Vondel's Lucifer Part 7

His odes on "The Regicides of England," "Charles Stuart's Murdered Majesty," "Protector Werewolf" (Cromwell), "The Flag of Scotland," and many other poems on the same subject, breathe the very spirit of war, and glow with the same intense indignation and righteous wrath that characterize the productions of John Milton on the other side. These fierce polemics, winged with rime, were very popular in Holland, where the cause of the royalists was favored.

But it was the Catholic, no less than the royalist, who spoke in these seething satires. That Vondel the republican should a.s.sume such a fierce att.i.tude against the would-be republicans of England can only be explained by his fear that in England, even as in Holland, canting bigotry would now usurp the altars of religion, and there, with unholy zeal, sacrifice the soul of art and the spirit of liberty.

Or was it an intuitive dread of a republican and Puritan England that made the Hollander seize these firebrands from his kindling wrath? It may be, for the Commonwealth was not at all friendly towards her sister republic, and ere long the Protector dealt the naval supremacy of the Dutch a blow from which they never recovered.

In 1648 Vondel celebrated the Treaty of Munster by his "Leeuwendalers,"

a pastoral drama in the style of Guarini's "Pastor Fido;" and more charming pastoral surely never was written, with not one note of strife, not one strident trumpet blast, to jar upon its harmony.

The "Leeuwendalers" is a fitting monument to the heroism of the patriots whose magnificent struggle of eighty-four years against the overwhelming tyranny of Spain had at last been rewarded by this glorious peace.

Not long afterwards, he wrote his excellent epitaph on that brave old sea-dog, Martin Tromp. Save among the clergy, Vondel's Romanism seemed now no longer to cause much comment.

The tragedy of "Solomon," Vondel's following drama, was remarkable for its opulence. At this time, also, his fiery denunciation of the Stadtholder William II. and his party for their attack upon, and their unsuccessful attempt against, the ancient privileges of Amsterdam did much to reestablish him in the good graces of his fellow citizens.

THE SUMMIT.

On October 20, 1653, one hundred leading painters, poets, architects, and sculptors of the city of Amsterdam, known as the Guild of St. Luke, a.s.sembled in the hall of the Order for their anniversary celebration.

This was the historic Feast of St. Luke, and Vondel was the honored guest of the occasion.

The poet was placed at one end of the table, on a high chair, which was to represent a throne. Here he was crowned with laurel as the "Symposiarch," or "King of the Feast," it is said, by the great painter Bartholomew van der Helst. Thus Apollo and Apelles were happily united in the bond of a common sympathy, and all petty dissensions were forgotten in the triumph of art. Poems were read, toasts were made; the ceremonies, as is usual at all the feasts of the Hollanders, closing with their national anthem--"the grand Wilhelmus"--the most affecting and sublime of all national odes, calling up, as it does, memories of a hundred years of martyrdom and of the heroic founder of the Republic.

It was the proudest moment of the poet's life; and we can imagine the depth of his emotion as the glorious laurel graced his battle-furrowed brow. Perhaps, too, the romantic face of Rembrandt was near by, drinking in with his thirsty eyes the picturesque beauty of the scene, unconscious of the crown which fickle destiny had reserved for him. Or it may be that the thoughtful youth Spinoza, silent and abstemious, found there some theme for his revolutionary philosophy.

Yet Vondel was king of them all; crowned with a kings.h.i.+p won by prodigies of valor on the battle-field of life. Every leaf in that laurel wreath was purchased by a thorn. But who thinks of the sharpness of the thorn when caressed by the velvet of the leaf?

So Vondel, in that moment of triumph, forgot his sorrows in his cup of joy, as he drained the sweet present to the dregs.

In return for the honor it had done him, Vondel dedicated his prose translation of the Odes of Horace to the hospitable Guild. He was now sixty-six years old, and was yet in the possession of every bodily and mental power. He was now to give forth his masterpiece--a work for which his whole life had been a constant preparation. We come to the "Lucifer."

This tragedy appeared in 1654 and was the monumental creation of this combatant poet, the crystallization of the t.i.tanic pa.s.sions of the age.

It has, therefore, a significance that can never fade.

