Vondel's Lucifer Part 10

Not one of those heroes whom he did not crown with the wreath of an immortal eulogy!

Yet Vondel, even as Dante, was at heart a man of peace. Like his countrymen, he never sought the fray; but when battle was forced upon him, it meant a fight to the death. All his fighting was for peace. In one of his poems he speaks of peace as:

"A treasure--Ah! its worth unknown, Surpa.s.sing far a triumph in renown."

Elsewhere he says, "The olive more than laurel pleases me." He never forgot the high seriousness of his mission. He never lost sight of the dignity of Christian manhood.

Vondel was in a large sense also the poet of Christendom; a crusader, with his face ever towards the New Jerusalem, throned in ethereal splendors. He felt himself a member of that large Christian alliance that Henry IV. wished to found as a barrier against the encroachments of the Turk, the arch-foe of Christendom.

"He comes--the Turk! We stand with winged arms,"

he shouts in one of his poems. Yet he never forgot to pray, also, that the erring ones, both Jew and Gentile, might be brought into the fold of the "true Church."

HIS VIEWS ON LIFE.

Of particular interest are the views of so old and so profound a seer on life; for every poet has his scheme of life. What men call genius is, indeed, only the faculty of seeing life through the prism of a temperament, and the poets are preeminently the men of temperament.

Vondel, with his earnest, sincere nature, out of the bewildering chaos of his environment soon evolved his own philosophy of existence. "Life, that sad tragedy," the youthful poet calls it in his "Pa.s.sover." To him already life was a pa.s.sing pageant, and man, an exile. His epitome of the world's history, moreover, is not unlike the celebrated epigram of Rhnvis Feith, another Dutch poet:

"Man, like a withered leaf, falls in oblivion's wave.

We are, and fade away--the cradle and the grave; Between them flits a dream, a drama of the heart; Smart yields his place to Joy, and Joy again to Smart; The monarch mounts his throne; the slave bows to the floor; Death breathes upon the scene--the players are no more."

His gaze, like Milton's, was ever upward, through the prison-bars of time, into the unconfined vast of eternity. His tone, too, was most glorious when singing "celestial things."

How like the voice of a Hebrew prophet his note of warning, where he cries:

"Batavians, repent; Think of Tyre and Sidon.

Repent as the Ninevites!

O! mourn your sins!"

And after all this painful revelry of life, this l.u.s.t of action, and the battle's roar, it is a "haven sweet and still" that his earth-tormented soul longs for. How softly he whispers after his fiery trumpet tones are done:

"O! help me, O my G.o.d, to give my life to thee, My fragile self, my will, my little all. Let me, O thou beyond compare! O source of everything!

In praises rich and deep thy matchless glory sing!"

In the pensive twilight of old age, he grew more and more conscious of the true everlasting, and his patriotism became the all-embracing one of the "fatherland above." He now began to look forward with child-like faith to the revelations of the resurrection, though not forgetting that:

"The infant of eternity Must first be cradled in the tomb;"

but believing that from the cerements of mystery shall break a light to lead the soul to heaven.

HIS PLACE AND ART.

Vondel, to an extraordinary degree, possessed that keen insight into human nature which is the first requisite of the great satirist. He was the Juvenal of his time. Though his wit is never delicate nor keen, it is, however, sweeping and irresistible. His was no gentle zephyr of irony to tickle the tender cuticle of a supersensitive age, but a very cyclone of mockery to laugh a thick-skinned generation out of folly.

His poetry is ever the instrument of exaltation; and though in its condemnation of evil it often by its directness and frankness gives some offense to the delicate edge of our modern refinement, it is never indecently coa.r.s.e; it is never a pander to vice.

Indignation more intense, scorn more contemptuous, satire more powerful, invective more tremendous than that glowing in the polemics of this great satirist have never struck fear into the hardened hearts of the wicked. Few men have been so hated; few have been so loved.

Yet the sublime is the true field of this poet, and sublimer thoughts than his were surely never spoken. The grandeur of Job, the glory of the Psalms, and the splendor of the Apocalypse are all to be found in his magnificent Biblical tragedies, that n.o.ble series commencing with the "Jerusalem Desolate" of his untried youth, and ending with the "Noah" of his octogenarian ripeness.

The influence of the Bible on his art was prodigious. The Holy Writ was the inexhaustible quarry from which he hewed his master, pieces; throughout whose development may be traced the growth of a human soul.

See his paraphrase of the Psalms, if you would know his enjoyment of the serene beauty of holiness.

The artistic truth of all his creations is seen in their elemental objectivity--the portrayal by vivid flashes of feeling and by artful representation of the ever-during and imperishable. In most of his dramas is the sublimity of aeschylus with the fine proportion and the directness of Sophocles. In others, as in the "Leeuwendalers," where he sings the triumph of peace, is the sweetness and the feminine strength of Euripides.

Of Vondel it has truly been said: "_Nihil tetigit quod non ornavit_;"

for to beauty--

"G.o.d's handmaid, Beauty, Whose touch rounds A dew-drop or a world"--

he ever paid the incense of a pa.s.sionate devotion.

