Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

He is, furthermore, to act as sentinel over the garden and over the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Ozias is enjoined to capture and securely bind the host of the infernal animals with the lion and the dragon, who so furiously raged against the standard of Heaven. Listen to this stern command:

"Sweep from the sky these hordes accursed, and bind
Them neck and claw, and chain them forcibly."

Azarias is entrusted with the key of the bottomless abyss, wherein he is commanded to lock all that assail the powers of Heaven. To Maceda is given the torch to light the sulphurous lake down in the centre of the earth, wherein Lucifer, the evil-breeding protagonist, with poetic justice, so near the scene of his last flagrant crime, is doomed to endless solitary torment; there,

"... In the eternal fire
Unquenchable, with chilling frosts commingled,"

"Amid the bitter blast of memory's regret,"

to suffer the throes of ten thousand hells, and to discover

"How slow time limps upon a crutch of pain,"

through an eternity of keen remorse.

For the last time the chorus comes on the stage, echoing in a brief epilogue the one silvery voice of hope that speaks from that dark conclusion of multitudinous despair.

It, too, gives promise of a brighter dawn, wherein the "grand deliverer" shall cleanse fallen man of the "foul taint original," opening for him a fairer Paradise on high, where the thrones, made vacant by the fall of the angels, shall, as in Cædmon, be filled by the glorified souls of the children of men Thus the spectator is left attuned to the triumph of Christ in the promised reconciliation, and the work of redemption is made complete.

In this noble ending, evil, though not annihilated, is controlled; the good is victorious; and Heaven is once more restored to its pristine holiness. The fallen angels, the imperious lords of Heaven, have been succeeded by the lowly third estate, the human worms whom they so much despised.

Thus here, too, revolution has proved progression. The storm of war has ceased, and above the thunder-mantled sky shines the glorious rainbow of peace.

THE "LUCIFER" AS A DRAMA.

Like all of Vondel's dramas, the "Lucifer" is after the Greek model; and surely that model was never inspiration for a more splendid tragedy. Vondel's idea of the classic drama was derived from the close study of the ancients and their modern Dutch commentators--Heinsius, Vossius, Grotius, Barlæus, and other Latinists of renown.

The "Lucifer" is a tragedy after Chaucer's own heart:

"Tragedis is to sayn a certeyn storie,
As olde bokes maken us memorie,
Of hem that stood in greet prosperité,
And is yfallen out of heigh degree
Into miserie, and endith wrecchedly."

There is no death, no blood, no murder. It is the drama of a magnificent ruin!

The action of the play, pursuing the straight track of one controlling purpose, and moving with terrible majesty to the goal of an inevitable destiny, also makes it a tragedy in the larger dramatic sense. The wonderful characterization and the overpowering ethical motive also make its application universal. The epico-lyrical quality of this drama, furthermore, gives it a force and cohesiveness unattainable by either epic or lyric.

True, the "Lucifer" as a drama does not deal with men. However, this is a distinction without a difference; for the characters, while they command our awe as divinities not subject to the limitations of this carnal shroud, the body, are yet sufficiently human to elicit our warmest sympathy.

It is, moreover, a play full of heart-agitating passion; and it is addressed, in a most extraordinary degree, to the moral nature--the chief function of all tragedy. Here, too, as in the great drama of the universe, the divine law is the first propelling cause of the action.

The clash of interests and the logical destiny of cause and effect carry the tragic subject without apparent effort to its denouement. The causes are everywhere adequate to produce the effects, and no trivial effects are the result of the huge action; no mountain is set in travail to bring forth a mouse. The disposition of the characters also conforms to our sense of justice, and their development is everywhere within the range of probability.

Besides the main theme, ambition, and the chief object, self-aggrandizement, are various incidental themes and objects which naturally arise out of the circumstances and conditions of the play. This is, however, but natural, and only renders the drama more varied and interesting; these little streams of interest being but tributaries to the main stream of the action, contributing to, rather than retarding, its majestic sweep to the Niagara of its catastrophe.

The drama, though concerning the divine beings of another sphere, conforms, except where tradition or religion has invested these with extraordinary qualities and powers, to the physical requirements of this, thus making it more probable and the action more dramatic.

The dramatist is a veritable illusion-weaving magician, leading the spectator through tortuous mazes of expectation into a labyrinth of suspense. The end is reached, and lo! the path which appeared so bewilderingly crooked is straight and direct, without a turn to its starting point. Everywhere, too, the mind of the reader coöperates with the mind of the poet in his logical appeals to the heart.

The action, moreover, has its mainspring in error, and ends in showing the natural consequences of crime, with a picture of the sin atoned though not unpunished.

Nowhere is the human interest of this drama lessened by grand scenic displays. These are truly splendid; but even such sublime properties as the universe affords only heighten the interest by showing that, after all, "the thinking will" we call the soul is the noblest work of God. As played on the stage, the drama must have had exceedingly simple, though perhaps somewhat costly, accessories.

Nothing in the play is more admirable than the uninterrupted contrast of thought and the constant antithesis of character. Nothing, furthermore, can surpass the inimitable art with which the monologue is handled at the critical moments that determine a character, as in Lucifer's soul-revealing soliloquy in the fourth act. Here the action, though still sweeping irresistibly on, seems to be in perfect poise, while the inmost secrets of the heart are laid bare.

In his dialogue, also, Vondel is simple and direct. The conversation is always used to recall, to suggest, or to display some motive that binds, while, at the same time, it urges, the action. In such scenes, of course, talk is action.

If art is, as some assert, a thing of proportions, then surely this drama is entitled to the highest praise; for its proportions are irreprehensible. If, too, as Ruskin says, "Poetry is the suggestion by the imagination of noble grounds for the noble emotions," as a poem, also, it is unsurpassed. There are, indeed, as many definitions of poetry as there are poets. The "Lucifer" is Vondel's definition.

