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The Age of Shakespeare

by Algernon Charles Swinburne · English · Gutenberg #14252 · 419,299 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Age of Shakespeare

Author: Algernon Charles Swinburne


        
Release date: December 3, 2004 [eBook #14252]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE ***

THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE

BY

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE



HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMVIII




TO THE MEMORY OF CHARLES LAMB

   When stark oblivion froze above their names
     Whose glory shone round Shakespeare's, bright as now,
   One eye beheld their light shine full as fame's,
     One hand unveiled it: this did none but thou.
   Love, stronger than forgetfulness and sleep,
     Rose, and bade memory rise, and England hear:
   And all the harvest left so long to reap
     Shone ripe and rich in every sheaf and ear.

   A child it was who first by grace of thine
   Communed with gods who share with thee their shrine:
     Elder than thou wast ever now I am,
   Now that I lay before thee in thanksgiving
   Praise of dead men divine and everliving
     Whose praise is thine as thine is theirs, Charles Lamb.




CONTENTS


CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

JOHN WEBSTER

THOMAS DEKKER

JOHN MARSTON

THOMAS MIDDLETON

WILLIAM ROWLEY

THOMAS HEYWOOD

GEORGE CHAPMAN

CYRIL TOURNEUR

INDEX




THE AGE OF SHAKESPEARE



CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE


The first great English poet was the father of English tragedy and the
creator of English blank verse. Chaucer and Spenser were great writers
and great men: they shared between them every gift which goes to the
making of a poet except the one which alone can make a poet, in the
proper sense of the word, great. Neither pathos nor humor nor fancy nor
invention will suffice for that: no poet is great as a poet whom no one
could ever pretend to recognize as sublime. Sublimity is the test of
imagination as distinguished from invention or from fancy: and the first
English poet whose powers can be called sublime was Christopher Marlowe.

The majestic and exquisite excellence of various lines and passages in
Marlowe's first play must be admitted to relieve, if it cannot be
allowed to redeem, the stormy monotony of Titanic truculence which
blusters like a simoom through the noisy course of its ten fierce acts.
With many and heavy faults, there is something of genuine greatness in
"Tamburlaine the Great"; and for two grave reasons it must always be
remembered with distinction and mentioned with honor. It is the first
poem ever written in English blank verse, as distinguished from mere
rhymeless decasyllabics; and it contains one of the noblest
passages--perhaps, indeed, the noblest in the literature of the
world--ever written by one of the greatest masters of poetry in loving
praise of the glorious delights and sublime submission to the
everlasting limits of his art. In its highest and most distinctive
qualities, in unfaltering and infallible command of the right note of
music and the proper tone of color for the finest touches of poetic
execution, no poet of the most elaborate modern school, working at ease
upon every consummate resource of luxurious learning and leisurely
refinement, has ever excelled the best and most representative work of a
man who had literally no models before him, and probably or evidently
was often, if not always, compelled to write against time for his
living.

The just and generous judgment passed by Goethe on the "Faustus" of his
English predecessor in tragic treatment of the same subject is somewhat
more than sufficient to counterbalance the slighting or the sneering
references to that magnificent poem which might have been expected from
the ignorance of Byron or the incompetence of Hallam. And the particular
note of merit observed, the special point of the praise conferred, by
the great German poet should be no less sufficient to dispose of the
vulgar misconception yet lingering among sciolists and pretenders to
criticism, which regards a writer than whom no man was ever born with a
finer or a stronger instinct for perfection of excellence in execution
as a mere noble savage of letters, a rough self-taught sketcher or
scribbler of crude and rude genius, whose unhewn blocks of verse had in
them some veins of rare enough metal to be quarried and polished by
Shakespeare. What most impressed the author of "Faust" in the work of
Marlowe was a quality the want of which in the author of "Manfred" is
proof enough to consign his best work to the second or third class at
most. "How greatly it is all planned!" the first requisite of all great
work, and one of which the highest genius possible to a greatly gifted
barbarian could by no possibility understand the nature or conceive the
existence. That Goethe "had thought of translating it" is perhaps hardly
less precious a tribute to its greatness than the fact that it has been
actually and admirably translated by the matchless translator of
Shakespeare--the son of Victor Hugo, whose labor of love may thus be
said to have made another point in common, and forged as it were another
link of union, between Shakespeare and the young master of Shakespeare's
youth. Of all great poems in dramatic form it is perhaps the most
remarkable for absolute singleness of aim and simplicity of
construction; yet is it wholly free from all possible imputation of
monotony or aridity. "Tamburlaine" is monotonous in the general roll and
flow of its stately and sonorous verse through a noisy wilderness of
perpetual bluster and slaughter; but the unity of tone and purpose in
"Doctor Faustus" is not unrelieved by change of manner and variety of
incident. The comic scenes, written evidently with as little of labor
as of relish, are for the most part scarcely more than transcripts,
thrown into the form of dialogue, from a popular prose _History of Dr.
Faustus_, and therefore should be set down as little to the discredit as
to the credit of the poet. Few masterpieces of any age in any language
can stand beside this tragic poem--it has hardly the structure of a
play--for the qualities of terror and splendor, for intensity of purpose
and sublimity of note. In the vision of Helen, for example, the intense
perception of loveliness gives actual sublimity to the sweetness and
radiance of mere beauty in the passionate and spontaneous selection of
words the most choice and perfect; and in like manner the sublimity of
simplicity in Marlowe's conception and expression of the agonies endured
by Faustus under the immediate imminence of his doom gives the highest
note of beauty, the quality of absolute fitness and propriety, to the
sheer straightforwardness of speech in which his agonizing horror finds
vent ever more and more terrible from the first to the last equally
beautiful and fearful verse of that tremendous monologue which has no
parallel in all the range of tragedy.

It is now a commonplace of criticism to observe and regret the decline
of power and interest after the opening acts of "The Jew of Malta." This
decline is undeniable, though even the latter part of the play is not
wanting in rough energy and a coarse kind of interest; but the first two
acts would be sufficient foundation for the durable fame of a dramatic
poet. In the blank verse of Milton alone, who perhaps was hardly less
indebted than Shakespeare was before him to Marlowe as the first English
master of word-music in its grander forms, has the glory or the melody
of passages in the opening soliloquy of Barabas been possibly surpassed.
The figure of the hero before it degenerates into caricature is as
finely touched as the poetic execution is excellent; and the rude and
rapid sketches of the minor characters show at least some vigor and
vivacity of touch.

In "Edward II." the interest rises and the execution improves as visibly
and as greatly with the course of the advancing story as they decline in
"The Jew of Malta." The scene of the king's deposition at Kenilworth is
almost as much finer in tragic effect and poetic quality as it is
shorter and less elaborate than the corresponding scene in Shakespeare's
"King Richard II." The terror of the death scene undoubtedly rises into
horror; but this horror is with skilful simplicity of treatment
preserved from passing into disgust. In pure poetry, in sublime and
splendid imagination, this tragedy is excelled by "Doctor Faustus"; in
dramatic power and positive impression of natural effect it is as
certainly the masterpiece of Marlowe. It was almost inevitable, in the
hands of any poet but Shakespeare, that none of the characters
represented should be capable of securing or even exciting any finer
sympathy or more serious interest than attends on the mere evolution of
successive events or the mere display of emotions (except always in the
great scene of the deposition) rather animal than spiritual in their
expression of rage or tenderness or suffering. The exact balance of
mutual effect, the final note of scenic harmony between ideal
conception and realistic execution, is not yet struck with perfect
accuracy of touch and security of hand; but on this point also Marlowe
has here come nearer by many degrees to Shakespeare than any of his
other predecessors have ever come near to Marlowe.

Of "The Massacre at Paris" it is impossible to judge fairly from the
garbled fragment of its genuine text, which is all that has come down
to us. To Mr. Collier, among numberless other obligations, we owe the
discovery of a striking passage excised in the piratical edition which
gives us the only version extant of this unlucky play; and which, it
must be allowed, contains nothing of quite equal value. This is
obviously an occasional and polemical work, and being as it is
overcharged with the anti-Catholic passion of the time, has a typical
quality which gives it some empirical significance and interest. That
anti-papal ardor is indeed the only note of unity in a rough and ragged
chronicle which shambles and stumbles onward from the death of Queen
Jeanne of Navarre to the murder of the last Valois. It is possible to
conjecture what it would be fruitless to affirm, that it gave a hint in
the next century to Nathaniel Lee for his far superior and really
admirable tragedy on the same subject, issued ninety-seven years after
the death of Marlowe.

The tragedy of "Dido, Queen of Carthage," was probably completed for the
stage after that irreparable and incalculable loss to English letters by
Thomas Nash, the worthiest English precursor of Swift in vivid, pure,
and passionate prose, embodying the most terrible and splendid qualities
of a personal and social satirist; a man gifted also with some fair
faculty of elegiac and even lyric verse, but in nowise qualified to put
on the buskin left behind him by the "famous gracer of tragedians," as
Marlowe had already been designated by their common friend Greene from
among the worthiest of his fellows. In this somewhat thin-spun and
evidently hasty play a servile fidelity to the text of Virgil's
narrative has naturally resulted in the failure which might have been
expected from an attempt at once to transcribe what is essentially
inimitable and to reproduce it under the hopelessly alien conditions of
dramatic adaptation. The one really noble passage in a generally feeble
and incomposite piece of work is, however, uninspired by the
unattainable model to which the dramatists have been only too obsequious
in their subservience.

It is as nearly certain as anything can be which depends chiefly upon
cumulative and collateral evidence that the better part of what is best
in the serious scenes of "King Henry VI." is mainly the work of Marlowe.
That he is, at any rate, the principal author of the second and third
plays passing under that name among the works of Shakespeare, but first
and imperfectly printed as "The Contention between the two Famous Houses
of York and Lancaster," can hardly be now a matter of debate among
competent judges. The crucial difficulty of criticism in this matter is
to determine, if indeed we should not rather say to conjecture, the
authorship of the humorous scenes in prose, showing as they generally do
a power of comparatively high and pure comic realism to which nothing in
the acknowledged works of any pre-Shakespearean dramatist is even
remotely comparable. Yet, especially in the original text of these
scenes as they stand unpurified by the ultimate revision of Shakespeare,
there are tones and touches which recall rather the clownish horseplay
and homely ribaldry of his predecessors than anything in the lighter
interludes of his very earliest plays. We find the same sort of thing
which we find in their writings, only better done than they usually do
it, rather than such work as Shakespeare's a little worse done than
usual. And even in the final text of the tragic or metrical scenes the
highest note struck is always, with one magnificent and unquestionable
exception, rather in the key of Marlowe at his best than of Shakespeare
while yet in great measure his disciple.

It is another commonplace of criticism to affirm that Marlowe had not a
touch of comic genius, not a gleam of wit in him or a twinkle of humor:
but it is an indisputable fact that he had. In "The Massacre at Paris,"
the soliloquy of the soldier lying in wait for the minion of Henri III.
has the same very rough but very real humor as a passage in the
"Contention" which was cancelled by the reviser. The same hand is
unmistakable in both these broad and boyish outbreaks of unseemly but
undeniable fun: and if we might wish it rather less indecorous, we must
admit that the tradition which denies all sense of humor and all
instinct of wit to the first great poet of England is no less unworthy
of serious notice or elaborate refutation than the charges and calumnies
of an informer who was duly hanged the year after Marlowe's death. For
if the same note of humor is struck in an undoubted play of Marlowe's
and in a play of disputed authorship, it is evident that the rest of the
scene in the latter play must also be Marlowe's. And in that
unquestionable case the superb and savage humor of the terribly comic
scenes which represent with such rough magnificence of realism the riot
of Jack Cade and his ruffians through the ravaged streets of London must
be recognizable as no other man's than his. It is a pity we have not
before us for comparison the comic scenes or burlesque interludes of
"Tamburlaine" which the printer or publisher, as he had the impudence to
avow in his prefatory note, purposely omitted and left out.

The author of _A Study of Shakespeare_ was therefore wrong, and utterly
wrong, when in a book issued some quarter of a century ago he followed
the lead of Mr. Dyce in assuming that because the author of "Doctor
Faustus" and "The Jew of Malta" "was as certainly"--and certainly it is
difficult to deny that whether as a mere transcriber or as an original
dealer in pleasantry he sometimes was--"one of the least and worst among
jesters as he was one of the best and greatest among poets," he could
not have had a hand in the admirable comic scenes of "The Taming of the
Shrew." For it is now, I should hope, unnecessary to insist that the
able and conscientious editor to whom his fame and his readers owe so
great a debt was over-hasty in assuming and asserting that he was a poet
"to whom, we have reason to believe, nature had denied even a moderate
talent for the humorous." The serious or would-be poetical scenes of the
play are as unmistakably the work of an imitator as are most of the
better passages in "Titus Andronicus" and "King Edward III." Greene or
Peele may be responsible for the bad poetry, but there is no reason to
suppose that the great poet whose mannerisms he imitated with so stupid
a servility was incapable of the good fun.

Had every copy of Marlowe's boyish version or perversion of Ovid's
_Elegies_ deservedly perished in the flames to which it was judicially
condemned by the sentence of a brace of prelates, it is possible that an
occasional bookworm, it is certain that no poetical student, would have
deplored its destruction, if its demerits--hardly relieved, as his first
competent editor has happily remarked, by the occasional incidence of a
fine and felicitous couplet--could in that case have been imagined. His
translation of the first book of Lucan alternately rises above the
original and falls short of it; often inferior to the Latin in point and
weight of expressive rhetoric, now and then brightened by a clearer note
of poetry and lifted into a higher mood of verse. Its terseness, vigor,
and purity of style would in any case have been praiseworthy, but are
nothing less than admirable, if not wonderful, when we consider how
close the translator has on the whole (in spite of occasional slips
into inaccuracy) kept himself to the most rigid limit of literal
representation, phrase by phrase and often line by line. The really
startling force and felicity of occasional verses are worthier of remark
than the inevitable stiffness and heaviness of others, when the
technical difficulty of such a task is duly taken into account.

One of the most faultless lyrics and one of the loveliest fragments in
the whole range of descriptive and fanciful poetry would have secured a
place for Marlowe among the memorable men of his epoch, even if his
plays had perished with himself. His "Passionate Shepherd" remains ever
since unrivalled in its way--a way of pure fancy and radiant melody
without break or lapse. The untitled fragment, on the other hand, has
been very closely rivalled, perhaps very happily imitated, but only by
the greatest lyric poet of England--by Shelley alone. Marlowe's poem of
"Hero and Leander," closing with the sunrise which closes the night of
the lovers' union, stands alone in its age, and far ahead of the work of
any possible competitor between the death of Spenser and the dawn of
Milton. In clear mastery of narrative and presentation, in melodious
ease and simplicity of strength, it is not less pre-eminent than in the
adorable beauty and impeccable perfection of separate lines or
passages.

The place and the value of Christopher Marlowe as a leader among English
poets it would be almost impossible for historical criticism to
overestimate. To none of them all, perhaps, have so many of the greatest
among them been so deeply and so directly indebted. Nor was ever any
great writer's influence upon his fellows more utterly and unmixedly an
influence for good. He first, and he alone, guided Shakespeare into the
right way of work; his music, in which there is no echo of any man's
before him, found its own echo in the more prolonged but hardly more
exalted harmony of Milton's. He is the greatest discoverer, the most
daring and inspired pioneer, in all our poetic literature. Before him
there was neither genuine blank verse nor genuine tragedy in our
language. After his arrival the way was prepared, the paths were made
straight, for Shakespeare.



JOHN WEBSTER


There were many poets in the age of Shakespeare who make us think, as we
read them, that the characters in their plays could not have spoken more
beautifully, more powerfully, more effectively, under the circumstances
imagined for the occasion of their utterance: there are only two who
make us feel that the words assigned to the creatures of their genius
are the very words they must have said, the only words they could have
said, the actual words they assuredly did say. Mere literary power, mere
poetic beauty, mere charm of passionate or pathetic fancy, we find in
varying degrees dispersed among them all alike; but the crowning gift of
imagination, the power to make us realize that thus and not otherwise it
was, that thus and not otherwise it must have been, was given--except by
exceptional fits and starts--to none of the poets of their time but only
to Shakespeare and to Webster.

Webster, it may be said, was but as it were a limb of Shakespeare: but
that limb, it might be replied, was the right arm. "The kingly-crownèd
head, the vigilant eye," whose empire of thought and whose reach of
vision no other man's faculty has ever been found competent to match,
are Shakespeare's alone forever: but the force of hand, the fire of
heart, the fervor of pity, the sympathy of passion, not poetic or
theatric merely, but actual and immediate, are qualities in which the
lesser poet is not less certainly or less unmistakably pre-eminent than
the greater. And there is no third to be set beside them: not even if we
turn from their contemporaries to Shelley himself. All that Beatrice
says in _The Cenci_ is beautiful and conceivable and admirable: but
unless we except her exquisite last words--and even they are more
beautiful than inevitable--we shall hardly find what we find in "King
Lear" and "The White Devil," "Othello" and "The Duchess of Malfy"--the
tone of convincing reality; the note, as a critic of our own day might
call it, of certitude.

