Conrad Busken Huet

Busken Huet, son of a Hague civil servant, attended Gymnasium Haganum and studied theology at Leiden University, in Geneva and Lausanne.

[1] A student of Prof. Johannes Henricus Scholten and friend of Prof. Abraham Kuenen, Busken Huet familiarized his parishioners with the insights of 'Modern Theology', e.g. with respect to the Bible.

Before this time, however, he had begun his career as a polemical man of letters, although it was not until 1872 that he was made famous by the first series of his Literary Fantasies and Chronicles, a title under which he gradually gathered in successive volumes all that was most durable in his work as a critic.

Perfectly honest, desirous to be sympathetic, widely read, and devoid of all sectarian obstinacy, Busken Huet introduced into Holland the light and air of Europe.

He was a brilliant writer, who would have been admired in any language, but whose appearance in a literature so stiff and dead as that of Holland in the fifties was dazzling enough to produce a sort of awe and stupefaction.