It is conception that suggests the correlated thought. It is construction that shapes it to the stature of a grand design; and construction is the highest form of the creative intellect; for was it not this same power that framed the templed universe out of the scattered fragments of countless millions of stars? It is in construction, the highest requisite of the dramatist, wherein the "Lucifer" is most grand. The architecture of the play is as symmetrical as a beautiful Greek temple.

There is no obscurity in this classic drama, into which, moreover, the poet has introduced enough of the modern romantic to lend it vivacity and interest. Such a subject could not have been cast save in a classic mould. The romantic drama would not have been equal to the majestic dignity and the stately style demanded by this sublime theme.

Each act, with its own subordinate conclusion, is followed by a chorus which not only fills the pause, but also intensifies, while at the same time it relieves, the suspense. These choruses, noble melodies of retrospect, are yet charged with the rumbling thunder of the coming catastrophe. Each is, as it were, an incarnate conscience, the concentrated echo of the preceding act, gathering around it the action, and blending harmoniously with it.

Vondel is one of the few moderns who grasped the fact that the Hellenic drama originated in rhythmic song, and that around the choral ode should gather the action and the interest of the play. His chorus, therefore, act both as singers and as interpreters of the action, relieving the measured tread of stately tragedy with pauses of musical suspense. Often, also, they break into the dialogue, and act as mediators and as moralists.

The chorus represent the populi of Heaven, and voice the sentiments of the many. The interchange of thoughts between chorus and chorus, and the chorus and the persons, produces variety. To this the swift changes of thought and emotion also contribute.

Here, also, as in the Greek dramas, we observe the proper subordination of the chorus to the protagonist and the chief characters, and of the lyric to the dramatic elements, while through the whole play the length of the speeches is artfully suited to the character and the situation. Much, too, might be said about Vondel's felicities of rime, his sweet feminine rimes, his stately, sonorous hexameters, his trimeters and tetrameters, his frequent use of the various classic metres, and his admirable shifting of the cæsura to suit the feeling of the speaker.

The three unities are here also carefully preserved, which perhaps was the more easily done on account of the divinity of the characters, to which a celerity of movement was natural not possible to mortals.

Hence, the time of the whole drama from the inception of the revolt until the final catastrophe could very probably be included in twenty-four hours. The unity of action we have already spoken of. The unity of place is equally well kept. The "Lucifer," hardly two thousand seven hundred lines, including the choruses, conforms also in respect to length to the classic standard.

The growth of the play is no less wonderful than the characterization, many preparations and conspiracies developing at last into a battle, many scenes into a definite situation; the numberless changes of cause and effect at length resulting in a plot full of the force of an action-impelling motive. Thus from the varied complexities of circumstance and situation is at last evolved the one controlling purpose.

A fine antithesis to the turbulent catastrophe is the quiet climax, Lucifer's soliloquy in Act IV.; where, however, all that precedes is resolved into one intense situation. The advent of Rafael here, furthermore, is an unforeseen complication to heighten the interest.

The end, by suggestive reminiscence of the fading perspective of the beginning, unites the commencement with the close, making the drama an organic whole, whose soul is purpose and whose heart is truth.

The exquisite blending of the action with the characters, each shaping the other, has rarely been equalled. It is the characters, after all, that are the chief interest and that control the action. We see here the strange anomaly of a classic play where the individual shapes the action, and is yet conquered by law.

Here, where the will of a god clashes with the supreme will of the Supreme God, great art is necessary to sustain human interest--to delay the interposition of the superior deity until the very close.

The primary motive, self-exaltation, fails grandly; yet in its failure it brings into partial fulfilment the secondary motive, the fall of man. True, the logical catastrophe does not occasion surprise. It has all along, as in every tragedy, been foreshadowed by circumstances big with fate. Yet Vondel has added the element of surprise, and to a remarkable degree, by the introduction of a second catastrophe, the expulsion of Adam from Paradise, the natural result of the first. Thus curiosity and reason only end with the play itself. One by one, too, the various episodes are seen to spring from the action, which, moreover, requires no introduction of antecedent circumstance to set it in motion.

The _ensemble_ scenes, or groups, a sure test of the great dramatist, are handled in a masterly manner. There is also a delightful retardation which heightens the suspense and delays the catastrophe, until, like an electric cloud, it bursts into the thunder of its own generating.

Each messenger, in the play, brings vividly before the eye of the spectator the consequential scene which he himself has just witnessed--of which, perhaps, he has been a part.

Thus, by the artful use of motive-producing complications, the action, once projected, moves on to its end, where the totality of figures, thoughts, and emotions are drawn into one maelstrom of ruin.

There is no distraction. There is no swerving from the opening to the catastrophe; from the catastrophe to the conclusion, the awful retribution.

As in the tragedy of life, so, too, in this drama, the innocent suffer through the punishment that overtakes the guilty; witness the sorrow of Rafael and the good angels at the fall of their fellows; the sin of Adam and Eve, and the doom pronounced upon their innocent descendants.

The truth of Vondel's poetic conception is seen in the fact that its essential elements are coeval with man and coeternal with the universe. As in Sophocles, we hardly know which most to admire, the balanced proportions of the play, or its general conception. Here, also, we often, in a single sentence, find a synthesis of a situation or a character.

Vondel, moreover, most impressively introduces into the ancient Greek form, with its suggestion of an over-ruling destiny, the modern idea of free will. And he does it so admirably that there is no confusion. Simple in its complexity, splendid in its largeness of design, grand in its harmony, magnificent in its whole conception, the drama sweeps irresistibly through the whole gamut of human emotion.

