Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/49

Rh Vondel's greatest success was achieved in lyrical poems—under which head his satires fall—and lyrical tragedy, and it will be sufficient here to indicate some aspects of the first of these. Of what I have called his laureate lyrics—pæans and eulogies—time has evaporated some of the interest, and poems of this sort produced in such abundance were necessarily unequal. Much of the content is conventional (whether mythological or pastoral), and Vondel handles the conventional with less art than Hooft. Nor had he the architectonic skill with which Milton builds an elaborate ode. His inspiration ebbs and flows, and the style with it, becoming at times harsh, bombastic, and prosaic. Yet, though unequal, these poems are wonderfully vital. Even such an elaborate and detailed description of Amsterdam and its commercial activity as is given in the Inwyding van het Stadhuis (1655) sustains the reader's interest to the end by its wonderfully animated and sympathetic picture of the stress of life in what was the greatest mercantile city in the world. In his short tractate on poetry, Aenleyding ter Nederduitsche Dichtkunst (1650), Vondel condemns emptiness above all faults. "If you are engaged on a work demanding sustained inspiration (van eenen langen adem), see to it that it flag neither in the middle nor at the close, but keep full sail throughout." These glowing and flowing poems, though certainly "long-winded," surprise by their sustained ardour, fertility of thought, and broad, full rhythm.