ENGLISH POETRY.
193
matter closest attention.[1] They have recognised that, when allowance has been made for the common indebtedness of both to Scripture, to patristic tradition, to the classical and Italian poets, as well as to that early favourite of both, Du Bartas, to say nothing of Grotius, there is not sufficient ground to establish the thesis that one poet actually influenced the other.
- ↑ Nicholas Beets, De Paradijsgeschiedenis en de Nederlandsche Dichters, Verscheidenheden, ii. 58, and J. J. Moolhuizen, Vondel's Lucifer en Milton's Verloren Paradijs, 'sGravenhage, 1895, decide against Mr Edmundson's thesis (Milton and Vondel, Lond., 1885). The German critic, Rudolf Buddensieg, Die Grenzboten, 1887, is more favourable. August Muller, Ueber Milton's Abhangigkeit von Vondel, Berlin, 1891, and Gustaaf Zeegers, Joost van den Vondel, Antwerpen, 1888, recognise resemblances, but will not go further. I quote these last from Moolhuizen. When Milton borrows from classical or Italian poetry, he makes no disguise of the fact; he was borrowing from what every one recognised to be the great models for imitation, and the resemblance is generally not more interesting than the difference. The alleged borrowings from Vondel seem to me of another kind. Many suggest at once either mere plagiarism or accidental resemblance. More closely examined, many of the resemblances disappear; others are explicable when one remembers "the fewness of the radical positions in Scripture"; the most striking can generally be traced to a common source. How difficult it was not to think of the same devices is proved by the fact that in his scheme of a drama, drawn up before 1642, Milton closed the first act with a "Chorus of Angels singing a hymn of Creation." Just so did Vondel close the first act of Adam in Ballingschap (1664).
As for Andreini, Belloni (Il Seicento, cap. vi.) claims for him pretty much everything which Mr Edmundson attributes to Vondel. That, as Mr Garnet says, Milton got from Andreini the idea of his first sketch of a tragic Morality I am not prepared to deny, but would venture to suggest that Milton may have derived his idea of presenting to Adam mute personified abstractions from Du Bartas' Les Furies and from the speech of Adam in Grotius' Adamus Exul, Act V., beginning"Hinc pallidorum longa morborum cohors
Turpisque egestas sequitur," &c.
