Justus Van Effen on Reason and Virtue

chapter 4 Justus van Effen on Reason and Virtue

1 Introduction

Today, Justus van Effen is probably the best known Dutch literary author from the first half of the eighteenth century.1 He was born in Utrecht in 1684. The son of a poor and retired officer who had served in the States’ army, Van Effen had great difficulty in financing his formal education. He studied occasionally at Utrecht and at Leiden, but only took his doctorate in law in 1727. In the mean- time, he made a living as the private tutor of the sons of a number of noble families, including the Van Wassenaer-Duivenvoirdes and the Van Welderens, which left him with a life-long fascination with the nobility:

J’étois élevé avec de jeunes gens, qui se trouvant fort au dessus de moi, et par leur naissance, et par leur fortune, ne m’épargnoient pas les manières dédaigneuses et méprisantes qui sont si familiéres aux enfans de famille à l’égard de leurs inférieurs. J’étois obligé de garder un triste silence, quand ils parloient des équipages et de la table de leurs Péres, des charges et du crédit de leur oncle le Président, et du Général leur cousin.2

He was to all intents and purposes a frightful, and arguably a very un-Dutch snob. Indeed, there is something tragic about his infatuation with the nobility, his obvious despair over the lack of distinction of his own family, which was made up largely of schoolmasters, and the way in which he managed to obstruct his own social mobility by eloping repeatedly with chamber-maids. But Van Effen excelled as a journalist, responsible for a series of very successful journals. In addition, he made quite a name for himself as the French translator of Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), Joseph Addison (1672–1719), Richard Steele (1672–1719), Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), and Bernard Mandeville’s Free Thoughts on Religion.3 In 1715, accompanying his aristocratic employers on a diplomatic mission to London, he became a member of the Royal Society.

1 Buijnsters, Justus van Effen; Los, Opvoeding tot mens en burger, Chapters 2 and 4. See most recently Leemans and Johannes, Worm en donder, 184–190. 2 Van Effen, Oeuvres Diverses, V, 347. See also Vermazen and Verstegen, ‘De adel in de Hollandsche Spectator’. 3 (Mandeville), Pensées libres sur la religion. On his practice as a translator, see Jagtenberg, Swift in Nederland.

It seems no coincidence that the first reliable biography of Van Effen was only published in 1992, by the Dutch literary historian Piet Buijnsters, for Van Effen only started to publish in Dutch towards the end of his life, when he launched the extremely popular De Hollandsche Spectator, a journal which ran from 1731 to 1735, the year he passed away. Up until the 1730s Van Effen had ex- clusively written in French, and since many Dutch eighteenth-century experts traditionally were historians of Dutch literature, he has long been regarded as a foreign author. In Buijnsters’s many publications on Van Effen, the emphasis is also on the latter, Dutch phase of his career. Van Effen’s intentions have always baffled experts, if only since he hardly left any personal papers, which is odd, to say the least, for such a consummate man of letters.4 Only a tiny correspon- dence has survived. Van Effen does not figure in Israel’s Radical Enlightenment, but he does in Margaret Jacob’s, mainly on account of the part he played as an editor of the famous Journal Littéraire. Together with such luminaries as Willem Jacob ’s Gravesande, Prosper Marchand, and Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe, Van Effen edited this journal, produced by Thomas Johnson (c. 1677–1735) in The Hague, from 1712 to 1723. Interestingly, the editors acted as a collective, forming a Société that according to Jacob served as a proto-masonic society in which all sorts of radical ideas were cultivated, while its members were sworn to secrecy. Much has been written about these claims, and on the whole Dutch experts remained unconvinced.5 Neither Prosper Marchand nor ’s Gravesande can be called radicals, but Saint-Hyacinthe was a well-known deist, and a good friend of Van Effen’s.6 It is also true that while, on the whole, the Journal Littéraire did not represent the most radical variety of early Enlightenment thought,7 it did pay attention to such authors as Anthony Collins (1676–1729).8 Van Effen had been invited to join the editorial equipe that produced the Journal Littéraire because of his previous engagement with Le Misanthrope, a highly successful journal published in eighty-nine issues from May 1711 to December 1712, and re-issued repeatedly throughout the eighteenth century. It was, in fact, the first Spectatorial journal published on the European Continent, destined for an audience consisting of ‘die intellektuelle Oberschicht des ge- hobenen holländischen Bürgertums’.9 According to Buijnsters the basic aim of

4 See also Buijnsters, Spectatoriale geschriften and ‘Van “Misanthrope” tot “Hollandsche Spectator”’. 5 See, most recently, Maass, Het Journal Littéraire de la Haye. 6 See Carayol, Thémiseul de Saint-Hyacinthe and Berkvens-Stevelinck, Prosper Marchand. 7 See the special issue of De Achttiende Eeuw 18–2 (1986). 8 Journal Littéraire, III, 210. 9 Graeber, Moralistik und Zeitschriftenliteratur, 22.