Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/70

50 romantic or the French classical model. Vondel and Hooft put some of their best poetry into dramatic form, but neither of them ever clearly grasped the fact that the essence of drama is neither the incident of the popular plays nor the sentiment, style, and morality of the scholarly, but the vivid presentation of the agitations and conflicts of the human soul, revealed in a motived and naturally evolved action. The history of the experiment is, however, not without interest and significance, and in comedy some humorous and realistic work was produced not unworthy of the countrymen of Jan Steen and Adriaen van Ostade.

The oldest Mediæval plays in Dutch which have survived are of a purely secular character, four serious, so-called abele Spelen, and six farces—kluchten or sotternien—belonging to the later fourteenth century. Of the serious plays, three—Esmoreit, Gloriant, Lanseloet van Denemarken—are romances dramatised in simple and naïve manner, but by no means ineffectively. In Esmoreit a prince is sold by his ambitious cousin to the Turks, but returns at the right moment to rescue his mother,