There are poets--in our own age, as in all past ages--from whose best
work it might be difficult to choose at a glance some verse sufficient
to establish their claim--great as their claim may be--to be remembered
forever; and who yet may be worthy of remembrance among all but the
highest. Webster is not one of these: though his fame assuredly does not
depend upon the merit of a casual passage here or there, it would be
easy to select from any one of his representative plays such examples of
the highest, the purest, the most perfect power, as can be found only in
the works of the greatest among poets. There is not, as far as my
studies have ever extended, a third English poet to whom these words
might rationally be attributed by the conjecture of a competent reader:

   We cease to grieve, cease to be fortune's slaves,
   Nay, cease to die, by dying.

There is a depth of severe sense in them, a height of heroic scorn, or a
dignity of quiet cynicism, which can scarcely be paralleled in the
bitterest or the fiercest effusions of John Marston or Cyril Tourneur or
Jonathan Swift. Nay, were they not put into the mouth of a criminal
cynic, they would not seem unworthy of Epictetus. There is nothing so
grand in the part of Edmund; the one figure in Shakespeare whose aim in
life, whose centre of character, is one with the view or the instinct of
Webster's two typical villains. Some touches in the part of Flamineo
suggest, if not a conscious imitation, an unconscious reminiscence of
that prototype: but the essential and radical originality of Webster's
genius is shown in the difference of accent with which the same savage
and sarcastic philosophy of self-interest finds expression through the
snarl and sneer of his ambitious cynic. Monsters as they may seem of
unnatural egotism and unallayed ferocity, the one who dies penitent,
though his repentance be as sudden if not as suspicious as any ever
wrought by miraculous conversion, dies as thoroughly in character as the
one who takes leave of life in a passion of scorn and defiant irony
which hardly passes off at last into a mood of mocking and triumphant
resignation. There is a cross of heroism in almost all Webster's
characters which preserves the worst of them from such hatefulness as
disgusts us in certain of Fletcher's or of Ford's: they have in them
some salt of manhood, some savor of venturesome and humorous resolution,
which reminds us of the heroic age in which the genius that begot them
was born and reared--the age of Richard Grenville and Francis Drake,
Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare.

The earliest play of Webster's now surviving--if a work so piteously
mutilated and defaced can properly be said to survive--is a curious
example of the combined freedom and realism with which recent or even
contemporary history was habitually treated on the stage during the
last years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The noblest poem known to
me of this peculiar kind is the play of "Sir Thomas More," first printed
by Mr. Dyce in 1844 for the Shakespeare Society: the worst must almost
certainly be that "Chronicle History of Thomas Lord Cromwell" which the
infallible verdict of German intuition has discovered to be "not only
unquestionably Shakespeare's, but worthy to be classed among his best
and maturest works." About midway between these two I should be inclined
to rank "The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt," a mangled and deformed
abridgment of a tragedy by Dekker and Webster on the story of Lady Jane
Grey. In this tragedy, as in the two comedies due to the collaboration
of the same poets, it appears to me more than probable that Dekker took
decidedly the greater part. The shambling and slipshod metre, which
seems now and then to hit by mere chance on some pure and tender note of
simple and exquisite melody--the lazy vivacity and impulsive
inconsequence of style--the fitful sort of slovenly inspiration, with
interludes of absolute and headlong collapse--are qualities by which a
very novice in the study of dramatic form may recognize the reckless and
unmistakable presence of Dekker. The curt and grim precision of
Webster's tone, his terse and pungent force of compressed rhetoric,
will be found equally difficult to trace in any of these three plays.
"Northward Ho!" a clever, coarse, and vigorous study of the realistic
sort, has not a note of poetry in it, but is more coherent, more
sensibly conceived and more ably constructed, than the rambling history
of Wyatt or the hybrid amalgam of prosaic and romantic elements in the
compound comedy of "Westward Ho!" All that is of any great value in this
amorphous and incongruous product of inventive impatience and impetuous
idleness can be as distinctly traced to the hand of Dekker as the
crowning glories of "The Two Noble Kinsmen" can be traced to the hand of
Shakespeare. Any poet, even of his time, might have been proud of these
verses, but the accent of them is unmistakable as that of Dekker.

                             Go, let music
   Charm with her excellent voice an awful silence
   Through all this building, that her sphery soul
   May, on the wings of air, in thousand forms
   Invisibly fly, yet be enjoyed.

This delicate fluency and distilled refinement of expression ought
properly, one would say, to have belonged to a poet of such careful and
self-respectful genius as Tennyson's: whereas in the very next speech of
the same speaker we stumble over such a phrase as that which closes the
following sentence:

   We feed, wear rich attires, and strive to cleave
   The stars with marble towers, fight battles, spend
   Our blood to buy us names, _and, in iron hold,
   Will we eat roots, to imprison fugitive gold_.

Which he who can parse, let him scan, and he who can scan, let him
construe. It is alike incredible and certain that the writer of such
exquisite and blameless verse as that in which the finer scenes of "Old
Fortunatus" and "The Honest Whore" are so smoothly and simply and
naturally written should have been capable of writing whole plays in
this headlong and halting fashion, as helpless and graceless as the
action of a spavined horse or a cripple who should attempt to run.

It is difficult to say what part of these plays should be assigned to
Webster. Their rough realistic humor, with its tone of somewhat
coarse-grained good-nature, strikes the habitual note of Dekker's comic
style: there is nothing of the fierce and scornful intensity, the ardor
of passionate and compressed contempt, which distinguishes the savagely
humorous satire of Webster and of Marston, and makes it hopeless to
determine by intrinsic evidence how little or how much was added by
Webster in the second edition to the original text of Marston's
_Malcontent_: unless--which appears to me not unreasonable--we assume
that the printer of that edition lied or blundered after the manner of
his contemporary kind in attributing on the title-page--as apparently he
meant to attribute--any share in the additional scenes or speeches to
the original author of the play. In any case, the passages thus added to
that grimmest and most sombre of tragicomedies are in such exact keeping
with the previous text that the keenest scent of the veriest blood-hound
among critics could not detect a shade of difference in the savor.

The text of either comedy is generally very fair--as free from
corruption as could reasonably be expected. The text of "Sir Thomas
Wyatt" is corrupt as well as mutilated. Even in Mr. Dyce's second
edition I have noted, not without astonishment, the following flagrant
errors left still to glare on us from the distorted and disfigured page.
In the sixth scene a single speech of Arundel's contains two of the most
palpably preposterous:

   The obligation wherein we all stood bound
       *       *       *       *       *
   Cannot be concealed without great reproach
   To us and to our issue.

We should of course read "cancelled" for "concealed": the sense of the
context and the exigence of the verse cry alike aloud for the
correction. In the sixteenth line from this we come upon an equally
obvious error:

   Advice in this I hold it better far,
   To keep the course we run, than, seeking change,
   Hazard our lives, our honors, and the realm.

It seems hardly credible to those who are aware how much they owe to the
excellent scholarship and editorial faculty of Mr. Dyce, that he should
have allowed such a misprint as "heirs" for "honors" to stand in this
last unlucky line. Again, in the next scene, when the popular leader
Captain Brett attempts to reassure the country folk who are startled at
the sight of his insurgent array, he is made to utter (in reply to the
exclamation, "What's here? soldiers!") the perfectly fatuous phrase,
"Fear not good speech." Of course--once more--we should read, "Fear not,
good people"; a correction which rectifies the metre as well as the
sense.

The play attributed to Webster and Rowley by a publisher of the next
generation has been carefully and delicately analyzed by a critic of our
own time, who naturally finds it easy to distinguish the finer from the
homelier part of the compound weft, and to assign what is rough and
crude to the inferior, what is interesting and graceful to the superior
poet. The authority of the rogue Kirkman may be likened to the outline
or profile of Mr. Mantalini's early loves: it is either no authority at
all, or at best it is a "demd" authority. The same swindler who assigned
to Webster and Rowley the authorship of "A Cure for a Cuckold" assigned
to Shakespeare and Rowley the authorship of an infinitely inferior
play--a play of which German sagacity has discovered that "none of
Rowley's other works are equal to this." Assuredly they are not--in
utter stolidity of platitude and absolute impotence of drivel. Rowley
was a vigorous artist in comedy and an original master of tragedy: he
may have written the lighter or broader parts of the play which rather
unluckily took its name from these, and Webster may have written the
more serious or sentimental parts: but there is not the slightest shadow
of a reason to suppose it. An obviously apocryphal abortion of the same
date, attributed to the same poets by the same knave, has long since
been struck off the roll of Webster's works.

The few occasional poems of this great poet are worth study by those who
are capable of feeling interest in the comparison of slighter with
sublimer things, and the detection in minor works of the same style,
here revealed by fitful hints in casual phrases, as that which animates
and distinguishes even a work so insufficient and incompetent as
Webster's "tragecomoedy" of "The Devil's Law-case." The noble and
impressive extracts from this most incoherent and chaotic of all plays
which must be familiar to all students of Charles Lamb are but patches
of imperial purple sewn on with the roughest of needles to a garment of
the raggedest and coarsest kind of literary serge. Hardly any praise can
be too high for their dignity and beauty, their lofty loyalty and
simplicity of chivalrous manhood or their deep sincerity of cynic
meditation and self-contemptuous mournfulness: and the reader who turns
from these magnificent samples to the complete play must expect to find
yet another and a yet unknown masterpiece of English tragedy. He will
find a crowning example of the famous theorem, that "the plot is of no
use except to bring in the fine things." The plot is in this instance
absurd to a degree so far beyond the most preposterous conception of
confused and distracting extravagance that the reader's attention may at
times be withdrawn from the all but unqualified ugliness of its ethical
tone or tendency. Two of Webster's favorite types, the meditative
murderer or philosophic ruffian, and the impulsive impostor who is
liable to collapse into the likeness of a passionate penitent, will
remind the reader how much better they appear in tragedies which are
carried through to their natural tragic end. But here, where the story
is admirably opened and the characters as skilfully introduced, the
strong interest thus excited at starting is scattered or broken or
trifled away before the action is half-way through: and at its close the
awkward violence or irregularity of moral and scenical effect comes to a
crowning crisis in the general and mutual condonation of unnatural
perjury and attempted murder with which the victims and the criminals
agree to hush up all grudges, shake hands all round, and live happy ever
after. There is at least one point of somewhat repulsive resemblance
between the story of this play and that of Fletcher's "Fair Maid of the
Inn": but Fletcher's play, with none of the tragic touches or interludes
of superb and sombre poetry which relieve the incoherence of Webster's,
is better laid out and constructed, more amusing if not more
interesting, and more intelligent if not more imaginative.

A far more creditable and workman-like piece of work, though glorified
by no flashes of such sudden and singular beauty, is the tragedy of
"Appius and Virginia." The almost infinite superiority of Webster to
Fletcher as a poet of pure tragedy and a painter of masculine character
is in this play as obvious as the inferiority in construction and
conduct of romantic story displayed in his attempt at a tragicomedy.
From the evidence of style I should judge this play to have been written
at an earlier date than "The Devil's Law-case": it is, I repeat, far
better composed; better, perhaps, than any other play of the author's:
but it has none of his more distinctive qualities; intensity of idea,
concentration of utterance, pungency of expression and ardor of pathos.
It is written with noble and equable power of hand, with force and
purity and fluency of apt and simple eloquence: there is nothing in it
unworthy of the writer: but it is the only one of his unassisted works
in which we do not find that especial note of tragic style, concise and
pointed and tipped as it were with fire, which usually makes it
impossible for the dullest reader to mistake the peculiar presence, the
original tone or accent, of John Webster. If the epithet unique had not
such a tang of German affectation in it, it would be perhaps the aptest
of all adjectives to denote the genius or define the manner of this
great poet. But in this tragedy, though whatever is said is well said
and whatever is done well done, we miss that sense of positive and
inevitable conviction, that instant and profound perception or
impression as of immediate and indisputable truth, which is burnt in
upon us as we read the more Websterian scenes of Webster's writing. We
feel, in short, that thus it may have been; not, as I observed at the
opening of these notes, that thus it must have been. The poem does him
no discredit; nay, it does him additional honor, as an evidence of
powers more various and many-sided than we should otherwise have known
or supposed in him. Indeed, the figure of Virginius is one of the finest
types of soldierly and fatherly heroism ever presented on the stage:
there is equal force of dramatic effect, equal fervor of eloquent
passion, in the scene of his pleading before the senate on behalf of the
claims of his suffering and struggling fellow-soldiers, and in the scene
of his return to the camp after the immolation of his daughter. The mere
theatric effect of this latter scene is at once so triumphant and so
dignified, so noble in its presentation and so passionate in its
restraint, that we feel the high justice and sound reason of the
instinct which inspired the poet to prolong the action of his play so
far beyond the sacrifice of his heroine. A comparison of Webster's
Virginius with any of Fletcher's wordy warriors will suffice to show
how much nearer to Shakespeare than to Fletcher stands Webster as a
tragic or a serious dramatist. Coleridge, not always just to Fletcher,
was not unjust in his remark "what strange self-trumpeters and tongue
bullies all the brave soldiers of Beaumont and Fletcher are"; and again
almost immediately--"all B. and F.'s generals are pugilists, or
cudgel-fighters, that boast of their bottom and of the 'claret' they
have shed." There is nothing of this in Virginius; Shakespeare himself
has not represented with a more lofty fidelity, in the person of
Coriolanus or of Brutus, "the high Roman fashion" of austere and heroic
self-respect. In the other leading or dominant figure of this tragedy
there is certainly discernible a genuine and thoughtful originality or
freshness of conception; but perhaps there is also recognizable a
certain inconsistency of touch. It was well thought of to mingle some
alloy of goodness with the wickedness of Appius Claudius, to represent
the treacherous and lecherous decemvir as neither kindless nor
remorseless, but capable of penitence and courage in his last hour. But
Shakespeare, I cannot but think, would have prepared us with more care
and more dexterity for the revelation of some such redeeming quality in
a character which in the act immediately preceding Webster has
represented as utterly heartless and shameless, brutal in its hypocrisy
and impudent in its brutality.

If the works already discussed were their author's only claims to
remembrance and honor, they might not suffice to place him on a higher
level among our tragic poets than that occupied by Marston and Dekker
and Middleton on the one hand, by Fletcher and Massinger and Shirley on
the other. "Antonio and Mellida," "Old Fortunatus," or "The
Changeling"--"The Maid's Tragedy," "The Duke of Milan," or "The
Traitor"--would suffice to counterweigh (if not, in some cases, to
outbalance) the merit of the best among these: the fitful and futile
inspiration of "The Devil's Law-case," and the stately but subdued
inspiration of "Appius and Virginia." That his place was with no
subordinate poet--that his station is at Shakespeare's right hand--the
evidence supplied by his two great tragedies is disputable by no one who
has an inkling of the qualities which confer a right to be named in the
same day with the greatest writer of all time.

Aeschylus is above all things the poet of righteousness. "But in any
wise, I say unto thee, revere thou the altar of righteousness": this is
the crowning admonition of his doctrine, as its crowning prospect is
the reconciliation or atonement of the principle of retribution with the
principle of redemption, of the powers of the mystery of darkness with
the coeternal forces of the spirit of wisdom, of the lord of inspiration
and of light. The doctrine of Shakespeare, where it is not vaguer, is
darker in its implication of injustice, in its acceptance of accident,
than the impression of the doctrine of Aeschylus. Fate, irreversible and
inscrutable, is the only force of which we feel the impact, of which we
trace the sign, in the upshot of "Othello" or "King Lear." The last step
into the darkness remained to be taken by "the most tragic" of all
English poets. With Shakespeare--and assuredly not with
Aeschylus--righteousness itself seems subject and subordinate to the
masterdom of fate: but fate itself, in the tragic world of Webster,
seems merely the servant or the synonyme of chance. The two chief agents
in his two great tragedies pass away--the phrase was, perhaps,
unconsciously repeated--"in a mist": perplexed, indomitable, defiant of
hope and fear; bitter and sceptical and bloody in penitence or
impenitence alike. And the mist which encompasses the departing spirits
of these moody and mocking men of blood seems equally to involve the
lives of their chastisers and their victims. Blind accident and
blundering mishap--"such a mistake," says one of the criminals, "as I
have often seen in a play"--are the steersmen of their fortunes and the
doomsmen of their deeds. The effect of this method or the result of this
view, whether adopted for dramatic objects or ingrained in the writer's
temperament, is equally fit for pure tragedy and unfit for any form of
drama not purely tragic in evolution and event. In "The Devil's
Law-case" it is offensive, because the upshot is incongruous and
insufficient: in "The White Devil" and "The Duchess of Malfy" it is
admirable, because the results are adequate and coherent. But in all
these three plays alike, and in these three plays only, the peculiar
tone of Webster's genius, the peculiar force of his imagination, is
distinct and absolute in its fulness of effect. The author of "Appius
and Virginia" would have earned an honorable and enduring place in the
history of English letters as a worthy member--one among many--of a
great school in poetry, a deserving representative of a great epoch in
literature: but the author of these three plays has a solitary station,
an indisputable distinction of his own. The greatest poets of all time
are not more mutually independent than this one--a lesser poet only than
those greatest--is essentially independent of them all.

