Preserving the Past and Constructing a Canon

On the 15^th of September, 1802, the Bataafsche Maatschappij voor Taal- en Dichtkunde (Batavian Society for Language and Poetry) announced that it would hold a scholarly competition to address an important issue in Dutch literary culture: ‘What have been the advances and what have been the setbacks in Dutch poetry over the course of the eighteenth century when compared to earlier ages?’ ¹ Three years later, the society determined that the decisive answer to this question had been given by Jeronimo de Vries (1776-1853), who duly received an honorary gold medal. De Vries’s submission was no small achievement, for it constituted one of the first elaborate overviews of Dutch literary history, ranging from the sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century, in an effort to provide a thoroughly contextualised interpretation of the development of eighteenth-century Dutch literature. ² While the question that the Batavian Society had formulated was fairly unbiased, De Vries’s four-volume answer can hardly be described as exhibiting an even-handed approach: after exalting the literary heroes of the Dutch Golden Age, De Vries could characterise the generations that succeeded them only as the deplorably untalented progeny of the seventeenth-century masters. ³