Vondel's Lucifer Part 9

Vondel, the admirer of the Italian cla.s.sics, with their delicacy and regularity, probably could not appreciate the revolutionary splendors of this great magician. Nor is there any evidence to show that any friends.h.i.+p existed between these two men, each the undying glory of his country. And yet in some respects the poet and the painter were strikingly alike. Both were masters of style, and grandly daring and original. Both were in the highest sense creative, and dealt in tremendous effects, soaring from mountain-top of grandeur into the heaven of the sublime. Each was comprehensive and universal; each was a personified mood of his nation and the maker of an epoch. Each suffered poverty in old age.

Yet in one respect the painter had the advantage over the poet. He spoke the universal language of the eye, and thus his message has reached millions who were deaf to his tongue. The political obscurity, on the other hand, into which little Holland was plunged so soon after the meteoric blaze of her brief ascendancy, confined her language to her narrow territory; and Vondel, equally worthy with Rembrandt of the admiration of the world, became a sealed book save to his countrymen.

The former, however, was the very life of his time, its recognized voice; the latter was in his life neglected, to become after his death the most ill.u.s.trious of his race, a name to conjure an age out of obscurity.

Rubens, on the other hand, the poet fully appreciated. In the dedication of his drama, "The Brothers," 1639, he calls the great Fleming "the glory among the pencils of our age."

Music, we know, had a powerful fascination for our poet. He himself played the lute, while his poetry throbs with the very heart of melody.

How lovingly he speaks of the divine art of song, that "charms the soul out of the body, filling it with rare delight--a foretaste of the bliss of the angels"!

How keen must have been his enjoyment when at Muiden he heard the lovely singers of that age--the gifted Tesselschade on her guitar, or the talented harpist, Christina van Erp; or when in his home in the Warmoesstraat he heard the patriotic chimes of his beloved city pealing the lingering hours into oblivion! How profoundly, too, must his deep, earnest soul have been stirred by the grandeur of the Psalms, rising on the wings of Zweling's n.o.ble melodies to the vaulted arches of the old cathedral where he was wont to wors.h.i.+p!

HIS FEELING FOR NATURE.

The att.i.tude of a poet toward nature is always of peculiar and absorbing interest. Is it because she is the perpetual fount of ideals, because of her voiceless sympathy with his ever-changing mood, or because her grandeur and loveliness have power to move the deeps of his soul?

However it be, the poets have almost without exception found her the source of their inspiration.

Into her rude confessional they pour the unreserved tale of sorrows that no man can understand; and she gently whispers peace. At her feet they lay the guilty story of a soul; the love, the pa.s.sions of a heart; the joys, the pains, the riotous thoughts of life; and she gently whispers peace. And here, too, Vondel opened his heart, and here he also obtained comfort for the vexing ills of life.

It has been said that man's appreciation of the beauties of nature is proportioned to the degree of his cultivation. In the ruder ages in Holland, as in Germany, the mysterious forces of the physical world and their various manifestations became personified in the good and bad genii of the Teutonic mythology. In proportion as the wors.h.i.+p of these genii ceased, nature became appreciated for its own sake. It had first to be divested of the fear-inspiring supernatural. To this Christianity and the acc.u.mulating discoveries in science largely contributed.

Karel van Mander first introduced this feeling into painting; and Hendrik Spieghel, into literature. And then came Hooft and Vondel, who in this respect, as in all else, stood far above their contemporaries.

Vondel's enjoyment of nature is not so keen as that of Hooft, but it is far deeper and stronger, and grew steadily to the end of his life. Now and then his descriptions remind one of the brooding landscapes of the "melancholy Ruysdael;" at other times of the creations of Lingelbach and Pynacker, in those striking scenes where Dutch realism and Italian fancy are oddly combined.

Under the influence of Seneca and Du Bartas, according to the artificial fas.h.i.+on of the day, he at first employed high-sounding mythological names as symbols for the things themselves; but he soon outgrew this cla.s.sical affectation. Already in his "Palamedes," especially in the chorus of "Eubeers," is this feeling for nature apparent. This charming bucolic is the picture of a Dutch landscape. Elsewhere we have mentioned its resemblance to the "L'Allegro" of Milton.

Like the bard of Avon, our poet saw but little of the world. Twice he made a business trip to Denmark, and shortly before his death he paid a visit to Cologne. In addition to this, he made several inland journeys--one to the Gooi:

"Where the grand oak so thickly grows Beyond rich fields, where buckwheat glows."

