The Age of Shakespeare Part 7

Because no drop of honor falls from him But I bleed with it.

This high-souled simplicity of instinct is as traceable in the earlier as in the later of Heywood's extant works: he is English of the English in his quiet, frank, spontaneous expression, when suppression is no longer either possible or proper, of all n.o.ble and gentle and natural emotion. His pa.s.sion and his pathos, his loyalty and his chivalry, are always so un.o.btrusive that their modesty may sometimes run the risk of eclipse before the glory of more splendid poets and more conspicuous patriots: but they are true and trustworthy as Shakespeare's or Milton's or Wordsworth's or Tennyson's or Browning's.

It was many a year before d.i.c.k Pike had earned the honor of commemoration by his hand or by any other poet's that Heywood had won his spurs as the champion presenter--if I may be allowed to revive the word--of his humbler and homelier countrymen under the light of a no less n.o.ble than simple realism. "The Fair Maid of the Exchange" is a notable example of what I believe is professionally or theatrically called a one-part piece. Adapting Dr. Johnson's curiously unjust and inept remark on Shakespeare's "King Henry VIII."--the play in which, according to the principles or tenets of the new criticism which walks or staggers by the new light of a new scholarship, "the new Shakspere"

may or must have been a.s.sisted by Flitcher (why not also by Meddletun, Messenger, and a few other _novi homines?_), we may say, and it may be said this time with some show of reason, that the genius of the author limps in and limps out with the Cripple. Most of the other characters and various episodical incidents of the incomposite story are alike, if I may revive a good and expressive phrase of the period, hastily and unskilfully slubbered up: Bowdler is a poor second-hand and third-rate example of the Jonsonian gull; and the transfer of Moll's regard from him to his friend is both childishly conceived and childishly contrived.

On the whole, a second-rate play, with one or two first-rate scenes and pa.s.sages to which Lamb has done perhaps no more than justice by the characteristic and eloquent cordiality of his commendations. Its date may be probably determined as early among the earliest of its author's by the occurrence in mid-dialogue of a sestet in the popular metre of "Venus and Adonis," with archaic inequality in the lengths of the second and fourth rhyming words: a notable note of metrical or immetrical antiquity in style. The self-willed if high-minded Phyllis Flower has something in her of Heywood's later heroines, Bess Bridges of Plymouth and Luce the goldsmith's daughter, but is hardly as interesting or attractive as either.

Much less than this can be said for the heroines, if heroines they can in any sense be called, of the two plays by which Heywood is best known as a tragic and a comic painter of contemporary life among his countrymen. It is certainly not owing to any exceptional power of painting or happiness in handling feminine character that the first place among his surviving works has been generally and rationally a.s.signed to "A Woman Killed with Kindness." The fame of this famous realistic tragedy is due to the perfect fitness of the main subject for treatment in the manner of which Heywood was in his day and remains to the present day beyond all comparison the greatest and the most admirable master. It is not that the interest is either naturally greater, or greater by force and felicity of genius in the dramatist, than that of other and far inferior plays. It is not that the action is more artistically managed: it is not that curiosity or sympathy is aroused or sustained with any particular skill. Such a play as "Fatal Curiosity" is as truthfully lifelike and more tragically exciting: it is in mere moral power and charm, with just a touch of truer and purer poetry pervading and coloring and flavoring and quickening the whole, that the work of a Heywood approves itself as beyond the reach or the ambition of a Lillo. One figure among many remains impressed on his reader's memory once for all: the play is full of incident, perhaps over-full of actors, excellently well written and pa.s.sably well composed; but it lives, it survives and overtops its fellows, by grace of the character of its hero. The underplot, whether aesthetically or historically considered, is not more singular and sensational than extravagant and unpleasant to natural taste as well as to social instinct: the other agents in the main plot are little more than sketches--sometimes deplorably out of drawing: Anne is never really alive till on her death-bed, and her paramour is never alive--in his temptation, his transgression, or his impenitence--at all. The whole play, as far as we remember or care to remember it, is Frankford: he suffices to make it a n.o.ble poem and a memorable play.

The hero of "The English Traveller," however worthy to stand beside him as a typical sample of English manhood at its n.o.blest and gentlest, cannot be said to occupy so predominant a place in the conduct of the action or the memory of the reader. The comic Plautine underplot--Plautus always brought good luck to Heywood--is so incomparably preferable to the ugly and unnatural though striking and original underplot of "A Woman Killed with Kindness" as wellnigh to counterbalance the comparative lack of interest, plausibility, and propriety in the main action. The seduction of Mrs. Frankford is so roughly slurred over that it is hard to see how, if she could not resist a first whisper of temptation, she can ever have been the loyal wife and mother whose fall we are expected to deplore: but the seduction of Mrs.

Wincott, or rather her transformation from the likeness of a loyal and high-minded lady to the likeness of an impudent and hypocritical harlot, is neither explained nor explicable in the case of a woman who dies of a sudden shock of shame and penitence. Her paramour is only not quite so shapeless and shadowy a scoundrel as the betrayer of Frankford: but Heywood is no great hand at a villain: his n.o.bly simple conception and grasp and development of character will here be recognized only in the quiet and perfect portraiture of the two grand old gentlemen and the gallant unselfish youth whom no more subtle or elaborate draughtsman could have set before us in clearer or fuller outline, with more attractive and actual charm of feature and expression.

"The Fair Maid of the West" is one of Heywood's most characteristic works, and one of his most delightful plays. Inartistic as this sort of dramatic poem may seem to the lovers of theatrical composition and sensational arrangement, of emotional calculations and premeditated shocks, it has a place of its own, and a place of honor, among the incomparably various forms of n.o.ble and serious drama which English poets of the Shakespearean age conceived, created, and left as models impossible to reproduce or to rival in any generation of poets or readers, actors or spectators, after the decadent forces of English genius in its own most natural and representative form of popular and creative activity had finally shrivelled up and shuddered into everlasting inanition under the withering blast of Puritanism. Before that blight had fallen upon the country of Shakespeare, the variety and fertility of dramatic form and dramatic energy which distinguished the typical imagination or invention of his countrymen can only be appreciated or conceived by students of what yet is left us of the treasure bequeathed by the fellows and the followers of Shakespeare.

