Vondel's Lucifer

by Joost van den Vondel

Of Vondel's fortune nothing remained save the portion that his daughter Anna had inherited from her mother, which was, however, by no means sufficient to support them both. What was to be done? All that the old man could do was to write verses—an art which as an income-producer was well characterized by Ovid's father: "Sæpe pater dixit: Studium quid inutile tentas? Mæonides millas ipse reliquit opes."

Although the poet, in his pride, did not let his want become known, some of his friends who knew the state of affairs secured him a position as clerk in the Bank of Loan at a salary of six hundred and fifty guldens a year. Thus the greatest Dutchman of the age and the most illustrious poet of his country was compelled, after a life of comparative leisure and comfort, at the age of seventy, to earn his living by the sweat of his brow, forced to engage in a labor which to him must have been peculiarly irksome.

The pen, which had been accustomed to the soaring style of tragedy was now chained to the dreary monotony of the ledger; the quill that had so often stung a nation to the quick was now tamely employed in the prosaic balance of debit and credit.

It is said that the poet, however, found it impossible to restrain his muse entirely, and that he sometimes mounted his Pegasus even in the dull interior of the counting-room; for he employed his leisure moments—let us hope there were many—in writing verses.

It has been said, too, that he was reprimanded for this by his employers; but of this there is no proof whatever.

Indeed, Brandt goes out of his way to say that this was overlooked on account of his age, and because he was a poet, and could therefore not be expected to pay such strict attention to business.

It would be easy enough to indulge in a little sympathetic bathos here. The poet's fate was indeed a hard one. Yet his salary, small enough, it is true, when we consider the man and his career, was not the beggarly pittance that the same amount would be now. Six hundred and fifty guldens in the Holland of that day would be equivalent to at least three thousand guldens in the nineteenth-century Amsterdam, or a salary of twenty-five hundred dollars in New York.

Furthermore, this was the only hard mercantile work that the poet ever did. The ten years of drudgery in his old age compensated for a life-time of leisure and literary retirement; for after his marriage at twenty-six, the poet hosier wisely left his business affairs in the hands of his energetic and trustworthy wife. Soon after her death the business devolved on "Joost" the younger, with the disastrous results already narrated.

At the age of eighty the old bard was given an honorable discharge, with full pay, the circumstances of which were not without pathos. When told that he was discharged, and that another had been found to take his place, the poet was dumbfounded and became very sad. But when he learned that his discharge was an honorable one, with a pension, the heaviness left him, and he seemed greatly pleased.

Never, however, was Vondel so near the brow of Parnassus as during these ten bitter years. For this is the period of his greatest literary activity. It was then that his genius ripened into its full maturity.