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 passionate 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
exactitude 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 Mallarmé's and verse like Moréas'! As a matter of
fact, however, the Dutch seem, in their general attitude of reserve, to
leave their mother-tongue unassailed, and to be as intelligible as their
inspiration allows them to be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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