Every other man who could speak or write at all was a lyric poet, a singer of beautiful songs, in the generation before Shakespeare's: every other such man in Shakespeare's was a dramatic poet above or beyond all comparison with any later claimant of the t.i.tle among Shakespeare's countrymen. One peculiarly and characteristically English type of drama which then flourished here and there among more ambitious if not more interesting forms or varieties, and faded forever with the close of the age of Shakespeare, was the curious and delightful kind of play dealing with records or fictions of contemporary adventure. The veriest failures in this line have surely something of national and historical interest; telling us as they do of the achievements or in any case of the aspirations and the ideals, the familiar traditions and ambitions and admirations, of our simplest and n.o.blest forefathers. Even such a play as that in which the adventures of the Shirleys were hurried and huddled into inadequate and incoherent presentation as "The Travels of Three English Brothers," however justly it may offend or dissatisfy the literary critic, can hardly be without attraction for the lover of his country: curiosity may be disappointed of its hope, yet patriotism may find matter for its sympathy. And if so much may be said on behalf of a poetic and dramatic failure, this and far more than this may be claimed on behalf of such plays as "The Fair Maid of the West" and "Fortune by Land and Sea." Of these the first is certainly the better play: I should myself be inclined to rank it among Heywood's very best. He never wrote anything brighter, sprightlier, livelier or fuller of life and energy: more amusing in episodical incident or by-play, more interesting and attractive in the structure or the progress of the main story. No modern heroine with so strong a dash of the Amazon--so decided a cross of the male in her--was ever so n.o.ble, credible and lovable as Bess Bridges: and Plymouth ought really to do itself the honor of erecting a memorial to her poet. An amusing instance of Heywood's incomparable good-nature and sweetness of temper in dealing with the creatures of his genius--incomparable I call it, because in Shakespeare the same beautiful quality is more duly tempered and toned down to more rational compliance with the demands of reason and probability, whether natural or dramatic--is here to be recognized in the redemption of a cowardly bully, and his conversion from a lying ruffian into a loyal and worthy sort of fellow. The same gallant spirit of sympathy with all n.o.ble homeliness of character, whether displayed in joyful search of adventure or in manful endurance of suffering and wrong, informs the less excellently harmonious and well-built play which bears the truly and happily English t.i.tle of "Fortune by Land and Sea." It has less romantic interest than the later adventures of the valiant Bess and her Spencer with the amorous King of Fez and his equally erratic consort; not to mention the no less susceptible Italians among whom their lot is subsequently cast: but it is a model of natural and n.o.ble simplicity, of homely and lively variety. There is perhaps more of the roughness and crudity of style and treatment which might be expected from Rowley than of the humaner and easier touch of Heywood in the conduct of the action: the curious vehemence and primitive brutality of social or domestic tyranny may recall the use of the same dramatic motives by George Wilkins in "The Miseries of Enforced Marriage": but the mixture or fusion of tender and sustained emotion with the national pa.s.sion for enterprise and adventure is pleasantly and peculiarly characteristic of Heywood.

In "The Wise Woman of Hogsdon" the dramatic ability of Heywood, as distinct from his more poetic and pathetic faculty, shows itself at its best and brightest. There are not many much better examples of the sort of play usually defined as a comedy of intrigue, but more properly definable as a comedy of action. The special risk to which a purveyor of this kind of ware must naturally be exposed is the tempting danger of sacrificing propriety and consistency of character to effective and impressive suggestions or developments of situation or event; the inclination to think more of what is to happen than of the persons it must happen to--the characters to be actively or pa.s.sively affected by the concurrence or the evolution of circ.u.mstances. Only to the very greatest of narrative or dramatic artists in creation and composition can this perilous possibility be all but utterly unknown. Poets of the city no less than poets of the court, the homely Heywood as well as the fashionable Fletcher, tripped and fell now and then over this awkward stone of stumbling--a very rock of offence to readers of a more exacting temper or a more fastidious generation than the respective audiences of patrician and plebeian London in the age of Shakespeare. The leading young man of this comedy now under notice is represented as "a wild-headed gentleman," and revealed as an abject ruffian of unredeemed and irredeemable rascality. As much and even more may be said of the execrable wretch who fills a similar part in an admirably written play published thirty-six years earlier and verified for the first time as Heywood's by the keen research and indefatigable intuition of Mr. Fleay.

The parallel pa.s.sages cited by him from the broadly farcical underplots are more than suggestive, even if they be not proof positive, of ident.i.ty in authorship: but the ident.i.ty in atrocity of the two hideous figures who play the two leading parts must reluctantly be admitted as more serious evidence. The abuse of innocent foreign words or syllables by comparison or confusion with indecent native ones is a simple and school-boy-like sort of jest for which Master Hey wood, if impeached as even more deserving of the birch than any boy on his stage, might have pleaded the example of the captain of the school, and protested that his humble audacities, if no less indecorous, were funnier and less forced than Master Shakespeare's. As for the other member of Webster's famous triad, I fear that the most indulgent sentence pa.s.sed on Master Dekker, if sent up for punishment on the charge of bad language and impudence, could hardly in justice be less than Orbilian or Draconic. But he was apparently if not a.s.suredly almost as incapable as Shakespeare of presenting the most infamous of murderers as an erring but pardonable transgressor, not unfit to be received back with open arms by the wife he has attempted, after a series of the most hideous and dastardly outrages, to despatch by poison. The excuse for Heywood is simply that in his day as in Chaucer's the orthodox ideal of a married heroine was still none other than Patient Grizel: Shakespeare alone had got beyond it.

