Religieus en burgerlijk realisme

Religious and civic realism. A comparison between the novel poetics of De Tijdspiegel and De Gids

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the monthly magazine De Tijdspiegel (established in 1844) developed a novel poetics that could be described as ‘religious realism’ to distinguish it from the more liberal ‘bourgeois realism’. Like the liberals, De Tijdspiegel attached great importance to the modern novel, but the magazine rejected the liberal separation of the spheres of life (and thus art for art’s sake), their view of mankind and the world, and their empiricism. De Tijdspiegel reverted to Jean Paul’s humour theory, as it had been introduced in the Netherlands in 1820 by Weiland. This theory of humour determined the form and content of the magazine, as well as their mutual interdependence, which would repeatedly lead to problems of interpretation. According to the Christian humourists’ view of mankind, the weak individual, making his way in an imperfect world, could only rise above himself through religion. Only through (Christian) religion the author, who should always be characterised as the (omniscient) narrator in the text, could elevate the world and mankind to a true ‘humanity’. The importance of this, often ironic, ‘religious realism’ should not be underestimated. The religious aspect has perhaps been proven indispensable, but to this day the novel’s ability to increase ‘sympathy’ is regarded as a crucial quality of this genre.