Such epic breadth and intense lyric concentration have rarely been combined in one poem. Such a drama is, indeed, the sum of all the arts!

THE CHARACTERIZATION.

Vondel's devils are no devils, until the last act, when they act no more, but are described. Then truly they are the incarnations of Hell's deepest deviltries, and are as splendid in their malignity as they were formerly superb in their wickedness.

The sophistries of these evil spirits are scarcely inferior to those in "Faust." They are the meshes of a gigantic delusion woven by the leaders of the conspiracy around the rank and file of the angels, seducing them from bliss to doom.

Belzebub is the cynic of the play--a compound of Iago and Mephistopheles. This dark contriver of hellish plots is colossal in his malignity. He is the first in Heaven to make a prurient suggestion. He is more fiend than his noble superior. Sleepless, unrelenting, resourceful, alert, he conjures motives of evil even from the tender beauty of the primal innocence. He finds the gall of hate even in the sweet flower of Eden's sinless love. His is the deliberating intellect necessary for the Stadtholder's counsellor; and though slowly unfolding the many sides of his malign nature, he is, we feel, evil from the beginning, grandly diabolical.

Belial, conscienceless and without remorse, is utterly depraved; a vile seducer, the genius of deceit, who does evil for its own sake; a useful tool to serve the baser purposes of the chief devil. Apollion has some gleams of goodness in his nature, but is weak, lustful, and easily influenced by the hope of gain--a type of the traitor. All of the devils, and they are the chief characters of the play, may be supposed to represent the different phases of evil; while the good angels, whose characteristics have been but briefly indicated, show the different attributes of the Deity.

As in the "Œdipus Tyrannus," "the country must be purged," so here, too, the Heavens must be cleansed of "this perjured scum,"--the rebellious angels.

We must now proceed to speak of Lucifer: his all-consuming wrath, his ambition, his pride, and infernal energy. These traits are exhibited in gigantic outlines even before his fall. After his defeat, what can be more impressive than his all-enduring Archangelic passion, glorious in its all-defying mood? Not his the wild outbursts nor the mad ravings of Lear. Every ebullition of his anger is fraught with purpose, and is transmuted into revengeful action. Mind and spirit are, after all, the conquering forces of the universe. Material circumstance and physical environment cannot thwart their design. It is this ennobling consciousness of intellectual power, supplemented by unconquerable and irresistible will, that makes the magnificence of the personality of Lucifer. Like Milton's Satan, he is, we feel, most near a god when he is most a devil.

Lucifer, like Macbeth, is not influenced all at once. With a god-like circumspection, he first weighs every atom of probability. However, when the die is cast and the line of rebellion has once been crossed, he fights to the last ditch.

Lucifer is a sublime egoist--the spirit of negation placed against the limitations of the positive. He is overpowering. No one, even for an instant, dares to dispute his power, not even the grand Michael. His is the unconquerable Batavian heart. He dominates the entire action, and like a magnet draws all the other characters around him. Though jealousy of man is the animating passion of the lower devils and the excuse of the protagonist himself, yet we feel that he uses this merely as a stalking horse for his overweening ambition. Lucifer would become God himself. It is an unwritten law of great tragedy that the villain, though a villain, must be admirable. Lucifer, arch-villain that he is, is superb in his constructive villany--a very god of evil, with resources at his command formidable enough to make or to mar a world, and yet resulting only in his own undoing. Proud in the consciousness of godlike powers, he thinks,

"I have a bit of fiat in my soul,
And can myself create a little world."

His confidence, however, proves to be but the fiat of his damnation.

"There is no fiercer hell than the failure in a great undertaking." Into this hell Lucifer was forever thrust. Yet he is allowed one brief moment of happiness; it is where he proclaims himself a god, and is worshipped by his followers.

Lucifer is the prince of thinkers, and a monarch among actors. His is the intellect to plan and to conceive, and the will to execute; and will is above all the one quality emphasized. As much as he is in this respect supereminent, so much greater the degree of his guilt. Could the force of this faculty have been better shown than in the picture of the fallen Archangel, where, in the agonies of torture and the throes of expiation, he not only deliberates, resolves, and executes, but even exults, as, culling the bitter sweetness of a hopeless hope from the hell-flower of despair, he rejoices in the fiendish triumph that he knows is but the prelude to everlasting doom? Unlike the unconquerable and torture-racked Prometheus, he allows not one sigh to escape from the depths of his anguish; not one moan rises from his abysmal despair. Malediction alone can unlock his implacable lips. From even the caverns of Hell he projects his evil genius back into space to accomplish a predetermined revenge.

Lucifer reasons with Rafael and with Gabriel; but with Michael only war is possible. The two chiefs are too equal in power, too proud, and too warlike to waste time in words. Each, accustomed to command, will brook no authority in the other. The pathos and the tenderness of Rafael, on the other hand, present a strong relief to the sombre passions of Lucifer. It is the ethical portraiture of this drama that is its most powerful feature.

Lucifer, also, in a certain sense, represents the ideal Dutchman--combining in a losing struggle the daring of Civilis and the intellect of Erasmus with the astuteness and magnanimity of William the Silent--a grand hero in a bad cause! Lucifer has indeed "set the time out of joint" for Adam's seed; yet the play also gives promise of the Christ who will again make all things right; there is here, also, a suggestion of the "Paradise Regained."

The drama is ended; the thunders have ceased to roll, and are again chained to the chariot of the Deity; the lightnings once more slumber in the bosom of the night. The battle is over, the air is again pure and clear. The good has been exalted; the bad has been debased. The heart of the spectator, too, has been the scene of the battle of the passions: terror, pity, hope, despair, love, joy, peace have each alternated in brief possession. The _katharsis_ of the soul is accomplished. It has been purified of all that is gross and earthly. It has become spiritualized. It has become conscious of its wings, thrilled with aspiration for the ethereal and for the stars beyond.

