Renaissance Forum: Volume 4, Number 1, 1999: H.R. Woudhuysen

Peter Davidson and Adriaan van der Weel, eds. 1996. A Selection from the Poems of Sir Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 228 pp. ISBN 90-5356-180-3. DFl.65.

Constantijn Huygens – his surname seems to have been pronounced 'Huggins' by his English friends – is one of those deeply representative figures of European and specifically Dutch Renaissance culture of whose existence scholars of the period need to be constantly reminded. The four-hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1996 seems to have passed largely unmarked, at least in Britain, with which he had so many contacts. This selection of his poems, the first substantial collection to be translated into English, was published to coincide with the event, but did not reach me until earlier this year. Despite its shortcomings,it is well worth having and should bring Huygens's remarkable career and works to the attention of a new audience.
His long life was spent almost entirely in the service of the House of Orange as a diplomat, following in the footsteps of his father who had been a secretary to William of Orange and to the State Council. Christiaan Huygens and his wife, Suzanna Hoefnagel (a member of the family of artists) made sure that their second son was educated for the part. He learned Latin and modern European languages, developed his artistic and literary abilities and became an accomplished musician. This was all before he went to the University of Leiden in 1616. He stayed there only a year and in 1618 began a series of diplomatic missions to England which lasted until 1623. During the course of them, as well as travelling to Oxford and Cambridge, Huygens came into contact with a wide circle of writers and scholars, including Donne, Jonson and Bacon: he was knighted by James I in 1622. He also began to publish his poems: in 1621 Batava Tempe, a long, arcadian pastoral poem about the avenues of limes in the Voorhout of The Hague; shortly afterwards another long poem, the satirical account of the folly of expensive clothes, 't Costelick Mal, dedicated to Jacob Cats; and in 1625 a large collection of miscellaneous poems under the title of Otiorum libri sex. Two years later he married Susanna van Baerle and settled in The Hague where the couple brought up their children, the most famous of whom was the scientist and astronomer Christiaan (1629-95). His wife died in 1637: Huygens celebrated their brief marriage and life together in another long poem Daghwerck, and in 1639 moved outside The Hague to Hofwijk where he created a superb house and garden which also were memorialized in verse printed in 1653. During the English Civil War Huygens was drawn into contact with the court in exile at The Hague and although he had both republican and royalist friends he was greatly moved by the King's execution. His collected poems, Koren-Bloemen, were published in 1657 and in a second edition in 1672, after he had returned from a last and not very successful visit to England. At sea on the way home, he composed what is probably one of his most famous poems, 'Oogentroost' or 'Consolation of the Eyes', which is addressed to his sister Geertruyd who suffered from cataract. Huygens finally died in his ninety-first year in 1687.
Peter Davidson and Adriaan van der Weel's selection of Huygens's verse consists of a brief introduction which sets the scene for contemporary Dutch society and tells the story of his life. There are then forty-two translations from the poems, including some Latin verse and extracts from his longer pieces, followed by three appendices: the first two present selections from Huygens's writings in other modern languages (French, Spanish, Italian, German and, more substantially with four letters, English) and the third traces Huygens's links with English literature under several headings (Donne, Marvell, Jonson and the Duchess of Newcastle). The translations in the appendices are into prose, but those for the main selection are into verse: for the most part these are done exactly line for line and are almost completely faithful to the original metres, but not to their rhyme-schemes. I am not competent to judge the accuracy of the translations, but on the whole – despite some occasionally puzzling and tortuous passages – they read well. Even if the translations cannot render Huygens's deep fondness for puns, they convey something of the rich and involved cleverness of his verse, the qualities which he developed from his reading of Jonson and Donne into an aesthetic which includes both his Calvinist and Baroque sympathies. Although his pointed and satirical shorter poems are sometimes easier to get to grips with, the extracts from longer pieces are often impressive and moving.
The edition, however, leaves a certain amount to be desired. There is little in it about Huygens's metres and verse forms: his evident fondness for assonance and internal rhyme go largely unnoticed. The editors have little to say about his language, and the annotation they supply tends to be very brief and not always helpful. The texts of the poems are taken from J.A. Worp's nine-volume edition (1892-9) which generally prints the manuscript versions: these allow their composition to be closely dated, but it deprives them of a published context. In this way, for example, it would be helpful to know that the wittily self-referential 'Een gesant' ('The Character of an Ambassador') was printed in what appears to be the Dutch first collection of 'characters', the 'Moral Prints' of 1623 and 1624. The first part of the introduction offers a helpful summary of the Dutch traditions in which Huygens wrote and the life covers some of the essential ground. But both are marred by a degree of carelessness which suggests either haste in composition or unfamiliarity with the period. For example, Huygens is said to have owned a copy of 'the Arte of Rhetorique (anonymous) in the 1584 edition' which sounds very like Thomas Wilson's; Haydocke's translation of Lomazzo's A Tracte Containing the Artes of Curious Paintinge is misleadingly described as 'an English painter's manual'. Dutch names change their form from page to page and James I is referred to several times as James VI.
Some of the same sorts of errors occur in the appendix dealing with Huygens's links with English literature: both Donne's and Jonson's dates are muddled, and there are slips like 'Stationer's Register' and 'Dean of St Pauls'. More seriously, the text of Huygens's letter to Jonson is taken from Worp's edition of the correspondence which differs considerably from that given by A.G.H. Bacharach in his important 1951 article (Neophilologus 35) on Huygens and Jonson: his text was passed on to Herford and Simpson for the eleventh volume of their edition of Jonson's works. Davidson and van der Weel advance the suggestion that Marvell's 'Upon Appleton House' was influenced by Huygens's Hofwijk and 'The Garden' by Batava Tempe: their arguments are not very convincing. Among the other links between Huygens and English literature, it is worth noticing that a folio manuscript of Richard Corbett's 'Iter Boreale' was listed as part of the library of Janus Albinus at Dordrecht in 1696 as 'Ex Bibliotheca Constantini Hugenii': the manuscript also contained 'quantités d'autres Poëmes, sur toute sorte de sujets par les Meilleurs Auteurs Anglois; à sçavoir par Edward Lapworth, John Squijer, Tomkis, Sr. Henry Godyer, John Donne, & autres; tous en Anglois'. Although the reference is noted by Peter Beal in volume two of Index of English Literary Manuscripts (CoR 315), the manuscript remains unlocated.
Anyone stimulated by Peter Davidson and Adriaan van der Weel's useful selection of Huygens's poems will find much has been written about his life and work. For those unable to read Dutch, the best substantial introductions to his world probably remain Bacharach's book, Sir Constantine Huygens and Britain, 1596-1619 (1962) and Rosalie Colie's 'Some Thankfulnesse to Constantine': A Study of English Influence upon the Early Works of Constantijn Huygens (1956): it is a pity that none of Colie's work on the subject appears in the selection's 'Bibliography'.

H.R. WOUDHUYSEN
UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON