Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/101

Rh Gysbrecht, are others of the many pieces which, when all has been said that can be of his dramatic weakness, leave Vondel still the pride of his countrymen.

It is maintained in a subsequent chapter that there is no conclusive evidence that Milton was in any way influenced by Vondel. There is no room here to compare them in detail. Milton was both a more perfect artist and a greater creative genius. No single character in all Vondel's plays lives in the imagination like Milton's Satan. Vondel is more purely the lyric poet at the mercy of his inspiration. Yet there are some notes in Vondel's lyre of which Milton never learned the secret. A less finished artist, a less sublime and overawing poet of the supernatural, there is a sweetness, a charm, in Vondel's poetry which Milton's too soon lost, and his religious verse glows with a purer flame of love for God and his fellow-men.

It is not difficult to understand that Vondel's dramas failed to achieve for the Dutch drama what Corneille's effected for the French. They might be admired by men of taste and scholarship who were not repelled by the Catholic atmosphere, but they could never thrill a crowded theatre like Hamlet or the Cid. Their failure in this respect is proved by the resurgence in 1641 of the romantic drama in a crude and barbaric form. In that year Jan Vos (c. 1620-1667), a glazier in Amsterdam, created a sensation, which affected even scholars like Barlaeus, and poets such as Hooft and Vondel, by his Aran en Titus, of Wraek