The earlier of these two plays, "a pleasant" if somewhat sensational "comedy ent.i.tled 'How to Choose a Good Wife from a Bad,'" is written for the most part in Heywood's most graceful and poetical vein of verse, with beautiful simplicity, purity, and fluency of natural and musical style. In none of his plays is the mixture or rather the fusion of realism with romance more simply happy and harmonious: the rescue of the injured wife by a faithful lover from the tomb in which, like Juliet, she has been laid while under the soporific influence of a supposed poison could hardly have been better or more beautifully treated by any but the very greatest among Heywood's fellow-poets. There is no merit of this kind in the later play: but from the dramatic if not even from the ethical point of view it is, on the whole, a riper and more rational sort of work. The culmination of acc.u.mulating evidence by which the rascal hero is ultimately overwhelmed and put to shame, driven from lie to lie and reduced from retractation to retractation as witness after witness starts up against him from every successive corner of the witch's dwelling, is as masterly in management of stage effect as any contrivance of the kind in any later and more famous comedy: nor can I remember a more spirited and vivid opening to any play than the quarrelling scene among the gamblers with which this one breaks out at once into life-like action, full of present interest and promise of more to come. The second scene, in which the fair sempstress appears at work in her father's shop, recalls and indeed repeats the introduction of the heroine in an earlier play: but here again the author's touch is firmer and his simplicity more masculine than before. This coincidence is at least as significant as that between the two samples of flogging-block doggrel collated for comparison by Mr. Fleay: it is indeed a suggestive though superfluous confirmation of Heywood's strangely questioned but surely unquestionable claim to the authorship of "The Fair Maid of the Exchange." A curious allusion to a more famous play of the author's is the characteristic remark of the young ruffian Chartley: "Well, I see you choleric hasty men are the kindest when all is done. Here's such wetting of handkerchers! he weeps to think of his wife, she weeps to see her father cry! Peace, fool, we shall else have thee claim kindred of the woman killed with kindness." And in the fourth and last scene of the fourth act the same scoundrel is permitted to talk Shakespeare: "I'll go, although the devil and mischance look big."

Poetical justice may cry out against the dramatic lenity which could tolerate or prescribe for the sake of a comfortable close to this comedy the triumphant escape of a villanous old impostor and baby-farmer from the condign punishment due to her misdeeds; but the severest of criminal judges if not of professional witch-finders might be satisfied with the justice or injustice done upon "the late Lancashire Witches" in the bright and vigorous tragicomedy which, as we learn from Mr. Fleay, so unwarrantably and uncharitably (despite a disclaimer in the epilogue) antic.i.p.ated the verdict of their judges against the defenceless victims of terrified prepossession and murderous perjury. But at this time of day the mere poetical reader or dramatic student need not concern himself, while reading a brilliant and delightful play, with the soundness or unsoundness of its moral and historical foundations. There may have been a boy so really and so utterly possessed by the devil who seems now and then to enter into young creatures of human form and be-monster them as to amuse himself by denouncing helpless and harmless women to the most horrible of deaths on the most horrible of charges: that hideous pa.s.sing fact does not affect or impair the charming and lasting truth of Heywood's unsurpa.s.sable study, the very model of a gallant and life-like English lad, all compact of fearlessness and fun, audacity and loyalty, so perfectly realized and rendered in this quaint and fascinating play. The admixture of what a modern boy would call cheek and chaff with the equally steadfast and venturesome resolution of the indomitable young scapegrace is so natural as to make the supernatural escapades in which it involves him quite plausible for the time to a reader of the right sort: even as (to compare this small masterpiece with a great one) such a reader, while studying the marvellous text of Meinhold, is no more sceptical than is their chronicler as to the sorceries of Sidonia von Bork. And however condemnable or blameworthy the authors of "The Witches of Lancashire"

may appear to a modern reader or a modern magistrate or jurist for their dramatic a.s.sumption or presumption in begging the question against the unconvicted defendants whom they describe in the prologue as "those witches the fat jailor brought to town," they can hardly have been either wishful or able to influence the course of justice toward criminals of whose evident guilt they were evidently convinced.

Shadwell's later play of the same name, though not wanting in such rough realistic humor and coa.r.s.e-grained homespun interest as we expect in the comic produce of his hard and heavy hand, makes happily no attempt to emulate the really n.o.ble touches of poetry and pathos with which Heywood has thrown out into relief the more serious aspect of the supposed crime of witchcraft in its influence or refraction upon the honor and happiness of innocent persons. Og was naturally more in his place and more in his element as the second "fat jailor" of Lancashire witches than as the second English dramatic poet of Psyche: he has come closer than his precursors, closer indeed than could have been thought possible, to actual presentation of the most b.e.s.t.i.a.l and abominable details of demonolatry recorded by the chroniclers of witchcraft: and in such scenes as are rather transcribed than adapted from such narratives he has imitated his professed master and model, Ben Jonson, by appending to his text, with the most minute and meticulous care, all requisite or more than requisite references to his original authorities. The allied poets who had preceded him were content to handle the matter more easily and lightly, with a quaint apology for having nothing of more interest to offer than "an argument so thin, persons so low," that they could only hope their play might "pa.s.s pardoned, though not praised." Brome's original vein of broad humor and farcical fancy is recognizable enough in the presentation of the bewitched household where the children rule their parents and are ruled by their servants; a situation which may have suggested the still more amusing development of the same fantastic motive in his admirable comedy of "The Antipodes." There is a noticeable reference to "Macbeth" in the objurgations lavished by the daughter upon the mother under the influence of a revolutionary spell: "Is this a fit habit for a handsome young gentlewoman's mother? as I hope to be a lady, you look like one o' the Scottish wayward sisters." The still more broadly comic interlude of the bewitched rustic bridegroom and his loudly reclamatory bride is no less humorously sustained and carried through. Altogether, for an avowedly hasty and occasional piece of work, this tragicomedy is very creditably characteristic of both its a.s.sociated authors.

How small a fraction of Heywood's actual work is comprised in these twenty-six plays we cannot even conjecturally compute; we only know that they amount to less than an eighth part of the plays written wholly or mainly by his indefatigable hand, and that they are altogether outweighed in volume, though decidedly not in value, by the existing ma.s.s of his undramatic work. We know also, if we have eyes to see, that the very hastiest and slightest of them does credit to the author, and that the best of them are to be counted among the genuine and imperishable treasures of English literature. Such amazing fecundity and such astonishing industry would be memorable even in a far inferior writer; but, though I certainly cannot pretend to anything like an exhaustive or even an adequate acquaintance with all or any of his folios, I can at least affirm that they contain enough delightfully readable matter to establish a more than creditable reputation. His prose, if never to be called masterly, may generally be called good and pure: its occasional pedantries and pretentions are rather signs of the century than faults of the author; and he can tell a story, especially a short story, as well as if not better than many a better-known writer.

