THE INTERPRETATION.
Yet we cannot believe that the "Lucifer" is a political allegory. Vondel was no more the poet of the "Palamedes." Those thirty years had wonderfully developed his art. Nor is it an idyllic allegory like the "Comus;" but, like the "Divina Commedia," an allegory of the world. Yet behind the characters of the sacred legend we may also see the national heroes, Siegfried, Beowulf, Civilis, Orange.
The "Lucifer" represents the gigantic and eternal battle of evil with good, with the universe as the battle-field—a type of the unending conflict in which the good finally conquers. We see here the Oriental imagination curbed by the reason of the Occident—the cold, statuesque Greek form aglow with the blazing Hebrew soul. The flaming Seraph of Christianity, winged with truth and armed with the lightning sword of Jehovah and the blasting thunderbolts of Jupiter, sweeps triumphant through the whole drama. Right prevails; wrong is overthrown.
The "Lucifer" is a theory of existence, a scheme of the universe. It is the revolt of the aspiring ideal against the invincible actual. It is the material against the spiritual; the unknown rendered comprehensible by the symbolism of the known.
"From shadowy types to truth; from flesh to spirit"
—this is the order of its progression.
It is the revolution of the speculative against the rule of dogma; an impassioned contemplation of life, in which the whole gamut of human feelings is harmoniously sounded; in which every link in the chain of causation is struck into the music of its meaning; in which the past and the future are mirrored in the present.
It is the struggle of a soul against the unchangeable environment of fate; the drama of the collective human soul aspiring from a chaos of unrest to the unattainable peace of absolute truth.
Furthermore, the tragedy typifies the character of the Hollanders themselves; a people who, as Charles V. once remarked, made "the best of subjects, but the worst of slaves;" a nation that has ever been in revolt, not only against man, but even against the sublime forces of nature; a race that has never known defeat.
The Batavians, who under Claudius Civilis carried on a successful rebellion against the all-conquering eagles of Rome—the only Germans who never bowed beneath the Latin yoke—and their Saxon descendants, who were the strongest foes of the territorial aggressions of Charlemagne, were all flamed with the same unconquerable spirit. It was this spirit, too, that enabled the Hollanders of the seventeenth century, after more than eighty years of terrible conflict, to free themselves alike from the grinding oppression of Spain and the still more oppressive coils of religious tyranny.