"I have a bit of fiat in my soul, And can myself create a little world."
His confidence, however, proves to be but the fiat of his damnation.
"There is no fiercer hell than the failure in a great undertaking." Into this hell Lucifer was forever thrust. Yet he is allowed one brief moment of happiness; it is where he proclaims himself a god, and is worshipped by his followers.
Lucifer is the prince of thinkers, and a monarch among actors. His is the intellect to plan and to conceive, and the will to execute; and will is above all the one quality emphasized. As much as he is in this respect supereminent, so much greater the degree of his guilt. Could the force of this faculty have been better shown than in the picture of the fallen Archangel, where, in the agonies of torture and the throes of expiation, he not only deliberates, resolves, and executes, but even exults, as, culling the bitter sweetness of a hopeless hope from the hell-flower of despair, he rejoices in the fiendish triumph that he knows is but the prelude to everlasting doom? Unlike the unconquerable and torture-racked Prometheus, he allows not one sigh to escape from the depths of his anguish; not one moan rises from his abysmal despair. Malediction alone can unlock his implacable lips. From even the caverns of Hell he projects his evil genius back into space to accomplish a predetermined revenge.
Lucifer reasons with Rafael and with Gabriel; but with Michael only war is possible. The two chiefs are too equal in power, too proud, and too warlike to waste time in words. Each, accustomed to command, will brook no authority in the other. The pathos and the tenderness of Rafael, on the other hand, present a strong relief to the sombre passions of Lucifer. It is the ethical portraiture of this drama that is its most powerful feature.
Lucifer, also, in a certain sense, represents the ideal Dutchman--combining in a losing struggle the daring of Civilis and the intellect of Erasmus with the astuteness and magnanimity of William the Silent--a grand hero in a bad cause! Lucifer has indeed "set the time out of joint" for Adam's seed; yet the play also gives promise of the Christ who will again make all things right; there is here, also, a suggestion of the "Paradise Regained."