A History of Elizabethan Literature Part 13

The huntsmen hearing (since they could not hear) Their hounds at fault, in eager chase drew near, Mounted on lions, unicorns, and boars, And saw their hounds lie licking of their sores Some yearning at the shroud, as if they chid Her stinging tongues, that did their chase forbid: By which they knew the game was that way gone.

Then each man forced the beast he rode upon, T' a.s.sault the thicket; whose repulsive thorns So gall'd the lions, boars, and unicorns, Dragons and wolves, that half their courages Were spent in roars, and sounds of heaviness: Yet being the princeliest, and hardiest beasts, That gave chief fame to those Ortygian forests, And all their riders furious of their sport, A fresh a.s.sault they gave, in desperate sort: And with their falchions made their way in wounds, The thicket open'd, and let in the hounds."

[35] The rhyme, bad as it is, is not unprecedented.

_Bu._ "What dismal change is here; the good old Friar Is murther'd, being made known to serve my love; And now his restless spirit would forewarn me Of some plot dangerous and imminent.

Note what he wants? He wants his upper weed, He wants his life and body; which of these Should be the want he means, and may supply me With any fit forewarning? This strange vision (Together with the dark prediction Used by the Prince of Darkness that was raised By this embodied shadow) stir my thoughts With reminiscion of the spirit's promise, Who told me, that by any invocation I should have power to raise him, though it wanted The powerful words and decent rites of art; Never had my set brain such need of spirit T' instruct and cheer it; now, then, I will claim Performance of his free and gentle vow T' appear in greater light and make more plain His rugged oracle. I long to know How my dear mistress fares, and be inform'd What hand she now holds on the troubled blood Of her incensed lord. Methought the spirit (When he had utter'd his perplex'd presage) Threw his changed countenance headlong into clouds, His forehead bent, as it would hide his face, He knock'd his chin against his darken'd breast, And struck a churlish silence through his powers.

Terror of darkness! O, thou king of flames!

That with thy music-footed horse dost strike The clear light out of crystal on dark earth, And hurl'st instructive fire about the world, Wake, wake, the drowsy and enchanted night That sleeps with dead eyes in this heavy riddle; Or thou great prince of shades where never sun Sticks his far darted beams, whose eyes are made To shine in darkness, and see ever best Where sense is blindest: open now the heart Of thy abashed oracle, that for fear Of some ill it includes, would fain lie hid, And rise thou with it in thy greater light."

"For Hector's glory still he stood, and ever went about To make him cast the fleet such fire, as never should go out; Heard Thetis' foul pet.i.tion, and wished in any wise The splendour of the burning ships might satiate his eyes.[36]

From him yet the repulse was then to be on Troy conferred, The honour of it given the Greeks; which thinking on, he stirr'd With such addition of his spirit, the spirit Hector bore To burn the fleet, that of itself was hot enough before.

But now he fared like Mars himself, so brandishing his lance As, through the deep shades of a wood, a raging fire should glance, Held up to all eyes by a hill; about his lips a foam Stood as when th' ocean is enraged; his eyes were overcome With fervour and resembled flames, set off by his dark brows, And from his temples his bright helm abhorred lightnings throws; For Jove, from forth the sphere of stars, to his state put his own And all the blaze of both the hosts confined in him alone.

And all this was, since after this he had not long to live, This lightning flew before his death, which Pallas was to give (A small time thence, and now prepared) beneath the violence Of great Pelides. In meantime, his present eminence Thought all things under it; and he, still where he saw the stands Of greatest strength and bravest arm'd, there he would prove his hands, Or no where; offering to break through, but that pa.s.sed all his power Although his will were past all theirs, they stood him like a tower Conjoined so firm, that as a rock, exceeding high and great, And standing near the h.o.a.ry sea, bears many a boisterous threat Of high-voiced winds and billows huge, belched on it by the storms; So stood the Greeks great Hector's charge, nor stirred their battellous forms."

[36] This line alone would suffice to exhibit Chapman's own splendour at his best.

