Dutch Renaissance and Golden Age Literature - Literature of The Dutch Golden Age

Literature of The Dutch Golden Age

At Amsterdam two men took a very prominent place thanks to their intelligence and modern spirit. The first, Hendrick Laurensz. Spieghel (1549–1612) was a humanist, less polemical than Coornhert. His chief contribution to literature was his Twe-spraack van de Nederduytsche Letterkunst ("Dialogue on Dutch Literature"), a philological exhortation urging the Dutch nation to purify and enrich its tongue at the fountains of antiquity. That Spieghel was a Catholic prevented him perhaps from exercising as much public influence as he exercised privately among his younger friends. The same may be said of the man who in 1614 first collected Spieghel's writings and published them in a volume together with his own verse. Roemer Visscher (1547–1620) proceeded a step further than Spieghel in the cultivation of polite letters. He was deeply tinged with a spirit of classical learning. His own disciples called him the Dutch Martial, but he was at best little more than an amateur in poetry, although an amateur whose function it was to perceive and encourage the genius of professional writers. Roemer Visscher stands at the threshold of the new Renaissance literature, himself practising the faded arts of the rhetoricians, but pointing by his counsel and his conversation to the naturalism of the great period.

It was in the salon at Amsterdam which Visscher's daughters formed around their father and themselves that the new school began to take form. The republic of the United Provinces, with Amsterdam at its head, had suddenly risen to first rank among the nations of Europe and it was under the influence of so much new ambition that the country asserted itself in a great school of painting and poetry.

The intellectual life of the Low Countries was concentrated in the provinces of Holland and Zeeland, while the universities of Leiden, Groningen, Utrecht, Amsterdam, Harderwijk and Franeker were enriched by a flock of learned exiles from Flanders and Brabant. Visscher realised that the path of literary honour lay not along the utilitarian road cut out by Maerlant and his followers, but in the study of beauty and antiquity. In this he was aided by the school of ripe and enthusiastic scholars who began to flourish at Leiden, such as Drusius, Vossius and Hugo Grotius, who themselves wrote little in Dutch but chastened the style of the rising generation by insisting on a pure and liberal Latinity.

Out of that generation arose the classic names in Dutch literature: Vondel, Hooft, Cats, and Huijgens. In their hands the language took at once its highest finish and melody. By the side of this serious and aesthetic growth there is to be noticed a quickening of the broad farcical humour which had been characteristic of the Dutch nation from its commencement. For fifty years, and these the most glorious in the annals of the Dutch republic, these two streams of influence, one towards beauty and melody, the other towards lively comedy, ran side by side, often in the same channel, and producing a rich harvest of great works. It was in the house of the daughters of Visscher that the tragedies of Vondel, the comedies of Bredero and the odes of Huygens alike found their first admirers and their best critics. Of the daughters of Roemer Visscher, Tesselschade (1594–1649) wrote some well-received lyrics; she also translated Tasso. Visscher's daughters were women of universal accomplishment and their company attracted to his house all the most gifted youths of the time, several of whom were suitors, but in vain, for the hand of Anna or of Tesselschade.