IS THE "LUCIFER" A POLITICAL ALLEGORY?

It is maintained by several eminent Dutch critics that the "Lucifer" is a political allegory like the "Palamedes" and several other tragedies of Vondel.

Some of these literati have displayed considerable ingenuity in their attempt to prove that it typifies the struggle of the Netherlands against Spain; Orange corresponding to Lucifer, Philip II. to God, Alva to Michael, the Cardinal Granvelle to Adam.

Many of the situations of the play bear out this analogy. Lucifer, like Orange, was the idol of his followers. Both desire to change a hated tyranny to a state of freedom. Both speak grandiloquently of a charter disannulled and of ancient privileges violated.

The simile of the sea dashing in vain against the rock in the battle-scene of the "Lucifer" may be supposed to illustrate the device of Orange: "_Sævis tranquillus in undis._" The crescent array of the rebels may refer to the shibboleth of the water-beggars: "Rather Turk than Papist."

The lion and the dragon that draw the chariot of the Archfiend are also blazoned upon the crest of the two provinces, Holland and Zealand, which were the chief supporters of Orange. The medley of seven beasts into which Lucifer, in falling, was changed, may be taken to represent the seven Northern provinces that became the Dutch Republic, while the Southern provinces, which remained loyal to Spain, nearly two-thirds of the whole number, may be typified by the faithful angels.

Lucifer renewed the fight three times; so did Orange. Both pretended to fight "_pro lege, rege, et grege_."

In that age, before successful revolutions had established a precedent, no revolt could hope for success unless by conforming to the maxim "the king can do no wrong"--a cardinal principle in every religion of that day. By this political fiction rebels professed to fight for the king, though really fighting against him. Vondel pictured his revolt after these examples, the most prominent of which was the revolt of his own country against Philip II. Lucifer, however, fell, and Orange triumphed; though the assassination of the latter might be taken as equivalent to a fall. Lucifer accomplished the fall of Adam, even as Orange brought about the expulsion of Granvelle. Alva, like Michael, furthermore, received the charge "to burn out with a glow of fire and zeal" the polluting stains of heresy. Egmont and Montigny, like Gabriel and Rafael, acted as ambassadors.

The cause of the jealousy of the Netherlander, as in the "Lucifer," was the fact that greater privileges were accorded to foreigners (the Spaniards) than to the hereditary princes of the land. As in the drama Gabriel's proclamation is followed by protest and rebellion, so in the Netherlands the unjust edicts of Philip were the primary cause of revolt.

It was the sworn duty of the Stadtholder, William of Orange, even as of the Stadtholder Lucifer, to maintain the laws of his superior. Orange also held a position similar to that of Lucifer. He was the favorite of Charles V., Stadtholder of Holland, and Knight of the Golden Fleece. Each placed himself at the head of the disaffected at their earnest importunity. Each was accused of ambition. Each accomplished his designs by Machiavelian methods, and attained a brief exaltation.

Cardinal Granvelle, who held a position similar to Adam in the drama, was, like him, of low descent; and was honored with greater privileges than even the nobles themselves, who hated him intensely. The opponents of the Cardinal changed the liveries of their servants into motley to mock him; so, also, we hear Lucifer say to his minions:

"Lay off your morning rays and wreaths of light."

The nobles complained of the presence of Spanish troops in the land; so the Luciferians speak of "Adam's life-guard, many thousand strong." The arguments of the drama were also the arguments advanced by the several parties in the Dutch revolt.

The three hierarchies of Heaven in the "Lucifer" correspond to Margaret's three Councils of State. Lucifer, though described as nighest to God, belonged only to the third rank of the hierarchies; just as Orange, though first among the Dutch noblemen, and next to Philip II., was yet subject to the State as Stadtholder.

Brederode, as the head of the aristocrats who went with supplications to Margaret of Parma, bears a close analogy to Belzebub, where the latter says to the Luciferians,

"With prayers ye first and best might gain your end,"

and where, too, he expresses his willingness to act as mediator. In this scheme, furthermore, Apollion would represent Louis of Nassau, and Belial, Marnix St. Aldegonde.

Others see in the drama the career of the great Wallenstein, the ambitious Generalissimo of the Thirty Years' War. In his envy of the son of his emperor, and in his desire to place the crown of Hungary on his own head, an analogy is suggested to Lucifer's attitude to Adam. Even as the celestial rebels swore their chief allegiance, so, too, his generals, after the reverse of Pilsen, when his enemies wished to deprive him of his command, swore him faith and fealty.

Vondel, it is asserted, was conscious of this when he dedicated this drama to Ferdinand the Third, Emperor of Austria, who was no other than the intended King of Hungary who had aroused the envy of Wallenstein, and whose succession to the crown had been so much endangered by the latter's treachery.

But there is yet another view of the subject, which has even more show of probability than either of the others. It is supposed by many that the "Lucifer" was intended to represent the English Rebellion of 1648. Lucifer in this analogy is supposed to represent Cromwell, whom Vondel hated so bitterly and against whom he thundered such tremendous invective. Indeed, there are some external circumstances in support of this theory. Speaking of his lampoons on the great English rebel, the poet says that they were written the same year that he "taught Lucifer his rôle to play." He also says elsewhere that the "Lucifer" was presented,

"Forsooth, as edifying lore,
Wherein proud England hath much store."

If the last supposition be true, the drama is remarkable as prophesying the fall of the Commonwealth, and the Restoration. It would then, moreover, not be uninteresting to compare it with Dryden's "Absalom and Achitophel," in which Oliver Cromwell is also one of the chief characters.

