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 ennobling 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 nobleness 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 altitude of lofty contemplation, or in the valley, battling like a god. 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 massive 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 bass 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 hell.
The word "vondel" in the Brabantian dialect means a "little bridge," which suggests a not inapt analogy; 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, instituted 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 noblest of Dutch diction, possessing that strange virility that defies time.