I fear, however, that it is not the poetical quality of his undramatic verse which can ever be said to make it worth reading: it is, as far as I know, of the very homeliest homespun ever turned out by the very humblest of workmen. His poetry, it would be pretty safe to wager, must be looked for exclusively in his plays: but there, if not remarkable for depth or height of imagination or of pa.s.sion, it will be found memorable for unsurpa.s.sed excellence of unpretentious elevation in treatment of character. The unity (or, to borrow from Coleridge a barbaric word, the triunity) of n.o.ble and gentle and simple in the finest quality of the English character at its best--of the English character as revealed in our Sidneys and Nelsons and Collingwoods and Franklins--is almost as apparent in the best scenes of his best plays as in the lives of our chosen and best-beloved heroes: and this, I venture to believe, would have been rightly regarded by Thomas Heywood as a more desirable and valuable success than the achievement of a noisier triumph or the attainment of a more conspicuous place among the poets of his country.

GEORGE CHAPMAN

George Chapman, translator of Homer, dramatist, and gnomic poet, was born in 1559, and died in 1634. At fifteen, according to Anthony Wood, "he, being well grounded in school learning, was sent to the university"

of Oxford; at thirty-five he published his first poem: "The Shadow of Night." Between these dates, though no fact has been unearthed concerning his career, it is not improbable that he may have travelled in Germany. At thirty-nine he was reckoned "among the best of our tragic writers for the stage"; but his only play published at that age was a crude and formless attempt at romantic comedy, which had been acted three years before it pa.s.sed from the stage to the press; and his first tragedy now extant in print, without name of author, did not solicit the suffrage of a reader till the poet was forty-eight. At thirty-nine he had also published the first instalment of his celebrated translation of the "Iliad," in a form afterward much remodelled; at sixty-five he crowned the lofty structure of his labor by the issue of an English version of the "Hymns" and other minor Homeric poems. The former he dedicated to Robert Devereux, Earl of Ess.e.x, the hapless favorite of Elizabeth; the latter to Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, the infamous minion of James. Six years earlier he had inscribed to Bacon, then Lord Chancellor, a translation of Hesiod's "Works and Days." His only other versions of cla.s.sic poems are from the fifth satire of Juvenal and the "Hero and Leander" which goes under the name of Musaeus, the latter dedicated to Inigo Jones. His revised and completed version of the "Iliad" had been inscribed in a n.o.ble and memorable poem of dedication to Henry Prince of Wales, after whose death he and his "Odyssey" fell under the patronage of Carr. Of the manner of his death at seventy-five we know nothing more than may be gathered from the note appended to a ma.n.u.script fragment, which intimates that the remainder of the poem, a lame and awkward piece of satire on his old friend Jonson, had been "lost in his sickness." Chapman, his first biographer is careful to let us know, "was a person of most reverend aspect, religious and temperate, qualities rarely meeting in a poet"; he had also certain other merits at least as necessary to the exercise of that profession. He had a singular force and solidity of thought, an admirable ardor of ambitious devotion to the service of poetry, a deep and burning sense at once of the duty implied and of the dignity inherent in his office; a vigor, opulence, and loftiness of phrase, remarkable even in that age of spiritual strength, wealth, and exaltation of thought and style; a robust eloquence, touched not unfrequently with flashes of fancy, and kindled at times into heat of imagination. The main fault of his style is one more commonly found in the prose than in the verse of his time--a quaint and florid obscurity, rigid with elaborate rhetoric and tortuous with labyrinthine ill.u.s.tration; not dark only to the rapid reader through closeness and subtlety of thought, like Donne, whose miscalled obscurity is so often "all glorious within," but thick and slab as a witch's gruel with forced and barbarous eccentricities of articulation.

As his language in the higher forms of comedy is always pure and clear, and sometimes exquisite in the simplicity of its sincere and natural grace, the stiffness and density of his more ambitious style may perhaps be attributed to some pernicious theory or conceit of the dignity proper to a moral and philosophic poet. Nevertheless, many of the gnomic pa.s.sages in his tragedies and allegoric poems are of singular weight and beauty; the best of these, indeed, would not discredit the fame of the very greatest poets for sublimity of equal thought and expression: witness the lines chosen by Sh.e.l.ley as the motto for a poem, and fit to have been chosen as the motto for his life.

The romantic and sometimes barbaric grandeur of Chapman's Homer remains attested by the praise of Keats, of Coleridge, and of Lamb; it is written at a pitch of strenuous and laborious exaltation, which never flags or breaks down, but never flies with the ease and smoothness of an eagle native to Homeric air. From his occasional poems an expert and careful hand might easily gather a n.o.ble anthology of excerpts, chiefly gnomic or meditative, allegoric or descriptive. The most notable examples of his tragic work are comprised in the series of plays taken, and adapted sometimes with singular license, from the records of such part of French history as lies between the reign of Francis I. and the reign of Henry IV., ranging in date of subject from the trial and death of Admiral Chabot to the treason and execution of Marshal Biron. The two plays bearing as epigraph the name of that famous soldier and conspirator are a storehouse of lofty thought and splendid verse, with scarcely a flash or sparkle of dramatic action. The one play of Chapman's whose popularity on the stage survived the Restoration is "Bussy d'Ambois" (d'Amboise)--a tragedy not lacking in violence of action or emotion, and abounding even more in sublime or beautiful interludes than in crabbed and bombastic pa.s.sages. His rarest jewels of thought and verse detachable from the context lie embedded in the tragedy of "Caesar and Pompey," whence the finest of them were first extracted by the unerring and unequalled critical genius of Charles Lamb. In most of his tragedies the lofty and laboring spirit of Chapman may be said rather to shine fitfully through parts than steadily to pervade the whole; they show n.o.bly altogether as they stand, but even better by help of excerpts and selections. But the excellence of his best comedies can only be appreciated by a student who reads them fairly and fearlessly through, and, having made some small deductions on the score of occasional pedantry and occasional crudity, finds in "All Fools," "Monsieur d'Olive," "The Gentleman Usher," and "The Widow's Tears" a wealth and vigor of humorous invention, a tender and earnest grace of romantic poetry, which may atone alike for these pa.s.sing blemishes and for the lack of such clear-cut perfection of character and such dramatic progression of interest as we find only in the yet higher poets of our heroic age.

