The Pure Language of the Heart: Sentimentalism in the Netherlands 1775-1800 (review)

REVIEWS 509 minor criticism is that the book lacks a consistent house style—some essays include page references in the body of the text, others litter the volume with pages of unnecessary endnotes (seventy-nine in one essay!). Finally, this volume has a forthcoming companion, Making History: Textuality and the Forms ofEighteenthCentury Culture. With much firmer editorial control this latter volume will, I hope, avoid the weaknesses of its predecessor and elaborate upon its potential—and considerable—strengths. Gary Boire Wilfrid Laurier University Annemieke Meijer. The Pure Language of the Heart: Sentimentalism in the Netherlands 1775-1800. Studies in Comparative Literature 14. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998. 197pp. Hfl65; US$34. ISBN 90-4200370 -7. In the past two decades literary scholarship in the Anglo-American world has transformed our critical understanding of the literature of sensibility in the eighteenth century. As recently as 1969, the editors of the anthology Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), which soon became the principal teaching text at North American colleges and universities, could remark without fear of contradiction that their selection of texts "has been made with an eye to literary merit, and in trying to determine what constitutes literary merit in the eighteenth century we have allowed the comic and the satiric ample room, while straitening the space customarily allotted to the sentimental" (p. v). Annemieke Meijer's new study of the sentimental novel in the Netherlands reminds us that sentimental writings evoked ambivalent responses in readers and critics almost from the beginning—and that, until recently, accounts of sentimentalism in Dutch literary histories remained generally dismissive, often vehemently so. More than anything else, the driving force behind the critical revaluation of sentimental writings, making them once again a focus for literary criticism and notjust an episode in literary history, has been new theoretical approaches—feminist, historicist , political—that enable a fresh understanding oftexts and writers previously deemed marginal, popular, and non-canonical. In this contextMeijerproposes what might initially seem an unpromising critical perspective for her study, which she characterizes as "eclectic," "weighted towards a traditional empiricism," and commencing without "a theoretical parti pris" (p. 104). She points out that hers is the first monograph on Dutch sentimentalism in over a century, and she sets out, accordingly , to supply a much-needed account ofthe Dutch response to the growing popular appeal (from the 1770s onward) of sentimental writings among readers in the Netherlands. In the first two chapters of her study, Meijer surveys the international context of Dutch sentimentalism, which was heavily influenced by translations from 510 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 11:4 abroad, chiefly England, France, and Germany. Indeed, the debate over sentimentalism in the Netherlands seems to have been as much concerned with the influence of English and German writers such as Goethe, Kleist, Richardson, Sterne, and Thomson (together with many lesser-known authors) as with the publication of sentimental works by Dutch writers—Rhijnvis Feith, Elisabeth Maria Post, and Jacob Eduard de Witte. The Dutch produced relatively few original sentimental works of their own: as a result they encountered sentimentalism as an "immigrant genre" which sprang up "under the impact of foreign examples" (p. 111). Interestingly , Meijer estimates that the influence of French sentimental writers was considerably less than that of their English and German counterparts. New terms were coined to name the cultural phenomenon of sensibility: in English "sentimental," in German empfindsam, and in Dutch sentimenteel. The latter word did not appear on the scene until the 1770s, well after its equivalents had come into use in Britain and Germany. The Dutch experience of sentimentalism is thus in large measure belated, and correspondingly compressed. Debate in the Netherlands about the value of sentimental fiction began when the tone of discussion elsewhere had already become distinctly mixed: those earlier phases in the semantic evolution ofthe word "sentimental" in English, Meijer tells us, "when itmeant 'rational,' 'ofthought,' or 'sententious' and 'moralizing,' never occurred in Dutch" (p. 27). She recounts in her third chapter the extensive polemical exchange on sentimentalism in the 1780s between Feith (the author of Julia [1783] and Ferdinand en Constantia [1785], Holland's most popular sentimental novels) and Willem Emmery de Perponcher Sedlnitzky—the most wide-ranging...