Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/90

70 faith. Vondel was a zealous champion of the Queen of Scots and of her grandson Charles. But the saint, a favourite hero or heroine with Vondel, is perhaps the least dramatic of characters, for in the saint's mind all conflict is over. Even in Corneille's great tragedy, it is not the lyrical Polyeucte who most interests, but the more human and agitated Pauline and Sévère.

Vondel returned to more solid ground in the Leeuwendaelers (1648), a pastoral drama written to celebrate the Treaty of Munster, which closed the eighty years' war. Peace was the note which Vondel, like Hooft in the Baeto, desired to strike. He had no wish to exult over Spain or to keep alive proud memories of the war. He regretted the final separation of the northern from the southern Netherlands, and was inclined to think that there had been wrong on both sides, and that the war had been prolonged by those who wished to fish in troubled waters. Instead of exalting the Netherlands or the House of Orange, he preferred to describe the evils of dissension and the blessings of peace. He took the plot of his pastoral allegory from the Pastor Fido, with suggestions from the Aminta, but the sentiments are Dutch, bourgeois, not courtly, and so are the scenes, green pastures and cows, canals and sluices,—a people for whom the mere glory of war has no attraction, which loves above all things peace and prosperity. In this play and those which followed Vondel's dramatic art attained maturity.

In Salomon (1648) he dealt with the falling away