"This the G.o.ddess told, And then the morning in her throne of gold Surveyed the vast world; by whose orient light The nymph adorn'd me with attires as bright, Her own hands putting on both shirt and weed Robes fine, and curious, and upon my head An ornament that glittered like a flame; Girt me in gold; and forth betimes I came Amongst my soldiers, roused them all from sleep, And bade them now no more observance keep Of ease, and feast, but straight a shipboard fall, For now the G.o.ddess had inform'd me all.

Their n.o.ble spirits agreed; nor yet so clear Could I bring all off, but Elpenor there His heedless life left. He was youngest man Of all my company, and one that wan Least fame for arms, as little for his brain; Who (too much steep'd in wine and so made fain To get refreshing by the cool of sleep, Apart his fellows plung'd in vapours deep, And they as high in tumult of their way) Suddenly waked and (quite out of the stay A sober mind had given him) would descend A huge long ladder, forward, and an end Fell from the very roof, full pitching on The dearest joint his head was placed upon, Which quite dissolved, let loose his soul to h.e.l.l."

With regard to Marston (of whose little-known personality something has been said in connection with his satires) I find myself somewhat unable to agree with the generality of critics, who seem to me to have been rather taken in by his blood-and-thunder work, his transpontine declamation against tyrants, and his affectation of a gloomy or furious scorn against mankind. The uncouthness, as well as the suspicion of insincerity, which we noted in his satirical work, extend, as it seems to me, also to his dramas; and if we cla.s.s him as a worker in horrors with Marlowe earlier, and with Webster and Ford later, the chief result will be to show his extreme inferiority to them. He is even below Tourneur in this respect, while, like Tourneur, he is exposed to the charge of utterly neglecting congruity and proportion. With him we relapse not merely from the luminous perfection of Shakespere, from the sane order of work which was continued through Fletcher, and the best of Fletcher's followers, but from the more artificial unity of Jonson, back into the chaotic extravagances of the First Period. Marston, like the rest, is fond of laughing at _Jeronimo_, but his own tragic construction and some of his own tragic scenes are hardly less bombastic, and scarcely at all less promiscuous than the tangled horrors of that famous melodrama. Marston, it is true, has lucid intervals--even many of them. Hazlitt has succeeded in quoting many beautiful pa.s.sages, one of which was curiously echoed in the next age by Nat. Lee, in whom, indeed, there was a strong vein of Elizabethan melodrama. The sarcasm on philosophical study in _What You Will_ is one of the very best things of its own kind in the range of English drama,--light, sustained, not too long nor too short, in fact, thoroughly "hit off."

"_Delight_ my spaniel slept, whilst I baused[37] leaves, Tossed o'er the dunces, pored on the old print Of t.i.tled words, and still my spaniel slept.

Whilst I wasted lamp oil, bated my flesh, Shrunk up my veins, and still my spaniel slept, And still I held converse with Zabarell, Aquinas, Scotus, and the musty saws Of antique Donate: still my spaniel slept.

Still on went I: first _an sit anima_, Then, an' 'twere mortal. O hold, hold!

At that they are at brain buffets, fell by the ears, Amain [pell-mell] together--still my spaniel slept.

Then whether 'twere corporeal, local, fixed, _Ex traduce_; but whether 't had free will Or no, hot philosophers Stood banding factions all so strongly propped, I staggered, knew not which was firmer part; But thought, quoted, read, observed and pried, Stuffed noting-books, and still my spaniel slept.

At length he waked and yawned, and by yon sky For aught I know, he knew as much as I."

[37] Kissed.

