THE SCENE OF THE PLAY.
"Lucifer" is not the story "of man's first disobedience," though this is the outcome of the catastrophe. It is the drama of the fall of the angels. Yet man is the one subject of contention. Our first parents are, therefore, kept in the logical background of cause and effect. The creation of Adam, his bliss and his growing eminence, were the prime cause of the angelic conspiracy. The two-fold effect of the revolt was to the rebellious angels loss of Heaven, and to Adam loss of Eden.
Vondel, moreover, follows the doctrines of certain theologians that Christ would have become man even had Adam not sinned. Like Milton, he measures the scene of his heroic action with "the endless radius of infinitude," and by the artful use of terrestrial analogies conveys to the reader that idea of incomprehensible vastness that the transcendent nature of the subject demands. Vondel is, indeed, even more vague; the drama not giving opportunity for detailed description. Both are a wonderful contrast to the minute visual exactness of Dante.
The attempt to reconcile the spiritual qualities of the divine world with the physical properties of this, necessarily introduces some unavoidable incongruities. How can a material conception of the immaterial be given save through the symbols of the real! How else can the unknown be ascertained save through the equation of the known! How else, save by visual and sensuous images, express such impalpable thought!
"Thus measuring things in Heaven by things on earth,"
the poet gives us a finite picture of the infinite; a picture which yet, by means of shadowy outlines and an artistic vagueness, impresses us with the awful sublimity of the illimitable and eternal. The physical immensity of the poem is unsurpassed.
Humanized gods and Titanic passions shadowed by fate upon the immaculate canvas of sacred legend—this is the play. The personality of the author is never seen; yet when we know the man and his life, we cannot but see therein the reflex of his own experience. The scene is in Heaven and never leaves it. When actions occur elsewhere, they are described.
Infinities above the scene of contention, far beyond "Heaven's blazing archipelagoes," where no imagination dares to soar, reigns He
"Before whose face
The universe with its eternity
Is but a mote, a moment poised in space."
There