A History of Elizabethan Literature Part 25

Who trained thee up in arms but I? Who taught thee Men were men only when they durst look down With scorn on death and danger, and contemn'd All opposition till plumed Victory Had made her constant stand upon their helmets?

Under my shield thou hast fought as securely As the young eaglet covered with the wings Of her fierce dam, learns how and where to prey.

All that is manly in thee I call mine; But what is weak and womanish, thine own.

And what I gave, since thou art proud, ungrateful, Presuming to contend with him to whom Submission is due, I will take from thee.

Look therefore for extremities and expect not I will correct thee as a son, but kill thee As a serpent swollen with poison; who surviving A little longer with infectious breath, Would render all things near him like itself Contagious. Nay, now my anger's up, Ten thousand virgins kneeling at my feet, And with one general cry howling for mercy, Shall not redeem thee.

_Malef. jun._ Thou incensed Power Awhile forbear thy thunder! let me have No aid in my revenge, if from the grave My mother----

_Malef. sen._ Thou shalt never name her more."

[_They fight._

_The Duke of Milan_ is sometimes considered Ma.s.singer's masterpiece; and here again there are numerous fine scenes and n.o.ble _tirades_. But the irrationality of the _donnee_ (Sforza the duke charges his favourite not to let the d.u.c.h.ess survive his own death, and the abuse of the authority thus given leads to horrible injustice and the death of both d.u.c.h.ess and duke) mars the whole. The predilection of the author for sudden turns and twists of situation, his neglect to make his plots and characters acceptable and conceivable as wholes, appear indeed everywhere, even in what I have no doubt in calling his real masterpiece by far, the fine tragi-comedy of _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_. The revengeful trick by which a satellite of the great extortioner, Sir Giles Overreach, brings about his employer's discomfiture, regardless of his own ruin, is very like the denouement of the Bra.s.s and Quilp part of the _Old Curiosity Shop_, may have suggested it (for _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_ lasted as an acting play well into d.i.c.kens's time), and, like it, is a little improbable. But the play is an admirable one, and Overreach (who, as is well known, was supposed to be a kind of study of his half namesake, Mompesson, the notorious monopolist) is by far the best single character that Ma.s.singer ever drew. He again came close to true comedy in _The City Madam_, another of the best known of his plays, where the trick adopted at once to expose the villainy of the apparently reformed spendthrift Luke, and to abate the ruinous extravagance of Lady Frugal and her daughters, is perhaps not beyond the limits of at least dramatic verisimilitude, and gives occasion to some capital scenes.

_The Bondman_, _The Renegado_, the curious _Parliament of Love_, which, like others of Ma.s.singer's plays, is in an almost aeschylean state of text-corruptness, _The Great Duke of Florence_, _The Maid of Honour_ (one of the very doubtful evidences of Ma.s.singer's supposed conversion to Roman Catholicism), _The Picture_ (containing excellent pa.s.sages, but for improbability and topsy-turviness of incident ranking with _The Duke of Milan_), _The Emperor of the East_, _The Guardian_, _A Very Woman_, _The Bashful Lover_, are all plays on which, if there were s.p.a.ce, it would be interesting to comment; and they all display their author's strangely mixed merits and defects. _The Roman Actor_ and _The Fatal Dowry_ must have a little more attention. The first is, I think, Ma.s.singer's best tragic effort; and the scene where Domitian murders Paris, with his tyrannical explanation of the deed, shows a greater conception of tragic poetry--a little cold and stately, a little Racinish or at least Cornelian rather than Shakesperian, but still pa.s.sionate and worthy of the tragic stage--than anything that Ma.s.singer has done. _The Fatal Dowry_, written in concert with Field and unceremoniously pillaged by Rowe in his once famous _Fair Penitent_, is a purely romantic tragedy, injured by the unattractive character of the light-of-love Beaumelle before her repentance (Ma.s.singer never could draw a woman), and by not a few of the author's favourite improbabilities and glaring or rather startling non-sequiturs of action, but full also of fine pa.s.sages, especially of the quasi-forensic kind in which Ma.s.singer so much delights.