THE INTERPRETATION.

Yet we cannot believe that the "Lucifer" is a political allegory. Vondel was no more the poet of the "Palamedes." Those thirty years had wonderfully developed his art. Nor is it an idyllic allegory like the "Comus;" but, like the "Divina Commedia," an allegory of the world. Yet behind the characters of the sacred legend we may also see the national heroes, Siegfried, Beowulf, Civilis, Orange.

The "Lucifer" represents the gigantic and eternal battle of evil with good, with the universe as the battle-field--a type of the unending conflict in which the good finally conquers. We see here the Oriental imagination curbed by the reason of the Occident--the cold, statuesque Greek form aglow with the blazing Hebrew soul. The flaming Seraph of Christianity, winged with truth and armed with the lightning sword of Jehovah and the blasting thunderbolts of Jupiter, sweeps triumphant through the whole drama. Right prevails; wrong is overthrown.

The "Lucifer" is a theory of existence, a scheme of the universe. It is the revolt of the aspiring ideal against the invincible actual. It is the material against the spiritual; the unknown rendered comprehensible by the symbolism of the known.

"From shadowy types to truth; from flesh to spirit"

--this is the order of its progression.

It is the revolution of the speculative against the rule of dogma; an impassioned contemplation of life, in which the whole gamut of human feelings is harmoniously sounded; in which every link in the chain of causation is struck into the music of its meaning; in which the past and the future are mirrored in the present.

It is the struggle of a soul against the unchangeable environment of fate; the drama of the collective human soul aspiring from a chaos of unrest to the unattainable peace of absolute truth.

Furthermore, the tragedy typifies the character of the Hollanders themselves; a people who, as Charles V. once remarked, made "the best of subjects, but the worst of slaves;" a nation that has ever been in revolt, not only against man, but even against the sublime forces of nature; a race that has never known defeat.

The Batavians, who under Claudius Civilis carried on a successful rebellion against the all-conquering eagles of Rome--the only Germans who never bowed beneath the Latin yoke--and their Saxon descendants, who were the strongest foes of the territorial aggressions of Charlemagne, were all flamed with the same unconquerable spirit. It was this spirit, too, that enabled the Hollanders of the seventeenth century, after more than eighty years of terrible conflict, to free themselves alike from the grinding oppression of Spain and the still more oppressive coils of religious tyranny.

The Dutch struggle itself was a terrific drama, of which William the Silent was the protagonist, and liberty the one controlling purpose that animated every character, that impelled every action. It was the details, the reasons, the arguments, and the conditions of this stupendous struggle that were before the poet's mind when he wrote this tragedy.

The "Lucifer," though a symbolic sketch of the age which preceded it, is essentially a drama embodying the spirit of the time in which it was created. It is a reflex of the life of that epoch, the embodiment of the soul consciousness of the "storm and stress" period of Vondel's own life. He himself was in perpetual revolt against the universal practices of his age.

Is it a wonder that men, seeing in it not only a picture of themselves, but also of their time, were at once attracted by its significance?

The Titanic imagination of the "Nibelungen" and the tremendous imagery of "Beowulf" were both the inevitable expression of the tumultuous soul of the Teuton, conscious of a great destiny. This was in the dawn of the nation's childhood.

We next view the race in the pride of its glorious youth, rousing itself, after the sleep of centuries, to gigantic action. From that age sprang the "Lucifer."

We then see it in the maturity of noble, reflecting manhood, whose years have given dignity and strength. "Faust" stands before us as its full expression. And Vondel and Goethe are each the "Seeing Eye" that pierced the hidden mystery of his time. Each in his own way solved the world riddle.

Like "Faust," the "Lucifer" is "ever more a striving towards the highest existence." True, the striving hero has here been hurled to the depths of the lowest abyss; yet is not his motive also the animating spirit of the race, ever onward and upward towards the unattainable?

Like the defeated Lucifer in Hell, the Teuton is ever evolving courage for a new attempt, fired with the hope that never despairs.

"Siegfried," "Beowulf," and "Lucifer," all typify the Anglo-Saxon spirit of revolt, that love of freedom and that strong individualism which has always been the distinguishing characteristic of the Low Germans.

Of the "Lucifer," therefore, it may truly be said, it is the biography of a national soul.

TRANSLATOR.

Bibliography of Vondelian Literature.

JOOST VAN DEN VONDEL, SEIN LEBEN UND SEINE WERKE. Von A. Baumgartner, S.J. Freiburg-im Breisgau, 1882. Pages 344-347, synopsis of Vondel's works.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF VONDEL'S WORKS. J.H.W. Unger. Amsterdam, 1888 (Frederic Muller & Co.). All editions of the "Lucifer" are here mentioned. This volume is in the library of Columbia University.

For the student we would recommend the excellent little edition of the "Lucifer" edited by N.A. Cramer (1891). Price 40 cents. Publisher, W.E.J. Tjeenk Willink, Zwolle, Holland.

BIOGRAPHY OF VONDEL. By Brandt. W.E.J. Tjeenk Willink, Zwolle.

BIOGRAPHY OF VONDEL. By Dr. G. Kalff. W.E.J. Tjeenk Willink, Zwolle.

We also heartily recommend the following studies by Dr. Kalff: "The Literature and Drama of Amsterdam during the Seventeenth Century;" "The Sources of Vondel's Works," in vol. xii. of Oud Holland (magazine); "Vondel as Translator," in Tydschrift (magazine) Voor Nederlandsche Taal en Letterkunde (1894); "Vondel's Self-Criticism," same magazine (1895); "Origin and Growth of Vondel's Poems," same magazine (1896).

VONDEL AND MILTON. August Müller. 1864.

