Just as there can be poetry without poems, just as landscapes, people or facts may be poetic, history appeared to Huizinga as poetry, and so he approached it as a form of literature. Historiography as a profession was of little concern to him, and language was everything. He saw language as a natural resource with an inherent poetic richness. To appreciate this is to read the unity of his work as the unity of his character. To be sure, Huizinga went through a process of development, and modified his style over the years. But that is the stuff of biography. The subject here is the enduring nature of the form; the subject is Huizinga the poet. ‘Et souviens-toi qu’en nous il existe souvent,’ he hummed to Alfred de Musset's lyrics, ‘un poète endormi toujours jeune et vivant.’ His monographs and biographies, studies and essays are all part of a single endeavour; they constitute an organic whole in which style, far from being a mode of technical manipulation, is a poetic process.

CONTRASTS

The most singular and striking element of Huizinga's style, perhaps, is his use of contrasting adjectives: the consistency with which he uses oppositions between, say, ‘heavy’ or ‘black’, ‘sharp’, and ‘high’ on the one hand, and ‘light’, ‘fluid’, and ‘humble’ on the other. Or take bont, meaning ‘colourful’, ‘multicoloured’, ‘diverse’. This is one of Huizinga's favourite words, but above all we notice the frequency with which it is opposed to innig, ‘intimate’ or ‘deep’. Both bont and innig were common currency in Huizinga's day, especially in the idiom of the 1880 Movement. Still, Huizinga's idiosyncratic use of them, the way in which he contrasts and harmonizes them, exemplifies the subtle mechanics of his style.

The versatile bont is certainly one of Huizinga's favoured repositories for a wide spectrum of meanings. It is applied to a specific style of Sanskrit drama, ‘dazzling [bont] with the choicest of handsome costumes’. The oldest Buddhist literature is described as ‘a rich [bont] treasure-house of the most diverse forms and colours’. And bont is put to work to describe mediaeval trade, ‘constrained within such a narrow framework and at the same time so rich and intricate [bont], so highly developed’.