The severest critic of his shortcomings or his errors, if not incompetent to appreciate his achievements and his merits, must recognize in Chapman an original poet, one who held of no man and acknowledged no master, but throughout the whole generation of our greatest men, from the birth of Marlowe wellnigh to the death of Jonson, held on his own hard and haughty way of austere and sublime ambition, not without an occasional pause for kindly and graceful salutation of such younger and still n.o.bler compeers as Jonson and Fletcher. With Shakespeare we should never have guessed that he had come at all in contact, had not the intelligence of Mr. Minto divined or rather discerned him to be the rival poet referred to in Shakespeare's sonnets with a grave note of pa.s.sionate satire, hitherto as enigmatic as almost all questions connected with those divine and dangerous poems. This conjecture the critic has fortified by such apt collocation and confrontation of pa.s.sages that we may now reasonably accept it as an ascertained and memorable fact.

The objections which a just and adequate judgment may bring against Chapman's master-work, his translation of Homer, may be summed up in three epithets: it is romantic, laborious, Elizabethan. The qualities implied by these epithets are the reverse of those which should distinguish a translator of Homer; but setting this apart, and considering the poems as in the main original works, the superstructure of a romantic poet on the submerged foundations of Greek verse, no praise can be too warm or high for the power, the freshness, the indefatigable strength and inextinguishable fire which animate this exalted work, and secure for all time that shall take cognizance of English poetry an honored place in its highest annals for the memory of Chapman.

CYRIL TOURNEUR

"They, shut up under their roofs, the prisoners of darkness, and fettered with the bonds of a long night, lay exiled, fugitives from the eternal providence. For while they supposed to lie hid in their secret sins, they were scattered under a dark veil of forgetfulness, being horribly astonished, and troubled with sights.... Sad visions appeared unto them with heavy countenances. No power of the fire might give them light: neither could the bright flames of the stars endure to lighten that horrible night. Only there appeared unto them a fire kindled of itself, very dreadful: for being much terrified, they thought the things which they saw to be worse than the sight they saw not.... The whole world shined with clear light, and none were hindered in their labor: over them only was spread an heavy night, an image of that darkness which should afterward receive them: but yet were they unto themselves more grievous than the darkness." In this wild world of fantastic retribution and prophetic terror the genius of a great English poet--if greatness may be attributed to a genius which holds absolute command in a strictly limited province of reflection and emotion--was born and lived and moved and had its being. The double mainspring of its energy is not difficult to define: its component parts are simply adoration of good and abhorrence of evil: all other sources of emotion were subordinate to these: love, hate, resentment, resignation, self-devotion, are but transitory agents on this lurid and stormy stage, which pa.s.s away and leave only the sombre fire of meditative indignation still burning among the ruins of shattered hopes and lives. More splendid success in pure dramatic dialogue has not been achieved by Shakespeare or by Webster than by Cyril Tourneur in his moments of happiest invention or purest inspiration: but the intensity of his moral pa.s.sion has broken the outline and marred the symmetry of his general design. And yet he was at all points a poet: there is an accent of indomitable self-reliance, a note of persistence and resistance more deep than any note of triumph, in the very cry of his pa.s.sionate and implacable dejection, which marks him as different in kind from the race of the great prosaic pessimists whose scorn and hatred of mankind found expression in the contemptuous and rancorous despondency of Swift or of Carlyle. The obsession of evil, the sensible prevalence of wickedness and falsehood, self-interest and stupidity, pressed heavily on his fierce and indignant imagination; yet not so heavily that mankind came to seem to him the "d.a.m.ned race," the hopeless horde of millions "mostly fools" too foolish or too foul to be worth redemption, which excited the laughing contempt of Frederic the Great and the raging contempt of his biographer. On this point the editor to whom all lovers of high poetry were in some measure indebted for the first collection and reissue of his works has done much less than justice to the poet on whose text he can scarcely be said to have expended an adequate or even a tolerable amount of pains. A reader of his introduction who had never studied the text of his author might be forgiven if he should carry away the impression that Tourneur, as a serious or tragic poet, was little more than a better sort of Byron; a quack less impudent but not less transparent than the less inspired and more inflated ventriloquist of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage": whereas it is hardly too much to say that the earnest and fiery intensity of Tourneur's moral rhetoric is no less unmistakable than the blatant and flatulent inept.i.tude of Byron's.

It seems to me that Tourneur might say with the greatest of the popes, "I have loved justice, and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile"; therefore, in other words, I am cast aside and left behind by readers who are too lazy, too soft and slow of spirit, too sleepily sensual and self-sufficient, to endure the fiery and purgatorial atmosphere of my work. But there are breaths from heaven as surely as there are blasts from h.e.l.l in the tumultuous and electric air of it. The cynicism and egotism which the editor already mentioned has the confidence to attribute to him are rather the outer garments than the inner qualities of his genius: the few and simple lines in which his purer and n.o.bler characters are rapidly but not roughly drawn suffice to give them all due relief and all requisite attraction. The virtuous victims of the murderous conspirator whose crimes and punishment are the groundwork of "The Atheist's Tragedy" have life and spirit enough to make them heartily interesting: and the mixed character of Sebastian, the high-hearted and gallant young libertine whose fearless frankness of generosity brushes aside and breaks away the best-laid schemes of his father, is as vividly and gracefully drawn as any of the same kind on the comic or the tragic stage.

In this earlier of the two plays extant which preserve the name of Cyril Tourneur the magnificent if grotesque extravagance of the design may perhaps be partly accounted for by the didactic or devotional aim of the designer. A more appalling scarecrow or scarebabe, as the contemporaries of his creator would have phrased it, was certainly never begotten by orthodoxy on horror than the figure of the portentous and prodigious criminal who here represents the practical results of indulgence in free thought. It is a fine proof of the author's naturally dramatic genius that this terrific successor of Vanini and precursor of Diderot should be other than a mere man of straw. Huge as is the wilful and deliberate exaggeration of his atrocity, there are scenes and pa.s.sages in which his daring and indomitable craft is drawn with native skill as well as force of hand; in which it is no mere stage monster, but a genuine man, plausible and relentless, versatile and fearless, who comes before us now clothed in all the cajoleries of cunning, now exultant in all the nakedness of defiance. But indeed, although the construction of the verse and the composition of the play may both equally seem to bear witness of crude and impatient inexperience, there is no lack of life in any of the tragic or comic figures which play their part through these tempestuous five acts. Even so small a figure as the profligate Puritan parasite of the atheist who hires his hypocrisy to plead against itself is bright with touches of real rough humor. There is not much of this quality in Tourneur's work, and what there is of it is as bitter and as grim in feature and in flavor as might be expected of so fierce and pa.s.sionate a moralist: but he knows well how to salt his invective with a due sprinkling of such sharply seasoned pleasantry as relieves the historic narrative of John Knox; whose "merry"[1] account, for instance, of Cardinal Beaton's last night in this world has the very savor of Tourneur's tragic irony and implacable disgust in every vivid and relentless line of it.

