Vondel's Lucifer

by Joost van den Vondel

The epic may wander through the dales of Arcady, along description's slow, meandering way, to pluck the roses of beauty and the lilies of sentiment there growing in so sweet abundance. The drama, with vigorous step and bold, unerring eye, pursues a straight path to the mountain-top of its climax, whence, with increasing momentum, it plunges down to its awful catastrophe. It is the difference between narration and action.

We shall have to content ourselves, therefore, by a brief reference to those who have already given this matter their attention.

That Milton was under great obligations to Vondel's drama has been maintained by Dutch men of letters for generations. It has also become the contention of several distinguished English critics. Even as far back as 1825 the poet Beddoes, in a review of "Hayley's Life and Letters" (Quarterly Review, vol. xxxi.), says: "An effect which has hitherto not been noticed was then produced by the Dutch poets. In their school Joshua Sylvester (who lived amongst them) learnt some of the peculiarities of his versification; and if Milton was incited by the perusal of any poem upon the same subject to compose his 'Paradise Lost,' it was by studying the 'Lucifer' and 'Adam in Ballingschap' of Vondel, for he tried his strength with the same great poet in the 'Samson Agonistes;' Vondel being, indeed, the only contemporary with whom he would not have felt it a degradation to vie."

Mr. Edmund W. Gosse, in a brilliant essay entitled "Milton and Vondel," was, we believe, the first Englishman who gave the subject conscientious study.

For this, on account of his knowledge of the difficult Dutch language, he was peculiarly fitted. Mr. Gosse, in his own interesting manner, tells how, during the seventeenth century, the Dutch, then one of the most vigorous languages of Europe, was much more studied than it is to-day; how the patriot Puritan, Roger Williams, having learned the language in Holland during his exile there, taught it to John Milton, then Cromwell's Latin secretary; how Milton also must have heard of the great fame of the "Lucifer," and of the storm of fanatical opposition that greeted its publication, from some of the Dutch diplomats whom it was his place to entertain; how, too, he could hardly have been ignorant of the name of the distinguished author of the drama, since it is known that he was well acquainted with Hugo Grotius, who was a warm admirer and the bosom friend of Vondel.

In addition to these and other reasons, Mr. Gosse then brings forward a plausible array of internal evidence, showing many points of similarity in the construction and in the treatment of the two poems, summing up with the conclusion that Milton was undoubtedly under considerable obligation to his great Dutch contemporary.

Rev. George Edmundson, M.A., of Middlesex, England, a graduate of Oxford, in a scholarly and painstaking work of two hundred pages, entitled "Milton and Vondel—a Literary Curiosity," next took up the subject, carrying the comparison not only into these two poems, but into all the works of Milton and into several others of Vondel.

Mr. Edmundson also discovered many wonderful coincidences and innumerable parallelisms in phrase and in imagery. Inspired with the motto, Suum cuique honorem, he has woven a tissue of most ingenious arguments to prove that Milton borrowed assiduously from the "Lucifer," the "Adam," the "Samson," and other works of Vondel.

Mr. Vance Thompson, in the New York Musical Courier of December 15, 1897, has also added some interesting data to the subject.

With all the conclusions of these gentlemen we are not yet, however, prepared to agree. It is true we have not given the matter the comparative study that they have given it. We would wait, therefore, until we had thought more deeply about it before expressing our final opinion. However, we believe that a critical and impartial comparison of the two masterpieces will neither detract from the glory of Milton nor dim the grandeur of Vondel.