The first quality which all readers recognize, and which may strike a
superficial reader as the exclusive or excessive note of his genius and
his work, is of course his command of terror. Except in Aeschylus, in
Dante, and in Shakespeare, I at least know not where to seek for
passages which in sheer force of tragic and noble horror--to the vulgar
shock of ignoble or brutal horror he never condescends to submit his
reader or subdue his inspiration--may be set against the subtlest, the
deepest, the sublimest passages of Webster. Other gifts he had as great
in themselves, as precious and as necessary to the poet: but on this
side he is incomparable and unique. Neither Marlowe nor Shakespeare had
so fine, so accurate, so infallible a sense of the delicate line of
demarcation which divides the impressive and the terrible from the
horrible and the loathsome--Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac from Eugène
Sue and Émile Zola. On his theatre we find no presentation of old men
with their beards torn off and their eyes gouged out, of young men
imprisoned in reeking cesspools and impaled with red-hot spits. Again
and again his passionate and daring genius attains the utmost limit and
rounds the final goal of tragedy; never once does it break the bounds of
pure poetic instinct. If ever for a moment it may seem to graze that
goal too closely, to brush too sharply by those bounds, the very next
moment finds it clear of any such risk and remote from any such
temptation as sometimes entrapped or seduced the foremost of its
forerunners in the field. And yet this is the field in which its paces
are most superbly shown. No name among all the names of great poets will
recur so soon as Webster's to the reader who knows what it signifies, as
he reads or repeats the verses in which a greater than this great
poet--a greater than all since Shakespeare--has expressed the latent
mystery of terror which lurks in all the highest poetry or beauty, and
distinguishes it inexplicably and inevitably from all that is but a
little lower than the highest.

   Les aigles sur les bords du Gange et du Caÿstre
           Sont effrayants;
   Rien de grand qui ne soit confusément sinistre;
           Les noirs paeans,

   Les psaumes, la chanson monstrueuse du mage
           Ezéchiel,
   Font devant notre oeil fixe errer la vague image
           D'un affreux ciel.

   L'empyrée est l'abîme, on y plonge, on y reste
           Avec terreur.
   Car planer, c'est trembler; si l'azur est céleste,
           C'est par l'horreur.

   L'épouvante est au fond des choses les plus belles;
           Les bleus vallons
   Font parfois reculer d'effroi les fauves ailes
           Des aquilons.

And even in comedy as in tragedy, in prosaic even as in prophetic
inspiration, in imitative as in imaginative works of genius, the
sovereign of modern poets has detected the same touch of terror wherever
the deepest note possible has been struck, the fullest sense possible of
genuine and peculiar power conveyed to the student of lyric or dramatic,
epic or elegiac masters.

   De là tant de beautés difformes dans leurs oeuvres;
           Le vers charmant
   Est par la torsion subite des couleuvres
           Pris brusquement;

   A de certains moments toutes les jeunes flores
           Dans la foret
   Out peur, et sur le front des blanches métaphores
           L'ombre apparait;

   C'est qu'Horace ou Virgile out vu soudain le spectre
           Noir se dresser;
   C'est que là-bas, derrière Amaryllis, Électre
           Vient de passer.

Nor was it the Electra of Sophocles, the calm and impassive accomplice
of an untroubled and unhesitating matricide, who showed herself ever in
passing to the intent and serious vision of Webster. By those candid
and sensible judges to whom the praise of Marlowe seems to imply a
reflection on the fame of Shakespeare, I may be accused--and by such
critics I am content to be accused--of a fatuous design to set Webster
beside Sophocles, or Sophocles--for aught I know--beneath Webster, if
I venture to indicate the superiority in truth of natural passion--and,
I must add, of moral instinct--which distinguishes the modern from
the ancient. It is not, it never will be, and it never can have been
natural for noble and civilized creatures to accept with spontaneous
complacency, to discharge with unforced equanimity, such offices or such
duties as weigh so lightly on the spirit of the Sophoclean Orestes that
the slaughter of a mother seems to be a less serious undertaking for his
unreluctant hand than the subsequent execution of her paramour. The
immeasurable superiority of Aeschylus to his successors in this quality
of instinctive righteousness--if a word long vulgarized by theology may
yet be used in its just and natural sense--is shared no less by Webster
than by Shakespeare. The grave and deep truth of natural impulse is
never ignored by these poets when dealing either with innocent or with
criminal passion: but it surely is now and then ignored by the artistic
quietism of Sophocles--as surely as it is outraged and degraded by the
vulgar theatricalities of Euripides. Thomas Campbell was amused and
scandalized by the fact that Webster (as he is pleased to express it)
modestly compares himself to the playwright last mentioned; being
apparently of opinion that "Hippolytus" and "Medea" may be reckoned
equal or superior, as works of tragic art or examples of ethical
elevation, to "The White Devil" and "The Duchess of Malfy"; and being no
less apparently ignorant, and incapable of understanding, that as there
is no poet morally nobler than Webster so is there no poet ignobler in
the moral sense than Euripides: while as a dramatic artist--an artist in
character, action, and emotion--the degenerate tragedian of Athens,
compared to the second tragic dramatist of England, is as a mutilated
monkey to a well-made man. No better test of critical faculty could be
required by the most exacting scrutiny of probation than is afforded by
the critic's professed or professional estimate of those great poets
whose names are not consecrated--or desecrated--by the conventional
applause, the factitious adoration, of a tribunal whose judgments are
dictated by obsequious superstition and unanimous incompetence. When
certain critics inform a listening world that they do not admire
Marlowe and Webster--they admire Shakespeare and Milton, we know at once
that it is not the genius of Shakespeare--it is the reputation of
Shakespeare that they admire. It is not the man that they bow down to:
it is the bust that they crouch down before. They would worship Shirley
as soon as Shakespeare--Glover as soon as Milton--Byron as soon as
Shelley--Ponsard as soon as Hugo--Longfellow as soon as Tennyson--if the
tablet were as showily emblazoned, the inscription as pretentiously
engraved.

The nobility of spirit and motive which is so distinguishing a mark of
Webster's instinctive genius or natural disposition of mind is proved by
his treatment of facts placed on record by contemporary annalists in the
tragic story of Vittoria Accoramboni, Duchess of Bracciano. That story
would have been suggestive, if not tempting, to any dramatic poet: and
almost any poet but Shakespeare or Webster would have been content to
accept the characters and circumstances as they stood nakedly on record,
and adapt them to the contemporary stage of England with such dexterity
and intelligence as he might be able to command. But, as Shakespeare
took the savage legend of Hamlet, the brutal story of Othello, and
raised them from the respective levels of the Heimskringla and the
Newgate Calendar to the very highest "heaven of invention," so has
Webster transmuted the impressive but repulsive record of villanies and
atrocities, in which he discovered the motive for a magnificent poem,
into the majestic and pathetic masterpiece which is one of the most
triumphant and the most memorable achievements of English poetry. If, in
his play, as in the legal or historic account of the affair, the whole
family of the heroine had appeared unanimous and eager in complicity
with her sins and competition for a share in the profits of her
dishonor, the tragedy might still have been as effective as it is now
from the theatrical or sensational point of view; it might have thrilled
the reader's nerves as keenly, have excited and stimulated his
curiosity, have whetted and satiated his appetite for transient emotion,
as thoroughly and triumphantly as now. But it would have been merely a
criminal melodrama, compiled by the labor and vivified by the talent of
an able theatrical journeyman. The one great follower of
Shakespeare--"haud passibus aequis" at all points; "longo sed proximus
intervallo"--has recognized, with Shakespearean accuracy and delicacy
and elevation of instinct, the necessity of ennobling and transfiguring
his characters if their story was to be made acceptable to the
sympathies of any but an idle or an ignoble audience. And he has done so
after the very manner and in the very spirit of Shakespeare. The noble
creatures of his invention give to the story that dignity and variety of
interest without which the most powerful romance or drama can be but an
example of vigorous vulgarity. The upright and high-minded mother and
brother of the shameless Flamineo and the shame-stricken Vittoria
refresh and purify the tragic atmosphere of the poem by the passing
presence of their virtues. The shallow and fiery nature of the fair
White Devil herself is a notable example of the difference so accurately
distinguished by Charlotte Brontë between an impressionable and an
impressible character. Ambition, self-interest, passion, remorse, and
hardihood alternate and contend in her impetuous and wayward spirit. The
one distinct and trustworthy quality which may always be reckoned on is
the indomitable courage underlying her easily irritable emotions. Her
bearing at the trial for her husband's murder is as dexterous and
dauntless as the demeanor of Mary Stuart before her judges. To Charles
Lamb it seemed "an innocence-resembling boldness"; to Mr. Dyce and Canon
Kingsley the innocence displayed in Lamb's estimate seemed almost
ludicrous in its misconception of Webster's text. I should hesitate to
agree with them that he has never once made his accused heroine speak in
the natural key of innocence unjustly impeached: Mary's pleading for her
life is not at all points incompatible in tone with the innocence which
it certainly fails to establish--except in minds already made up to
accept any plea as valid which may plausibly or possibly be advanced on
her behalf; and the arguments advanced by Vittoria are not more evasive
and equivocal, in face of the patent and flagrant prepossession of her
judges, than those put forward by the Queen of Scots. It is impossible
not to wonder whether the poet had not in his mind the actual tragedy
which had taken place just twenty-five years before the publication of
this play: if not, the coincidence is something more than singular. The
fierce profligacy and savage egotism of Brachiano have a certain energy
and activity in the display and the development of their motives and
effects which suggest rather such a character as Bothwell's than such a
character as that of the bloated and stolid sensualist who stands or
grovels before us in the historic record of his life. As presented by
Webster, he is doubtless an execrable ruffian: as presented by history,
he would be intolerable by any but such readers or spectators as those
on whom the figments or the photographs of self-styled naturalism
produce other than emetic emotions. Here again the noble instinct of the
English poet has rectified the aesthetic unseemliness of an ignoble
reality. This "Brachiano" is a far more living figure than the porcine
paramour of the historic Accoramboni. I am not prepared to maintain that
in one scene too much has not been sacrificed to immediate vehemence of
effect. The devotion of the discarded wife, who to shelter her Antony
from the vengeance of Octavius assumes the mask of raging jealousy, thus
taking upon herself the blame and responsibility of their final
separation, is expressed with such consummate and artistic simplicity of
power that on a first reading the genius of the dramatist may well blind
us to the violent unlikelihood of the action. But this very extravagance
of self-sacrifice may be thought by some to add a crowning touch of
pathos to the unsurpassable beauty of the scene in which her child,
after the murder of his mother, relates her past sufferings to his
uncle. Those to whom the great name of Webster represents merely an
artist in horrors, a ruffian of genius, may be recommended to study
every line and syllable of this brief dialogue:

   _Francisco_. How now, my noble cousin? what, in black?

   _Giovanni_. Yes, uncle, I was taught to imitate you
   In virtue, and you [? now] must imitate me
   In colors of your garments. My sweet mother
   Is--

   _Francisco_. How! where?

   _Giovanni_. Is there; no, yonder: indeed, sir, I'll not tell you,
   For I shall make you weep.

   _Francisco_. Is dead?

   _Giovanni_. Do not blame me now,
   I did not tell you so.

   _Lodovico_. She's dead, my lord.

   _Francisco_. Dead!

   _Monticelso_. Blest lady, thou art now above thy woes!

       *       *       *       *       *

   _Giovanni_. What do the dead do, uncle? do they eat,
   Hear music, go a-hunting, and be merry,
   As we that live?

   _Francisco_. No, coz; they sleep.

   _Giovanni_. Lord, Lord, that I were dead!
   I have not slept these six nights.--When do they wake?

   _Francisco_. When God shall please.

   _Giovanni_. Good God, let her sleep ever!
   For I have known her wake an hundred nights
   When all the pillow where she laid her head
   Was brine-wet with her tears. I am to complain to you, sir;
   I'll tell you how they have used her now she's dead:
   They wrapped her in a cruel fold of lead,
   And would not let me kiss her.

   _Francisco_. Thou didst love her.

   _Giovanni_. I have often heard her say she gave me suck,
   And it should seem by that she dearly loved me,
   Since princes seldom do it.

   _Francisco_. O, all of my poor sister that remains!--
   Take him away, for God's sake!

I must admit that I do not see how Shakespeare could have improved upon
that. It seems to me that in any one of even his greatest tragedies this
scene would have been remarkable among its most beautiful and perfect
passages; nor, upon the whole, do I remember a third English poet who
could be imagined capable of having written it. And it affords, I think,
very clear and sufficient evidence that Webster could not have handled
so pathetic and suggestive a subject as the execution of Lady Jane Grey
and her young husband in a style so thin and feeble, so shallow in
expression of pathos and so empty of suggestion or of passion, as that
in which it is presented at the close of "Sir Thomas Wyatt."

There is a perfect harmony of contrast between this and the death scene
of the boy's father: the agony of the murdered murderer is as superb in
effect of terror as the sorrow of his son is exquisite in effect of
pathos. Again we are reminded of Shakespeare, by no touch of imitation
but simply by a note of kinship in genius and in style, at the cry of
Brachiano under the first sharp workings of the poison:

   O thou strong heart!
   There's such a covenant 'tween the world and it,
   They're loath to break.

Another stroke well worthy of Shakespeare is the redeeming touch of
grace in this brutal and cold-blooded ruffian which gives him in his
agony a thought of tender care for the accomplice of his atrocities:

   Do not kiss me, for I shall poison thee.

Few instances of Webster's genius are so well known as the brief but
magnificent passage which follows; yet it may not be impertinent to cite
it once again:

   _Brachiano_. O thou soft natural death, that art joint twin
   To sweetest slumber! no rough-bearded comet
   Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl
   Beats not against thy casement; the hoarse wolf
   Scents not thy carrion; pity winds thy corpse,
   Whilst horror waits on princes.

   _Vittoria_. I am lost forever.

   _Brachiano_. How miserable a thing it is to die
   'Mongst women howling!--What are those?

   _Flamineo_. Franciscans:
   They have brought the extreme unction.

   _Brachiano_. On pain of death, let no man name death to me;
   It is a word [? most] infinitely terrible.

The very tremor of moral and physical abjection from nervous defiance
into prostrate fear which seems to pant and bluster and quail and
subside in the natural cadence of these lines would suffice to prove the
greatness of the artist who could express it with such terrible
perfection: but when we compare it, by collation of the two scenes, with
the deep simplicity of tenderness, the child-like accuracy of innocent
emotion, in the passage previously cited, it seems to me that we must
admit, as an unquestionable truth, that in the deepest and highest and
purest qualities of tragic poetry Webster stands nearer to Shakespeare
than any other English poet stands to Webster; and so much nearer as to
be a good second; while it is at least questionable whether even Shelley
can reasonably be accepted as a good third. Not one among the
predecessors, contemporaries, or successors of Shakespeare and Webster
has given proof of this double faculty--this coequal mastery of terror
and pity, undiscolored and undistorted, but vivified and glorified, by
the splendor of immediate and infallible imagination. The most
grovelling realism could scarcely be so impudent in stupidity as to
pretend an aim at more perfect presentation of truth; the most fervent
fancy, the most sensitive taste, could hardly dream of a desire for more
exquisite expression of natural passion in a form of utterance more
naturally exalted and refined.