On account of the character of the play, which naturally treats of holy subject matter, the clergy at once gave it the benefit of their most strenuous opposition, saying that it was full of "unholy, unchaste, idolatrous, false, and utterly depraved things."

Through their meddlesome interference, the "Lucifer," after it had twice been presented on the stage, was interdicted.

As a matter of course this caused it to be the subject of much comment, and the first edition of one thousand was sold in a week. Petrus Wittewrongel, a native of Zealand, was the most conspicuous among the opponents of this play. His opposition, however, extended to the drama in general, making it the theme of every sermon. According to this Dutch Puritan, the theatre was "a school of idleness, a mount of idolatry, a relic of paganism, leading to sin, G.o.dlessness, impurity, and frivolity; a mere waste of time." This bitter attack on his beloved art gave the occasion for Vondel's famous vindication of the drama in his proem to the "Lucifer."

He also wrote two biting satirical poems, "The Pa.s.sing of Orpheus," and the "Rivalry of Apollo and Pan," both of which were full of humorous raillery and of sarcastic allusions to the round-heads in general and to Wittewrongel in particular.

The force of the "Lucifer" as a picture of the age, of the nation, and of the world, was instantly felt. It was a cla.s.sic from the day of its birth; and from that time to this it has easily maintained its position as the grandest poem of the language.

The costly and artistic scenic heavens especially prepared for the "Lucifer" were, now that the play was forbidden, stored away as useless--a great loss to the managers of the theatre. Vondel accordingly wrote his excellent tragedy "Salmoneus," founded upon the cla.s.sic story of the Jove-defying King of Elis, in which this scene, as an imitated heaven, could also be used.

His "Psalms of David," in various metres, was his next venture. These he dedicated to Queen Christina of Sweden, who, like the poet himself, was a proselyte to the Catholic faith, he also honored her with a panegyric, in return for which the queen sent him a golden locket and chain.

In 1657 we find the poet making another journey to Denmark, where he went to fulfil the unpleasant duty of paying his son's debts. In Denmark he was the recipient of considerable attention, and while there his portrait was painted by the celebrated Dutch artist Karl van Mander, who was painter to the Danish court.

THE SHADOWS.

Soon after his return to Amsterdam, the great poet who had celebrated so many distinguished personages, and who had become the pride of his nation, was, by the bankruptcy of his profligate son, brought to the very verge of poverty.

Besides the little Constantine, whose early death we have elsewhere recorded, the poet had three children: one son, Justus, and two daughters, Sarah and Anna. Sarah died in childhood, and Anna, who was said to resemble her father both in intellect and in appearance, lived with him, and was ever a loving and devoted daughter. The son, "Joost,"

was both stupid and dissolute. His ignorance was so great that, when some one spoke of his father's tragedy, "Joseph in Egypt," he inquired if Joseph was not also a Catholic. During the life of his first wife, a woman of some force, this unworthy son of a distinguished sire kept within due bounds. Shortly after her death, however, he was united to a shallow spendthrift with whom he wasted his substance in riotous living, while the shop, of course, was neglected; and the business, in consequence, soon ruined.

At this the old man was so grieved that, with his daughter, who was yet with him, he moved away to another part of the city.

Here he was many times heard to say, "Had I not the comfort and the quickening of the Psalms"--of which at that time he was making his version--"I should die in my misery." He often also said to his friends, "Name no child by your own name; for if he should not turn out well it is forever branded."

In the meantime the son went from bad to worse. He squandered not only all of his own property, but also much that had been intrusted into his hands by others.

He stood on the point of bankruptcy, with the penalty of imprisonment staring him in the face, when his father, with a keen sense of honor and of family pride, satisfied all creditors by the sacrifice of his own snug little fortune of forty thousand guldens, the savings of half a century.

Friends of the family advised the erring son to go to the Dutch Colonies in the East Indies, there to begin life anew. But he obstinately refused even to listen to such a proposition, and continued his wild career unchecked. The unhappy father was finally compelled to ask the Burgomaster of the city to use the gentle compulsion of the law, which was done.

