Vondel's Lucifer Part 45

"Conspicuous in the claims and seemingly substantiated was in the influence of Holland in spreading abroad, notably in America, the doctrines of the equality of all men, separation of Church and State, religious freedom, freedom of the press, local self-government.

"Fine was the description of Philip of Spain, of William the Silent.

Interesting was the portrayal of the work of the Chamber of Eglantine of Amsterdam, of the men of letters of Leiden and the intellectual forces leading up to and resulting in the great University in Leiden.

"Most striking of all was his brilliant description of the life and work of the great Dutch poet Vondel and the story of how Milton, the greatest of English Epic poets, has been content to follow, imitate and copy from Vondel in his Lucifer where Vondel has shown himself the great dramatist."

The "Baltimore Sun" writes of his lecture at Johns Hopkins:

"Very frequently since the day when Geoffrey Chaucer fas.h.i.+oned his immortal 'Canterbury Tales' upon Bocaccio's 'Decameron,' English poets have been subject to the impeachment of having borrowed (usually without proper acknowledgment) from foreign sources--borrowed material, plot, episodes, characters and, sometimes, language, embodied in whole phrases and sentences. The Elizabethan Age, pre-eminent though it was in creative literary excellence, has not escaped the challenge of its originality. French and Italian influences and writers exercised a strongly formative power upon Drayton, Sidney, Spenser and others of the elect, and even the great Bard of Stratford did not scruple at trans.m.u.ting the clay of less gifted molders into the gold of his superb coinage.

"But it has not been generally recognized that Milton was such an appropriator. Accordingly, Dr. L.C. van Noppen's lecture showing that the great Puritan poet was indebted to the 'Lucifer' of Vondel, the Dutch author, for the theme, the treatment, the description and even some of the finest pa.s.sages in 'Paradise Lost,' is a surprise. Yet Dr.

Van Noppen makes out a very strong case. The appearance of 'Lucifer' a short time before Milton's Continental tour, which was cut short by the breaking out of the great civil war in England; the strong likelihood that Milton had heard of Vondel and his work through Roger Williams, whose sojourn in Europe had made him acquainted with 'Lucifer,' and who had instructed Milton in modern languages; Milton's a.s.sociation in Paris with Hugo Grotius, one of the most eminent scholars of his time, a countryman and an enthusiastic admirer of Vondel--all combine into a strong chain of circ.u.mstantial evidence, which, reinforced by the undeniable similarity and the many parallel pa.s.sages in the two great works, make a conclusion which is almost imperative.

"But the conceding of Milton's debt to Vondel does not cancel our debt to Milton, whose sublime epic has given pleasure and comfort to scores of readers to whom Vondel's drama has been a sealed volume. Neither does it release our obligation to 'render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.'"

Furthermore, we hope that you will consider the establishment of a chair in Dutch Literature or History and that you, in antic.i.p.ation of this foundation, will from time to time send us such students as desire to make this subject their specialty. Hoping that you, after a consideration of this matter, will co-operate with us, I am

Respectfully yours for the Board of the Queen Wilhelmina Lectures.h.i.+p,

H.J. Kiewiet de Jonge, Hon. Secretary.

DORDRECHT (Holland), November, 1915.