In all the vast and voluminous records of critical error there can be
discovered no falsehood more foolish or more flagrant than the vulgar
tradition which represents this high-souled and gentle-hearted poet as
one morbidly fascinated by a fantastic attraction toward the "violent
delights" of horror and the nervous or sensational excitements of
criminal detail; nor can there be conceived a more perverse or futile
misapprehension than that which represents John Webster as one whose
instinct led him by some obscure and oblique propensity to darken the
darkness of southern crime or vice by an infusion of northern
seriousness, of introspective cynicism and reflective intensity in
wrong-doing, into the easy levity and infantile simplicity of
spontaneous wickedness which distinguished the moral and social
corruption of renascent Italy. Proof enough of this has already been
adduced to make any protestation or appeal against such an estimate as
preposterous in its superfluity as the misconception just mentioned is
preposterous in its perversity. The great if not incomparable power
displayed in Webster's delineation of such criminals as Flamineo and
Bosola--Bonapartes in the bud, Napoleons in a nutshell, Caesars who have
missed their Rubicon and collapse into the likeness of a Catiline--is a
sign rather of his noble English loathing for the traditions associated
with such names as Caesar and Medici and Borgia, Catiline and Iscariot
and Napoleon, than of any sympathetic interest in such incarnations of
historic crime. Flamineo especially, the ardent pimp, the enthusiastic
pandar, who prostitutes his sister and assassinates his brother with
such earnest and single-hearted devotion to his own straightforward
self-interest, has in him a sublime fervor of rascality which recalls
rather the man of Brumaire and of Waterloo than the man of December and
of Sedan. He has something too of Napoleon's ruffianly good-humor--the
frankness of a thieves' kitchen or an imperial court, when the last thin
fig-leaf of pretence has been plucked off and crumpled up and flung
away. We can imagine him pinching his favorites by the ear and dictating
memorials of mendacity with the self-possession of a self-made monarch.
As it is, we see him only in the stage of parasite and pimp--more like
the hired husband of a cast-off Creole than the resplendent rogue who
fascinated even history for a time by the clamor and glitter of his
triumphs. But the fellow is unmistakably an emperor in the egg--so
dauntless and frontless in the very abjection of his villany that we
feel him to have been defrauded by mischance of the only two
destinations appropriate for the close of his career--a gibbet or a
throne.

This imperial quality of ultimate perfection in egotism and crowning
complacency in crime is wanting to his brother in atrocity, the most
notable villain who figures on the stage of Webster's latest
masterpiece. Bosola is not quite a possible Bonaparte; he is not even on
a level with the bloody hirelings who execute the orders of tyranny and
treason with the perfunctory atrocity of Anicetus or Saint-Arnaud. There
is not, or I am much mistaken, a touch of imaginative poetry in the part
of Flamineo: his passion, excitable on occasion and vehement enough is
as prosaic in its homely and cynical eloquence as the most fervent
emotions of a Napoleon or an Iago when warmed or goaded into elocution.
The one is a human snake, the other is a human wolf. Webster could not
with equal propriety have put into the mouth of Flamineo such
magnificent lyric poetry as seems to fall naturally, however suddenly
and strangely, from the bitter and blood-thirsty tongue of Bosola. To
him, as to the baffled and incoherent ruffian Romelio in the
contemporary play of "The Devil's Law-case," his creator has assigned
the utterance of such verse as can only be compared to that uttered by
Cornelia over the body of her murdered son in the tragedy to which I
have just given so feeble and inadequate a word of tribute. In his
command and in his use of the metre first made fashionable by the
graceful improvisations of Greene, Webster seems to me as original and
as peculiar as in his grasp and manipulation of character and event. All
other poets, Shakespeare no less than Barnfield and Milton no less than
Wither, have used this lyric instrument for none but gentle or gracious
ends: Webster has breathed into it the power to express a sublimer and a
profounder tone of emotion; he has given it the cadence and the color of
tragedy; he has touched and transfigured its note of meditative music
into a chord of passionate austerity and prophetic awe. This was the key
in which all previous poets had played upon the metre which Webster was
to put to so deeply different an use.

   Walking in a valley greene,
   Spred with Flora summer queene:
   Where shee heaping all hir graces,
   Niggard seem'd in other places:
   Spring it was, and here did spring
   All that nature forth can bring.

   (_Tullies Loue_, p. 53, ed. 1589.)


   Nights were short, and daies were long;
   Blossoms on the Hauthorns hung:
   Philomele (Night-Musiques King)
   Tolde the comming of the spring.

   (_Grosart's Barnfield_ [1876], p. 97.)

   On a day (alack the day!)
   Love, whose month is ever May,
   Spied a blossom passing fair
   Playing in the wanton air.

   (_Love's Labor's Lost_, act iv., sc. iii.)

And now let us hear Webster.

   Hearke, now every thing is still,
   The Scritch-Owle, and the whistler shrill,
   Call upon our Dame, aloud,
   And bid her quickly don her shrowd:
   Much you had of Land and rent,
   Your length in clay's now competent.
   A long war disturb'd your minde,
   Here your perfect peace is sign'd.
   Of what is't, fooles make such vaine keeping?
   Sin their conception, their birth, weeping:
   Their life, a generall mist of error,
   Their death, a hideous storme of terror.
   Strew your haire with powders sweete:
   Don cleane linnen, bath[e] your feete,
   And (the foule feend more to checke)
   A crucifixe let blesse your necke:
   'Tis now full tide 'tweene night and day,
   End your groane, and come away.

   (_The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy_: 1623: sig. K, K 2.)

The toll of the funereal rhythm, the heavy chime of the solemn and
simple verse, the mournful menace and the brooding presage of its note,
are but the covering, as it were, or the outer expression, of the tragic
significance which deepens and quickens and kindles to its close.
Aeschylus and Dante have never excelled, nor perhaps have Sophocles and
Shakespeare ever equalled in impression of terrible effect, the fancy of
bidding a live woman array herself in the raiment of the grave, and do
for her own living body the offices done for a corpse by the ministers
attendant on the dead.

The murderous humorist whose cynical inspiration gives life to these
deadly lines is at first sight a less plausible, but on second thoughts
may perhaps seem no less possible a character than Flamineo. Pure and
simple ambition of the Napoleonic order is the motive which impels into
infamy the aspiring parasite of Brachiano: a savage melancholy inflames
the baffled greed of Bosola to a pitch of wickedness not unqualified by
relenting touches of profitless remorse, which come always either too
early or too late to bear any serviceable fruit of compassion or
redemption. There is no deeper or more Shakespearean stroke of tragic
humor in all Webster's writings than that conveyed in the scornful and
acute reply--almost too acute perhaps for the character--of Bosola's
remorseless patron to the remonstrance or appeal of his instrument
against the insatiable excess and persistence of his cruelty: "Thy pity
is nothing akin to thee." He has more in common with Romelio in "The
Devil's Law-case," an assassin who misses his aim and flounders into
penitence much as that discomfortable drama misses its point and
stumbles into vacuity: and whose unsatisfactory figure looks either like
a crude and unsuccessful study for that of Bosola, or a disproportioned
and emasculated copy from it. But to him too Webster has given the
fitful force of fancy or inspiration which finds expression in such
sudden snatches of funereal verse as this:

   How then can any monument say
   "Here rest these bones till the last day,"
   When Time, swift both of foot and feather,
   May bear them the sexton kens not whither?
   What care I, then, though my last sleep
   Be in the desert or the deep,
   No lamp nor taper, day and night,
   To give my charnel chargeable light?
   I have there like quantity of ground,
   And at the last day I shall be found.

The villanous laxity of versification which deforms the grim and
sardonic beauty of these occasionally rough and halting lines is
perceptible here and there in "The Duchess of Malfy," but comes to its
head in "The Devil's Law-case." It cannot, I fear, be denied that
Webster was the first to relax those natural bonds of noble metre "whose
service is perfect freedom"--as Shakespeare found it, and combined with
perfect loyalty to its law the most perfect liberty of living and
sublime and spontaneous and accurate expression. I can only conjecture
that this greatest of the Shakespeareans was misguided out of his
natural line of writing as exemplified and perfected in the tragedy of
Vittoria, and lured into this cross and crooked by-way of immetrical
experiment, by the temptation of some theory or crotchet on the score of
what is now called naturalism or realism; which, if there were any real
or natural weight in the reasoning that seeks to support it, would of
course do away, and of course ought to do away, with dramatic poetry
altogether: for if it is certain that real persons do not actually
converse in good metre, it is happily no less certain that they do not
actually converse in bad metre. In the hands of so great a tragic poet
as Webster a peculiar and impressive effect may now and then be produced
by this anomalous and illegitimate way of writing; it certainly suits
well with the thoughtful and fantastic truculence of Bosola's
reflections on death and dissolution and decay--his "talk fit for a
charnel," which halts and hovers between things hideous and things
sublime. But it is a step on the downward way that leads to the negation
or the confusion of all distinctions between poetry and prose; a result
to which it would be grievous to think that the example of Shakespeare's
greatest contemporary should in any way appear to conduce.

The doctrine or the motive of chance (whichever we may prefer to call
it) is seen in its fullest workings and felt in its furthest bearings by
the student of Webster's masterpiece. The fifth act of "The Duchess of
Malfy" has been assailed on the very ground which it should have been
evident to a thoughtful and capable reader that the writer must have
intended to take up--on the ground that the whole upshot of the story is
dominated by sheer chance, arranged by mere error, and guided by pure
accident. No formal scheme or religious principle of retribution would
have been so strangely or so thoroughly in keeping with the whole scheme
and principle of the tragedy. After the overwhelming terrors and the
overpowering beauties of that unique and marvellous fourth act, in which
the genius of this poet spreads its fullest and its darkest wing for the
longest and the strongest of its flights, it could not but be that the
subsequent action and passion of the drama should appear by comparison
unimpressive or ineffectual; but all the effect or impression possible
of attainment under the inevitable burden of this difficulty is achieved
by natural and simple and straightforward means. If Webster has not
made the part of Antonio dramatically striking and attractive--as he
probably found it impossible to do--he has at least bestowed on the
fugitive and unconscious widower of his murdered heroine a pensive and
manly grace of deliberate resignation which is not without pathetic as
well as poetical effect. In the beautiful and well-known scene where the
echo from his wife's unknown and new-made grave seems to respond to his
meditative mockery and forewarn him of his impending death, Webster has
given such reality and seriousness to an old commonplace of contemporary
fancy or previous fashion in poetry that we are fain to forget the
fantastic side of the conception and see only the tragic aspect of its
meaning. A weightier objection than any which can be brought against the
conduct of the play might be suggested to the minds of some readers--and
these, perhaps, not too exacting or too captious readers--by the sudden
vehemence of transformation which in the great preceding act seems to
fall like fire from heaven upon the two chief criminals who figure on
the stage of murder. It seems rather a miraculous retribution, a
judicial violation of the laws of nature, than a reasonably credible
consequence or evolution of those laws, which strikes Ferdinand with
madness and Bosola with repentance. But the whole atmosphere of the
action is so charged with thunder that this double and simultaneous
shock of moral electricity rather thrills us with admiration and faith
than chills us with repulsion or distrust. The passionate intensity and
moral ardor of imagination which we feel to vibrate and penetrate
through every turn and every phrase of the dialogue would suffice to
enforce upon our belief a more nearly incredible revolution of nature or
revulsion of the soul.

It is so difficult for even the very greatest poets to give any vivid
force of living interest to a figure of passive endurance that perhaps
the only instance of perfect triumph over this difficulty is to be found
in the character of Desdemona. Shakespeare alone could have made her as
interesting as Imogen or Cordelia; though these have so much to do and
dare, and she after her first appearance has simply to suffer: even
Webster could not give such individual vigor of characteristic life to
the figure of his martyr as to the figure of his criminal heroine. Her
courage and sweetness, her delicacy and sincerity, her patience and her
passion, are painted with equal power and tenderness of touch: yet she
hardly stands before us as distinct from others of her half-angelic
sisterhood as does the White Devil from the fellowship of her comrades
in perdition. But if, as we may assuredly assume, it was on the
twenty-third "nouell" of William Painter's _Palace of Pleasure_ that
Webster's crowning masterpiece was founded, the poet's moral and
spiritual power of transfiguration is here even more admirable than in
the previous case of his other and wellnigh coequally consummate poem.
The narrative degrades and brutalizes the widowed heroine's affection
for her second husband to the actual level of the vile conception which
the poet attributes and confines to the foul imagination of her envious
and murderous brothers. Here again, and finally and supremely here, the
purifying and exalting power of Webster's noble and magnanimous
imagination is gloriously unmistakable by all and any who have eyes to
read and hearts to recognize.

For it is only with Shakespeare that Webster can ever be compared in any
way to his disadvantage as a tragic poet: above all others of his
country he stands indisputably supreme. The place of Marlowe indeed is
higher among our poets by right of his primacy as a founder and a
pioneer: but of course his work has not--as of course it could not
have--that plenitude and perfection of dramatic power in construction
and dramatic subtlety in detail which the tragedies of Webster share in
so large a measure with the tragedies of Shakespeare. Marston, the poet
with whom he has most in common, might almost be said to stand in the
same relation to Webster as Webster to Shakespeare. In single lines and:
phrases, in a few detached passages and a very few distinguishable
scenes, he is worthy to be compared with the greater poet; he suddenly
rises and dilates to the stature and the strength of a model whom
usually he can but follow afar off. Marston, as a tragic poet, is not
quite what Webster would be if his fame depended simply on such scenes
as those in which the noble mother of Vittoria breaks off her daughter's
first interview with Brachiano--spares, and commends to God's
forgiveness, the son who has murdered his brother before her eyes--and
lastly appears "in several forms of distraction," "grown a very old
woman in two hours," and singing that most pathetic and imaginative of
all funereal invocations which the finest critic of all time so justly
and so delicately compared to the watery dirge of Ariel. There is less
refinement, less exaltation and perfection of feeling, less tenderness
of emotion and less nobility of passion, but hardly less force and
fervor, less weighty and sonorous ardor of expression, in the very best
and loftiest passages of Marston: but his genius is more uncertain, more
fitful and intermittent, less harmonious, coherent, and trustworthy than
Webster's. And Webster, notwithstanding an occasional outbreak into
Aristophanic license of momentary sarcasm through the sardonic lips of
such a cynical ruffian as Ferdinand or Plamineo, is without exception
the cleanliest, as Marston is beyond comparison the coarsest writer of
his time. In this as in other matters of possible comparison that
"vessel of deathless wrath," the implacable and inconsolable poet of
sympathy half maddened into rage and aspiration goaded backward to
despair--it should be needless to add the name of Cyril Tourneur--stands
midway between these two more conspicuous figures of their age. But
neither the father and master of poetic pessimists, the splendid and
sombre creator of Vindice and his victims, nor any other third whom our
admiration may discern among all the greatest of their fellows, can be
compared with Webster on terms more nearly equal than those on which
Webster stands in relation to the sovereign of them all.



THOMAS DEKKER


Of all English poets, if not of all poets on, record, Dekker is perhaps
the most difficult to classify. The grace and delicacy, the sweetness
and spontaneity of his genius are not more obvious and undeniable than
the many defects which impair and the crowning deficiency which degrades
it. As long, but so long only, as a man retains some due degree of
self-respect and respect for the art he serves or the business he
follows, it matters less for his fame in the future than for his
prosperity in the present whether he retains or discards any vestige of
respect for any other obligation in the world. François Villon, compared
with whom all other reckless and disreputable men of genius seem
patterns of austere decency and elevated regularity of life, was as
conscientious and self-respectful an artist as a Virgil or a Tennyson:
he is not a great poet only, but one of the most blameless, the most
perfect, the most faultless among his fellows in the first class of
writers for all time. If not in that class, yet high in the class
immediately beneath it, the world would long since have agreed to enrol
the name of Thomas Dekker, had he not wanted that one gift which next to
genius is the most indispensable for all aspirants to a station among
the masters of creative literature. For he was by nature at once a
singer and a maker: he had the gift of native music and the birthright
of inborn invention. His song was often sweet as honey; his fancy
sometimes as rich and subtle, his imagination as delicate and strong, as
that of the very greatest among dramatists or poets. For gentle grace of
inspiration and vivid force of realism he is eclipsed at his very best
by Shakespeare's self alone. No such combination or alternation of such
admirable powers is discernible in any of his otherwise more splendid or
sublime compeers. And in one gift, the divine gift of tenderness, he
comes nearer to Shakespeare and stands higher above others than in any
other quality of kindred genius.

