page_title: 19th-century Dutch literature
section_title: Ministers, formalism and romanticism (1830–1880)
hierarchical_section_title: 19th-century Dutch literature / Ministers, formalism and romanticism (1830–1880)
caption_attribution_description: Hendrik Conscience
context_page_description: The last years of the 18th century, which had seen decline in the Republic, including the arts and international politics, were marked by a general revival of intellectual force. The romantic movement in Germany made itself deeply felt in all branches of Dutch literature and German lyricism took the place hitherto held by French classicism, in spite of the country falling to French expansionalism.
context_section_description: In scientific and religious literature men of letters showed themselves cognizant of the newest shades of opinion, and freely ventilated their ideas. The language resisted the pressure of German from the outside, and from within broke through its long stagnation and enriched itself, as a medium for literary expression, with a multitude of fresh and colloquial forms. At the same time, no very great genius arose in the Netherlands in any branch of literature. For the thirty or forty years preceding 1880 the course of literature in Holland was smooth and even sluggish. The Dutch writers had slipped into a conventionality of treatment and a strict limitation of form from which even the most striking talents among them could scarcely escape.
  Poetry and a large part of prose was dominated by the so-called school of ministers, as the leading writers all were or had been Calvinist ministers. As a result, many of their products emphasized Biblical and bourgeois domestic values. Prime examples include Everhardus Johannes Potgieter (1808–1875, lyric poetry) and Nicolaas Beets (1814–1903), who wrote large quantities of sermons and poetry under his own name but is chiefly remembered today for the humorous prose sketches of Dutch life in Camera Obscura (1839), which he wrote during his student days under the pseudonym of Hildebrand.
  A poet of power and promise was lost in the early death of P.A. de Genestet (1829–1861). His narrative poem "De Sint-Nicolaasavond" ("Eve of Saint Nicholas") appeared in 1849 and attained great popularity. Another poet who among others wrote verse for children was Jan Pieter Heije (1809–1876), whose songs are sung to this day. A poet who left no large contemporary impression but who is considered one of the very few readable 19th-century poets is Piet Paaltjens (ps. of François Haverschmidt, 1835–1894). Paaltjens personifies the pure Romantic vein exemplified in German literature by Heine and others. Criticism was best represented by W. J. A. Jonckbloet (1817–1885), who was the first to write a comprehensive history of Dutch literature (1870).
  Under the influence of romantic nationalism, writers in Belgium began to reconsider their Flemish heritage and move for a recognition of the Dutch language in both official affairs (including education) and literature. Charles De Coster laid the foundations for a native Belgian literature by recounting the Flemish past in historic romances but wrote his works, including his masterpiece Légende de Thyl Ulenspiegel et de Lamme Goedzak (1867) in French. Hendrik Conscience (1812–1883), himself the son of a Frenchman, was the first to write about Flemish subjects in the Dutch language and so is considered the father of modern Flemish literature. In Flemish poetry, Guido Gezelle (1830–1899) is an important figure. Gezelle, an ordained journalist-cum-ethnologist, celebrated his faith and his Flemish roots using an archaic vocabulary based on Medieval Flemish dialects to the detriment of his intelligibility beyond his native West Flanders.
  After the restoration in 1815 to the Dutch state of the Dutch East Indies, former corporate Dutch East India Company possessions occupied by the United Kingdom during the Napoleonic era, works of literature continued to be produced there, among which the romances of Melati van Java (ps. of Nicolina Maria Christina Sloot, 1853–1927), which were widely read in both the Netherlands and Belgium. With the rise of social consciousness regarding the administration of the colonies and the treatment of their inhabitants, however, a far more influential voice rose from the Indies in the form of Multatuli (ps. of Eduard Douwes Dekker, 1820–1887), whose Max Havelaar (1860) is a scathing indictment of colonial mismanagement and one of the few 19th-century prose works still widely considered readable today. Although the Belgians had obtained colonial possessions in their own right with the Congo Free State/Belgian Congo, no Dutch-language literature was forthcoming as the territory was entirely Francophone.
  The two leading Dutch men of letters in the mi
caption: Hendrik Conscience.
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