"aeschylus does right without knowing it," said Sophocles; even so Vondel possessed an unerring instinct for the true; ever stringing the jewelled beads of fancy on the golden thread of truth.

Like aeschylus, too, he was at heart a lyric poet; yet who shall say that in his character delineation, in the sweeping energy of his action, and in the management of his plot, he was not almost equally as admirable?

Like Dryden, Vondel rose very slowly to the stature of his full power.

All of his dramas preceding the "Lucifer" show this gradual development; all of those that come later maintain the same standard of excellence.

Like Goethe, the Dutch poet exerted an enn.o.bling influence on the theatre of his country. Like Dante, he was fond of a strong, bold outline, and always chose a direct rather than a circuitous route. Like Shakespeare, he was a keen observer of affairs, a student of life. His works are the rimed chronicles of his age. His was a transcendent genius, not oppressed by excessive culture, and with the creative ever the ruling instinct. To him poetry was the divinest of the arts. It became the ritual of his soul's worship; duty, beauty, and religion were the three strings on his melodious lyre.

His works abound in little scholasticism. Pedantry and affectation were his abomination; pith and vigor, directness and comprehensiveness, the radical elements of his strength. In his works we find a harvest of such glorious themes as store the granary of poet minds; we see everywhere evidences of power. We are ever startled by:

"The lightning flash of an immortal thought, The rolling thunder of a mighty line."

Vondel's similes are more striking than his metaphors; there is a sustained glow in his imagery. In this respect, also, he shows the Oriental bent of his genius. This is furthermore seen in his personification of the elements of nature and of the stars and constellations, as in the "Lucifer," which gives a barbaric splendor to the play. Few poets, indeed, in any literature, contain such splendid and elevated images.

He, too, could woo discordant sounds to harmony, and wove the consonantal Dutch into mellow meshes of ensnaring sound. A n.o.bleness not devoid of grace, a sublimity not austere, but warm with human sympathy; a manner more remarkable for chaste strength and a rugged symmetry of form than for delicacy or elegance--these are some of the characteristics of his style.

Not for him the sweet felicities of the mincing phraser or the dreamy languors of the riming troubadour. Not for him the gaysome zephyr or the dim, romantic moon. He is ever on the serene alt.i.tude of lofty contemplation, or in the valley, battling like a G.o.d. He is always deeply serious. He is everywhere sincere. His is the whirlwind and the storm; the noonday glare and the midnight gloom. His is the eagle's bold, epic flight and the lark's wild, lyric soar. No nightingale of sentiment trills her dulcet serenade amid the forest of his song. And yet who can be more tender and affecting, who more truly, softly sweet?

All is virile; nothing is effeminate. All is manly, healthful, pure.

There is no morbid fever of a brain diseased and foul. There is no pale, misleading will-o'-the-wisp of a heart decayed and bad. There is freshness, there is beauty, there is truth. "Magnificent" is the one word for his manner, "the grand style" of the Netherlands.

His was the sombre Occidental imagination fired with the splendor of the Orient. His poetry is a Gothic cathedral, grand, towering, and impressive, typical at once of the ma.s.sive ruggedness of the oak and the severe sublimity of the Alp; a Teutonic temple, in whose cloistered corridors we hear the majestic sweep of unseen angels' wings, while the glorious symphony of harps and psalteries, played by countless cherubim, mingling with the rich ba.s.s of the organ and the ethereal tenor of invisible choristers, rolls like a flood of celestial harmony through all the deep diapason from heaven to h.e.l.l.

The word "vondel" in the Brabantian dialect means a "little bridge,"

which suggests a not inapt a.n.a.logy; for it was Vondel who bridged the chasm between the crude Mystery and Miracle Plays of the Chambers of Rhetoric, and the "Lucifer," a drama unequalled in the history of Dutch literature. Between the dead abstractions of the Chambers and the warm, concrete life of the sublime Vondelian drama, even as between "Gorboduc"

and "Hamlet," lay the experience of one soul.

Hooft, like Heiberg in Denmark and Lessing in Germany, inst.i.tuted a revolution in the world of taste. But Vondel, even more than Hooft, developed the latent powers of the tongue, enlarged its resources, and fixed its form. His is still the n.o.blest of Dutch diction, possessing that strange virility that defies time.

At the beginning of the century the language was hardly fit for literary use. The school of Vondel in one generation--the first half of the seventeenth century--did for Holland what the thirteenth century had done for Italy and the sixteenth for England. Vondel, no less than Shakespeare, was the creator of an epoch. His influence on his own language was equally as wonderful, his impress on his country's literature almost as great.

To him the poets of the following generations, even the great Bilderdk, looked for inspiration. To him also they have ever paid homage.

Like Homer, he also found his Zoilus, but the greatest intellects of his country and his age--and surely few epochs have seen greater--Grotius, Hooft, Vossius, Huyghens, and scores of others of almost equal fame thought him not inferior to the n.o.blest poets of antiquity.