There are few sadder pictures in the history of letters than that of the old gray-haired poet, bowed down with this greatest of all griefs, the heart-crus.h.i.+ng realization of being the parent of ungrateful and criminal offspring, standing on the quay, and bidding, with bitter agony, his unfeeling child a last farewell. We imagine the tear-bedimmed eyes of the heart-broken father straining for one more glimpse of the unworthy but yet beloved son, who, in the far horizon, was perhaps even then carelessly walking the deck of the departing s.h.i.+p, meditating some new and disgraceful profligacy upon his arrival in India. Fortunately he died on the journey, and the poet was doubtless spared much suffering.

Too bitterly had Vondel learned, even as Lear, "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child!"

Of Vondel's fortune nothing remained save the portion that his daughter Anna had inherited from her mother, which was, however, by no means sufficient to support them both. What was to be done? All that the old man could do was to write verses--an art which as an income-producer was well characterized by Ovid's father: "_Saepe pater dixit: Studium quid inutile tentas? Maeonides millas ipse reliquit opes_."

Although the poet, in his pride, did not let his want become known, some of his friends who knew the state of affairs secured him a position as clerk in the Bank of Loan at a salary of six hundred and fifty guldens a year. Thus the greatest Dutchman of the age and the most ill.u.s.trious poet of his country was compelled, after a life of comparative leisure and comfort, at the age of seventy, to earn his living by the sweat of his brow, forced to engage in a labor which to him must have been peculiarly irksome.

The pen, which had been accustomed to the soaring style of tragedy was now chained to the dreary monotony of the ledger; the quill that had so often stung a nation to the quick was now tamely employed in the prosaic balance of debit and credit.

It is said that the poet, however, found it impossible to restrain his muse entirely, and that he sometimes mounted his Pegasus even in the dull interior of the counting-room; for he employed his leisure moments--let us hope there were many--in writing verses.

It has been said, too, that he was reprimanded for this by his employers; but of this there is no proof whatever.

Indeed, Brandt goes out of his way to say that this was overlooked on account of his age, and because he was a poet, and could therefore not be expected to pay such strict attention to business.

It would be easy enough to indulge in a little sympathetic bathos here.

The poet's fate was indeed a hard one. Yet his salary, small enough, it is true, when we consider the man and his career, was not the beggarly pittance that the same amount would be now. Six hundred and fifty guldens in the Holland of that day would be equivalent to at least three thousand guldens in the nineteenth-century Amsterdam, or a salary of twenty-five hundred dollars in New York.

Furthermore, this was the only hard mercantile work that the poet ever did. The ten years of drudgery in his old age compensated for a life-time of leisure and literary retirement; for after his marriage at twenty-six, the poet hosier wisely left his business affairs in the hands of his energetic and trustworthy wife. Soon after her death the business devolved on "Joost" the younger, with the disastrous results already narrated.

At the age of eighty the old bard was given an honorable discharge, with full pay, the circ.u.mstances of which were not without pathos. When told that he was discharged, and that another had been found to take his place, the poet was dumbfounded and became very sad. But when he learned that his discharge was an honorable one, with a pension, the heaviness left him, and he seemed greatly pleased.

Never, however, was Vondel so near the brow of Parna.s.sus as during these ten bitter years. For this is the period of his greatest literary activity. It was then that his genius ripened into its full maturity.

Among other works produced during this decade were his "Jephtha," a tragedy, with which he himself was much pleased, as fulfilling every requirement of the cla.s.sic drama; his metrical translations of the "dipus Rex," "Iphigenia in Tauris," and the "Trachiniae;" of Sophocles; the tragedies, "David in Exile" and "David Restored,"

allegories in which the exile and the restoration of Charles II. were clearly set forth; "Adonis," "Batavian Brothers," "Faeton," and "Zungchin, or, the Fall of the Chinese Empire." Of special interest also, and of unusual literary merit, is his tragedy, "Samson," which, even as Milton's "Samson Agonistes," was perhaps more largely biographical than any other of his poems. The points of similarity between this drama and Milton's tragedy also are many and remarkable.

But the two most important tragedies of this period were his "Adam in Exile" and the "Noah," which together with the "Lucifer" form a grand trilogy. The "Adam," especially, only less sublime than the latter, has more of idyllic beauty, and as a whole is scarcely inferior in power.

Here, too, the choruses blend with the action, and are unsurpa.s.sed for melody, sweetness, and tenderness, proclaiming their author as the foremost lyrist of his nation.