There is real pathos in _Antonio and Mellida_, and real satire in _Parasitaster_ and _The Malcontent_. Hazlitt (who had a very high opinion of Marston) admits that the remarkable inequalities of this last piece "seem to show want of interest in the subject." This is an odd explanation, but I suspect it is really only an antic.i.p.ation in more favourable words of my own theory, that Marston's tragic and satiric moods were not really sincere; that he was a clever man who found a fashion of satire and a fashion of blood-and-thunder tragedy prevailing, and threw himself into both without much or any heart in the matter. This is supported by the curious fact that almost all his plays (at least those extant) were produced within a very few years, 1602-1607, though he lived some thirty years after the latter date, and quite twenty after his last dated appearances in literature, _The Insatiate Countess_, and _Eastward Ho!_ That he was an ill-tempered person with considerable talents, who succeeded, at any rate for a time, in mistaking his ill-temper for _saeva indignatio_, and his talents for genius, is not, I think, too harsh a description of Marston. In the hotbed of the literary influences of the time these conditions of his produced some remarkable fruit. But when the late Professor Minto attributes to him "amazing and almost t.i.tanic energy,"

mentions "life" several times over as one of the chief characteristics of his personages (I should say that they had as much life as violently-moved marionettes), and discovers "amiable and admirable characters" among them, I am compelled not, of course, to be positive that my own very different estimate is right, but to wonder at the singularly different way in which the same things strike different persons, who are not as a rule likely to look at them from very different points of view.

Marston's plays, however, are both powerful enough and famous enough to call for a somewhat more detailed notice. _Antonio and Mellida_, the earliest and if not the best as a whole, that which contains the finest scenes and fragments, is in two parts--the second being more properly called _The Revenge of Antonio_. The revenge itself is of the exaggerated character which was so popular with the Elizabethan dramatists, but in which (except in the famous Cornwall and Gloucester scene in _Lear_) Shakespere never indulged after his earliest days. The wicked tyrant's tongue is torn out, his murdered son's body is thrown down before him, and then the conspirators, standing round, gibe, curse, and rant at him for a couple of pages before they plunge their swords into his body. This goodly conclusion is led up to by a sufficient quant.i.ty of antecedent and casual crimes, together with much not very excellent fooling by a court gull, Balurdo, who might be compared with Shakespere's fools of the same kind, to the very great advantage of those who do not appreciate the latter. The beautiful descriptive and reflective pa.s.sages which, in Lamb's _Extracts_, gave the play its reputation, chiefly occur towards the beginning, and this is the best of them:--

_And._ "Why man, I never was a Prince till now.

'Tis not the bared pate, the bended knees, Gilt tipstaves, Tyrian purple, chairs of state, Troops of pied b.u.t.terflies, that flutter still In greatness summer, that confirm a prince: 'Tis not the unsavoury breath of mult.i.tudes, Shouting and clapping, with confused din; That makes a prince. No, Lucio, he's a king, A true right king, that dares do aught save wrong, Fears nothing mortal, but to be unjust, Who is not blown up with the flattering puffs Of spungy sycophants: who stands unmov'd Despite the jostling of opinion: Who can enjoy himself, maugre the throng That strive to press his quiet out of him: Who sits upon Jove's footstool as I do Adoring, not affecting majesty: Whose brow is wreathed with the silver crown Of clear content: this, Lucio, is a king, And of this empire, every man's possessed That's worth his soul."

