must feel that, as he spoke of the rice-fields on the mountains, his glances wandered up to them through the open end of the hall, and that he really saw those fields. One realizes that, when he made the tree ask where the man was who as a child had played at its foot, that tree was actually there and, to the imagination of Havelaar’s audience, gazed around in truth inquiring about the departed dwellers of Lebak. Also, he invented nothing: he heard the tree speaking, and imagined he was only repeating what in his poetic conception he had so clearly understood.
If anyone should make the remark that the originality in Havelaar’s manner of speaking was not altogether indisputable, as his language was reminiscent of the style of the prophets in the Old Testament, I must remind him that I have already described how in moments of exaltation he really became more or less a seer. Fed on the impressions communicated to him by a life in forests and on mountains, surrounded by the poetry-breathing atmosphere of the East, and therefore drawing from sources similar to those of the Monitors of old with whom one felt at times compelled to compare him, we may guess that he would not have spoken otherwise even if he had never read the glorious poems of the Old Testament. Do we not find, already in the verses that date back to his youth, lines like the following, written on the Salak—one of the giants, though not the biggest, among the mountains of the Preanger Regencies—where again the start suggests the sweetness of his emotions, but suddenly passes into an echo of the thunder which he hears from below?—
By hill and mountain-range his prayer sounds true . . .
Here more than yonder are my soul-wings fleeter:
On mountain-heights I soar my God unto!
Here He created temple-choirs and altars,
Where human footsteps would seem blasphemy;
Here, in His tempest, He inspired our psalters . . .
Here rolls His thunder, voicing: ‘Majesty!’”
