In the intellectual history of all countries we find the same phenomenonincessantly recurring. New writers, new artists, new composers arise inrevolt against what has delighted their grandfathers and satisfied theirfathers. These young men, pressed together at first, by externalopposition, into a serried phalanx, gradually win their way, becomethemselves the delight and then the satisfaction of theircontemporaries, and, falling apart as success is secured to them, cometo seem lax, effete and obsolete to a new race of youths, who effect afresh esthetic revolution. In small communities, these movements areoften to be observed more precisely than in larger ones. But they arevery tardily perceived by foreigners, the established authorities inart and literature retaining their exclusive place in dictionaries andhandbooks long after the claim of their juniors to be observed withattention has been practically conceded at home.
For this reason, partly, and partly also because the mental life ofHolland receives little attention in this country, no account has yetbeen taken of the revolution in Dutch taste which has occupied the lastsix or seven years. I believe that the present occasion is the first onwhich it has been brought to the notice of any English-speaking public.There exists, however, in Holland, at this moment, a group of youngwriters, most of them between thirty-five and twenty-five years of agewho exhibit a violent zeal for literature, passing often intoextravagance, who repudiate, sometimes with ferocity, the rather sleepyDutch authorship of the last forty years, and who are held together, orcrushed together, by the weight of antiquated taste and indifference toexecutive merit which they experience around them. Certain facts seem tobe undeniable; first, that every young man of letters in Holland, whosework is really promising, has joined the camp; and secondly, that, withall the ferment and crudity inseparable from prose and verse composed indirect opposition to existing canons of taste, the poems and thestories of these young Dutchmen are often full of beauty and delicacy.They have read much in their boyhood; they have imitated Rossetti andKeats; they have been fascinated by certain Frenchmen, by Flaubert, byGoncourt, particularly by Huysmans, who is a far-away kinsman of theirown; they have studied the disquieting stories of Edgar Poe. But theseexotic influences are passing away, and those who know something ofcurrent Dutch belles-lettres can realise best how imperatively aploughing up of the phlegmatic tradition of Dutch thought was requiredbefore a new crop of imagination could spring up.
Rejecting the conventional aspects of contemporary Dutch literature, Iwill now attempt to give some sketch of the present situation as itappears to a foreign critic observing the field without prejudice. Thelatest novelist of great importance was Madame GertrudeBosboom-Toussaint, who was born in 1821. After having written a longseries of historical romances for nearly forty years, this intelligentwoman and careful writer broke with her own assured public, and took upthe discussion of psychological questions. She treated the problem ofSocialism in Raymond de Schrijnwerker and the status of woman inMajoor Frans. Madame Bosboom-Toussaint died in 1886, just too early towelcome the new school o