_Sophonisba_, which followed, is much less rambling, but as b.l.o.o.d.y and extravagant. The scene where the witch Erichtho plays Succubus to Syphax, instead of the heroine, and in her form, has touches which partly, but not wholly, redeem its extravagance, and the end is dignified and good. _What You Will_, a comedy of intrigue, is necessarily free from Marston's worst faults, and here the admirable pa.s.sage quoted above occurs. But the main plot--which turns not only on the courtship, by a mere fribble, of a lady whose husband is supposed to be dead, and who has very complacently forgotten all about him, but on a ridiculous plot to foist a pretender off as the dead husband itself--is simply absurd. The lack of probability, which is the curse of the minor Elizabethan drama, hardly anywhere appears more glaringly. _Parasitaster_, or _The Fawn_, a satirical comedy, is much better, but the jealous hatred of _The Dutch Courtesan_ is again not made probable. Then came Marston's completest work in drama, _The Malcontent_, an antic.i.p.ation, after Elizabethan fashion, of _Le Misanthrope_ and _The Plain Dealer_. Though not free from Marston's two chief vices of coa.r.s.eness and exaggerated cynicism, it is a play of great merit, and much the best thing he has done, though the reconciliation, at the end, of such a husband and such a wife as Piero and Aurelia, between whom there is a chasm of adultery and murder, again lacks verisimilitude. It is to be observed that both in _The Fawn_ and _The Malcontent_ there are disguised dukes--a fact not testifying any very great originality, even in borrowing. Of _Eastward Ho!_ we have already spoken, and it is by no means certain that _The Insatiate Countess_ is Marston's. His reputation would not lose much were it not. A _fabliau_-like underplot of the machinations of two light-o'-love citizens' wives against their husbands is not unamusing, but the main story of the Countess Isabella, a modern Messalina (except that she adds cruelty to the vices of Messalina) who alternately courts lovers and induces their successors to a.s.sa.s.sinate them, is in the worst style of the whole time--the tragedy of l.u.s.t that is not dignified by the slightest pa.s.sion, and of murder that is not excused by the slightest poetry of motive or treatment. Though the writing is not of the lowest order, it might have been composed by any one of some thirty or forty writers. It was actually attributed at the time to William Barksted, a minor poet of some power, and I am inclined to think it not Marston's, though my own estimate of him is, as will have been seen, not so high as some other estimates. It is because those estimates appear to me unduly high that I have rather accentuated the expression of my own lower one. For the last century, and perhaps longer, the language of hyperbole has been but too common about our dramatists, and I have known more than one case in which the extravagant praise bestowed upon them has, when students have come to the works themselves, had a very disastrous effect of disappointment. It is, therefore, all the more necessary to be candid in criticism where criticism seems to be required.

As to the last of our good company, there is fortunately very little risk of difference of opinion. A hundred years ago Thomas Dekker was probably little more than a name to all but professed students of Elizabethan literature, and he waited longer than any of his fellows for due recognition by presentation of his work in a complete form. It was not until the year 1873 that his plays were collected; it was not till eleven years later that his prose works had the same honour. Yet, since attention was directed to Dekker in any way, the best authorities have been unanimous in his praise. Lamb's famous outburst of enthusiasm, that he had "poetry enough for anything," has been soberly endorsed by two full generations of the best judges, and whatever differences of detail there may be as to his work, it is becoming more and more the received, and correctly-received opinion, that, as his collaborator Webster came nearest to Shakespere in universalising certain types in the severer tragedy, so Dekker has the same honour on the gently pathetic side. Yet this great honour is done to one of the most shadowy personalities in literature. We have four goodly volumes of his plays and five of his other works; yet of Thomas Dekker, the man, we know absolutely less than of any one of his shadowy fellows. We do not know when he was born, when he died, what he did other than writing in the certainly long s.p.a.ce between the two unknown dates. In 1637 he was by his own words a man of threescore, which, as it has been justly remarked, may mean anything between fifty-five and seventy. He was in circ.u.mstances a complete contrast to his fellow-victim in Jonson's satire, Marston. Marston was apparently a gentleman born and bred, well connected, well educated, possessed of some property, able to make testamentary dispositions, and probably in the latter part of his life, when Dekker was still toiling at journalism of various kinds, a beneficed clergyman in country retirement.