ÜBER MILTON'S ABHÄNGIGKEIT VON VONDEL. Berlin, 1891.

MILTON AND VONDEL: A Curiosity of Literature. George Edmundson, M.A. Trübner & Co., London, 1885.

VONDEL AND MILTON. Edmund W. Gosse. "Northern Studies." Also in "Littell's Living Age," vol. cxxxiii., page 500; and in the "Academy," vol. xxxviii., page 613.

David Haek (1854). JUSTUS VON DEN VONDEL: ein betrag zur geschichte des Niederländischen schriftthums. Hamburg, 1890.

WORKS OF VONDEL, twelve volumes, in association with his life, by Jacob van Lennep.

VONDEL'S LUCIFER. Agnes Repplier. "Catholic World," vol. xlii., page 959.

"Praecipitemque immani turbine adegit"

J. van Vondel's

Lucifer

A tragedy

1654

DEDICATION.

To the invincible Prince and Lord, the Lord Ferdinand the Third, elected Emperor of Rome, Perpetual Increaser of the Empire.

As the Divine Majesty is throned amid unapproachable splendors, so, too, the Sovran Powers of the world, which owe their lustre to God, and are made in the image of the Godhead, are seated on high, crowned with glory. But as the Godhead, or, rather, the Supreme Goodness, favors the least and most humble with access to His throne, so, too, doth the temporal power deem its most insignificant subject worthy to kneel reverentially at its feet.

Inspired with this hope, my muse is encouraged from afar to dedicate to your Imperial Majesty this Tragedy of Lucifer, whose style demands a most liberal degree of that gravity and stateliness of which the poet speaks:

"Omne genus scripti gravitate Tragoedia vincit."

"Sublime in style and deep in tone,
The tragic art doth stand alone."

Though whatever of the requisite sublimity may be wanting in the style will be compensated by the subject of the drama, and the title, name, and eminence of the personage who, the mirror of all ungrateful and ambitious ones, doth here invest the tragic scene, the Heavens; from which he, who once presumed to sit by the side of God, and thought to become His equal, was cast, and justly condemned to eternal darkness.

This unhappy example of Lucifer, the Archangel, and at one time the most glorious of all the Angels, has since been followed, through nearly all the centuries, by various rebellious usurpers, of which both ancient and modern histories bear witness, showing how violence, cunning, and the wily plots of the wicked, disguised beneath a show and pretext of lawfulness, are idle and powerless so long as God's Providence protects the anointed Powers and Dynasties, to the peace and safety of divers states, which, without a lawful supreme head, could not exist in civil intercourse. Therefore, God's Oracle Himself, for the good of mankind, by one word identified the Sovran Power as His own, when He commanded that to God and to Caesar should be rendered the things that to each were due.

Christendom, so often attacked on every side, and at present beset by Turk and Tartar, like unto a ship on a stormy sea, in danger of ship-wreck, demands to the highest degree this universal reverence for the Empire, that thereby the hereditary foe of Christ's name may be repulsed, and that the Realm and its frontiers may be strengthened and rendered safe against the incursions of his savage hordes; wherefore it behooves us to praise God that it pleased Him to continue the Authority and the Crown of the Holy Roman Empire, at the last Imperial Diet, before his father's death, in the son, Ferdinand the Fourth, a blessing which has filled so many nations with courage, and which causes the tragic trumpet of our Netherland Muse to sound more boldly before the throne of the High Germans concerning the vanquished Lucifer, borne along in Michael's triumph.

Your Imperial Majesty's Most humble servant,

J.V. VONDEL.

ON HIS MAJESTY'S PORTRAIT

On the Portrait of His Imperial Majesty. Ferdinand the Third.

When Joachim Sandrart van Stokou, out of Vienna, in Austria, honored me with his Majesty's portrait, adorned with festoons and other ornaments.

_Deus nobis haec otia fecit._

The Sun of Austria uplifts his glorious rays
From shadow-glooms of art to bless each wondering eye.
Behold him on his throne, high towering in the sky!
Nor doth he scorn to beam on all his glance surveys.

Good Ferdinand the Third, born for the sovran crown.
A Father of the Peace, a new Augustus, shows
His Son the heights whereon the heavenly palace glows;
And teaches how with arms of Peace to win renown.

How blest the mighty realm, how blest their destinies,
O'er which his gracious eyes keep sleepless vigils kind.
And where he holds the Scales for holy Justice blind!
An Eagle brought him sword and sceptre from the skies.

A crown adorns the head which empires grand engage:
This Head adorns the Crown, and makes a golden age.

VONDEL'S FOREWORD

A Word to All Fellow-Academicians and Patrons of the Drama.

To reïnkindle your zeal for art, and at the same time to edify and to quicken your spirit, the holy tragic scene, which represents the Heavens, is here presented to your view.

The great Archangels. Lucifer and Michael, each strengthened by his followers, come on the stage, and play their parts.

The stage and the actors are, in sooth, of such nature, and so glorious, that they demand a grander style and higher buskins than I know how to put on. No one who understands the speech of the infallible oracles of the Holy Spirit will judge that we present here the story of Salmoneus, who, in Elis, mounted upon his chariot, while defying Jupiter, and imitating his thunder and lightning by riding over a brazen bridge, holding a burning torch, was slain by a thunderbolt.

Nor do we renew here the grey fable of the war of the Titans, in which disguise Poesy sought to make its auditors forget their reckless presumption and godless sacrilege, and to acquire a knowledge of nature instead; namely, that the air and the winds, locked within the hollow belly and the sulphurous bowels of the earth, seeking, at times, an outlet, accompanied by the violence of bursting rocks, and by smoke and steam and flames and earthquakes and dreadful mutterings, are vomited, and, rising heavenwards, again descend, strewing and heaping the surface of land and sea with stones and ashes.