[Footnote 1: These thingis we wreat mearelie.--_Works of John Knox_, vol. i., p. 180.]

The execution of this poem is singularly good and bad: there are pa.s.sages of such metrical strength and sweetness as will hardly be found in the dramatic verse of any later English poet; and there are pa.s.sages in which this poet's verse sinks wellnigh to the tragic level of a Killigrew's, a Shadwell's, or a Byron's. Such terminations as "of,"

"to," "with," "in," "and," "my," "your," preceding the substantive or the verb which opens the next verse, make us feel as though we were reading "Sardanapalus" or "The Two Foscari"--a sensation not easily to be endured. In a poet so far superior as Tourneur to the author of those abortions we must seek for an explanation of this perverse error in a transient and tentative theory of realism rather than in an incurable infirmity or obliquity of talent: for no quality is more remarkable in the execution of his masterpiece than his mastery of those metrical properties in which the style of this play is so generally deficient.

Whether in dialogue or in monologue, "The Revenger's Tragedy" is so equally admirable for instinctive obedience to nature and imaginative magnificence of inspiration, so equally perfect in the pa.s.sionate harmony of its verse and the inspired accuracy of its locution, that years of study and elaboration might have seemed necessary to bring about this inexpressible improvement in expression of yet more sombre and more fiery thought or feeling. There are gleams in "The Atheist's Tragedy" of that clear light in which the whole Shakespearean world lay shining, and here and there the bright flames of the stars do still endure to lighten the gloom of it by flashes or by fits; the gentle and n.o.ble young lovers, whose patient loyalty is at last rescued from the toils of crime to be crowned with happiness and honor, are painted, though rapidly and slightly, with equal firmness of hand and tenderness of touch; and there is some vigorous and lively humor in the lighter action of the comic scenes, however coa.r.s.e and crude in handling: but there is no such relief to the terrors of the maturer work, whose sultrier darkness is visible only by the fire kindled of itself, very dreadful, which burns in the heart of the revenger whom it lights along his blood-stained way. Nor indeed is any relief wanted; the harmony of its fervent and stern emotion is as perfect, as sufficient, as sublime as the full rush and flow of its diction, the fiery majesty of its verse. There never was such a thunder-storm of a play: it quickens and exhilarates the sense of the reader as the sense of a healthy man or boy is quickened and exhilarated by the rolling music of a tempest and the leaping exultation of its flames. The strange and splendid genius which inspired it seems now not merely to feel that it does well to be angry, but to take such keen enjoyment in that feeling, to drink such deep delight from the inexhaustible wellsprings of its wrath, that rage and scorn and hatred a.s.sume something of the rapturous quality more naturally proper to faith and hope and love. There is not a breath of rant, not a pad of bombast, in the declamation which fills its dazzling scenes with fire: the language has no more perfect models of style than the finest of its more sustained and elevated pa.s.sages. The verse is unlike any other man's in the solemn pa.s.sion of its music: if it reminds us of Shakespeare's or of Webster's, it is simply by right of kinship and equality of power with the most vivid and sonorous verse that rings from the lips of Coriola.n.u.s or of Timon, of Brachiano or the d.u.c.h.ess of Malfy; not by any servility of discipleship or reverberation of an imitative echo. It is so rich and full and supple, so happy in its freedom and so loyal in its instinct, that its veriest audacities and aberrations have an indefinable harmony of their own. Even if we admit that Tourneur is to Webster but as Webster is to Shakespeare, we must allow, by way of exception to this general rule of relative rank, that in his n.o.blest hours of sustained inspiration he is at least the equal of the greater dramatist on the score of sublime and burning eloquence, poured forth in verse like the rushing of a mighty wind, with fitful breaks and pauses that do but enhance the majestic sweetness and perfection of its forward movement, the strenuous yet spontaneous energy of its triumphant ardor in advance.

To these magnificent qualities of poetry and pa.s.sion no critic of the slightest note or the smallest pretention to poetic instinct has ever failed to do ample and cordial justice: but to the truthfulness and the power of Cyril Tourneur as a dramatic student and painter of human character not only has such justice not generally been done, but grave injustice has been too generally shown. It is true that not all the agents in the evolution of his greater tragedy are equally or sufficiently realized and vivified as active and distinct figures: true, for instance, that the two elder sons of the d.u.c.h.ess are little more than conventional outlines of such empty violence and futile ambition as might be inferred from the crude and puerile symbolism of their respective designations: but the third brother is a type no less living than revolting and no less dramatic than detestable: his ruffian cynicism and defiant brutality are in life and death alike original and consistent, whether they express themselves in curses or in jeers. The brother and accomplice of the hero in the accomplishment of his manifold revenge is seldom much more than a serviceable shadow: but there is a definite difference between their sister and the common type of virginal heroine who figures on the stage of almost every dramatist then writing; the author's profound and n.o.ble reverence for goodness gives at once precision and distinction to the outline and a glow of active life to the color of this pure and straightforward study. The brilliant simplicity of tone which distinguishes the treatment of this character is less remarkable in the figure of the mother whose wickedness and weakness are so easily played upon and blown about by every gust of penitence or temptation; but there is the same life-like vigor of touch in the smallest detail of the scenes between her children and herself.