Dekker was, it is to be feared, what the arrogance of certain members of the literary profession has called, and calls, a gutter-journalist--a man who had no regular preparation for the literary career, and who never produced anything but hand-to-mouth work. Jonson went so far as to say that he was a "rogue;" but Ben, though certainly not a rogue, was himself not to be trusted when he spoke of people that he did not like; and if there was any but innocent roguery in Dekker he has contrived to leave exactly the opposite impression stamped on every piece of his work. And it is particularly interesting to note, that constantly as he wrote in collaboration, one invariable tone, and that the same as is to be found in his undoubtedly independent work, appears alike in plays signed with him by persons so different as Middleton and Webster, as Chettle and Ford. When this is the case, the inference is certain, according to the strictest rules of logic. We can define Dekker's idiosyncrasy almost more certainly than if he had never written a line except under his own name. That idiosyncrasy consists, first, of an exquisite lyrical faculty, which, in the songs given in all collections of extracts, equals, or almost equals, that of Shakespere; secondly, of a faculty for poetical comedy, for the comedy which transcends and plays with, rather than grasps and exposes, the vices and follies of men; thirdly, for a touch of pathos again to be evened only to Shakespere's; and lastly, for a knack of representing women's nature, for which, except in the master of all, we may look in vain throughout the plentiful dramatic literature of the period, though touches of it appear in Greene's Margaret of Fressingfield, in Heywood, in Middleton, and in some of the anonymous plays which have been fathered indifferently, and with indifferent hopelessness of identification, on some of the greatest of names of the period, on some of the meanest, and on an equal number of those that are neither great nor mean.

Dekker's very interesting prose works we shall treat in the next chapter, together with the other tracts into whose cla.s.s they fall, and some of his plays may either go unnoticed, or, with those of the dramatists who collaborated with him, and whose (notably in the case of _The Roaring Girl_) they pretty evidently were more than his. His own characteristic pieces, or those in which his touch shows most clearly, though they may not be his entirely, are _The Shoemaker's Holiday_, _Old Fortunatus_, _Satiromastix_, _Patient Grissil_, _The Honest Wh.o.r.e_, _The Wh.o.r.e of Babylon_, _If it be not Good the Devil is in it_, _The Virgin Martyr_, _Match me in London_, _The Son's Darling_, and _The Witch of Edmonton_. In everyone of these the same characteristics appear, but the strangely composite fashion of writing of the time makes them appear in differing measures. _The Shoemaker's Holiday_ is one of those innumerable and yet singular pieces in which the taste of the time seems to have so much delighted, and which seem so odd to modern taste,--pieces in which a plot or underplot, as the case may be, of the purest comedy of manners, a mere picture of the life, generally the lower middle-cla.s.s life of the time, is united with hardly a thought of real dramatic conjunction to another plot of a romantic kind, in which n.o.ble and royal personages, with, it may be, a dash of history, play their parts. The crowning instance of this is Middleton's _Mayor of Queenborough_; but there are scores and hundreds of others, and Dekker specially affects it. _The Shoemaker's Holiday_ is princ.i.p.ally distinguished by the directness and raciness of its citizen sketches. _Satiromastix_ (the second t.i.tle of which is "The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet") is Dekker's reply to _The Poetaster_, in which he endeavours to retort Jonson's own machinery upon him. With his customary disregard of congruity, however, he has mixed up the personages of Horace, Crispinus, Demetrius, and Tucca, not with a Roman setting, but with a purely romantic story of William Rufus and Sir Walter Tyrrel, and the king's attempt upon the fidelity of Tyrrel's bride. This incongruous mixture gives one of the most charming scenes of his pen, the apparent poisoning of Celestina by her father to save her honour. But as Lamb himself candidly confessed, the effect of this in the original is marred, if not ruined, by the farcical surroundings, and the more farcical upshot of the scene itself,--the poisoning being, like Juliet's, a mere trick, though very differently fortuned. In _Patient Grissil_ the two exquisite songs, "Art thou poor" and "Golden slumbers kiss thine eyes," and the sympathetic handling of Griselda's character (the one of all others to appeal to Dekker) mark his work. In all the other plays the same notes appear, and there is no doubt that Mr. Swinburne is wholly right in singling out from _The Witch of Edmonton_ the feminine characters of Susan, Winifred, and the witch herself, as showing Dekker's unmatched command of the colours in which to paint womanhood. In the great debate as to the authorship of _The Virgin Martyr_, everything is so much conjecture that it is hard to p.r.o.nounce authoritatively. Gifford's cool a.s.sumption that everything bad in the play is Dekker's, and everything good Ma.s.singer's, will not hold for a moment; but, on the other side, it must be remembered that since Lamb there has been a distinct tendency to depreciate Ma.s.singer.