Among the Prophets, Isaiah and Ezekiel assure us of the fall of the Archangel and his faction. In the Evangelist, Christ, truest of all oracles, with His voice, out of the Heavens, enjoins us to hear; and finally, Judas Thaddeus, His faithful apostle; which parables are worthy to be engraved in eternal diamond, and, more worthy still, upon our hearts.

Isaiah cries: "How art thou fallen from Heaven, O Lucifer, who didst rise in the morning! How art thou fallen to the earth, that didst wound the nations!

"And thou saidst in thy heart, I will ascend to Heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. I will sit in the mountain of the covenant, in the sides of the north:

"I will ascend above the height of the clouds. I will be like the Most High.

"But yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, into the depth of the pit."

God speaks through Ezekiel thus: "Thou wast the seal of resemblance, full of wisdom, perfect in beauty. Thou wast in the pleasures of the paradise of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, the topaz, and the jasper, the chrysolite and the onyx and the beryl, the sapphire and the carbuncle and the emerald; gold was thy adornment. Thy pipes were prepared in the day thou wast created. Thou didst spread thyself like an overshadowing cherub, and I set thee on the mountain of God. Thou didst walk in the midst of the stones of fire. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day of thy creation, until iniquity was found in thee."

Both of these parables are spoken, the one of the King of Babylon, the other of the King of Tyre, who, like unto Lucifer in pride and in splendor, were threatened and punished.

Jesus Christ refers to the fall of the rebellious Lucifer, where he says: "I saw Satan like lightning falling from Heaven."

And Thaddeus reveals the fall of the Angels and their crime, and the punishments which followed thereon, without any palliation, briefly, in this manner: "And the Angels who kept not their principality, but forsook their own habitation, he hath reserved with everlasting chains of darkness unto the judgment of the great God."

Stayed by these golden sayings, and in particular by that of Judas Thaddeus, disciple of the Heavenly Teacher and Ambassador from the King of kings, we receive, as upon a shield of adamant, the darts of the unbelieving who would dare to cast a doubt upon the fall of the Angels.

Besides this, we are strongly supported throughout the whole period of antiquity by the most illustrious of the devout Church Fathers, who, in respect to the plot of this history, are unanimously agreed: though, lest we detain our Academic friends, we shall be content to cite only three places, the first taken out of the holy Cyprian, Bishop and martyr at Carthage, where he writes: "When he who was formerly throned in angelic majesty and accounted worthy by God and pleasing in his sight, saw man, made in God's own image, he burst into malicious hate; not, however, causing him to fall by poisoning him with this hatred, ere he himself was thereby also undone--himself made captive ere he captured, and ruined ere he brought him to ruin. While he, spurred on by envy, robbed man of the grace of immortality once given him, he himself also lost all that he had before possessed,"

The great Gregory furnishes us the second quotation: "The rebellious Angel, created to shine preëminent among hosts of Angels, is through his pride brought to such a fall that he now remains subject to the dominion of the loyal Angels."

The third and last evidence we cull from the sermons of the mellifluous St. Bernard: "Shun pride; I pray you, shun it. The source of all transgression is pride, which hath overcast Lucifer himself, shining most splendidly amongst the stars, with eternal darkness. Not only an Angel, but the chief among Angels, it hath changed into a Devil."

Pride and envy, the two causes or inciters of this horrible conflagration of discord and battle, are represented by us as a team of starred animals, the Lion and the Dragon, which, harnessed to Lucifer's battle-chariot, carry him against God and Michael; seeing that these animals are types of these two deadly sins. For the Lion, king of beasts, encouraged by his strength, in his vanity, thinks no one above him; and envy injures the envied from afar, even as the Dragon wounds his enemy a long way off by shooting poison [from his tongue].

St. Augustine, ascribing these two deadly sins to Lucifer, pictures the nature of the same most vividly, saying that pride is a love of one's own greatness; but envy is a hatred of another's happiness, the outcome of which seems clear enough. "For each one," says he, "who loves his own greatness envies his equals, inasmuch as they stand as high as he; or envies his inferiors, lest they become his equals; or his superiors, because they are above him."

Now, since the beasts themselves were abused and possessed by the damned Spirits, as in the beginning the Paradise Serpent, and in the holy age the herd of swine, that with a loud noise was precipitated into the sea, and since, also, the constellations are pictured on the Heavens in the forms of animals, as hath been thought even by the Prophets, as the Pleiades, or Seven Stars, and Arcturus, Orion, and Lucifer; so may it please you to overlook the elaborateness and the didacticism of this drama, if the unfortunate Spirits upon our stage, by means of the same, help and defend themselves: for to the infernal monsters nothing is more natural than cunning traits and the abuse of all creatures and elements, to the prejudice of the name and honor of the Most High, so far as He shall this permit.

St. John, in his Revelation, typifies the heavenly mysteries and the war in Heaven by the Dragon, whose tail drew after him a third part of the stars, supposed by the theologians to refer to the fallen Angels; wherefore in Poetry the flowered manner of expression should not be examined too narrowly, nor regulated by the subtlety of the schools.

We should also make distinction between the two kinds of characters who contend on this stage; namely, the bad and the good Angels, each kind playing its own rôle, even as Cicero and our inborn sense of verisimilitude teach us to picture each character according to his rank and nature.

At the same time we by no means deny that holy subject matter restrains and binds the dramatist more closely than worldly histories or pagan fables, notwithstanding that ancient and famous motto of the poets, expressed by Horatius Flaccus in his "Art of Poetry" in these lines:

"The painter and the bard did both this power receive,
To aid their art with all that they of use believe."