It has been objected that her ready avowal of weakness as common to all her s.e.x is the undramatic epigram of a satirist, awkwardly ventriloquizing through the mechanism of a tragic puppet; but it is really quite in keeping with the woman's character to enlarge and extenuate the avowal of her own infamy and infirmity into a sententious reflection on womanhood in general. A similar objection has been raised against the apparent change of character implied in the confession made by the hero to the duke elect, at the close of the play, that he and his brother had murdered the old duke--"all for your grace's good," and in the cry when arrested and sentenced to instant execution, "Heart, was't not for your good, my lord?" But if this seems incompatible with the high sense of honor and of wrong which is the mainspring of Vindice's implacable self-devotion and savage unselfishness, the unscrupulous ferocity of the means through which his revenge is worked out may surely be supposed to have blunted the edge of his moral perception, distorted his natural instinct, and infected his n.o.bler sympathies with some taint of contagious egotism and pessimistic obduracy of imagination. And the intensity of sympathy with which this crowning creation of the poet's severe and fiery genius is steadily developed and displayed should make any critic of reasonable modesty think more than twice or thrice before he a.s.sumes or admits the likelihood or the possibility of so gross an error or so grave a defect in the conception of so great an artist. For if the claim to such a t.i.tle might be disputed in the case of a claimant who could show no better credentials than his authorship of "The Atheist's Tragedy"--and even in that far from faultless work of genius there are manifest and manifold signs, not merely of excellence, but of greatness--the claim of the man who could write "The Revenger's Tragedy"

is questionable by no one who has any glimmering of insight or perception as to what qualities they are which confer upon a writer the indisputable t.i.tle to a seat in the upper house of poets.

This master work of Cyril Tourneur, the most perfect and most terrible incarnation of the idea of retribution impersonate and concentrated revenge that ever haunted the dreams of a tragic poet or the vigils of a future tyrannicide, is resumed and embodied in a figure as original and as impossible to forget, for any one who has ever felt the savage fascination of its presence, as any of the humaner figures evoked and immortalized by Shakespeare. The rage of Swift, without his insanity and impurity, seems to utter in every word the healthier if no less consuming pa.s.sion of a heart lacerated by indignation and envenomed by contempt as absolute, as relentless, and as inconsolable as his own. And in the very torrent of the man's meditative and solitary pa.s.sion, a very Phlegethon of agony and fury and ravenous hunger after the achievement of a desperate expiation, comes the sudden touch of sarcasm which serves as a momentary breakwater to the raging tide of his reflections, and reveals the else unfathomable bitterness of a spiritual Marah that no plummet even of his own sinking can sound, and no infusion of less fiery sorrow or less venomous remembrance can sweeten. The mourner falls to scoffing, the justicer becomes a jester: the lover, with the skull of his murdered mistress in his hand, slides into such reflections on the influence of her living beauty as would beseem a s.e.xless and malignant satirist of her s.e.x. This power of self-abstraction from the individual self, this impersonal contemplation of a personal wrong, this contemptuous yet pa.s.sionate scrutiny of the very emotions which rend the heart and inflame the spirit and poison the very blood of the thinker, is the special seal or sign of original inspiration which distinguishes the type most representative of Tourneur's genius, most significant of its peculiar bias and its peculiar force. Such a conception, clothed in mere prose or in merely pa.s.sable verse, would be proof sufficient of the mental power which conceived it; when expressed in such verse as follows, it proves at once and preserves forever the claim of the designer to a place among the immortals:

Thou sallow picture of my poisoned love, My study's ornament, thou sh.e.l.l of death, Once the bright face of my betrothed lady, When life and beauty naturally filled out These ragged imperfections; When two heaven-pointed diamonds were set In these unsightly rings;--then 'twas a face So far beyond the artificial shine Of any woman's bought complexion That the uprightest man (if such there be, That sin but seven times a day) broke custom And made up eight with looking after her.

The very fall of the verse has a sort of fierce and savage pathos in the note of it; a cadence which comes nearer to the echo of such laughter as utters the cry of an anguish too deep for weeping and wailing, for curses or for prayers, than anything in dramatic poetry outside the part of Hamlet. It would be a conjecture not less plausible than futile, though perhaps not less futile than plausible, which should suggest that the influence of Shakespeare's Hamlet may be responsible for the creation of Tourneur's Vindice, and the influence of Tourneur's Vindice for the creation of Shakespeare's Timon. It is a certainty indisputable except by the blatant audacity of immedicable ignorance that the only poet to whose manner and style the style and manner of Cyril Tourneur can reasonably be said to bear any considerable resemblance is William Shakespeare. The more curt and abrupt style of Webster is equally unlike the general style of either. And if, as his first editor observes, "the parallel" between Tourneur and Marston, "as far as it goes, is so obvious that it is not worth drawing," it is no less certain that the diverence between the genius which created Andrugio and the genius which created Vindice is at least as wide as the points of resemblance or affinity between them are vivid and distinct. While Marston's imaginative and tragic power was at its highest, his style was crude and quaint, turgid and eccentric; when he had cured and purified it--perhaps, as Gifford suggests, in consequence of Ben Jonson's unmerciful but salutary ridicule--he approved himself a far abler writer of comedy or tragicomedy than before, but his right hand had forgotten its cunning as the hand of "a tragic penman." Now the improvement of Tourneur's style, an improvement amounting to little less than transfiguration, keeps time with his advance as a student of character and a tragic dramatist as distinguished from a tragic poet.

The style of his earlier play has much of beauty, of facility, and of freshness: the style of his later play, I must repeat, is comparable only with Shakespeare's. In the superb and inexhaustible imprecations of Timon there is a quality which reminds us of Cyril Tourneur as delightfully as we are painfully reminded of John Marston in reading certain scenes and pa.s.sages which disfigure and deface the magnificent but incomprehensible composition of "Troilus and Cressida."

Of Tourneur's two elegies on the death of Sir Francis Vere and of Henry Prince of Wales, it may be said that they are about as good as Chapman's work of the same order: and it may be added that his first editor has shown himself, to say the least, unreasonably and unaccountably virulent in his denunciation of what he a.s.sumes to be insincere and sycophantic in the elegiac expression of the poet's regret for a prince of such n.o.ble promise as the elder brother of Charles I. The most earnest and fervent of republicans, if not wanting in common-sense and common courtesy, would not dream of reflecting in terms of such unqualified severity on the lamentation of Lord Tennyson for the loss of Albert the Good: and the warmest admirer of that loudly lamented person will scarcely maintain that this loss was of such grave importance to England as the loss of a prince who might probably have preserved the country from the alternate oppression of prelates and of Puritans, from the social tyranny of a dictator and the political disgrace of the Restoration.

