By D. H. Lawrence
Max Havelaar was first published in Holland, nearly seventy years ago, and it created a furore. In Germany it was the book of the moment, even in England it had a liberal vogue. And to this day it remains vaguely in the minds of foreigners as the one Dutch classic.
I say vaguely, because many well-read people know nothing about it. Mr. Bernard Shaw, for example, confessed that he had never heard of it. Which is curious, considering the esteem in which it was held by men whom we might call the pre-Fabians, both in England and in America, sixty years ago.
But then Max Havelaar, when it appeared, was hailed as a book with a purpose. And the Anglo-Saxon mind loves to hail such books. They are so obviously in the right. The Anglo-Saxon mind also loves to forget completely, in a very short time, any book with a purpose. It is a bore, with its insistency.
So we have forgotten, with our usual completeness, all about Max Havelaar and about Multatuli, its author. Even the pseudonym, Multatuli (Latin for: I suffered much, or: I endured much), is to us irritating as it was exciting to our grandfathers. We don’t care for poor but noble characters who are aware that they have suffered much. There is too much self-awareness.
On the surface, Max Havelaar is a tract or a pamphlet very much in the same line as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Instead of “pity the poor Negro slave” we have “pity the poor oppressed Javanese”; with the same urgent appeal for legislation, for the government to do something about it. Well, the government did something about Negro slaves, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin fell out of date. The Nether-
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