All that can be said is, that the grace and tenderness of the Virgin's part are much more in accordance with what is certainly Dekker's than with what is certainly Ma.s.singer's, and that either was quite capable of the Hircius and Spungius pa.s.sages which have excited so much disgust and indignation--disgust and indignation which perhaps overlook the fact that they were no doubt inserted with the express purpose of heightening, by however clumsily designed a contrast, the virgin purity of Dorothea the saint.

It will be seen that I have reserved _Old Fortunatus_ and _The Honest Wh.o.r.e_ for separate notice. They ill.u.s.trate, respectively, the power which Dekker has in romantic poetry, and his command of vivid, tender, and subtle portraiture in the characters, especially, of women. Both, and especially the earlier play, exhibit also his rapid careless writing, and his ignorance of, or indifference to, the construction of a clear and distinctly outlined plot. _Old Fortunatus_ tells the well-known story of the wishing cap and purse, with a kind of addition showing how these fare in the hands of _Fortunatus's_ sons, and with a wild intermixture (according to the luckless habit above noted) of kings and lords, and pseudo-historical incidents. No example of the kind is more chaotic in movement and action. But the interlude of Fortune with which it is ushered in is conceived in the highest romantic spirit, and told in verse of wonderful effectiveness, not to mention two beautiful songs; and throughout the play the allegorical or supernatural pa.s.sages show the same character.

Nor are the more prosaic parts inferior, as, for instance, the pretty dialogue of Orleans and Galloway, cited by Lamb, and the fine pa.s.sage where Andelocia says what he will do "to-morrow."

_Fort._ "No more: curse on: your cries to me are music, And fill the sacred roundure of mine ears With tunes more sweet than moving of the spheres.

Curse on: on our celestial brows do sit Unnumbered smiles, which then leap from their throne When they see peasants dance and monarchs groan.

Behold you not this Globe, this golden bowl, This toy call'd world at our Imperial feet?

This world is Fortune's ball wherewith she sports.

Sometimes I strike it up into the air, And then create I Emperors and Kings.

Sometimes I spurn it: at which spurn crawls out That wild beast mult.i.tude: curse on, you fools.

'Tis I that tumble Princes from their thrones, And gild false brows with glittering diadems.

'Tis I that tread on necks of conquerors, And when like semi-G.o.ds they have been drawn, In ivory chariots to the capitol, Circled about with wonder of all eyes The shouts of every tongue, love of all hearts Being swoll'n with their own greatness, I have p.r.i.c.k'd The bladder of their pride, and made them die, As water bubbles, without memory.

I thrust base cowards into honour's chair, Whilst the true spirited soldier stands by Bare headed, and all bare, whilst at his scars They scoff, that ne'er durst view the face of wars.

I set an Idiot's cap on virtue's head, Turn learning out of doors, clothe wit in rags And paint ten thousand images of loam In gaudy silken colours: on the backs Of mules and a.s.ses I make a.s.ses ride Only for sport, to see the apish world Worship such beasts with sound idolatry.

This Fortune does, and when this is done, She sits and smiles to hear some curse her name, And some with adoration crown her fame.

_And._ "To-morrow? ay to-morrow thou shalt buy them.

To-morrow tell the Princess I will love her, To-morrow tell the King I'll banquet him, To-morrow, Shadow, will I give thee gold, To-morrow pride goes bare, and l.u.s.t a-cold.

To-morrow will the rich man feed the poor, And vice to-morrow virtue will adore.

To-morrow beggars shall be crowned kings.

This no-time, morrow's time, no sweetness sings.

I pray thee hence: bear that to Agripyne."

The whole is, as a whole, to the last degree crude and undigested, but the ill-matured power of the writer is almost the more apparent.

