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Vossius assures Meursius it is the most perfect thing in its kind the age has produced : Vondel, a celebrated poet of Holland, translated it into Dutch: and Grotius expressed a high sense of Vondel's friendship, in condescending to translate his works, when he could write much better of his own . The most learned critics, many of whom were good versifiers, agreed that Grotius excelled in Poetry.
Van Lennep's contributions to literature were, however, by no means confined to the writing of fiction, as his great critical edition of Vondel's poetical works testifies. Mevrouw Bosboom-Toussaint's novels were not only excellent from the literary point of view, but as reproductions of historical events were most conscientiously written.
In Paradise Lost the relation of the two events is inverted, the fall of the angels being there an episode, not transacted, but told by one of the personages of the epic. It is therefore only in one book of Paradise Lost, the sixth, that the influence of Vondel can be looked for. There may possibly occur in other parts of our epic single lines of which an original may be found in Vondel's drama.
"It seems altogether unnecessary, Lenora, to inquire what new beauties you have discovered in Vondel's 'Lucifer. You have not had time, I take it for granted, to begin the comparison between this masterpiece of our native tongue and Milton's 'Paradise Lost'?" "Ah! father," murmured Lenora, "my mind is indeed strangely troubled.
Gosse, who has given an analysis, with some translated extracts, of Vondel's Lucifer, the resemblances are too close and too numerous to be mere coincidences. Vondel is more human than Milton, just where human attributes are unnatural, so that heaven is made to seem like earth, while in Paradise Lost we always feel that we are in a region aloft.
These lines of Vondel's seem as if composed for him: "The physician must not only know How high the pulse has mounted, And where the sickness lies, which makes him groan with pain, But he must see the cause, from where The great weakness of this sickness came." The Macmillan Company, New. York, 1913.
Such a vast production, as is inevitable, contains material of very unequal merit; but it is not too much to say that the highest flights of Vondel's lyric poetry, alike in power of expression and imagery, in the variety of metre and the harmonious cadence of the verse, deserve a far wider appreciation than they have ever received, through the misfortune of having been written in a language little known and read.
Notably such a one is the often-quoted Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. Paradise Lost, i. 263. which is Vondel's En liever d'eerste Vorst in eenigh lager hof Dan in't gezalight licht de tweede, of noch een minder! But it is in the sixth book only in which anything more than a verbal similarity is traceable. According to Mr.
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