It is surely the mistake of modern criticism, to conceive the public, the man-in-the-street, as the real god, who must be served and flattered by every book that appears, even if it were the Bible. To my thinking, the critic, like a good beadle, should rap the public on the knuckles and make it attend during divine service. And any good book is divine service.
The critic, having dated Max Havelaar a back number, hits him on the head if he dares look up, and says: Down! Revere the awesome modernity of the holy public!
I say: Not at all! The thing in Max that the public once loved, the tract, is really a back number. But there is so very little of the tract, actually, and what there is, the author has retracted so comically, as he went, that the reader can grin as he goes.
It was a stroke of cunning journalism on Multatuli’s part (Dostoevsky also made such strokes of cunning journalism) to put his book through on its face value as a tract. What Multatuli really wanted was to get his book over. He wanted to be heard. He wanted to be read. I want to be heard. I will be heard! he vociferates on the last pages. He himself must have laughed in his sleeve as he vociferated. But the public gaped and fell for it.
He was the passionate missionary for the poor Javanese! Because he knew missionaries were, and are, listened to! And the Javanese were a good stick with which to beat the dog. The successful public being the dog. Which dog he longed to beat! To give it the trouncing of its life!
He did it, in missionary guise, in Max Havelaar. The book isn’t really a tract, it is a satire. Multatuli isn’t really a preacher, he’s a satirical humourist. Straight on in the life of Jean Paul Richter the same bitter, almost mad-dog aversion from humanity that appeared in Jean Paul, appears again in Multatuli, as it appears in the later Mark Twain. Dostoevsky was somewhat the same, but in him the missionary had swallowed the mad dog of revulsion, so that the howls of derision are all ventriloquistic undertone.
Max Havelaar isn’t a tract or a pamphlet, it is a satire. The