And with all these gifts, if the vulgar verdict of his own day and of
later days be not less valid than vulgar, he was a failure. There is a
pathetic undertone of patience and resignation not unqualified by manly
though submissive regret, which recurs now and then, or seems to recur,
in the personal accent of his subdued and dignified appeal to the
casual reader, suggestive of a sense that the higher triumphs of art,
the brighter prosperities of achievement, were not reserved for him; and
yet not unsuggestive of a consciousness that, if this be so, it is not
so through want of the primal and essential qualities of a poet. For, as
Lamb says, Dekker "had poetry enough for anything"; at all events, for
anything which can be accomplished by a poet endowed in the highest
degree with the gifts of graceful and melodious fancy, tender and
cordial humor, vivid and pathetic realism, a spontaneous refinement and
an exquisite simplicity of expression. With the one great gift of
seriousness, of noble ambition, of self-confidence rooted in
self-respect, he must have won an indisputable instead of a questionable
place among the immortal writers of his age. But this gift had been so
absolutely withheld from him by nature or withdrawn from him by
circumstance that he has left us not one single work altogether worthy
of the powers now revealed and now eclipsed, now suddenly radiant and
now utterly extinct, in the various and voluminous array of his
writings. Although his earlier plays are in every way superior to his
later, there is evidence even in the best of them of the author's
infirmity of hand. From the first he shows himself idly or perversely or
impotently prone to loosen his hold on character and story alike before
his plot can be duly carried out or his conceptions adequately
developed. His "pleasant Comedie of 'The Gentle Craft,'" first printed
three years before the death of Queen Elizabeth, is one of his brightest
and most coherent pieces of work, graceful and lively throughout, if
rather thin-spun and slight of structure: but the more serious and
romantic part of the action is more lightly handled than the broad light
comedy of the mad and merry Lord Mayor Simon Eyre, a figure in the main
original and humorous enough, but somewhat over-persistent in
ostentation and repetition of jocose catch-words after the fashion of
mine host of the Garter; a type which Shakespeare knew better than to
repeat, but of which his inferiors seem to have been enamoured beyond
all reason. In this fresh and pleasant little play there are few or no
signs of the author's higher poetic abilities: the style is pure and
sweet, simple and spontaneous, without any hint of a quality not
required by the subject: but in the other play of Dekker's which bears
the same date as this one his finest and rarest gifts of imagination and
emotion, feeling and fancy, color and melody, are as apparent as his
ingrained faults of levity and laziness. The famous passage in which
Webster couples together the names of "Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Dekker, and
Mr. Heywood," seems explicable when we compare the style of "Old
Fortunatus" with the style of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Dekker had as
much of the peculiar sweetness, the gentle fancy, the simple melody of
Shakespeare in his woodland dress, as Heywood of the homely and noble
realism, the heartiness and humor, the sturdy sympathy and joyful pride
of Shakespeare in his most English mood of patriotic and historic
loyalty. Not that these qualities are wanting in the work of Dekker: he
was an ardent and a combative patriot, ever ready to take up the cudgels
in prose or rhyme for England and her yeomen against Popery and the
world: but it is rather the man than the poet who speaks on these
occasions: his singing faculty does not apply itself so naturally to
such work as to the wild wood-notes of passion and fancy and pathos
which in his happiest moments, even when they remind us of
Shakespeare's, provoke no sense of unworthiness or inequality in
comparison with these. It is not with the most popular and famous names
of his age that the sovereign name of Shakespeare is most properly or
most profitably to be compared. His genius has really far less in common
with that of Jonson or of Fletcher than with that of Webster or of
Dekker. To the last-named poet even Lamb was for once less than just
when he said of the "frantic Lover" in "Old Fortunatus" that "he talks
pure Biron and Romeo; he is almost as poetical as they." The word
"almost" should be supplanted by the word "fully"; and the criticism
would then be no less adequate than apt. Sidney himself might have
applauded the verses which clothe with living music a passion as fervent
and as fiery a fancy as his own. Not even in the rapturous melodies of
that matchless series of songs and sonnets which glorify the inseparable
names of Astrophel and Stella will the fascinated student find a passage
more enchanting than this:

   Thou art a traitor to that white and red
     Which sitting on her cheeks (being Cupid's throne)
   Is my heart's sovereign: O, when she is dead,
     This wonder, Beauty, shall be found in none.
   Now Agripyne's not mine, I vow to be
   In love with nothing but deformity.
   O fair Deformity, I muse all eyes
   Are not enamoured of thee: thou didst never
   Murder men's hearts, or let them pine like wax,
   Melting against the sun of thy disdain;[1]
   Thou art a faithful nurse to Chastity;
   Thy beauty is not like to Agripyne's,
   For cares, and age, and sickness, hers deface,
   But thine's eternal: O Deformity,
   Thy fairness is not like to Agripyne's,
   For, dead, her beauty will no beauty have,
   But thy face looks most lovely in the grave.

   [Footnote 1: As even Lamb allowed the meaningless and immetrical
   word "destiny" to stand at the end of this line in place of the
   obviously right reading, it is not wonderful that all later editors
   of this passage should hitherto have done so.]

Shakespeare has nothing more exquisite in expression of passionate
fancy, more earnest in emotion, more spontaneous in simplicity, more
perfect in romantic inspiration. But the poet's besetting sin of laxity,
his want of seriousness and steadiness, his idle, shambling, shifty way
of writing, had power even then, in the very prime of his promise, to
impede his progress and impair his chance of winning the race which he
had set himself--and yet which he had hardly set himself--to run. And if
these things were done in the green tree, it was only too obvious what
would be done in the dry; it must have been clear that this
golden-tongued and gentle-hearted poet had not strength of spirit or
fervor of ambition enough to put conscience into his work and resolution
into his fancies. But even from such headlong recklessness as he had
already displayed no reader could have anticipated so singular a
defiance of all form and order, all coherence and proportion, as is
exhibited in his "Satiromastix." The controversial part of the play is
so utterly alien from the romantic part that it is impossible to regard
them as component factors of the same original plot. It seems to me
unquestionable that Dekker must have conceived the design, and probable
that he must have begun the composition, of a serious play on the
subject of William Rufus and Sir Walter Tyrrel, before the appearance of
Ben Jonson's "Poetaster" impelled or instigated him to some immediate
attempt at rejoinder; and that being in a feverish hurry to retort the
blow inflicted on him by a heavier hand than his own he devised--perhaps
between jest and earnest--the preposterously incoherent plan of piecing
out his farcical and satirical design by patching and stitching it into
his unfinished scheme of tragedy. It may be assumed, and it is much to
be hoped, that there never existed another poet capable of
imagining--much less of perpetrating--an incongruity so monstrous and so
perverse. The explanation so happily suggested by a modern critic that
William Rufus is meant for Shakespeare, and that "Lyly is Sir Vaughan ap
Rees," wants only a little further development, on the principle of
analogy, to commend itself to every scholar. It is equally obvious that
the low-bred and foul-mouthed ruffian Captain Tucca must be meant for
Sir Philip Sidney; the vulgar idiot Asinius Bubo for Lord Bacon; the
half-witted underling Peter Flash for Sir Walter Raleigh; and the
immaculate Celestina, who escapes by stratagem and force of virtue from
the villanous designs of Shakespeare, for the lady long since indicated
by the perspicacity of a Chalmers as the object of that lawless and
desperate passion which found utterance in the sonnets of her
unprincipled admirer--Queen Elizabeth. As a previous suggestion of my
own, to the effect that George Peele was probably the real author of
"Romeo and Juliet," has had the singular good-fortune to be not merely
adopted but appropriated--in serious earnest--by a contemporary student,
without--- as far as I am aware--a syllable of acknowledgment, I cannot
but anticipate a similar acceptance in similar quarters for the modest
effort at interpretation now submitted to the judgment of the ingenuous
reader.

Gifford is not too severe on the palpable incongruities of Dekker's
preposterous medley: but his impeachment of Dekker as a more virulent
and intemperate controversialist than Jonson is not less preposterous
than the structure of this play. The nobly gentle and manly verses in
which the less fortunate and distinguished poet disclaims and refutes
the imputation of envy or malevolence excited by the favor enjoyed by
his rival in high quarters should have sufficed, in common justice, to
protect him from such a charge. There is not a word in Jonson's satire
expressive of anything but savage and unqualified scorn for his humbler
antagonist: and the tribute paid by that antagonist to his genius, the
appeal to his better nature which concludes the torrent of
recrimination, would have won some word of honorable recognition from
any but the most unscrupulous and ungenerous of partisans. That Dekker
was unable to hold his own against Jonson when it came to sheer hard
hitting--that on the ground or platform of personal satire he was as a
light-weight pitted against a heavy-weight--is of course too plain, from
the very first round, to require any further demonstration. But it is
not less plain that in delicacy and simplicity and sweetness of
inspiration the poet who could write the scene in which the bride takes
poison (as she believes) from the hand of her father, in presence of her
bridegroom, as a refuge from the passion of the king, was as far above
Jonson as Jonson was above him in the robuster qualities of intellect or
genius. This most lovely scene, for pathos tempered with fancy and for
passion distilled in melody, is comparable only with higher work, of
rarer composition and poetry more pure, than Jonson's: it is a very
treasure-house of verses like jewels, bright as tears and sweet as
flowers. When Dekker writes like this, then truly we seem to see his
right hand in the left hand of Shakespeare.

To find the names of Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker amicably associated in
the composition of a joint poem or pageant within the space of a year
from the publication of so violent a retort by the latter to so vehement
an attack by the former must amuse if it does not astonish the reader
least capable of surprise at the boyish readiness to quarrel and the
boyish readiness to shake hands which would seem to be implied in so
startling a change of relations. In all the huge, costly, wearisome,
barbaric, and pedantic ceremonial which welcomed into London the Solomon
of Scotland, the exhausted student who attempts to follow the ponderous
elaboration of report drawn up by these reconciled enemies will remark
the solid and sedate merit of Jonson's best couplets with less pleasure
than he will receive from the quaint sweetness of Dekker's lyric notes.
Admirable as are many of Ben Jonson's songs for their finish of style
and fulness of matter, it is impossible for those who know what is or
should be the special aim or the distinctive quality of lyric verse to
place him in the first class--much less, in the front rank--of lyric
poets. He is at his best a good way ahead of such song-writers as Byron;
but Dekker at his best belongs to the order of such song-writers as
Blake or Shelley. Perhaps the very finest example of his flawless and
delicate simplicity of excellence in this field of work may be the
well-known song in honor of honest poverty and in praise of honest labor
which so gracefully introduces the heroine of a play published in this
same year of the accession of James--"Patient Grissel"; a romantic
tragicomedy so attractive for its sweetness and lightness of tone and
touch that no reader will question the judgment or condemn the daring of
the poets who ventured upon ground where Chaucer had gone before them
with such gentle stateliness of step and such winning tenderness of
gesture. His deepest note of pathos they have not even attempted to
reproduce: but in freshness and straightforwardness, in frankness and
simplicity of treatment, the dramatic version is not generally unworthy
to be compared with the narrative which it follows afar off.[1] Chettle
and Haughton, the associates of Dekker in this enterprise, had each of
them something of their colleague's finer qualities; but the best scenes
in the play remind me rather of Dekker's best early work than of
"Robert, Earl of Huntington" or of "Englishmen for My Money." So much
has been said of the evil influence of Italian example upon English
character in the age of Elizabeth, and so much has been made of such
confessions or imputations as distinguish the clamorous and malevolent
penitence of Robert Greene, that it is more than agreeable to find at
least one dramatic poet of the time who has the manliness to enter a
frank and contemptuous protest against this habit of malignant
self-excuse. "Italy," says an honest gentleman in this comedy to a lying
and impudent gull, "Italy infects you not, but your own diseased
spirits. Italy? Out, you froth, you scum! because your soul is mud, and
that you have breathed in Italy, you'll say Italy has denied you: away,
you boar: thou wilt wallow in mire in the sweetest country in the
world."

[Footnote 1: I may here suggest a slight emendation in the text of the
spirited and graceful scene with which this play opens. The original
reads:

   So fares it with coy dames, who, great with scorn,
   Shew the care-pinèd hearts that sue to them.

The word _Shew_ is an obvious misprint--but more probably, I venture to
think, for the word _Shun_ than for the word _Fly_, which is substituted
by Mr. Collier and accepted by Dr. Grosart.]

There are many traces of moral or spiritual weakness and infirmity in
the writings of Dekker and the scattered records or indications of his
unprosperous though not unlaborious career: but there are manifest and
manifold signs of an honest and earnest regard for justice and fair
dealing, as well as of an inexhaustible compassion for suffering, an
indestructible persistency of pity, which found characteristic
expression in the most celebrated of his plays. There is a great gulf
between it and the first of Victor Hugo's tragedies: yet the instinct of
either poet is the same, as surely as their common motive is the
redemption of a fallen woman by the influence of twin-born love and
shame. Of all Dekker's works, "The Honest Whore" comes nearest to some
reasonable degree of unity and harmony in conception and construction;
his besetting vice of reckless and sluttish incoherence has here done
less than usual to deform the proportions and deface the impression of
his design. Indeed, the connection of the two serious plots in the first
part is a rare example of dexterous and happy simplicity in composition:
the comic underplot of the patient man and shrewish wife is more loosely
attached by a slighter thread of relation to these two main stories, but
is so amusing in its light and facile play of inventive merriment and
harmless mischief as to need no further excuse. Such an excuse, however,
might otherwise be found in the plea that it gives occasion for the most
beautiful, the most serious, and the most famous passage in all the
writings of its author. The first scene of this first part has always
appeared to me one of the most effective and impressive on our stage:
the interruption of the mock funeral by the one true mourner whose
passion it was intended to deceive into despair is so striking as a mere
incident or theatrical device that the noble and simple style in which
the graver part of the dialogue is written can be no more than worthy of
the subject: whereas in other plays of Dekker's the style is too often
beneath the merit of the subject, and the subject as often below the
value of the style. The subsequent revival of Infelice from her trance
is represented with such vivid and delicate power that the scene, short
and simple as it is, is one of the most fascinating in any play of the
period. In none of these higher and finer parts of the poem can I trace
the touch of any other hand than the principal author's: but the
shopkeeping scenes of the underplot have at least as much of Middleton's
usual quality as of Dekker's; homely and rough-cast as they are, there
is a certain finish or thoroughness about them which is more like the
careful realism of the former than the slovenly naturalism of the
latter. The coarse commonplaces of the sermon on prostitution by which
Bellafront is so readily and surprisingly reclaimed into respectability
give sufficient and superfluous proof that Dekker had nothing of the
severe and fiery inspiration which makes a great satirist or a great
preacher; but when we pass again into a sweeter air than that of the
boudoir or the pulpit, it is the unmistakable note of Dekker's most
fervent and tender mood of melody which enchants us in such verses as
these, spoken by a lover musing on the portrait of a mistress whose
coffin has been borne before him to the semblance of a grave:

   Of all the roses grafted on her cheeks,
   Of all the graces dancing in her eyes,
   Of all the music set upon her tongue,
   Of all that was past woman's excellence
   In her white bosom, look, a painted board
   Circumscribes all!

Is there any other literature, we are tempted to ask ourselves, in which
the writer of these lines, and of many as sweet and perfect in their
inspired simplicity as these, would be rated no higher among his
countrymen than Thomas Dekker?

From the indisputable fact of Middleton's partnership in this play Mr.
Dyce was induced to assume the very questionable inference of his
partnership in the sequel which was licensed for acting five years
later. To me this second part seems so thoroughly of one piece and one
pattern, so apparently the result of one man's invention and
composition, that without more positive evidence I should hesitate to
assign a share in it to any colleague of the poet under whose name it
first appeared. There are far fewer scenes or passages in this than in
the preceding play which suggest or present themselves for quotation or
selection: the tender and splendid and pensive touches of pathetic or
imaginative poetry which we find in the first part, we shall be
disappointed if we seek in the second: its incomparable claim on our
attention is the fact that it contains the single character in all the
voluminous and miscellaneous works of Dekker which gives its creator an
indisputable right to a place of perpetual honor among the imaginative
humorists of England, and therefore among the memorable artists and
creative workmen of the world. Apart from their claim to remembrance as
poets and dramatists of more or less artistic and executive capacity,
Dekker and Middleton are each of them worthy to be remembered as the
inventor or discoverer of a wholly original, interesting, and natural
type of character, as essentially inimitable as it is undeniably
unimitated: the savage humor and cynic passion of De Flores, the genial
passion and tender humor of Orlando Friscobaldo, are equally lifelike in
the truthfulness and completeness of their distinct and vivid
presentation. The merit of the play in which the character last named
is a leading figure consists mainly or almost wholly in the presentation
of the three principal persons: the reclaimed harlot, now the faithful
and patient wife of her first seducer; the broken-down, ruffianly,
light-hearted and light-headed libertine who has married her; and the
devoted old father who watches in the disguise of a servant over the
changes of her fortune, the sufferings, risks, and temptations which try
the purity of her penitence and confirm the fortitude of her constancy.
Of these three characters I cannot but think that any dramatist who ever
lived might have felt that he had reason to be proud. It is strange that
Charles Lamb, to whom of all critics and all men the pathetic and
humorous charm of the old man's personality might most confidently have
been expected most cordially to appeal, should have left to Hazlitt and
Leigh Hunt the honor of doing justice to so beautiful a creation--the
crowning evidence to the greatness of Dekker's gifts, his power of moral
imagination and his delicacy of dramatic execution. From the first to
the last word of his part the quaint sweet humor of the character is
sustained with an instinctive skill which would do honor to a far more
careful and a far more famous artist than Dekker. The words with which
he receives the false news of his fallen daughter's death: "Dead? my
last and best peace go with her!"--those which he murmurs to himself on
seeing her again after seventeen years of estrangement: "The mother's
own face, I ha' not forgot that"--prepare the way for the admirable
final scene in which his mask of anger drops off, and his ostentation of
obduracy relaxes into tenderness and tears. "Dost thou beg for him, thou
precious man's meat, thou? has he not beaten thee, kicked thee, trod on
thee? and dost thou fawn on him like his spaniel? has he not pawned thee
to thy petticoat, sold thee to thy smock, made ye leap at a crust? yet
wouldst have me save him?--What, dost thou hold him? let go his hand: if
thou dost not forsake him, a father's everlasting blessing fall upon
both your heads!" The fusion of humor with pathos into perfection of
exquisite accuracy in expression which must be recognized at once and
remembered forever by any competent reader of this scene is the highest
quality of Dekker as a writer of prose, and is here displayed at its
highest: the more poetic or romantic quality of his genius had already
begun to fade out when this second part of his finest poem was written.
Hazlitt has praised the originality, dexterity, and vivacity of the
effect produced by the stratagem which Infelice employs for the
humiliation of her husband, when by accusing herself of imaginary
infidelity under the most incredibly degrading conditions she entraps
him into gratuitous fury and turns the tables on him by the production
of evidence against himself; and the scene is no doubt theatrically
effective: but the grace and delicacy of the character are sacrificed to
this comparatively unworthy consideration: the pure, high-minded,
noble-hearted lady, whose loyal and passionate affection was so simply
and so attractively displayed in the first part of her story, is so
lamentably humiliated by the cunning and daring immodesty of such a
device that we hardly feel it so revolting an incongruity as it should
have been to see this princess enjoying, in common with her father and
her husband, the spectacle of imprisoned harlots on penitential parade
in the Bridewell of Milan; a thoroughly Hogarthian scene in the grim and
vivid realism of its tragicomic humor.