To sum up, it may seem inconsistent that, after allowing so many faults in Ma.s.singer, I should protest against the rather low estimate of him which critics from Lamb downwards have generally given. Yet I do so protest. It is true that he has not the highest flashes either of verbal poetry or of dramatic character-drawing; and though Hartley Coleridge's dictum that he had no humour has been exclaimed against, it is only verbally wrong. It is also true that in him perhaps for the first time we perceive, what is sure to appear towards the close of a period, a distinct touch of _literary_ borrowing--evidence of knowledge and following of his forerunners. Yet he had a high, a varied, and a fertile imagination. He had, and was the last to have, an extensive and versatile command of blank verse, never perhaps reaching the most perfect mastery of Marlowe or of Shakespere, but singularly free from monotony, and often both harmonious and dignified. He could deal, and deal well, with a large range of subjects; and if he never ascends to the height of a De Flores or a Bellafront, he never descends to the depths in which both Middleton and Dekker too often complacently wallow. Unless we are to count by mere flashes, he must, I think, rank after Shakespere, Fletcher, and Jonson among his fellows; and this I say, honestly avowing that I have nothing like the enthusiasm for him that I have for Webster, or for Dekker, or for Middleton. We may no doubt allow too much for bulk of work, for sustained excellence at a certain level, and for general competence as against momentary excellence. But we may also allow far too little; and this has perhaps been the general tendency of later criticism in regard to Ma.s.singer. It is unfortunate that he never succeeded in making as perfect a single expression of his tragic ability as he did of his comic, for the former was, I incline to think, the higher of the two. But many of his plays are lost, and many of those which remain come near to such excellence. It is by no means impossible that Ma.s.singer may have lost incomparably by the misdeeds of the constantly execrated, but never to be execrated enough, minion of that careless herald.

As in the case of Clarendon, almost absolutely contradictory opinions have been delivered, by critics of great authority, about John Ford. In one of the most famous outbursts of his generous and enthusiastic estimate of the Elizabethan period, Lamb has p.r.o.nounced Ford to be of the first order of poets. Mr Swinburne, while bringing not a few limitations to this tremendous eulogy, has on the whole supported it in one of the most brilliant of his prose essays; and critics as a rule have bowed to Lamb's verdict. On the other hand, Hazlitt (who is "gey ill to differ with" when there are, as here, no extra-literary considerations to reckon) has traversed that verdict in one of the most damaging utterances of commonsense, yet not commonplace, criticism anywhere to be found, asking bluntly and pointedly whether the exceptionableness of the subject is not what const.i.tutes the merit of Ford's greatest play, p.r.o.nouncing the famous last scene of _The Broken Heart_ extravagant, and fixing on "a certain perversity of spirit" in Ford generally. It is pretty clear that Hartley Coleridge (who might be paralleled in our own day as a critic, who seldom went wrong except through ignorance, though he had a sublime indifference as to the ignorance that sometimes led him wrong) was of no different opinion. It is not easy to settle such a quarrel. But I had the good fortune to read Ford before I had read anything except Hartley Coleridge's rather enigmatic verdict about him, and in the many years that have pa.s.sed since I have read him often again. The resulting opinion may not be exceptionally valuable, but it has at least stood the test of frequent re-reading of the original, and of reading of the main authorities among the commentators.

John Ford, like Fletcher and Beaumont, but unlike almost all others of his cla.s.s, was a person not compelled by need to write tragedies,--comedies of any comic merit he could never have written, were they his neck verse at Hairibee. His father was a man of good family and position at Ilsington in Devon. His mother was of the well-known west-country house of the Pophams.

He was born(?) two years before the Armada, and three years after Ma.s.singer. He has no university record, but was a member of the Middle Temple, and takes at least some pains to a.s.sure us that he never wrote for money. Nevertheless, for the best part of thirty years he was a playwright, and he is frequently found collaborating with Dekker, the neediest if nearly the most gifted gutter-playwright of the time. Once he worked with Webster in a play (_The Murder of the Son upon the Mother_) which must have given the fullest possible opportunity to the appet.i.te of both for horrors.