The existence of a comedy by the author of "The Revenger's Tragedy," and of a comedy bearing the suggestive if not provocative t.i.tle of "Laugh and Lie Down," must always have seemed to the students of Lowndes one of the most curious and amusing pieces of information to be gathered from the "Bibliographer's Manual"; and it is with a sense of disappointment proportionate to this sense of curiosity that they will discover the non-existence of such a comedy, and the existence in its stead of a mere pamphlet in prose issued under that more than promising t.i.tle: which yet, if attainable, ought surely to be reprinted, however dubious may be its claim to the honor of a great poet's authorship. In no case can it possibly be of less interest or value than the earliest extant publication of that poet--"The Transformed Metamorphosis." Its first editor has given proof of very commendable perseverance and fairly creditable perspicacity in his devoted attempt at elucidation of this most astonishing and indescribable piece of work: but no interpretation of it can hope to be more certain or more trustworthy than any possible exposition of Blake's "Jerusalem" or the Apocalypse of St. John. All that can be said by a modest and judicious reader is that any one of these three effusions may unquestionably mean anything that anybody chooses to read into the text; that a Luther is as safe as a Loyola, that a Renan is no safer than a c.u.mming, from the chance of confutation as a less than plausible exponent of its possible significance: but that, however indisputable it may be that they were meant to mean something, not many human creatures who can be trusted to go abroad without a keeper will be likely to pretend to a positive understanding of what that significance may be. To me, the most remarkable point in Tourneur's problematic poem is the fact that this most monstrous example of senseless and barbarous jargon that ever disfigured English type should have been written--were it even for a wager--by one of the purest, simplest, most exquisite and most powerful writers in the language.

This extraordinary effusion is the single and certainly the sufficient tribute of a great poet, and a great master of the purest and the n.o.blest English, to the most monstrous and preposterous taste or fashion of his time. As the product of an eccentric imbecile it would be no less curious than Stanihurst's Virgil: as the work of Cyril Tourneur it is indeed "a miracle instead of wit." For it cannot be too often repeated that in mere style, in commanding power and purity of language, in positive instinct of expression and direct eloquence of inspiration, the author of "The Revenger's Tragedy" stands alone in the next rank to Shakespeare. Many if not most of their contemporaries could compose a better play than he probably could conceive--a play with finer variation of incidents and daintier diversity of characters: not one of them, not even Webster himself, could pour forth poetry of such continuous force and flow. The fiery jet of his molten verse, the rush of its radiant and rhythmic lava, seems alone as inexhaustible as that of Shakespeare's. As a dramatist, his faults are doubtless as flagrant as his merits are manifest: as a writer, he is one of the very few poets who in their happiest moments are equally faultless and sublime. The tone of thought or of feeling which gives form and color to this splendid poetic style is so essentially what modern criticism would define as that of a natural Hebraist, and so far from that of a h.e.l.lenist or Latinist of the Renascence, that we recognize in this great poet one more of those Englishmen of genius on whom the direct or indirect influence of the Hebrew Bible has been actually as great as the influences of the country and the century in which they happened to be born. The single-hearted fury of unselfish and devoted indignation which animates every line of his satire is more akin to the spirit of Ezekiel or Isaiah than to the spirit of Juvenal or Persius: though the fierce literality of occasional detail, the prosaic accuracy of implacable and introspective abhorrence, may seem liker the hard Roman style of impeachment by photography than the great Hebrew method of denunciation by appeal. But the fusion of sarcastic realism with imaginative pa.s.sion produces a compound of such peculiar and fiery flavor as we taste only from the tragic chalice of Tourneur or of Shakespeare. The bitterness which serves but as a sauce or spice to the meditative rhapsodies of Marston's heroes or of Webster's villains is the dominant quality of the meats and wines served up on the stage which echoes to the cry of Vindice or of Timon. But the figure of Tourneur's typic hero is as distinct in its difference from the Shakespearean figure which may possibly have suggested it as in its difference from the Shakespearean figure which it may not impossibly have suggested. There is perhaps too much play made with skulls and cross-bones on the stage of Cyril Tourneur: he cannot apparently realize the fact that they are properties of which a thoughtful poet's use should be as temperate and occasional as Shakespeare's: but the graveyard meditations of Hamlet, perfect in dramatic tact and instinct, seem cool and common and shallow in sentiment when set beside the intensity of inspiration which animates the fitful and impetuous music of such pa.s.sages as these:

Here's an eye Able to tempt a great man--to serve G.o.d; A pretty hanging lip, that has forgot now to dissemble.

Methinks this mouth should make a swearer tremble, A drunkard clasp his teeth, and not undo 'em To suffer wet d.a.m.nation to run through 'em.

Here's a cheek keeps her color let the wind go whistle; Spout, rain, we fear thee not: be hot or cold, All's one with us; and is not he absurd, Whose fortunes are upon their faces set That fear no other G.o.d but wind and wet?

_Hippolito._ Brother, y'ave spoke that right; Is this the face that living shone so bright?

_Vindice._ The very same.

And now methinks I could e'en chide myself For doting on her beauty, though her death Shall be revenged after no common action.

Does the silk-worm expend her yellow labors For thee? for thee does she undo herself?

Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships For the poor benefit of a bewitching minute?[1]

Why does yon fellow falsify highways And put his life between the judge's lips, To refine such a thing, keeps horse and men To beat their valors for her?

Surely we're all mad people, and they[2]

Whom we think are, are not: we mistake those: 'Tis we are mad in sense, they but in clothes.

_Hippolito_. 'Faith, and in clothes too we, give us our due.

_Vindice_. Does every proud and self-affecting dame Camphire her face for this? and grieve her Maker In sinful baths of milk--when many an infant starves, For her superfluous outside,--all for this?

[Footnote 1: This is not, I take it, one of the poet's irregular though not unmusical lines; the five short unemphatic syllables, rapidly run together in one slurring note of scorn, being not more than equivalent in metrical weight to three such as would take their places if the verse were thus altered--and impaired:

For the poor price of one bewitching minute.]

[Footnote 2: Perhaps we might venture here to read--"and only they."