Vondel's Lucifer

by Joost van den Vondel

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.