In the Netherlands, as in Germany, the" Reformation, not the Renaissance, was the cause and the inspiration of a national literary language and a national literature. Upon the Dutch the Italian Renaissance made, indeed, but a slight impression. Its sensuousness could find no echo in the hearts or minds of freemen who had been robbed of their rights and forced to bow to absolutism and its denial of freedom of conscience. It took a sterner aim in life than that of the Renaissance to attract them; priestcraft and the "divine right" supporting it drove them to embrace the Reformation, political as well as religious. To be sure, the lighter touch, the Italianate influence, is not missing in the Dutch literature of the seventeenth century; nor, on the other hand, does it lack the coarseness that is characteristic of the period of the Synod of Dort, But at the core this literature is morally sound and serious. Soaring with the outward power and inward prosperity of the Dutch Republic, this literature declined with them, until, at the end of the eighteenth century, Dutch letters, like the country's naval power and its standing in Europe sank to a level of utter insignificance. Waterloo brought a revival of national feeling and pride. A new literary "school" rose, flourished, and was dethroned by still younger men. And these, having gradually wandered into an uninspired, uninspiring rut of mediocrity, were in their turn driven from the places of honor by the leaders of the great so-called "Sensitivist" movement in Dutch letters, which began in the year 1880.
It was a Donnybrook fair sort of an insurrection at first. These young enthusiasts of the eighties, inspired by a deep, genuine love of letters, did not always stop to consider how hard they struck, or how fair. Of course, there was the usual desire to epater les bourgeois —to startle the Philistines—in this case quite understandable, however, because the greatest Philistines in the Holland of that period were undeniably its literai*y Mandarins. The young band fought hard, receiving blows more unfair than any it gave. The defense was, indeed, mostly confined to offensive personalities. This literary revolt was against matter as well as against form; it was a rising against a literary aristocracy; it had its social as well as its purely artistic side. Indeed, it was more or less socialistic in some of its manifestations from the very first. And no wonder, for the many foreign influences that contributed to the outbreak (Dutch literature has always been very susceptible to foreign influences) ranged from Shelley to Tolstoy, and from him to Baudelaire, Gautier, Poe, Huysmans—a Fleming writing French—and, above all others, to Zola. No wonder that conservative middle-aged Holland shuddered and protested.
The band of insurgents set about remodeling the literary uses of the language in a manner of their own, somewhat after that of Meredith and James; they made progress, won the day, and have been justified of their doings by the results, these fifteen years or so. Now that their leaders have reached middle age, the impetuousness of youth has died out. In their turn they incline toward conservatism; they contemplate what they have achieved, and retain their faith in it. But instead of further development along the lines hewed out by them, another general revolt may be impending—although of this there is as yet no positive sign. The only token thus far of a waning of the influence of the "Sensitivist" school of 1880 is the appearance of independents, of authors who repudiate all idea of allegiance to, or derivation from, all schools and movements in general, and this one in particular. From the foreign standpoint, Maarten Maartens would be considered the most prominent of these independents; but he, writing in English, is not accounted a Dutch novelist by the Dutch. There remains, then, as the first independent of real and growing importance in contemporary Dutch letters, the author of "Eline Vere," "Majesty," and "Fate."
Louis Couperus is beyond doubt the leading novelist of Holland to-day, the only one of its living authors, moreover, who has earned and received the distinction of translation into English, French, and German. His place is beyond the ranks of national authors; he stands among the writers who have international fame—with Matilde Serao, Hermann Sudermann, Pierre Loti, Marion Crawford. His versatility is great, for he ranges from the novel of contemporary manners to a decidedly obscure mysticism. He claims not only literary independence but absolute originality, a somewhat sweeping claim that can not be allowed without many qualifications. It is true, none the less, that his literary descent is exceedingly hard to trace. He is strikingly Dutch in "Eline Vere," which, notwithstanding his disclaimer, belongs to the "Sensitivist" school in atmosphere and treatment, though most decidedly not in manner. It is a study of the moods of a young woman who lacks the firmness of purpose that character gives, while- at the same time it is a delightfully vivid and truthful picture of the social life of The Hague, the "village capital" of Europe. "Majesty," a thinly disguised tale of royalty hemmed in by anarchy, is cosmopolitan; it might as well have come, certain allowances being made, from a German, or a