Once he, Rowley, and Dekker combined to produce the strange masterpiece (for a masterpiece it is in its own undisciplined way) of the _Witch of Edmonton_, where the obvious signs of a play hastily cobbled up to meet a popular demand do not obscure the talents of the cobblers. It must be confessed that there is much less of Ford than of Rowley and Dekker in the piece, except perhaps its comparative regularity and the quite unreasonable and unintelligible bloodiness of the murder of Susan. In _The Sun's Darling_, due to Ford and Dekker, the numerous and charming lyrics are pretty certainly Dekker's; though we could p.r.o.nounce on this point with more confidence if we had the two lost plays, _The Fairy Knight_ and _The Bristowe Merchant_, in which the same collaborators are known to have been engaged. _The Fancies_, _Chaste and n.o.ble_, and _The Lady's Trial_ which we have, and which are known to be Ford's only, are but third-rate work by common consent, and _Love's Sacrifice_ has excited still stronger opinions of condemnation from persons favourable to Ford. This leaves us practically four plays upon which to base our estimate--_'Tis Pity She's a Wh.o.r.e_, _The Lover's Melancholy_, _The Broken Heart_, and _Perkin Warbeck_. The last-named I shall take the liberty of dismissing summarily with the same borrowed description as Webster's _Appius and Virginia_. Hartley Coleridge, perhaps willing to make up if he could for a general distaste for Ford, volunteered the strange judgment that it is the best specimen of the historic drama to be found out of Shakespere; and Hazlitt says nothing savage about it. I shall say nothing more, savage or otherwise. _The Lover's Melancholy_ has been to almost all its critics a kind of lute-case for the very pretty version of Strada's fancy about the nightingale, which Crashaw did better; otherwise it is naught. We are, therefore, left with _'Tis Pity She's a Wh.o.r.e_ and _The Broken Heart_. For myself, in respect to the first, after repeated readings and very careful weighings of what has been said, I come back to my first opinion--to wit, that the Annabella and Giovanni scenes, with all their perversity, all their availing themselves of what Hazlitt, with his unerring instinct, called "unfair attractions,"

are among the very best things of their kind. Of what may be thought unfair in them I shall speak a little later: but allowing for this, the sheer effects of pa.s.sion--the "All for love and the world well lost," the shutting out, not instinctively or stupidly, but deliberately, and with full knowledge, of all other considerations except the dictates of desire--have never been so rendered in English except in _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Antony and Cleopatra_. The comparison of course brings out Ford's weakness, not merely in execution, but in design; not merely in accomplishment, but in the choice of means for accomplishment. Shakespere had no need of the _haut gout_ of incest, of the unnatural horrors of the heart on the dagger. But Ford had; and he in a way (I do not say fully) justified his use of these means.

_The Broken Heart_ stands far lower. I own that I am with Hazlitt, not Lamb, on the question of the admired death scene of Calantha. In the first place, it is certainly borrowed from Marston's _Malcontent_; in the second, it is wholly unnatural; in the third, the great and crowning point of it is not, as Lamb seemed to think, Calantha's sentimental inconsistency, but the consistent and n.o.ble death of Orgilus. There Ford was at home, and long as it is it must be given:--

_Cal._ "b.l.o.o.d.y relator of thy stains in blood, For that thou hast reported him, whose fortunes And life by thee are both at once s.n.a.t.c.h'd from him, With honourable mention, make thy choice Of what death likes thee best, there's all our bounty.

But to excuse delays, let me, dear cousin, Intreat you and these lords see execution Instant before you part.

_Near._ Your will commands us.

_Org._ One suit, just queen, my last: vouchsafe your clemency That by no common hand I be divided From this my humble frailty.

_Cal._ To their wisdoms Who are to be spectators of thine end I make the reference: those that are dead Are dead; had they not now died, of necessity They must have paid the debt they owed to nature, One time or other. Use dispatch, my lords; We'll suddenly prepare our coronation.