Though here it is especially noteworthy to state how we, in order to inflame the hate of the proud and envious Spirits the more strongly, did cause the mystery of the future incarnation of the Word to be partially revealed to the Angels by the Archangel Gabriel, Ambassador from God, and Herald of His Mysteries; herein to improve the matter, following not the opinion of the majority of the theologians, but only of a few, because this furnished our tragic picture richer material and more lustre. However, neither in this point nor in other circumstances of cause, time, place, and manner (which we employed to render this tragedy more powerful, more glorious, more natural, and more instructive) has it been our purpose to obscure the orthodox truth, or to establish anything after our own finding or notion.

St. Paul, the revealer of God's mysteries to the Hebrews, extols most enviably--even to the prejudice of the kingdom of the lying and tempting Spirits--the glory, might, and Godhead of the Incarnate Word, preëminent among all Angels in name, in sonship, and in heirship; in the adoration of the Angels; in His unction; in His exaltation at God's right hand; and in the eternity of His rulership as a king over the coming world, as the cause and the end of all things, and as the crowned Head of men and Angels: while the Angels, His worshippers, God's messengers, as ministering Spirits, are sent to serve man, the heir of salvation, whose nature God's Son, passing the Angels by, hath taken upon Himself in the blood of Abraham.

By occasion of this justification, I do not deem it unsuitable here, in passing, to say a few words in vindication of those dramas and dramatists that employ Biblical subjects, inasmuch as they have, occasionally, come into reproach; since, forsooth, human tastes are so various; for a difference in temperament causes the same subject to be agreeable to one which is repulsive to another.

All honorable arts and customs have their supporters and opponents, also their proper use and abuse. The holy writers of tragedy have, among the ancient Hebrews, for their example, the poet Ezekiel, who has left us, in Greek, the exodus of the twelve tribes from Egypt. Among the reverend Church Fathers, they have that bright star out of the East, Gregory of Nazianzus, who, in Greek dramatic verse, hath pictured the Crucified Saviour Himself; as also, not long since, we became indebted to the Royal Ambassador, Hugo Grotius, that great light of the learning and piety of our age, who, following in the track of St. Gregory, hath given us the Crucified One in Latin, for which immortal and edifying labor we owe him both honor and thankfulness.

Among the English Protestants, the learned pen of Richard Baker hath discoursed very freely in prose concerning Lucifer and all the acts of the rebellious Spirits.

It is true that the Fathers of the Ancient Church banished the Christian actors from the community of the Church, and that from that time forth they were strongly opposed to the drama. But let us take into consideration the time and the fact that their reasons for this were far different. At that period the world, in many places, was yet deeply sunken in heathenish idolatry. The foundations of Christianity were not yet well established, and the dramas were played in honor of Cybele, a great goddess and mother of their imagined gods, and were esteemed a serviceable expedient with which to avert the land plagues from the bodies of the people.

St. Augustine testifies how a heathen archpriest, a minister of Numa's ritual and idol service, on account of a deadly pest, first instituted the drama at Rome, sanctioning it by his authority.

Scaliger himself acknowledges that it was established for the health of the people by order of the Sibyls, so that these plays became a truly powerful incentive to the blind idolatry of the heathen, extolling their gods--a cankering abomination, whose destruction cost the first heroes of the Cross and the long-struggling Church so much sweat and blood; but being now long extirpated, hath left in Europe not a vestige behind.

That the holy old Church Fathers, therefore, for these reasons, and also because of their corrupting the public morals, and various open and shameless customs, as the employment of naked boys, women, and maidens, and other obscenities, should rebuke these plays, was needful and commendable, as, in that case, would also be so now. This being considered, let us not hold the good and the usefulness of edifying and entertaining plays too lightly.

Holy and honorable examples serve as a mirror, reflecting for our edification all virtue and piety, and teaching us, at the same time, to shun wickedness and its consequent misery.

The purpose and design of true tragedy is through terror and sympathy to stir the spectators to tenderness. Through the drama, students and growing youth are cultivated in the languages, eloquence, wisdom, modesty, good morals and manners; and these sink into their tender hearts and are impressed upon their senses, conducing towards habits of propriety and discretion, which remain with them, and to which they adhere even until old age; yea, it occurs, at times, that erratic geniuses, not to be bent or diverted by ordinary methods, are touched by this subtle art and by an exalted dramatic style, thus influenced beyond their own suspicion; even as a delicate lyre-string gives forth an answering sound when its companion string, of the same kind and nature, of a similar tone, and strung on another lyre, is caressed by a skilled hand, which, while playing, can drive the turbulent spirit out of a possessed and hardened Saul.

The history of the early Church seals this with the noteworthy examples of Genesius and Ardaleo, both actors, enlightened in the theatre by the Holy Ghost, and there converted; for they, while playing, wishing to mock the Christian Religion, were convicted of the truth, which they had learned out of their serious rôles, filled with the pith of wisdom, rather than with trifling discourse to be mouthed for hours into the air and more vexatious than instructive.

They tell us in regard to Biblical subject matter that we should not _play_ with holy things, and, indeed, this seems to have some show of plausibility in our language, which hath given us the word _play_; but he that can stammer but a word or two of Greek knows that among the Greeks and Latins this word was not used in this sense; for _τραγῳδία_ is a compound word, and really means a goat-song, after the lyric contests of the shepherds, instituted for the purpose of winning a goat by singing, in which custom the tragic songs, and, following them, dramatic plays, took their origin. And if one would, nevertheless, unmercifully bring us to task on account of this word _play_, what then shall be done with organ _play_, David's harp and song _play_, and the _play_ on the instrument with ten strings, and the other kinds of play on flute and stringed instruments, introduced by various sects among the Protestants into their meetings?