Board of the Queen Wilhelmina Lectureship, Columbia University
GENTLEMEN:
We, members of the "Board of the Queen Wilhelmina Lectureship, Columbia University," Professor Doctor G. Kalff, of the University of Leiden; Member Royal Academy of Sciences of Amsterdam; Leiden. President; J. Heldring, of Heldring & Pierson, Bankers, the Hague; J.W. IJzerman, President of the Royal Netherland Geographical Society at Amsterdam, the Hague; Wouter Nijhoff, President of the Dutch Publishers' Association, the Hague; Doctor H.J. Kiewiet de Jonge, President of the General Dutch Alliance, Dordrecht, Hon. Secretary, herewith plead for your co-operation with our endeavors to spread in America a knowledge of our civilization and institutions. Notwithstanding the tremendous influence of Holland upon England and the American Colonies—an influence as yet hardly guessed—the study of the Dutch and their history in the colleges and universities of America is still universally neglected. So little in fact is known of this subject and of Holland's part in civilization that there is even among scholars but little appreciation of the importance of this subject. Only at Columbia University is there any evidence of interest. Here our literary representative, Leonard C. Van Noppen, whom we have selected as the pioneer to blaze the way, has inaugurated several courses in Dutch Literature and given besides lectures on the various periods of its development. Since Columbia has been the first to co-operate with us, will not your institution be the second? If so, will you kindly address Prof. Leonard C. van Noppen, Queen Wilhelmina Lecturer, Columbia University, N.Y.? Mr. Van Noppen will be glad at any time to introduce you to this subject and to lecture on such phases of it as you may deem the most interesting.
We invite your students to our universities. Here is a field which will enrich scholarship with many discoveries. The selection of the Hague as the Capital of Peace has given Holland a new international importance. Your universities have established chairs in Icelandic, Chinese and Russian, subjects whose importance and value are incalculably less than that of Dutch. Is it not time that a beginning be made in this direction? Not even the study of the Spanish, the Italian and the French is so fertile of results as that of the civilization of the Netherlands, which, as the mother of the Teutonic Renaissance, influenced the civilization of the English-speaking world so largely. Prof. Butler will, upon application, be glad to give Mr. van Noppen leave of absence to lecture at your university. Mr. Van Noppen has given courses of lectures on this subject at the Lowell Institute, Brooklyn Institute, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Cincinnati and many other colleges and universities.
We add the following notice of his lecture at Davidson College, N.C.:
"Davidson, April 20.—It is altogether too seldom that our Southern colleges, certainly it is true of Davidson, are privileged to have with them a lecturer of the type seen in Professor Leonard Charles van Noppen of the Queen Wilhelmina Chair of Dutch Literature in Columbia University, who spoke last evening in Shearer Hall and who speaks again this evening and to-night.
"Doctor van Noppen was introduced by Professor Thomas W. Lingle, who in a brief speech told of the lecturers right by virtue of birth and training to speak on the topic selected and for a few minutes in an instructive way pointed out what Holland had contributed to Western civilization and particularly to American life and history, an introduction so full of facts marked with such accurate historical perspective that the Columbia lecturer in making acknowledgment said he felt inclined to take his seat and let Doctor Lingle continue, so familiar did he seem with the subject he himself was to present.
"To say that Doctor van Noppen's lecture was popular, in the ordinary sense of the word, would do it great injustice. It was too comprehensive in its reach, and strong in its grasp, too scholarly, too suggestive of research and prolonged investigation and study, too elaborate in phrase and too masterful in its discriminating use of choice English and ornate diction for any one to call it popular. Its purpose and its value is not of this order. Rather, after listening to such a paper, the scholar is glad that it is doubtless to appear in permanent or book form, where he can study it at leisure. To the college student it serves as a stimulus, an inspiration, an ideal to show him that in his daily routine of class room work he is only laying a foundation on which to build and with which he may begin the higher intellectual life, may start out for himself to read, to investigate and in time reduce to consistent and articulated form the results of his own weeks and months not to say years of patient toil in the great libraries.
"In a very strict sense Doctor van Noppen's first lecture was scholarly and showed clearly that it breathes a university atmosphere and is intended primarily and ultimately for the lecture hall of the Johns Hopkins University, where he is soon to deliver the series. He is just now returning from a lecture tour in the West.
"Beginning with a clever characterization of the people of Holland as a practical one, first reclaiming from the sea a land to live on, and then anchoring it to the continent, in rapid review he showed what a wonderful contribution this little country, less than Maryland, and small in everything but in history, has made to modern Christian civilization. Washed out of the soil of Germany on toward the sea—and no wonder that Germany looks with envious eyes upon it—it is the richest country imaginable. It has a per capita wealth of $12,000 as against America's $4,000. In proportion to population it has done more for civilization than any other nation, not even Greece excepted. Then followed in rapid review the facts of history in substantiation of the claim.