But if the poetic and realistic merits of these two plays make us
understand why Webster should have coupled its author with the author of
"Twelfth Night" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor," the demerits of the
two plays next published under his single name are so grave, so gross,
so manifold, that the writer seems unworthy to be coupled as a dramatist
with a journeyman poet so far superior to him in honest thoroughness
and smoothness of workmanship as, even at his very hastiest and crudest,
was Thomas Heywood. In style and versification the patriotic and
anti-Catholic drama which bears the Protestant and apocalyptic title of
"The Whore of Babylon" is still, upon the whole, very tolerably spirited
and fluent, with gleams of fugitive poetry and glimpses of animated
action; but the construction is ponderous and puerile, the declamation
vacuous and vehement. An Aeschylus alone could have given us, in a
tragedy on the subject of the Salamis of England, a fit companion to the
"Persae"; which, as Shakespeare let the chance pass by him, remains
alone forever in the incomparable glory of its trumphant and sublime
perfection. Marlowe perhaps might have made something of it, though the
task would have taxed his energies to the utmost, and overtasked the
utmost of his skill; Dekker could make nothing. The Empress of Babylon
is but a poor slipshod ragged prostitute in the hands of this poetic
beadle: "non ragioniam di lei, ma guarda e passa."

Of the three plays in which Dekker took part with Webster, the two plays
in which he took part with Ford, and the second play in which he took
part with Middleton, I have spoken respectively in my several essays on
those other three poets. The next play which bears his name alone was
published five years later than the political or historical sketch or
study which we have just dismissed; and which, compared with it, is a
tolerable if not a creditable piece of work. It is difficult to abstain
from intemperate language in speaking of such a dramatic abortion as
that which bears the grotesque and puerile inscription, "If this be not
a good Play, the Devil is in it." A worse has seldom discredited the
name of any man with a spark of genius in him. Dryden's delectable
tragedy of "Amboyna," Lee's remarkable tragicomedy of "Gloriana," Pope's
elegant comedy of "Three Hours after Marriage," are scarcely more
unworthy of their authors, more futile or more flaccid or more audacious
in their headlong and unabashed incompetence. Charity would suggest that
it must have been written against time in a debtor's prison, under the
influence of such liquor as Catherina Bountinall or Doll Tearsheet would
have flung at the tapster's head with an accompaniment of such language
as those eloquent and high-spirited ladies, under less offensive
provocation, were wont to lavish on the officials of an oppressive law.
I have read a good deal of bad verse, but anything like the metre of
this play I have never come across in all the range of that
excruciating experience. The rare and faint indications that the writer
was or had been an humorist and a poet serve only to bring into fuller
relief the reckless and shameless incompetence of the general
workmanship.[1]

[Footnote 1: As I have given elsewhere a sample of Dekker at his best, I
give here a sample taken at random from the opening of this unhappy
play:

   Hie thee to Naples, Rufman; thou shalt find
   A prince there newly crowned, aptly inclined
   To any bendings: lest his youthful brows
   Reach at stars only, weigh down his loftiest boughs
   With leaden plummets, poison his best thoughts with taste
   Of things most sensual: if the heart once waste,
   The body feels consumption: good or bad kings
   Breed subjects like them: clear streams flow from clear springs.
   Turn therefore Naples to a puddle: with a civil
   Much promising face, and well oiled, play the court devil.

The vigorous melody of these "masculine numbers" is not more remarkable
for its virile force and honied fluency than is the lighter dialogue of
the play for such brilliant wit or lambent humor as flashes out in
pleasantries like this:

   _King_. What are you, and whence come you?

   _Rufman_. From Helvetia.

   _Spendola_. What hell says he?

   _Jovinelli_. Peace; you shall know hot hell [_sic_] time enough.

"I hope here be proofs" that my strictures on the worst work of a poet
whose best work I treasure so heartily, and whose best qualities I rate
so highly, are rather too sparing than too severe.]

This supernatural and "superlunatical" attempt at serious farce or
farcical morality marks the nadir of Dekker's ability as a dramatist.
The diabolic part of the tragicomic business is distinctly inferior to
the parallel or similar scenes in the much older play of "Grim the
Collier of Croydon," which is perhaps more likely to have been the
writer's immediate model than the original story by Machiavelli. The two
remaining plays now extant which bear the single name of Dekker give no
sign of his highest powers, but are tolerable examples of journeyman's
work in the field of romantic or fanciful comedy. "Match Me in London"
is the better play of the two, very fairly constructed after its simple
fashion, and reasonably well written in a smooth and unambitious style:
"The Wonder of a Kingdom" is a light, slight, rough piece of work, in
its contrasts of character as crude and boyish as any of the old
moralities, and in its action as mere a dance of puppets: but it shows
at least that Dekker had regained the faculty of writing decent verse on
occasion. The fine passage quoted by Scott in _The Antiquary_ and taken
by his editors to be a forgery of his own, will be familiar to many
myriads of readers who are never likely to look it up in the original
context. Of two masks called "Britannia's Honor" and "London's Tempe" it
must suffice to say that the former contains a notable specimen of
cockney or canine French which may serve to relieve the conscientious
reader's weariness, and the latter a comic song of blacksmiths at work
which may pass muster at a pinch as a tolerably quaint and lively piece
of rough and ready fancy. But Jonson for the court and Middleton for the
city were far better craftsmen in this line than ever was Dekker at his
best.

Two plays remain for notice in which the part taken by Dekker would be,
I venture to think, unmistakable, even if no external evidence were
extant of his partnership in either. As it is, we know that in the
winter which saw the close of the sixteenth century he was engaged with
the author of "The Parliament of Bees" and the author of "Englishmen for
My Money" in the production of a play called "The Spanish Moor's
Tragedy." More than half a century afterward a tragedy in which a
Spanish Moor is the principal and indeed the only considerable agent was
published, and attributed--of all poets in the world--to Christopher
Marlowe, by a knavish and ignorant bookseller of the period. That
"Lust's Dominion; or, the Lascivious Queen," was partly founded on a
pamphlet published after Marlowe's death was not a consideration
sufficient to offer any impediment to this imposture. That the hand
which in the year of this play's appearance on the stage gave "Old
Fortunatus" to the world of readers was the hand to which we owe the
finer scenes or passages of "Lust's Dominion," the whole of the opening
scene bears such apparent witness as requires no evidence to support and
would require very conclusive evidence to confute it. The sweet
spontaneous luxury of the lines in which the queen strives to seduce her
paramour out of sullenness has the very ring of Dekker's melody: the
rough and reckless rattle of the abrupt rhymes intended to express a
sudden vehemence of change and energy; the constant repetition or
reiteration of interjections and ejaculations which are evidently
supposed to give an air of passionate realism and tragic nature to the
jingling and jerky dialogue; many little mannerisms too trivial to
specify and too obvious to mistake; the occasional spirit and beauty,
the frequent crudity and harshness, of the impetuous and uncertain
style; the faults no less than the merits, the merits as plainly as the
faults, attest the presence of his fitful and wilful genius with all the
defects of its qualities and all the weakness of its strength. The
chaotic extravagance of collapse which serves by way of catastrophe to
bring the action headlong to a close is not more puerile in the violence
of its debility than the conclusions of other plays by Dekker;
conclusions which might plausibly appear, to a malcontent or rather to
a lenient reader, the improvisations of inebriety. There is but one
character which stands out in anything of life-like relief; for the
queen and her paramour are but the usual diabolic puppets of the
contemporary tragic stage: but there is something of life-blood in the
part of the honest and hot-headed young prince. This too is very like
Dekker, whose idle and impatient energy could seldom if ever sustain a
diffused or divided interest, but except when working hopelessly and
heartlessly against time was likely to fix on some special point, and
give life at least to some single figure.

There is nothing incongruous in his appearance as a playwright in
partnership with Middleton or with Chettle, with Haughton or with Day;
but a stranger association than that of Massinger's name with Dekker's
it would not be easy to conceive. Could either poet have lent the other
something of his own best quality, could Massinger have caught from
Dekker the freshness and spontaneity of his poetic inspiration, and
Dekker have learned of Massinger the conscientious excellence and
studious self-respect of his dramatic workmanship, the result must have
been one of the noblest and completest masterpieces of the English
stage. As it is, the famous and beautiful play which we owe to the
alliance of their powers is a proverbial example of incongruous
contrasts and combinations. The opening and the closing scenes were very
properly and very fortunately consigned to the charge of the younger and
sedater poet: so that, whatever discrepancy may disturb the intervening
acts, the grave and sober harmonies of a temperate and serious artist
begin and end the concert in perfect correspondence of consummate
execution. "The first act of 'The Virgin Martyr,'" said Coleridge, "is
as fine an act as I remember in any play." And certainly it would be
impossible to find one in which the business of the scene is more
skilfully and smoothly opened, with more happiness of arrangement, more
dignity and dexterity of touch. But most lovers of poetry would give it
all, and a dozen such triumphs of scenical and rhetorical composition,
for the brief dialogue in the second act between the heroine and her
attendant angel. Its simplicity is so childlike, its inspiration so pure
in instinct and its expression so perfect in taste, its utterance and
its abstinence, its effusion and its reserve, are so far beyond praise
or question or any comment but thanksgiving, that these forty-two lines,
homely and humble in manner as they are if compared with the refined
rhetoric and the scrupulous culture of Massinger, would suffice to keep
the name of Dekker sweet and safe forever among the most memorable if
not among the most pre-eminent of his kindred and his age. The four
scenes of rough and rank buffoonery which deface this act and the two
following have given very reasonable offence to critics from whom they
have provoked very unreasonable reflections. That they represent the
coarser side of the genius whose finer aspect is shown in the sweetest
passages of the poem has never been disputed by any one capable of
learning the rudiments or the accidence of literary criticism. An
admirable novelist and poet who had the misfortune to mistake himself
for a theologian and a critic was unlucky enough to assert that he knew
not on what ground these brutal buffooneries had been assigned to their
unmistakable author; in other words, to acknowledge his ignorance of the
first elements of the subject on which it pleased him to write in a tone
of critical and spiritual authority. Not even when his unwary and
unscrupulous audacity of self-confidence impelled Charles Kingsley to
challenge John Henry Newman to the duel of which the upshot left him
gasping so piteously on the ground selected for their tournament--not
even then did the author of _Hypatia_ display such a daring and
immedicable capacity of misrepresentation based on misconception as
when this most ingenuously disingenuous of all controversialists avowed
himself "aware of no canons of internal criticism which would enable us
to decide as boldly as Mr. Gifford does that all the indecency is
Dekker's and all the poetry Massinger's." Now the words of Gifford's
note on the dialogue of which I have already spoken, between the saint
and the angel, are these: "What follows is exquisitely beautiful.... I
am persuaded that this also was written by Dekker." And seeing that no
mortal critic but Kingsley ever dreamed of such absurdity as Kingsley
rushes forward to refute, his controversial capacity will probably be
regarded by all serious students of poetry or criticism as measurable by
the level of his capacity for accurate report of fact or accurate
citation of evidence.

There are times when we are tempted to denounce the Muse of Dekker as
the most shiftless and shameless of slovens or of sluts; but when we
consider the quantity of work which she managed to struggle or shuffle
through with such occasionally admirable and memorable results, we are
once more inclined to reclaim for her a place of honor among her more
generally respectable or reputable sisters. I am loath to believe what I
see no reason to suppose, that she was responsible for the dismal
drivel of a poem on the fall of Jerusalem, which is assigned, on the
surely dangerous ground of initials subscribed under the dedication, to
a writer who had the misfortune to share these initials with Thomas
Deloney. The ballad-writing hack may have been capable of sinking so far
below the level of a penny ballad as to perpetrate this monstrous
outrage on human patience and on English verse; but the most conclusive
evidence would be necessary to persuade a jury of competent readers that
a poet must be found guilty of its authorship. And we know that a
pamphlet or novelette of Deloney's called "Thomas of Reading; or, the
Six Worthy Yeomen of the West," was ascribed to Dekker until the actual
author was discovered.[1] Dr. Grosart, to whom we owe the first
collected edition of Dekker's pamphlets, says in the introduction to
the fifth of his beautiful volumes that he should have doubted the
responsibility of Dekker for a poem with which it may perhaps be unfair
to saddle even so humble a hackney on the poetic highway as the jaded
Pegasus of Deloney, had he not been detected as the author of another
religious book. But this latter is a book of the finest and rarest
quality--one of its author's most unquestionable claims to immortality
in the affection and admiration of all but the most unworthy readers;
and "Canaan's Calamity" is one of the worst metrical samples extant of
religious rubbish. As far as such inferential evidence can be allowed to
attest anything, the fact of Dekker's having written one of the most
beautiful and simple of religious books in prose tends surely rather to
disprove than to prove his authorship of one of the feeblest and most
pretentious of semi-sacred rhapsodies in verse.

[Footnote 1: It would be a very notable addition to Dekker's claims
on our remembrance if he had indeed written the admirable narrative,
worthy of Defoe at his very best, which describes with such impressive
simplicity of tragic effect the presageful or premonitory anguish of
a man on his unconscious way to a sudden and a secret death of
unimaginable horror. Had Deloney done more such work as this, and
abjured the ineffectual service of an inauspicious Muse, his name would
now be famous among the founders and the masters of realistic fiction.]

Among his numerous pamphlets, satirical or declamatory, on the manners
of his time and the observations of his experience, one alone stands out
as distinct from the rest by right of such astonishing superiority in
merit of style and interest of matter that I prefer to reserve it for
separate and final consideration. But it would require more time and
labor than I can afford to give an adequate account of so many effusions
or improvisations as served for fuel to boil the scanty and precarious
pot of his uncertain and uncomfortable sustenance. "The Wonderful Year"
of the death of Elizabeth, the accession of James, and the devastation
of London by pestilence, supplied him with matter enough for one of his
quaintest and liveliest tracts: in which the historical part has no
quality so valuable or remarkable as the grotesque mixture of horror and
humor in the anecdotes appended "like a merry epilogue to a dull play,
of purpose to shorten the lives of long winter's nights that lie
watching in the dark for us," with touches of rude and vivid pleasantry
not unworthy to remind us, I dare not say of the _Decameron_, but at
least of the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_. In "The Seven Deadly Sins of
London"--one of the milder but less brilliant _Latter-day Pamphlets_ of
a gentler if no less excitable Carlyle--there are touches of earnest
eloquence as well as many quaint and fitful illustrations of social
history; but there is less of humorous vigor and straightforward realism
than in the preceding tract. And yet there are good things to be
gathered out of this effusive and vehement lay sermon; this sentence,
for example, is worth recollection: "He is not slothful that is only
lazy, that only wastes his good hours and his silver in luxury and
licentious ease:--no, he is the true slothful man, that does no good."
And there is genuine insight as well as honesty and courage in his
remonstrance with the self-love and appeal against the self-deceit of
his countrymen, so prone to cry out on the cruelty of others, on the
blood-thirstiness of Frenchmen and Spaniards, and to overlook the
heavy-headed brutality of their own habitual indifference and neglect.
Although the cruelty of penal laws be now abrogated, yet the condition
of the poorest among us is assuredly not such that we can read without a
sense of their present veracity the last words of this sentence: "Thou
set'st up posts to whip them when they are alive: set up an hospital to
comfort them being sick, or purchase ground for them to dwell in when
they be well; _and that is, when they be dead_." The next of Dekker's
tracts is more of a mere imitation than any of his others: the influence
of a more famous pamphleteer and satirist, Tom Nash, is here not only
manifest as that of a model, but has taken such possession of his
disciple that he is hardly more than a somewhat servile copyist; not
without a touch of his master's more serious eloquence, but with less
than little of his peculiar energy and humor. That rushing wind of
satire, that storm of resonant invective, that inexhaustible volubility
of contempt, which rages through the controversial writings of the
lesser poet, has sunk to a comparative whisper; the roar of his Homeric
or Rabelaisian laughter to a somewhat forced and artificial chuckle.
This "News from Hell, brought by the Devil's Carrier," and containing
"The Devil's Answer to Pierce Penniless," might have miscarried by the
way without much more loss than that of such an additional proof as we
could have been content to spare of Dekker's incompetence to deal with a
subject which he was curiously fond of handling in earnest and in jest.
He seems indeed to have fancied himself, if not something of a Dante,
something at least of a Quevedo; but his terrors are merely tedious, and
his painted devils would not terrify a babe. In this tract, however,
there are now and then some fugitive felicities of expression; and this
is more than can be said for either the play or the poem in which he has
gone, with feebler if not more uneasy steps than Milton's Satan, over
the same ground of burning marl. There is some spirit in the prodigal's
denunciation of his miserly father: but the best thing in the pamphlet
is the description of the soul of a hero bound for paradise, whose name
is given only in the revised and enlarged edition which appeared a year
later under the title of "A Knight's Conjuring; done in earnest;
discovered in jest." The narrative of "William Eps his death" is a fine
example of that fiery sympathy with soldiers which glows in so many
pages of Dekker's verse, and flashes out by fits through the murky
confusion of his worst and most formless plays; but the introduction of
thil hero is as fine a passage of prose as he has left us:

    The foremost of them was a personage of so composed a presence,
    that Nature and Fortune had done him wrong, if they had not
    made him a soldier. _In his countenance there was a kind of
    indignation, fighting with a kind of exalted joy_, which by his
    very gesture were apparently decipherable; for he was jocund,
    that his soul went out of him in so glorious a triumph; but
    disdainfully angry, that she wrought her enlargement through no
    more dangers: yet were there bleeding witnesses enow on his
    breast, which testified, he did not yield till he was conquered,
    and was not conquered, till there was left nothing of a man in
    him to be overcome.

