“I ask you, Chiefs of Bantan Kedool, why are there so many that went away to be buried where they were not born? Why does the tree ask what has become of the man whom he saw as a child playing at its foot?”
Havelaar ceased for a moment. One had to hear and see in order to realize the impression his language made. When he spoke of his child, his voice had a softness, an indescribable emotion, which invited the question: “Where is the little one? Already now let me kiss the child that makes his father speak like this!” But when shortly afterwards, with little apparent transition, he passed on to the questions as to why Lebak was poor, and why so many inhabitants of the district left for elsewhere, there was a quality in the tone of his voice which reminded one of that made by a gimlet when it is forcibly screwed into hard wood. Yet he did not speak loudly, nor lay any special stress on isolated words, and there was even a certain monotony in his voice; but, be it study or nature, this very monotony made the impression of his words more intense on the hearts that were so particularly receptive to such language.
His metaphors, always taken from the life about him, were to him truly the auxiliary means to make clear what he wished to express, and not, as is so often the case, irksome appendages that overload the periods of orators, without adding any clearness to the sense of the matter they pretend to elucidate. We are long accustomed to the absurdity of the expression: “strong as a lion,” but he that first in Europe used this metaphor showed that he had not drawn his simile from the poesy of the soul, which gives images by way of reasoning, and which cannot speak otherwise, but that he had merely copied his trite commonplace from some book or other—perhaps the Bible—in which a lion was mentioned. For none of his hearers had ever experienced the strength of the lion, and consequently it would have been far more requisite to make them realize that strength by comparison of the lion with something the power of which was known to them by experience, than vice versa.
Be it acknowledged that Havelaar was in truth a poet. Anyone