"Conspicuous in the claims and seemingly substantiated was in the influence of Holland in spreading abroad, notably in America, the doctrines of the equality of all men, separation of Church and State, religious freedom, freedom of the press, local self-government.
"Fine was the description of Philip of Spain, of William the Silent. Interesting was the portrayal of the work of the Chamber of Eglantine of Amsterdam, of the men of letters of Leiden and the intellectual forces leading up to and resulting in the great University in Leiden.
"Most striking of all was his brilliant description of the life and work of the great Dutch poet Vondel and the story of how Milton, the greatest of English Epic poets, has been content to follow, imitate and copy from Vondel in his Lucifer where Vondel has shown himself the great dramatist."
The "Baltimore Sun" writes of his lecture at Johns Hopkins:
"Very frequently since the day when Geoffrey Chaucer fashioned his immortal 'Canterbury Tales' upon Bocaccio's 'Decameron,' English poets have been subject to the impeachment of having borrowed (usually without proper acknowledgment) from foreign sources —borrowed material, plot, episodes, characters and, sometimes, language, embodied in whole phrases and sentences. The Elizabethan Age, pre-eminent though it was in creative literary excellence, has not escaped the challenge of its originality. French and Italian influences and writers exercised a strongly formative power upon Drayton, Sidney, Spenser and others of the elect, and even the great Bard of Stratford did not scruple at transmuting the clay of less gifted molders into the gold of his superb coinage.
"But it has not been generally recognized that Milton was such an appropriator. Accordingly, Dr. L.C. van Noppen's lecture showing that the great Puritan poet was indebted to the 'Lucifer' of Vondel, the Dutch author, for the theme, the treatment, the description and even some of the finest passages in 'Paradise Lost,' is a surprise. Yet Dr. Van Noppen makes out a very strong case. The appearance of 'Lucifer' a short time before Milton's Continental tour, which was cut short by the breaking out of the great civil war in England; the strong likelihood that Milton had heard of Vondel and his work through Roger Williams, whose sojourn in Europe had made him acquainted with 'Lucifer,' and who had instructed Milton in modern languages; Milton's association in Paris with Hugo Grotius, one of the most eminent scholars of his time, a countryman and an enthusiastic admirer of Vondel—all combine into a strong chain of circumstantial evidence, which, reinforced by the undeniable similarity and the many parallel passages in the two great works, make a conclusion which is almost imperative.
"But the conceding of Milton's debt to Vondel does not cancel our debt to Milton, whose sublime epic has given pleasure and comfort to scores of readers to whom Vondel's drama has been a sealed volume. Neither does it release our obligation to 'render unto Caesar the things that are Cæsar's.'"
Furthermore, we hope that you will consider the establishment of a chair in Dutch Literature or History and that you, in anticipation of this foundation, will from time to time send us such students as desire to make this subject their specialty. Hoping that you, after a consideration of this matter, will co-operate with us, I am
Respectfully yours for the Board of
the Queen Wilhelmina Lectureship,
H.J. Kiewiet de Jonge,Hon. Secretary.
DORDRECHT (Holland), November, 1915.
Parallelisms Between Vondel and Milton
Since Mr. Edmundson's book is out of print, we have been asked to give a list of his parallelisms between the "Lucifer" and Milton. This will give the student the benefit of his comparisons.
LUCIFER, ACT I.
Line 13.
PARADISE LOST.—Book III., line 741.
Line 22.
P.L.—{V., 266-272.
{II., 1012.
Line 35.
P.L.—V., 426.
Line 52.
P.L.—{VIII., 107.
{X., 85.
Line 57.
P.L.—II., 104-105.
Line 61.
P.L.—IV., 227.
Line 63.
P.L.—IV., 233.
Line 64.
P.L.—III., 554.
Line 73.
P.L.—IV., 225.
Line 78.
P.L.—VII., 577.
Line 85-95.
P.L.—{VII., 317.
{VII., 333.
{IV., 644.
Line 107.
P.L.—IV., 340.
Line 115.
P.L.—{V., 7.
{IV., 642.
{IV., 238.
Line 131.
P.L.—{IV., 360-365.
{IX., 457.
Line 134.
P.L.—VII., 505-511.
Line 158.
P.L.—{V., 137.
{IV., 689.
Line 174.
P.L.—{IV., 288-306.
{IV., 496.
Line 180.
P.L.—IX., 450-460.
Line 192.
P.L.—IX., 489.
Line 193-195.
P.L.—IX., 460-470.
Line 199.
P.L.—IV., 304-306.
Line 203.
P.L.—VIII., 40-50.
Line 260.
P.L.—III., 276-290.
Line 268.
P.L.—{III., 313-317.
{III., 323-333.
Line 280.
P.L.—V., 602.
Line 326.
P.L.—V., 429.
Line 330.
P.L.—X., 660-670.
Line 364.