That the poet's loyalty and devotion were at least as ardent when
offered by his gratitude to sailors as to soldiers we may see by this
description of "The Seaman" in his next work:

   A progress doth he take from realm to realm,
   With goodly water-pageants borne before him;
   The safety of the land sits at his helm,
   No danger here can touch, but what runs o'er him:
   But being in heaven's eye still, it doth restore him
   To livelier spirts; to meet death with ease,
   _If thou wouldst know thy maker, search the seas_.[1]

   [Footnote 1: The italics are here the author's.]

These homely but hearty lines occur in a small and mainly metrical
tract bearing a title so quaint that I am tempted to transcribe it at
length: "The Double PP. A Papist in Arms. Bearing Ten several Shields.
Encountered by the Protestant. At Ten several Weapons. A Jesuit Marching
before them. Cominùs and Eminùs." There are a few other vigorous and
pointed verses in this little patriotic impromptu, but the greater part
of it is merely curious and eccentric doggrel.

The next of Dekker's tracts or pamphlets was the comparatively
well-known "Gull's Hornbook." This brilliant and vivid little satire is
so rich in simple humor, and in life-like photography taken by the
sunlight of an honest and kindly nature, that it stands second only to
the author's masterpiece in prose, "The Bachelor's Banquet," which has
waited so much longer for even the limited recognition implied by a
private reprint. There are so many witty or sensible or humorous or
grotesque excerpts to be selected from this pamphlet--and not from the
parts borrowed or copied from a foreign satire on the habits of slovenly
Hollanders--that I take the first which comes under my notice on
reopening the book; a study which sets before us in fascinating relief
the professional poeticule of a period in which as yet clubs, coteries,
and newspapers were not--or at the worst were nothing to speak of:

    If you be a Poet, and come into the Ordinary (though it can be
    no great glory to be an ordinary Poet) order yourself thus.
    Observe no man, doff not cap to that gentleman to-day at dinner,
    to whom, not two nights since, you were beholden for a supper;
    but, after a turn or two in the room, take occasion (pulling out
    your gloves) to have Epigram, or Satire, or Sonnet fastened in
    one of them, that may (as it were unwittingly to you) offer
    itself to the Gentlemen: they will presently desire it: but,
    without much conjuration from them, and a pretty kind of
    counterfeit lothness in yourself, do not read it; and, though it
    be none of your own, swear you made it.

This coupling of injunction and prohibition is worthy of Shakespeare or
of Sterne:

    Marry, if you chance to get into your hands any witty thing of
    another man's, that is somewhat better, I would counsel you
    then, if demand be made who composed it, you may say: "'Faith,
    a learned Gentleman, a very worthy friend." And this seeming to
    lay it on another man will be counted either modesty in you, or
    a sign that you are not ambitious of praise, _or else that you
    dare not take it upon you, for fear of the sharpness it carries
    with it_.

The modern poetaster by profession knows a trick worth any two of these:
but it is curious to observe the community of baseness, and the
comparative innocence of awkwardness and inexperience, which at once
connote the species and denote the specimens of the later and the
earlier animalcule.

The "Jests to make you merry," which in Dr. Grosart's edition are placed
after "The Gull's Horn-book," though dated two years earlier, will
hardly give so much entertainment to any probable reader in our own time
as "The Misery of a Prison, and a Prisoner," will give him pain to read
of in the closing pages of the same pamphlet, when he remembers how
long--at the lowest computation--its author had endured the loathsome
and hideous misery which he has described with such bitter and pathetic
intensity and persistency in detail. Well may Dr. Grosart say that "it
shocks us to-day, though so far off, to think of 1598 to 1616 onwards
covering so sorrowful and humiliating trials for so finely touched a
spirit as was Dekker's"; but I think as well as hope that there is no
sort of evidence to that surely rather improbable as well as deplorable
effect. It may be "possible," but it is barely possible, that some
"seven years' continuous imprisonment" is the explanation of an
ambiguous phrase which is now incapable of any certain solution, and
capable of many an interpretation far less deplorable than this. But in
this professedly comic pamphlet there are passages as tragic, if not as
powerful, as any in the immortal pages of _Pickwick_ and _Little
Dorrit_ which deal with a later but a too similar phase of prison
discipline and tradition:

    The thing that complained was a man:--"Thy days have gone over
    thee like the dreams of a fool, thy nights like the watchings of
    a madman.--Oh sacred liberty! with how little devotion do men
    come into thy temples, when they cannot bestow upon thee too
    much honor! Thy embracements are more delicate than those of a
    young bride with her lover, and to be divorced from thee is half
    to be damned! For what else is a prison but the very next door
    to hell? It is a man's grave, wherein he walks alive: it is a
    sea wherein he is always shipwrackt: it is a lodging built out
    of the world: it is a wilderness where all that wander up and
    down grow wild, and all that come into it are devoured."

In Dekker's next pamphlet, his "Dream," there are perhaps half a dozen
tolerably smooth and vigorous couplets immersed among many more vacuous
and vehement in the intensity of their impotence than any reader and
admirer of his more happily inspired verse could be expected to believe
without evidence adduced. Of imagination, faith, or fancy, the ugly
futility of this infernal vision has not--unless I have sought more than
once for it in vain--a single saving trace or compensating shadow.

Two years after he had tried his hand at an imitation of Nash, Dekker
issued the first of the pamphlets in which he attempted to take up the
succession of Robert Greene as a picaresque writer, or purveyor of
guide-books through the realms of rascaldom. "The Bellman of London," or
Rogue's Horn-book, begins with a very graceful and fanciful description
of the quiet beauty and seclusion of a country retreat in which the
author had sought refuge from the turmoil and forgetfulness of the vices
of the city; and whence he was driven back upon London by disgust at the
discovery of villany as elaborate and roguery as abject in the beggars
and thieves of the country as the most squalid recesses of metropolitan
vice or crime could supply. The narrative of this accidental discovery
is very lively and spirited in its straightforward simplicity, and the
subsequent revelations of rascality are sometimes humorous as well as
curious: but the demand for such literature must have been singularly
persistent to evoke a sequel to this book next year, "Lantern and
Candle-light; or, the Bellman's Second Night-walk," in which Dekker
continues his account of vagrant and villanous society, its lawless laws
and its unmannerly manners; and gives the reader some vivid studies,
interspersed with facile rhetoric and interlarded with indignant
declamation, of the tricks of horse-dealers and the shifts of
gypsies--or "moon-men" as he calls them; a race which he regarded with
a mixture of angry perplexity and passionate disgust. "A Strange
Horse-race" between various virtues and vices gives occasion for the
display of some allegoric ingenuity and much indefatigable but fatiguing
pertinacity in the exposure of the more exalted swindlers of the
age--the crafty bankrupts who anticipated the era of the Merdles
described by Dickens, but who can hardly have done much immediate injury
to a capitalist of the rank of Dekker. Here too there are glimpses of
inventive spirit and humorous ingenuity; but the insufferable iteration
of jocose demonology and infernal burlesque might tempt the most patient
and the most curious of readers to devote the author, with imprecations
or invocations as elaborate as his own, to the spiritual potentate whose
"last will and testament" is transcribed into the text of this pamphlet.

In "The Dead Term" such a reader will find himself more or less relieved
by the return of his author to a more terrene and realistic sort of
allegory. This recriminatory dialogue between the London and the
Westminster of 1608 is now and then rather flatulent in its reciprocity
of rhetoric, but is enlivened by an occasional breath of genuine
eloquence, and redeemed by touches of historic or social interest. The
title and motto of the next year's pamphlet--"Work for Armourers; or,
the Peace is Broken.--God help the Poor, the rich can shift"--were
presumably designed to attract the casual reader, by what would now be
called a sensational device, to consideration of the social question
between rich and poor--or, as he puts it, between the rival queens,
Poverty and Money. The forces on either side are drawn out and arrayed
with pathetic ingenuity, and the result is indicated with a quaint and
grim effect of humorous if indignant resignation. "The Raven's Almanack"
of the same year, though portentous in its menace of plague, famine, and
civil war, is less noticeable for its moral and religious declamation
than for its rather amusing than edifying anecdotes; which, it must
again be admitted, in their mixture of jocular sensuality with somewhat
ferocious humor, rather remind us of King Louis XI. than of that royal
novelist's Italian models or precursors. "A Rod for Runaways" is the
title of a tract which must have somewhat perplexed the readers who came
to it for practical counsel or suggestion, seeing that the very
title-page calls their attention to the fact that, "if they look back,
they may behold many fearful judgments of God, sundry ways pronounced
upon this city, and on several persons, both flying from it and staying
in it." What the medical gentleman to whom this tract was dedicated may
have thought of the author's logic and theology, we can only
conjecture. But even in this little pamphlet there are anecdotes and
details which would repay the notice of a social historian as curious in
his research and as studious in his condescension as Macaulay.

A prayer-book written or compiled by a poet of Dekker's rank in Dekker's
age would have some interest for the reader of a later generation even
if it had not the literary charm which distinguishes the little volume
of devotions now reprinted from a single and an imperfect copy. We
cannot be too grateful for the good-fortune and the generous care to
which we are indebted for this revelation of a work of genius so curious
and so delightful that the most fanatical of atheists or agnostics, the
hardest and the driest of philosophers, might be moved and fascinated by
the exquisite simplicity of its beauty. Hardly even in those almost
incomparable collects which Macaulay so aptly compared with the sonnets
of Milton shall we find sentences or passages more perfect in their
union of literary grace with ardent sincerity than here. Quaint as are
several of the prayers in the professional particulars of their
respective appeals, this quaintness has nothing of irreverence or
incongruity: and the subtle simplicity of cadence in the rhythmic
movement of the style is so nearly impeccable that we are perplexed to
understand how so exquisite an ear as was Dekker's at its best can have
been tolerant of such discord or insensible to such collapse as so often
disappoints or shocks us in the hastier and cruder passages of his
faltering and fluctuating verse. The prayer for a soldier going to
battle and his thanksgiving after victory are as noble in the dignity of
their devotion as the prayers for a woman in travail and "for them that
visit the sick" are delicate and earnest in their tenderness. The prayer
for a prisoner is too beautiful to stand in need of the additional and
pathetic interest which it derives from the fact of its author's
repeated experience of the misery it expresses with such piteous yet
such manful resignation. The style of these faultlessly simple devotions
is almost grotesquely set off by the relief of a comparison with the
bloated bombast and flatulent pedantry of a prayer by the late Queen
Elizabeth which Dekker has transcribed into his text--it is hardly
possible to suppose, without perception of the contrast between its
hideous jargon and the refined purity of his own melodious English. The
prayer for the Council is singularly noble in the eloquence of its
patriotism: the prayer for the country is simply magnificent in the
austere music of its fervent cadences: the prayer in time of civil war
is so passionate in its cry for deliverance from all danger of the
miseries then or lately afflicting the continent that it might well have
been put up by a loyal patriot in the very heat of the great war which
Dekker might have lived to see break out in his own country. The prayer
for the evening is so beautiful as to double our regret for the
deplorable mutilation which has deprived us of all but the opening of
the morning prayer.[1] The feathers fallen from the wings of these "Four
Birds of Noah's Ark" would be worth more to the literary ornithologist
than whole flocks of such "tame villatic fowl" as people the ordinary
coops and hen-roosts of devotional literature.

[Footnote 1: A noticeable instance of the use of a common word in the
original and obsolete sense of its derivation may be cited from the
unfortunately truncated and scanty fragment of a prayer for the court:
"Oh Lord, be thou a husband" (house-band) "to that great household of
our King."]

One work only of Dekker's too often overtasked and heavy-laden genius
remains to be noticed: it is one which gives him a high place forever
among English humorists. No sooner has the reader run his eye over the
first three or four pages than he feels himself, with delight and
astonishment, in the company of a writer whose genius is akin at once to
Goldsmith's and to Thackeray's; a writer whose style is so pure and
vigorous, so lucid and straightforward, that we seem to have already
entered upon the best age of English prose. Had Mr. Matthew Arnold,
instead of digging in Chapman for preposterous barbarisms and
eccentricities of pedantry, chanced to light upon this little treatise,
or had he condescended to glance over Daniel's compact and admirable
"Defence of Rhyme," he would have found in writers of the despised
Shakespearean epoch much more than a foretaste of those excellent
qualities which he imagined to have been first imported into our
literature by writers of the age of Dryden. The dialogue of the very
first couple introduced with such skilful simplicity of presentation at
the opening of Dekker's pamphlet is worthy of Sterne: the visit of the
gossip or kinswoman in the second chapter is worthy of Molière, and the
humors of the monthly nurse in the third are worthy of Dickens. The
lamentations of the lady for the decay of her health and beauty in
consequence of her obsequious husband's alleged neglect, "no more like
the woman I was than an apple is like an oyster"; the description of the
poor man making her broth with his own hands, jeered at by the maids and
trampled underfoot by Mrs. Gamp; the preparations for the christening
supper and the preliminary feast of scandal--are full of such bright and
rich humor as to recall even the creator of Dogberry and Mrs. Quickly.
It is of Shakespeare again that we are reminded in the next chapter, by
the description of the equipage to which the husband of "a woman that
hath a charge of children" is reduced when he has to ride to the assizes
in sorrier plight than Petruchio rode in to his wedding; the details
remind us also of Balzac in the minute and grotesque intensity of their
industrious realism: but the scene on his return reminds us rather of
Thackeray at the best of his bitterest mood--the terrible painter of
Mrs. Mackenzie and Mrs. General Baynes. "The humor of a woman that
marries her inferior by birth" deals with more serious matters in a
style not unworthy of Boccaccio; and no comedy of the time--Shakespeare's
always excepted--has a scene in it of richer and more original humor
than brightens the narrative which relates the woes of the husband
who invites his friends to dinner and finds everything under lock and
key. Hardly in any of Dekker's plays is the comic dialogue so masterly
as here--so vivid and so vigorous in its life-like ease and spontaneity.
But there is not one of the fifteen chapters, devoted each to the
description of some fresh "humor," which would not deserve, did space
and time allow of it, a separate note of commentary. The book is simply
one of the very finest examples of humorous literature, touched now
and then with serious and even tragic effect, that can be found in any
language; it is generally and comparatively remarkable for its freedom
from all real coarseness or brutality, though the inevitable change of
manners between Shakespeare's time and our own may make some passages
or episodes seem now and then somewhat over-particular in plain speaking
or detail. But a healthier, manlier, more thoroughly good-natured and
good-humored book was never written; nor one in which the author's real
and respectful regard for womanhood was more perceptible through the
veil of a satire more pure from bitterness and more honest in design.