[_Exeunt_ CAL., PHIL., _and_ CHRIS.

_Arm._ 'Tis strange, these tragedies should never touch on Her female pity.

_Ba.s.s._ She has a masculine spirit, And wherefore should I pule, and, like a girl, Put finger in the eye? Let's be all toughness Without distinction betwixt s.e.x and s.e.x.

_Near._ Now, Orgilus, thy choice?

_Org._ To bleed to death.

_Arm._ The executioner?

_Org._ Myself, no surgeon; I am well skilled in letting blood. Bind fast This arm, that so the pipes may from their conduits Convey a full stream; here's a skilful instrument:

[_Shows his dagger._

Only I am a beggar to some charity To speed me in this execution By lending the other p.r.i.c.k to the other arm When this is bubbling life out.

_Ba.s.s._ I am for you, It most concerns my art, my care, my credit, Quick, fillet both his arms.

_Org._ Gramercy, friendship!

Such courtesies are real which flow cheerfully Without an expectation of requital.

Reach me a staff in this hand. If a p.r.o.neness

[_They give him a staff._

Or custom in my nature, from my cradle Had been inclined to fierce and eager bloodshed, A coward guilt hid in a coward quaking, Would have betray'd me to ign.o.ble flight And vagabond pursuit of dreadful safety: But look upon my steadiness and scorn not The sickness of my fortune; which since Ba.s.sanes Was husband to Penthea, had lain bed-rid.

We trifle time in words: thus I show cunning In opening of a vein too full, too lively.

[_Pierces the vein with his dagger._

_Arm._ Desperate courage!

_Near._ Honourable infamy!

_Hem._ I tremble at the sight.

_Gron._ Would I were loose!

_Ba.s.s._ It sparkles like a l.u.s.ty wine new broach'd; The vessel must be sound from which it issues.

Grasp hard this other stick--I'll be as nimble-- But prithee look not pale--Have at ye! stretch out Thine arm with vigour and unshaken virtue.

[_Opens the vein._

Good! oh I envy not a rival, fitted To conquer in extremities: this pastime Appears majestical; some high-tuned poem Hereafter shall deliver to posterity The writer's glory, and his subjects triumph.

How is't man?--droop not yet.

_Org._ I feel no palsies, On a pair-royal do I wait in death: My sovereign as his liegeman; on my mistress As a devoted servant; and on Ithocles As if no brave, yet no unworthy enemy: Nor did I use an engine to entrap His life out of a slavish fear to combat Youth, strength, or cunning; but for that I durst not Engage the goodness of a cause on fortune By which his name might have outfaced my vengeance.

Oh, Tecnicus, inspired with Phoebus' fire!

I call to mind thy augury, 'twas perfect; _Revenge proves its own executioner._ When feeble man is lending to his mother The dust he was first framed in, thus he totters.

_Ba.s.s._ Life's fountain is dried up.

_Org._ So falls the standard Of my prerogative in being a creature, A mist hangs o'er mine eyes, the sun's bright splendour Is clouded in an everlasting shadow.

Welcome, thou ice that sit'st about my heart, No heat can ever thaw thee.

[_Dies._

The perverse absurdity of a man like Orgilus letting Penthea die by the most horrible of deaths must be set aside: his vengeance (the primary absurdity granted), is exactly and wholly in character. But if anything could be decisive against Ford being "of the first order of poets," even of dramatic poets, it would be the total lack of interest in the characters of Calantha and Ithocles. Fate-disappointed love seems (no doubt from something in his own history) to have had a singular attraction for Lamb; and the glorification, or, as it were, apotheosis of it in Calantha must have appealed to him in one of those curious and illegitimate ways which every critic knows. But the mere introduction of Ba.s.sanes would show that Ford is not of the first order of poets. He is a purely contemptible character, neither sublimed by pa.s.sion of jealousy, nor kept whole by salt of comic exposition; a mischievous poisonous idiot who ought to have had his brains knocked out, and whose brains would a.s.suredly have been knocked out, by any Orgilus of real life. He is absolutely unequal to the place of central personage, and causer of the harms, of a romantic tragedy such as _The Broken Heart_.