_The Honest Wh.o.r.e_, in two parts, is, as far as general character goes, a mixed comedy of intrigue and manners combining, or rather uniting (for there is little combination of them), four themes--first, the love of Hippolito for the Princess Infelice, and his virtuous motions followed by relapse; secondly, the conversion by him of the courtesan Bellafront, a damsel of good family, from her evil ways, and her marriage to her first gallant, a hairbrained courtier named Matheo; thirdly, Matheo's ill-treatment of Bellafront, her constancy and her rejection of the temptations of Hippolito, who from apostle has turned seducer, with the humours of Orlando Friscobaldo, Bellafront's father, who, feigning never to forgive her, watches over her in disguise, and acts as guardian angel to her reckless and sometimes brutal husband; and lastly, the other humours of a certain marvellously patient citizen who allows his wife to hector him, his customers to bully and cheat him, and who pushes his eccentric and unmanly patience to the point of enduring both madhouse and jail. Lamb, while ranking a single speech of Bellafront's very high, speaks with rather oblique approval of the play, and Hazlitt, though enthusiastic for it, admires chiefly old Friscobaldo and the ne'er-do-well Matheo. My own reason for preferring it to almost all the non-tragical work of the time out of Shakespere, is the wonderful character of Bellafront, both in her unreclaimed and her reclaimed condition. In both she is a very woman--not as conventional satirists and conventional encomiasts praise or rail at women, but as women are. If her language in her unregenerate days is sometimes coa.r.s.er than is altogether pleasant, it does not disguise her nature,--the very nature of such a woman misled by giddiness, by curiosity, by love of pleasure, by love of admiration, but in no thorough sense depraved. Her selection of Matheo not as the instrument of her being "made an honest woman," not apparently because she had any love for him left, or had ever had much, but because he was her first seducer, is exactly what, after a sudden convincing of sin, such a woman would have done; and if her patience under the long trial of her husband's thoughtlessness and occasional brutality seem excessive, it will only seem so to one who has been unlucky in his experience. Matheo indeed is a thorough good-for-nothing, and the natural man longs that Bellafront might have been better parted; but Dekker was a very moral person in his own way, and apparently he would not entirely let her--Imogen gone astray as she is--off her penance.

CHAPTER VI

LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE

One name so far dominates the prose literature of the last years of Elizabeth, and that of the whole reign of James, that it has probably alone secured attention in the general memory, except such as may be given to the purple patches (of the true Tyrian dye, but not extremely numerous) which decorate here and there the somewhat featureless expanse of Sir Walter Raleigh's _History of the World_. That name, it is scarcely necessary to say, is the name of Francis Bacon. Bacon's eventful life, his much debated character, his philosophical and scientific position, are all matters beyond our subject. But as it is of the first importance in studying that subject to keep dates and circ.u.mstances generally, if not minutely, in view, it may be well to give a brief summary of his career. He was born in 1561, the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper; he went very young to Cambridge, and though early put to the study of the law, discovered an equally early bent in another direction. He was unfortunate in not obtaining the patronage then necessary to all men not of independent fortune. Though Elizabeth was personally familiar with him, she gave him nothing of importance--whether owing to the jealousy of his uncle and cousin, Burleigh and Robert Cecil, is a point not quite certain. The patronage of Ess.e.x did him very little good, and drew him into the worst action of his life. But after Elizabeth's death, and when a man of middle age, he at last began to mount the ladder, and came with some rapidity to the summit of his profession, being made Lord Chancellor, and created Baron Verulam and Viscount St. Alban. The t.i.tle Lord Bacon he never bore in strictness, but it has been consecrated by the use of many generations, and it is perhaps pedantry to object to it. Entangled as a courtier in the rising hatred of the Court felt by the popular party, exposed by his own carelessness, if not by actual venality in office, to the attacks of his enemies, and weakly supported, if supported at all, by the favourite Buckingham (who seems to have thought that Bacon took too much upon himself in state affairs), he lost, in 1621, all his places and emoluments, and was heavily fined. The retirement of his last few years produced much literary fruit, and he died (his death being caused or hastened by an injudicious experiment) in 1626.

Great as is the place that Bacon occupies in English literature, he occupies it, as it were, _malgre lui_. Unlike almost all the greatest men of his own and even of the preceding generation, he seems to have thought little of the capacities, and less of the chances of the English language.