P.L.—III., 382.
LUCIFER ACT II.
Line 22.
P.L.—V., line 787-792.
Line 108.
P.L.—{I., 94-98.
{I., 106-111.
Line 110.
PARADISE REGAINED (P.R.).—III., 201-211.
Line 118.
P.L.—I., 261-263.
Line 176-180.
P.L.—{III., 380-382.
{VIII., 65-67.
{VIII., 71-75.
{VIII., 168-170.
Line 197.
P.L.—V., 810-825.
Line 343.
P.L.—IV, 1010-1012.
Line 367.
P.L.—II., 188-191.
Line 377.
P.L.{—II., 188-191.
{II., 343-346.
{V., 254.
Line 405.
P.L.—{II., 110-112.
{I., 490.
LUCIFER ACT III.
Line 120.
P.L.—X., 1045.
Line 238.
P.L.—V., 617-627.
Line 572.
P.L.—V., 708-710.
LUCIFER ACT IV.
Line 10.
P.L.—V., 708-710.
Line 43.
P.L.—VI., 56-59.
Line 120-155.
P.L.—V., 722-802.
Line 186.
P.L.—III., 383-389.
Line 207.
P.L.—III., 648.
Line 251.
P.L.—IV., 393.
Line 258.
P.L.—II., 188-194.
Line 351.
P.L.—IV., 391-394.
Line 370.
P.R.—IV., 518-520.
Line 410.
P.R.—III., 204.
Line 421.
P.L.—VI., 540.
LUCIFER ACT V.
Line 3.
P.L.—VI., 200-206.
Line 4.
P.L.—VI., 305.
Line 7.
P.L.—VI., 320-323.
Line 8.
P.L.—VI., 250-253.
Line 29.
P.L.—IV., 556-557.
Line 43.
P.L.—VI., 44-53.
Line 54.
P.L.—VI., 61-63.
Line 65.
P.L.—VI., 85-87.
Line 70.
P.L.—IV., 977-980.
Line 85-88.
P.L.—I., 533-540.
Line 94-100.
P.L.—VI., 99-110.
Line 97.
P.L.—XI., 240-241.
Line 101.
P.L.—VI., 754-755.
Line 103.
P.L.—VI., 848-849.
Line 105.
P.L.—I., 286.
Line 111.
P.L.—{I., 84-87.
{I., 588-590.
Line 114.
P.L.—V., 833-845.
Line 115.
P.L.—{I., 68-71.
{VI., 105-107.
Line 124.
P.L.—{VI., 203-219.
{VI., 546.
Line 128.
P.L.—VI., 310-315.
Line 155-161.
P.R.—IV., 18-25.
Line 164.
P.L.—VI., 200-205.
Line 195.
P.L.—IV., 1000.
Line 235.
P.L.—VI., 246-255.
Line 255.
P.L.—VI., 275-278.
Line 269.
P.L.—VI., 324.
Line 275.
P.L.—VI., 390.
Line 290.
P.L.—I., 305.
Line 308.
P.L.—{X., 449-454.
{X., 511-529.
Line 320.
P.L.—X., 510-520.
Line 328.
P.L.—539-545.
Line 345.
P.L.—X., 510-520.
Line 347.
P.R.—IV., 423.
Line 353.
P.L.—VI., 884-886.
Line 410.
P.L.—I., 300-310.
Line 412.
P.L.—538-545.
Line 416.
P.R.—I., 39-42.
Line 417.
P.L.—I., 192-195.
Line 419.
P.L.—II., 1-5.
Line 426.
P.L.—{I., 120-122.
{I., 178-189.
Line 431.
P.L.—{II., 362-375.
{III., 90-96.
Line 433.
P.L.—IX., 130-134.
Line 455.
P.L.—X., 637.
Line 448.
P.L.—XI., 500-513.
Line 457.
P.L.—I., 367-373.
Line 461.
P.L.—I., 381-390.
Line 488.
P.L.—IX., 575-581.
Line 492.
P.L.—IX., 716-732.
Line 494.
P.L.—IX., 685-687.
Line 499.
P.L.—IX., 679-683.
Line 500.
P.L.—IX., -732-743.
Line 509.
P.L.—IX., 1090-1095.
Line 519.
P.L.—{IX., 780-783.
{IX., 1000-1003.
Line 537-545.
P.L.—Last of Book IX.
Line 553.
P.L.—X., 1051-1055.
Line 560.
P.L.—X., 498-499.
Line 564.
P.L.—XII., 386.
Line 604.
P.L.—II., 595-600.
Line 604.
P.L.—I., 56-63.
Line 606.
P.L.—X., 112.
Line 616-627.—Suggestion of Paradise Regained.
Note.—(1) The word feather, line 370, Act I., is here used by Vondel in the old sense of pen.
(2) The word treason in the epode of the chorus of angels at the end of Act III. more literally means treasonable ambition.