To Vondel truly "the heavens declare the glory of G.o.d, and the firmament showeth his handiwork." All of his poems, particularly the "Lucifer,"

are studded with figures of the stars.

The poet drew many of his figures, too, from animal life, as the beasts and the birds in the sustained Virgilian similes in the "Lucifer." What can be more exquisite, also, than his verses on the tame sparrow of the lovely Susanne Bartelot, in the style of the "Pa.s.ser, deliciae suae puellae" of Catullus?

The north wind he calls "a winter-bird, so cold and rough." The spring is his delight. He is glad when he sees men busy fis.h.i.+ng, planting, and hunting, and engaged in all manner of bucolic occupations. In the Norway pines unloaded on the River Y, he sees a forest of masts from which the tricolor of his dear country will be unfurled in every clime.

Would you know his capacity for aesthetic symbolism? Read his superb ode to the Rhine.

Flowers were to him the beautiful symbols of equally beautiful moral truths. What a world of pathos in his voice where he says of Mary Queen of Scots:

"O! Roman Rose, cut from her bleeding stem!"

And where he speaks of the mournful rosemary in the death-wreath of his little daughter Saartje! For little Maria, his darling grand-child, he wishes "a winding sheet of flowers--of violets white and red and purple, blue and yellow." In the garlands of his fancy he ever weaves the blooms of his delight, lilies, violets, roses--white and red--and his national flower, the glorious tulip.

He loved the open heaven and the airy freedom of solitude. "The welkin wide is mine," he says, and like a wild bird adds, "and mine the open sky." He loved the woods, where his ears were caressed by "the blithe echoes of the careless birds."

Long before Sh.e.l.ley he sang of the lark, "wiens keeltje steiltjes steigert" ("whose throat so steeply soars"). Long before Keats he was thrilled by the deep-toned nightingale.

"The shrill-voiced nightingale, Who at thy cas.e.m.e.nt bower Pours out his breathless tale,"

reminds him of the questioning soul at the window of eternity," peering through panes on darkness unconfined." Then, again, he likens himself to a nightingale, caged for days in the mournful cold, that bursts into a rapturous melody to see the warm sun melt away the gloom.

His soul communed with nature in her deepest and quietest moods. The peaceful meadow, the calm beauty of the woods, the forest-crowned mountains, the tumultuous sea were all the themes of his song.

Though his feeling for nature was not so fine nor so intense as that of some of the later poets, yet it was deeper and truer. In the world around him he saw but a reflection of the grander world beyond.

Nor was the pantheistic conception strange to him. See the first chorus of the "Lucifer," where he calls G.o.d "the soul of all we can conceive;"

and the second act, where he speaks of:

"----the farthest rounds And endless circles of eternity, That, from the bounds of time and s.p.a.ce set free, Revolve unceasingly around one G.o.d, Who is their centre and circ.u.mference.

How like the pantheism of Spinoza, first proclaimed some years later!

HIS PATRIOTISM.

Would you know him as a patriot? Hear his splendid tones of jubilation over the victory of his countrymen--a victory where truth and freedom triumphed. Hear his fine odes celebrating the commerce and the progress of the growing commonwealth. Listen to his bursts of patriotism in his "Orange May Song," and where he calls the ancient Greek sea-galleys, "child's play beside ours."

Vondel was a representative Dutchman, and there was a strong national stamp on all that he did. He was a grand type of the burgher of the great Dutch middle cla.s.s, which has ever been the glory of the Netherlands, and which has given to the world such an ill.u.s.trious array of soldiers, painters, scholars, poets, and statesmen. In reading him we are continually reminded that we are in the land of d.y.k.es and windmills. Thus all of his heroes are invested with Holland dignities.

We hear of burghers, burgomasters, and stadtholders; of the dunes, the sea, the dams, the strand, and the green, fertile meadows. Wherever the scene of the play, we always recognize the streets, the ca.n.a.ls, the houses, the palaces, and the environs of Amsterdam. This was not due to a lack of historical information, as was the case with Shakespeare, but because the poet desired to bring the truth closer to the hearts of his hearers. The fact, too, that this made the scenic requirements of a play considerably less, thus reducing the expense of presentation, might also have had some influence.

Vondel, furthermore, when representing the past, never forgot the present. It was ever before his eyes. Hence many of his plays were political allegories, and were significant for their bearing upon the time.