I have said "by any Orgilus of real life," but Ford has little to do with real life; and it is in this fact that the insufficiency of his claim to rank among the first order of poets lies. He was, it is evident, a man of the greatest talent, even of great genius, who, coming at the end of a long literary movement, exemplified the defects of its decadence. I could compare him, if there was here any s.p.a.ce for such a comparison, to Baudelaire or Flaubert with some profit; except that he never had Baudelaire's perfect sense of art, and that he does not seem, like Flaubert, to have laid in, before melancholy marked him for her own, a sufficient stock of living types to save him from the charge of being a mere study-student. There is no Frederic, no M. Homais, in his repertory.

Even Giovanni--even Orgilus, his two masterpieces, are, if not exactly things of shreds and patches, at any rate artificial persons, young men who have known more of books than of life, and who persevere in their eccentric courses with almost more than a half knowledge that they are eccentric.

Annabella is incomplete, though there is nothing, except her love, unnatural in her. The strokes which draw her are separate imaginations of a learned draughtsman, not fresh transcripts from the living model. Penthea and Calantha are wholly artificial; a live Penthea would never have thought of such a fantastic martyrdom, unless she had been insane or suffering from green-sickness, and a live Calantha would have behaved in a perfectly different fashion, or if she had behaved in the same, would have been quit for her temporary aberration. We see (or at least I think I see) in Ford exactly the signs which are so familiar to us in our own day, and which repeat themselves regularly at the end of all periods of distinct literary creativeness--the signs of _excentricite voulue_. The author imagines that "all is said" in the ordinary way, and that he must go to the ends of the earth to fetch something extraordinary. If he is strong enough, as Ford was, he fetches it, and it _is_ something extraordinary, and we owe him, with all his extravagance, respect and honour for his labour. But we can never put him on the level of the men who, keeping within ordinary limits, achieve masterpieces there.

Ford--an Elizabethan in the strict sense for nearly twenty years--did not suffer from the decay which, as noted above, set in in regard to versification and language among the men of his own later day. He has not the natural trick of verse and phrase which stamps his greatest contemporaries unmistakably, and even such lesser ones as his collaborator, Dekker, with a hardly mistakable mark; but his verse is nervous, well proportioned, well delivered, and at its best a n.o.ble medium. He was by general consent utterly incapable of humour, and his low-comedy scenes are among the most loathsome in the English theatre. His lyrics are not equal to Shakespere's or Fletcher's, Dekker's or Shirley's, but they are better than Ma.s.singer's. Although he frequently condescended to the Fletcherian license of the redundant syllable, he never seems to have dropped (as Fletcher did sometimes, or at least allowed his collaborators to drop) floundering into the Serbonian bog of stuff that is neither verse nor prose. He showed indeed (and Mr. Swinburne, with his usual insight, has noticed it, though perhaps he has laid rather too much stress on it) a tendency towards a severe rule-and-line form both of tragic scheme and of tragic versification, which may be taken to correspond in a certain fashion (though Mr. Swinburne does not notice this) to the "correctness" in ordinary poetry of Waller and his followers. Yet he shows no sign of wishing to discard either the admixture of comedy with tragedy (save in _The Broken Heart_, which is perhaps a crucial instance), or blank verse, or the freedom of the English stage in regard to the unities. In short, Ford was a person distinctly deficient in initiative and planning genius, but endowed with a great executive faculty. He wanted guidance in all the greater lines of his art, and he had it not; the result being that he produced unwholesome and undecided work, only saved by the unmistakable presence of poetical faculty. I do not think that Webster could ever have done anything better than he did: I think that if Ford had been born twenty years earlier he might have been second to Shakespere, and at any rate the equal of Ben Jonson and of Fletcher. But the flagging genius of the time made its imprint on his own genius, which was of the second order, not the first.