Dutch Civilisation in the Seventeenth Century and Other Essays PDF
Preview Dutch Civilisation in the Seventeenth Century and Other Essays
DUTCH CIVILISATION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY and other essays J. H. HUIZINGA DUTCH CIVILISATION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY and other essays SELECTED BY PIETER GEYL AND F. W. N. HUGENHOLTZ TRANSLATED BY ARNOLD J. POMERANS COLLINS THE FONTANA LIBRARY First published in the Fontana Library ig68 <2? and simultaneously by William Collins Sons Co Ltd London and Glasgow conditions of sale : This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated with out the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. © The Estate of the late Professor Dr J. Huizinga in the English translation William Collins Sons & Co Ltd and Harper & Row Inc 1968 Set in Monotype Baskerville Printed in Great Britain Collins Clear-Type Press London and Glasgow Foreword \ few years ago the late Professor Geyl asked me to join him n selecting some of Johan Huizinga’s essays for translation nto English. The centrepiece of the collection was to be Dutch Civilisation in the Seventeenth Century > a work which re zeals a profound insight into the special character of the Jolden Age of the United Provinces, so different from cul- ural achievements elsewhere on the continent. This work, ind his essays on the Spirit of the Netherlands and on the position of the Netherlands between Western and Central European cultural influences, represent the best and most ypical of Huizinga’s writings on his own country. Huizinga’s approach to historical theory is most brilliant- y revealed in his piece on Spengler and H. G. Wells—Two Wrestlers with the Angel—an essay which is important both or its theme and for what it reveals of Huizinga’s in- ellectual stature. Similarly, how Huizinga developed into the eminent uithor of The Waning of the Middle Ages and of the many im portant studies on Renaissance problems is shown by the lutobiographical essay My Path to History and by his in- lugural lecture, in which he made clear his basic ideas about listory. The death of Professor Geyl, himself both an admirer and i severe critic of Huizinga, is the sad cause of my signing bis Foreword alone. F. W. N. Hugenholtz Contents On The Netherlands itch Civilisation in the Seventeenth Century page 9 ie Spirit of the Netherlands 105 ie Netherlands as Mediator between Western and Central Europe 138 On History vo Wrestlers with the Angel 158 ie Aesthetic Element in Historical Thought 219 y Path to History 244 iex 277 Dutch Civilisation in the Seventeenth Century1 I Were we to test the average Dutchman’s knowledge of life in the Netherlands during the seventeenth century, we should probably find that it is largely confined to odd stray notions gleaned from paintings. True, one or two will have read Vondel or Hooft, or even Spinoza, and few will have forgotten all they were taught at school about our great leaders, sailors and the servants of the East India Company, but their recollections of political and historical events are likely to be hazy. Moreover, what they lack in general knowledge they but rarely make good with any real appre ciation of the work of our great masters, let alone of those twin treasure-houses of art and history combined : drawing and engraving. Had we applied the same test a century ago, in the age of Potgieter and Jacob van Lennep, the results would have been quite different: in 1840, knowledge of history, in the ordinary political sense of the word, was far greater than it is today. Literature, too, was much better known, if only by its greatest works. Art, on the other hand, played a far less important part in nineteenth-century man’s historical vista than it does in ours. Here we come up against an in tellectual transformation that was not confined to our country alone: as more and more visual material for the appreciation of the past became quite generally available, so thinking and writing about the past fell into increasing lFirst published by H. Tjeenk Willink & Zoon, Haarlem, 1941. 9 Dutch Civilisation in the Seventeenth Century neglect. In what follows, we shall try to eschew the one sided aesthetic view of today as much as the one-sided political approach of the last century, and look at civilisa tion in the widest possible context. Though Dutch civilisation in the seventeenth century is a thing of the past, and hence intangible, it was so full of life that we can hardly think of it as an abstraction. In order to grasp it more fully, we cannot do better than start from that mainspring of all historical knowledge: our perpetual as tonishment that the past was once a living reality. In the case of the Netherlands, this amazement is particularly great. How was it possible, we ask, that so small and rela tively remote a country as the young Republic should nevertheless have been so advanced politically, economic ally and culturally ? We can see why Athens and Florence, Rome and Paris should, in their time, have all been centres of culture, but it seems incredible that their mantle should have fallen, for however brief a time, on a small water logged country between the Ems and Vlie and the Maas and Scheldt. Nor does this peculiar phenomenon exhaust our wonder. For it leads us directly to another marvel: where else was there a civilisation that reached its greatest peak so soon after state and nation came into being ? It must be remem bered that a hundred, indeed only fifty years before Rem brandt’s birth, there was no Dutch nation in the sense in which we here speak of it. Even while the passionate strains of national unity were being sounded by the Sea Beggars, Prince William of Orange was still trying diligently, and without much hope of success, to discover the form best suited to the Dutch state. He did not live to see it born, and no one in the anxious years of 1584-1588 could have told what lay in store for the Netherlands. And then, there it suddenly was, a new state, built on the shaky foundations of the Union of Utrecht, a torso of the rich Low Countries 19
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