He held (and, unluckily for him, expressed his opinion in writing) that "these modern languages will at one time or the other play the bankrupt with books," and even when he wrote in the despised vernacular he took care to translate his work, or have it translated, into Latin in order to forestall the oblivion he dreaded. Nor is this his only phrase of contempt towards his mother-tongue--the tongue which in his own lifetime served as a vehicle to a literature compared with which the whole literary achievement of Latin antiquity is but a neat school exercise, and which in every point but accomplished precision of form may challenge comparison with Greek itself. This insensibility of Bacon's is characteristic enough, and might, if this were the place for any such subtlety, be connected with the other defects of his strangely blended character--his pusillanimity, his lack of pa.s.sion (let any one read the Essay on Love, and remember that some persons, not always inmates of lunatic asylums, have held that Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespere), his love of empty pomp and display, and so forth.

But the English language which he thus despised had a n.o.ble and worthy revenge on Bacon. Of his Latin works hardly anything but the _Novum Organum_ is now read even for scholastic purposes, and it is not certain that, but for the saving influences of academical study and prescription, even that might not slip out of the knowledge of all but specialists. But with the wider and wider spread and study of English the _Essays_ and _The Advancement of Learning_ are read ever more and more, and the only reason that _The History of Henry VII._, _The New Atlantis_, and the _Sylva Sylvarum_ do not receive equal attention, lies in the comparative obsoleteness of their matter, combined with the fact that the matter is the chief thing on which attention is bestowed in them. Even in the two works noted, the _Essays_ and _The Advancement_, which can go both together in a small volume, Bacon shows himself at his very greatest in all respects, and (ignorant or careless as he was of the fact) as one of the greatest writers of English prose before the accession of Charles I.

The characteristics of style in these two works are by no means the same; but between them they represent fairly enough the characteristics of all Bacon's English prose. It might indeed be desirable in studying it to add to them the _Henry the Seventh_, which is a model of clear historical narration, not exactly picturesque, but never dull; and though not exactly erudite, yet by no means wanting in erudition, and exhibiting conclusions which, after two centuries and a half of record-grubbing, have not been seriously impugned or greatly altered by any modern historian. In this book, which was written late, Bacon had, of course, the advantage of his long previous training in the actual politics of a school not very greatly altered since the time he was describing, but this does not diminish the credit due to him for formal excellence.

The _Essays_--which Bacon issued for the first time, to the number of ten, in 1597, when he was, comparatively speaking, a young man, which he reissued largely augmented in 1612, and yet again just before his death, in their final and fullest condition--are not so much in the modern sense essays as collections of thoughts more or less connected. We have, indeed, the genesis of them in the very interesting commonplace book called the _Promus_ [butler or storekeeper] _of Elegancies_, the publication of which, as a whole, was for some reason or other not undertaken by Mr. Spedding, and is due to Mrs. Henry Pott. Here we have the quaint, but never merely quaint, a.n.a.logies, the apt quotations, the singular flashes of reflection and ill.u.s.tration, which characterise Bacon, in their most unformed and new-born condition. In the _Essays_ they are worked together, but still sententiously, and evidently with no attempt at sustained and fluent connection of style. That Montaigne must have had some influence on Bacon is, of course, certain; though few things can be more unlike than the curt severity of the scheme of the English essays and the interminable diffuseness of the French. Yet here and there are pa.s.sages in Montaigne which might almost be the work of a French Bacon, and in Bacon pa.s.sages which might easily be the work of an English Montaigne. In both there is the same odd mixture of dignity and familiarity--the familiarity predominating in Montaigne, the dignity in Bacon--and in both there is the union of a rich fancy and a profound interest in ethical questions, with a curious absence of pa.s.sion and enthusiasm--a touch, as it may almost be called, of Philistinism, which in Bacon's case contrasts most strangely with his frequently gorgeous language, and the evident richness of his imagination, or at least his fancy.