the doors of periodical publication in Holland were closed to them, led to the foundation in 1885 of _De Nieuwe Gids_, a rival to the old Dutch quarterly, _De Gids_. In this new review, which has steadily maintained and improved its position, most of the princ.i.p.al productions of the new school have appeared. The first three numbers contained _De Kleine Johannes_ (Little Johnny), of Dr. Frederik van Eeden, the first considerable prose-work of the younger generation.

This is a charming romance, fantastic and refined, half symbolical, half realistic, which deserves to be known to English readers. It has been highly appreciated in Holland. To this followed two powerful books by L.

van Deyssel, _Een Liefde_ ("A Love") and _De Kleine Republiek_ ("The Little Republic"). Van Deyssel has written with great force, but he has. .h.i.therto been the _enfant terrible_ of the school, the one who has claimed with most insolence to say precisely what has occurred to him to say. He has been influenced, more than the rest, by the latest French literature.

While speaking of the new school, it is difficult to restrain from mentioning others of those whose work in _De Nieuwe Gids_ and elsewhere has raised hopes of high performance in the future. Jacques van Looy, a painter by profession, has published, among other things, an exquisitely finished volume of _Proza_ (Prose Essays). Frans Netscher, who deliberately marches in step with the French realists, is the George Moore of Holland; he has published a variety of small sketches and one or two novels. Ary Prins, under the pseudonym of Coopland, has written some very good studies of life. Among the poets are Willem Kloos Albert Verwey, and Herman Gorter, each of whom deserves a far more careful critical consideration than can here be given to him.

Willem Kloos, indeed, may be considered as the leader of the school since the death of Perk. It was to Kloos that, in the period from 1880 to 1885, each of the new writers went in secret for encouragement, criticism and sympathy. He appears to be a man of very remarkable character. Violent and pa.s.sionate in his public utterances, he is adored by his own colleagues and disciples, and one of the most gifted of them has told me that "Kloos has never made a serious mistake in his estimate of the force of a man or of a book." His writings, however, are very few, and his tone in controversy is acrid and uncompromising, as I have already indicated. He remains the least known and the least liked, though the most powerful, of the band. The member of the new generation whose verse and prose alike have won most acceptance is, certainly, Frederik van Eeden. His cycle of lyrical verse, _Ellen_, 1891, is doubtless the most exquisite product of recent Dutch literature.

For the peculiar quality which unites in one movement the varied elements of the school which I have attempted thus briefly to describe, the name Sensitivism has been invented by one of themselves, by Van Deyssel. It is a development of impressionism, grafted upon naturalism, as a frail and exotic bud may be set in the rough basis of a thorn. It preserves the delicacy of sensation of the one and strengthens it by the exact.i.tude and conscientiousness of the other, yet without giving way to the vagaries of impressionism or to the brutality of mere realism. It selects and refines, it re-embraces fancy, that maiden so rudely turned out of house and home by the naturalists; it aims, in fact, at retaining the best, and nothing but the best, of the experiments of the French during the last quarter of a century.

Van Deyssel greets _L'Argent_ with elaborate courtesy, with the respect due to a fallen divinity. He calls his friends in Holland to attend the gorgeous funeral of naturalism, which is dead; but urges them not to sacrifice their own living Sensitivism to the imitation of what is absolutely a matter of past history. It will be seen that Dutch Sensitivism is not by _any_ means unlike French Symbolism, and we might expect prose like Mallarme's and verse like Moreas'! As a matter of fact, however, the Dutch seem, in their general att.i.tude of reserve, to leave their mother-tongue una.s.sailed, and to be as intelligible as their inspiration allows them to be.

To one of these writers, however, and to one of the youngest, it is time that I should turn. The first member of the new Dutch school to be presented, in the following pages, to English readers, is Louis Marie Anne Couperus. Of him, as the author of this book, I must give a fuller biography, although he is still too young to occupy much s.p.a.ce by the record of his achievements. Louis Couperus was born on the 10th of June, 1863, at the Hague, where he spent the first ten years of his life. He was then taken in company with his family to Java, and resided five years in Batavia. Returning to the Hague, where he completed his education, he began to make teaching his profession, but gradually drifted into devoting himself entirely to literature. He published a little volume of verses in 1884, and another, of more importance, called _Orchideen_ (Orchids), in 1887, Oriental and luscious. But he has succeeded, as every one allows, much better in prose. His long novel of modern life in the Hague, called _Eline Vere_, which ran through _De Gids_, and was published in book form in 1889, is an admirable performance. Of _Noodlot_ (literally to be translated "Fate" or "Destiny"), 1890, our readers will now judge for themselves. Mr.

Couperus is at present engaged, as he tells me, on a novel called _Extaze_ ("Ecstasy"). Such is the brief chronicle of a writer from whom much is expected by the best critics of his own country.

EDMUND GOSSE.

FOOTSTEPS OF FATE

I

His hands in his pockets, and the collar of his fur coat turned up, Frank was making his way one evening, through squalls of snow, along the deserted length of Adelaide Road. As he approached the villa where he lived--White-Rose Cottage, it was called--sunk, buried, wrapped in white snow, like a nest in cotton wool, he was aware of some one coming to meet him from Primrose Hill. He looked steadily in the man's face, since he evidently intended to address him, doubting as to what his purpose might be this lonely, snowy night, and he was greatly surprised when he heard said in Dutch:

"Pardon the intrusion. Are you not Mr. Westhove?"

"Yes," replied Frank Westhove. "Who are you? What do you want?"

"I am Robert van Maeren. You may perhaps remember--"

"What! you, Bertie?" cried Frank. "How came you here in London?"

And in his amazement there rose up before him, through the driving snow, a vision of his youth; a pleasing picture of boyish friends.h.i.+p, of something young and warm.

"Not altogether by chance," said the other, whose voice had taken a somewhat more confident tone at the sound of the familiar "Bertie." "I knew that you lived here, and I have been to your door three times; but you had not come in. Your maid said that you were expected at home this evening, so I made so bold as to wait here for you." And again his voice lost its firmness and a.s.sumed the imploring accent of a beggar.

"Is your business so urgent, then?" asked Frank in surprise.

"Yes. I want--perhaps you could help me. I know no one here--"

"Where are you living?"

"Nowhere. I only arrived here early this morning, and I have--I have no money."

He was s.h.i.+vering from standing in the cold during this short dialogue, and seemed to shrink into himself, almost fawning, like a cowed dog.

"Come in with me," said Frank, greatly astonished, but full of sympathy and of the affectionate reminiscences of his boyhood. "Come and spend the night with me."

"Oh, gladly!" was the reply, eager and tremulous, as if he feared that the heaven-inspired words might be retracted.

They went together a few steps further; then Frank took a key out of his pocket, the key of White-Rose Cottage. He opened the door; a hexagonal Moorish lantern was burning low, and shed a soft light in the hall.

"Go in," said Frank; And he locked the door and bolted it behind them.

It was half-past twelve.

The maid had not yet gone to bed.

"That gentleman called here a little while ago, two or three times," she murmured; with a look of suspicion at Bertie, "And I have seen him hanging about all the evening, as if he was on the watch. I was frightened, do you know; it is so lonely in these parts."

Frank shook his head rea.s.suringly.

"Make the fire up as quickly as possible, Annie. Is your husband still up?"

"The fire, sir?"

"Yes. Bertie, will you have something to eat?"