The one universal characterization of all of his work, one that glows in every poem, is his love of freedom--the ruling pa.s.sion of his countrymen. Already in the "Pa.s.sover "--his first tragedy, written at the age of twenty-six--we hear his cry, "O! sweetest freedom." Soon afterwards, in his lyrics and in "Palamedes," he showed his strong sympathy with Oldenbarneveldt; and during the bitter persecution that followed, when he was forced to fly like a hunted beast from house to house, this spirit grew by the opposition that it fed upon into a fierce blaze, only quenched by death.

Like the Father of Tuscan literature, his thoughts were ever attuned to the spirit of his age. Like Dante, too, he was ever in the heart of the battle. Like him, also, he was not worldly wise, and was naturally of a rebellious temperament. He was himself in perpetual revolt. This was due, however, not to a saturnine disposition, but to a keen sense of justice, and to the idealism of a lofty, cultivated mind. To compel the age to conform to the measure of his own conceptions he often found procrustean methods necessary. Hence his stern aggressiveness against wrong.

He fain would have sat apart in silent contemplation, but he was destined to know neither the Olympic calm of Goethe, nor the sublime serenity of Shakespeare. "The life of the day, like an octopus, grasped him and would not let him go." He drank in the wine of freedom, and his soul was filled with the hunger of strife. His cry now became a battle-cry. Wherever he saw wrong and injustice--and his eyes were ever open--he donned his armor and dealt crus.h.i.+ng blows for the cause of the oppressed. Earnest, still, and pa.s.sionate, great of soul and impressionable of heart, the poet was a born fighter. His whole life was a polemic against tyranny.

His dear fatherland was the alpha and omega of his inspiration, and he was, perhaps, the first Dutchman who deeply felt the consciousness of national power. The next object of his soul's affection was his city, Amsterdam, whose glories he never grew tired of singing. His characterization:

"The town of commerce, Amsterdam, Known round the circle of the globe,"

might not improperly be reflected upon its new and yet more powerful namesake in the New World, of whose grandeur he might well be deemed the prophet, when, in his "Gysbrecht," with patriotic eloquence he pictures the Amsterdam of the coming centuries. What though the ruling trident has departed from the "Venice of the North," her peerless daughter, far across the seas, yet holds triumphant sway!

In his fiery patriotism Vondel much reminds us of Milton. He also was at heart a zealous republican, though he had a Christian's unshaken reverence for the anointed kings of earth, and for what he thought a G.o.d-const.i.tuted authority. Hence the "Lucifer," and his relentless opposition to the regicides of England and to Cromwell, "that murderer without G.o.d and shame, who dared to desecrate and to a.s.sault the Lord's anointed," as he says bitterly in one of his polemics.

Like the great Englishman, the Hollander was also a good hater; and he never spared what he hated. Though charitable, he was uncompromising, and forgave not easily; always, however, deprecating the excesses of the "root and branch" zealots of his own party. Just as Milton, after having joined the Presbyterians, forsook them when they in turn began to persecute the followers of other creeds, so, too, Vondel left the Remonstrants when they crossed the jealous line of freedom.

We are indeed inclined to believe that his strongest trait was his love of justice, which caused him to oppose tyranny under every guise, and to stigmatize the faults of his own church and party with expletives as crus.h.i.+ng as those that he hurled against his enemies.

Thus his hatred of the Catholic Spaniards and of the Dutch Gomarists.

The b.l.o.o.d.y persecution of the one was in his eyes no worse than the oppressive hypocrisy of the other. Even his beloved House of Orange drew from him the bitterest opposition when, in Prince Maurice and in William II., it threatened the liberty of his country and the privileges of his beloved Amsterdam. Of him it may truly be said that his eyes were never blinded by party prejudice.

Milton, in an immortal sonnet, blew a trumpet-blast of vengeance for the slaughtered Piedmontese. Why was that trumpet silent w hen his own party perpetrated a similar ma.s.sacre at Drogheda? Vondel was, indeed, far more magnanimous than his great English contemporary. He had more of "the milk of human kindness."

How strong is our poet's admiration for the founders of the Republic, the fathers of the "golden age," and for that grand race of intrepid discoverers, pioneers, and explorers that pierced every corner of the globe! How, too, flames his soul with pride, when he recounts the brave deeds of those old sea-lions, Tromp and de Ruyter, and their fearless companions, in the fierce battle against the growing English supremacy!