The list of works over which we have now glanced is surely not
inconsiderable; and yet the surviving productions of Dekker's genius or
necessity are but part of the labors of his life. If he wanted--as
undoubtedly he would seem to have wanted--that "infinite capacity for
taking pains" which Carlyle professed to regard as the synonyme of
genius, he was at least not deficient in that rough-and-ready diligence
which is habitually in harness, and cheerfully or resignedly prepared
for the day's work. The names of his lost plays--all generally
suggestive of some true dramatic interest, now graver and now
lighter--are too numerous to transcribe: but one at least of them must
excite unspeakable amazement as well as indiscreet curiosity in every
reader of Ariosto or La Fontaine who comes in the course of the
catalogue upon such a title as "Jocondo and Astolfo." How on earth the
famous story of Giocondo could possibly be adapted for representation on
the public stage of Shakespearean London is a mystery which the
execrable cook of the execrable Warburton has left forever insoluble and
inconceivable: for to that female fiend, the object of Sir Walter
Scott's antiquarian imprecations, we owe, unless my memory misguides me,
the loss of this among other irredeemable treasures.

To do justice upon the faults of this poet is easy for any sciolist: to
do justice to his merits is less easy for the most competent scholar and
the most appreciative critic. In despite of his rare occasional spurts
or outbreaks of self-assertion or of satire, he seems to stand before us
a man of gentle, modest, shiftless, and careless nature, irritable and
placable, eager and unsteady, full of excitable kindliness and deficient
in strenuous principle; loving the art which he professionally followed,
and enjoying the work which he occasionally neglected. There is no
unpoetic note in his best poetry such as there is too often--nay, too
constantly--in the severer work and the stronger genius of Ben Jonson.
What he might have done under happier auspices, or with a tougher fibre
of resolution and perseverance in his character, it is waste of time and
thought for his most sympathetic and compassionate admirers to assume or
to conjecture: what he has done, with all its shortcomings and
infirmities, is enough to secure for him a distinct and honorable place
among the humorists and the poets of his country.



JOHN MARSTON


If justice has never been done, either in his own day or in any after
age, to a poet of real genius and original powers, it will generally be
presumed, with more or less fairness or unfairness, that this is in
great part his own fault. Some perversity or obliquity will be
suspected, even if no positive infirmity or deformity can be detected,
in his intelligence or in his temperament: some taint or some flaw will
be assumed to affect and to vitiate his creative instinct or his
spiritual reason. And in the case of John Marston, the friend and foe of
Ben Jonson, the fierce and foul-mouthed satirist, the ambitious and
overweening tragedian, the scornful and passionate humorist, it is easy
for the shallowest and least appreciative reader to perceive the nature
and to estimate the weight of such drawbacks or impediments as have so
long and so seriously interfered with the due recognition of an
independent and remarkable poet. The praise and the blame, the
admiration and the distaste excited by his works, are equally just, but
are seemingly incompatible: the epithets most exactly appropriate to
the style of one scene, one page, one speech in a scene or one passage
in a speech, are most ludicrously inapplicable to the next. An anthology
of such noble and beautiful excerpts might be collected from his plays,
that the reader who should make his first acquaintance with this poet
through the deceptive means of so flattering an introduction would be
justified in supposing that he had fallen in with a tragic dramatist of
the very highest order--with a new candidate for a station in the very
foremost rank of English poets. And if the evil star which seems
generally to have presided over the literary fortunes of John Marston
should misguide the student, on first opening a volume of his works,
into some such arid or miry tract of wilderness as too frequently
deforms the face of his uneven and irregular demesne, the inevitable
sense of disappointment and repulsion which must immediately ensue will
too probably discourage a casual explorer from any renewal of his
research.

Two of the epithets which Ben Jonson, in his elaborate attack on
Marston, selected for ridicule as characteristically grotesque instances
of affected and infelicitous innovation--but which nevertheless have
taken root in the language, and practically justified their
adoption--describe as happily as any that could be chosen to describe
the better and the worse quality of his early tragic and satiric style.
These words are "strenuous" and "clumsy." It is perpetually,
indefatigably, and fatiguingly strenuous; it is too often vehemently,
emphatically, and laboriously clumsy. But at its best, when the clumsy
and ponderous incompetence of expression which disfigures it is
supplanted by a strenuous felicity of ardent and triumphant aspiration,
it has notes and touches in the compass of its course not unworthy of
Webster or Tourneur or even Shakespeare himself. Its occasionally
exquisite delicacy is as remarkable as its more frequent excess of
coarseness, awkwardness, or violent and elaborate extravagance. No
sooner has he said anything especially beautiful, pathetic, or sublime,
than the evil genius must needs take his turn, exact as it were the
forfeit of his bond, impel the poet into some sheer perversity, deface
the flow and form of the verse with some preposterous crudity or
flatulence of phrase which would discredit the most incapable or the
most fantastic novice. And the worst of it all is that he limps or
stumbles with either foot alternately. At one moment he exaggerates the
license of artificial rhetoric, the strain and swell of the most
high-flown and hyperbolical poetic diction; at the next, he falls flat
upon the naked level of insignificant or offensive realism.

These are no slight charges; and it is impossible for any just or sober
judgment to acquit John Marston of the impeachment conveyed in them. The
answer to it is practical and simple: it is that his merits are great
enough to outweigh and overshadow them all. Even if his claim to
remembrance were merely dependent on the value of single passages, this
would suffice to secure him his place of honor in the train of
Shakespeare. If his most ambitious efforts at portraiture of character
are often faulty at once in color and in outline, some of his slighter
sketches have a freshness and tenderness of beauty which may well atone
for the gravest of his certainly not infrequent offences. The sweet
constancy and gentle fortitude of a Beatrice and a Mellida remain in the
memory more clearly, leave a more life-like impression of truth on the
reader's mind, than the light-headed profligacy and passionate
instability of such brainless and blood-thirsty wantons as Franceschina
and Isabella. In fact, the better characters in Marston's plays are
better drawn, less conventional, more vivid and more human than those of
the baser sort. Whatever of moral credit may be due to a dramatist who
paints virtue better than vice, and has a happier hand at a hero's
likeness than at a villain's, must unquestionably be assigned to the
author of "Antonio and Mellida." Piero, the tyrant and traitor, is
little more than a mere stage property: like Mendoza in "The Malcontent"
and Syphax in "Sophonisba," he would be a portentous ruffian if he had a
little more life in him; he has to do the deeds and express the emotions
of a most bloody and crafty miscreant; but it is only now and then that
we catch the accent of a real man in his tones of cajolery or menace,
dissimulation or triumph. Andrugio, the venerable and heroic victim of
his craft and cruelty, is a figure not less living and actual than
stately and impressive: the changes of mood from meditation to passion,
from resignation to revolt, from tenderness to resolution, which mark
the development of the character with the process of the action, though
painted rather broadly than subtly and with more of vigor than of care,
show just such power of hand and sincerity of instinct as we fail to
find in the hot and glaring colors of his rival's monotonous ruffianism.
Again, in "The Wonder of Women," the majestic figures of Massinissa,
Gelosso, and Sophonisba stand out in clearer relief than the traitors of
the senate, the lecherous malignity of Syphax, or the monstrous profile
of the sorceress Erichtho. In this labored and ambitious tragedy, as in
the two parts of "Antonio and Mellida," we see the poet at his best--and
also at his worst. A vehement and resolute desire to give weight to
every line and emphasis to every phrase has too often misled him into
such brakes and jungles of crabbed and convulsive bombast, of stiff and
tortuous exuberance, that the reader in struggling through some of the
scenes and speeches feels as though he were compelled to push his way
through a cactus hedge: the hot and heavy blossoms of rhetoric blaze and
glare out of a thickset fence of jagged barbarisms and exotic
monstrosities of metaphor. The straining and sputtering declamation of
narrative and oratory scarcely succeeds in expressing through a dozen
quaint and far-fetched words or phrases what two or three of the
simplest would easily and amply have sufficed to convey. But when the
poet is content to deliver his message like a man of this world, we
discover with mingled satisfaction, astonishment, and irritation that he
can write when he pleases in a style of the purest and noblest
simplicity; that he can make his characters converse in a language
worthy of Sophocles when he does not prefer to make them stutter in a
dialect worthy of Lycophron. And in the tragedy of "Sophonisba" the
display of this happy capacity is happily reserved for the crowning
scene of the poem. It would be difficult to find anywhere a more
preposterous or disjointed piece of jargon than the speech of Asdrubal
at the close of the second act:

                    Brook open scorn, faint powers!--
   Make good the camp!--No, fly!--yes, what?--wild rage!--
   To be a prosperous villain! yet some heat, some hold;
   But to burn temples, and yet freeze, O cold!
   Give me some health; now your blood sinks: thus deeds
   Ill nourished rot: without Jove nought succeeds.

And yet this passage occurs in a poem which contains such a passage as
the following:

   And now with undismayed resolve behold,
   To save you--you--for honor and just faith
   Are most true gods, which we should much adore--
   With even disdainful vigor I give up
   An abhorred life!--You have been good to me,
   And I do thank thee, heaven. O my stars,
   I bless your goodness, that with breast unstained,
   Faith pure, a virgin wife, tried to my glory,
   I die, of female faith the long-lived story;
   Secure from bondage and all servile harms,
   But more, most happy in my husband's arms.

The lofty sweetness, the proud pathos, the sonorous simplicity of these
most noble verses might scarcely suffice to attest the poet's possession
of any strong dramatic faculty. But the scene immediately preceding
bears evidence of a capacity for terse and rigorous brevity of dialogue
in a style as curt and condensed as that of Tacitus or Dante:

   _Sophonisba_. What unjust grief afflicts my worthy lord?

   _Massinissa_. Thank me, ye gods, with much beholdingness;
   For, mark, I do not curse you.

   _Sophonisba_. Tell me, sweet,
   The cause of thy much anguish.

   _Massinissa_. Ha, the cause?
   Let's see; wreathe back thine arms, bend down thy neck,
   Practise base prayers, make fit thyself for bondage.

   _Sophonisba_. Bondage!

   _Massinissa_. Bondage: Roman bondage.

   _Sophonisba_. No, no![1]

   _Massinissa_. How then have I vowed well to Scipio?

   _Sophonisba_. How then to Sophonisba?

   _Massinissa_. Right: which way
   Run mad? impossible distraction![2]

   _Sophonisba_. Dear lord, thy patience; let it maze all power,
   And list to her in whose sole heart it rests
   To keep thy faith upright.

   _Massinissa_. Wilt thou be slaved?

   _Sophonisba_. No; free.

   _Massinissa_. How then keep I my faith?

   _Sophonisba_. My death
   Gives help to all. From Rome so rest we free:
   So brought to Scipio, faith is kept in thee.

   _Massinissa_. Thou darest not die!--Some wine.--Thou
   darest not die!

   _Sophonisba_. How near was I unto the curse of man, Joy!
   How like was I yet once to have been glad!
   He that ne'er laughed may with a constant face
   Contemn Jove's frown. Happiness makes us base.

   [Footnote 1: This verse, unmusical to an English ear, is good Italian
   metre; possibly an intentional and deliberate example of the poet's
   Italian predilections, and if so certainly a less irrational and
   inexplicable one than the intrusion of some villanously bad Italian
   lines and phrases into the text of "Antonio and Mellida."]

   [Footnote 2: In other words--intolerable or unimaginable division or
   divulsion of mind and spirit between two contending calls of honor,
   two irreconcilable claims of duty. Modern editors of this great scene
   have broken up the line into pieces, marked or divided by superfluous
   dashes and points of exclamation. Campbell, who had the good taste to
   confute his own depreciatory criticism of Marston by including the
   passage among his "Selections," was the first, as far as I know, to
   adopt this erroneous and rather spasmodic punctuation.]

The man or the boy does not seem to me enviable who can read or remember
these verses without a thrill. In sheer force of concision they recall
the manner of Alfieri; but that noble tragic writer could hardly have
put such fervor of austere passion into the rigid utterance, or touched
the note of emotion with such a glowing depth of rapture. That "bitter
and severe delight"--if I may borrow the superb phrase of Landor--which
inspires and sustains the imperial pride of self-immolation might have
found in his dramatic dialect an expression as terse and as sincere: it
could hardly have clothed itself with such majestic and radiant
solemnity of living and breathing verse. The rapid elliptic method of
amoebaean dialogue is more in his manner than in any English poet's
known to me except the writer of this scene; but indeed Marston is
in more points than one the most Italian of our dramatists. His
highest tone of serious poetry has in it, like Alfieri's, a note of
self-conscious stoicism and somewhat arrogant self-control; while as a
comic writer he is but too apt, like too many transalpine wits, to
mistake filth for fun, and to measure the neatness of a joke by its
nastiness. Dirt for dirt's sake has never been the apparent aim of any
great English humorist who had not about him some unmistakable touch of
disease--some inheritance of evil or of suffering like the congenital
brain-sickness of Swift or the morbid infirmity of Sterne. A poet of so
high an order as the author of "Sophonisba" could hardly fail to be in
general a healthier writer than such as these; but it cannot be denied
that he seems to have been somewhat inclined to accept the illogical
inference which would argue that because some wit is dirty all dirt
must be witty--because humor may sometimes be indecent, indecency must
always be humorous. "The clartier the cosier" was an old proverb among
the northern peasantry while yet recalcitrant against the inroads of
sanitary reform: "the dirtier the droller" would seem to have been
practically the no less irrational motto of many not otherwise
unadmirable comic writers. It does happen that the drollest character in
all Marston's plays is also the most offensive in his language--"the
foulest-mouthed profane railing brother"; but the drollest passages in
the whole part are those that least want washing. How far the example of
Ben Jonson may have influenced or encouraged Marston in the indulgence
of this unlovely propensity can only be conjectured; it is certain that
no third writer of the time, however given to levity of speech or
audacity in the selection of a subject, was so prone--in Shakespeare's
phrase--to "talk greasily" as the authors of "Bartholomew Fair" and "The
Dutch Courtesan."

In the two parts of his earlier tragedy the interest is perhaps, on the
whole, rather better sustained than in "The Wonder of Women." The
prologue to "Antonio's Revenge" (the second part of the "Historie of
Antonio and Mellida") has enjoyed the double correlative honor of ardent
appreciation by Lamb and responsive depreciation by Gifford. Its
eccentricities and perversities of phrase[1] may be no less noticeable,
but should assuredly be accounted less memorable, than its profound and
impassioned fervor of grave and eloquent harmony. Strange, wayward and
savage as is the all but impossible story, rude and crude and crabbed as
is the pedantically exuberant language of these plays, there are touches
in them of such terrible beauty and such terrible pathos as to convince
any competent reader that they deserve the tribute of such praise and
such dispraise. The youngest student of Lamb's "Specimens" can hardly
fail to recognize this when he compares the vivid and piercing
description of the death of Mellida with the fearful and supernatural
impression of the scene which brings or thrusts before us the immolation
of the child, her brother.

[Footnote 1: One strange phrase in the very first line is surely a
palpable misprint--_ramps_ for _cramps_.]

The labored eccentricity of style which signalizes and disfigures the
three chief tragedies or tragic poems of Marston is tempered and subdued
to a soberer tone of taste and a more rational choice of expression in
his less ambitious and less unequal works. It is almost impossible to
imagine any insertion or addition from the hand of Webster which would
not be at once obvious to any reader in the text of "Sophonisba" or in
either part of "Antonio and Mellida." Their fierce and irregular
magnificence, their feverish and strenuous intemperance of rhetoric,
would have been too glaringly in contrast with the sublime purity of the
greater poet's thought and style In the tragicomedy of "The Malcontent,"
published two years later than the earlier and two years earlier than
the later of these poems, if the tone of feeling is but little changed
or softened, the language is duly clarified and simplified. "The
Malcontent, (augmented) by Marston, with the additions written by John
Webster," is as coherent, as harmonious, as much of a piece throughout,
as was the text of the play in its earlier state. Not all the
conscientious art and skill of Webster could have given this uniformity
to a work in which the original design and execution had been less in
keeping with the bent of his own genius and the accent of his natural
style. Sad and stern, not unhopeful or unloving, the spirit of this poem
is more in harmony with that of Webster's later tragedies than with that
of Marston's previous plays; its accent is sardonic rather than
pessimistic, ironical rather than despondent. The plot is neither well
conceived nor well constructed; the catastrophe is little less than
absurd, especially from the ethical or moral point of view; the
characters are thinly sketched, the situations at once forced and
conventional; there are few sorrier or stranger figures in serious
fiction than that of the penitent usurper when he takes to his arms his
repentant wife, together with one of her two paramours, in a sudden
rapture of forgiving affection; the part which gives the play its name
is the only one drawn with any firmness of outline, unless we except
that of the malignant and distempered old parasite; but there is a
certain interest in the awkward evolution of the story, and there are
scenes and passages of singular power and beauty which would suffice to
redeem the whole work from condemnation or oblivion, even though it had
not the saving salt in it of an earnest and evident sincerity. The
brooding anger, the resentful resignation, the impatient spirit of
endurance, the bitter passion of disdain, which animate the utterance
and direct the action of the hero, are something more than dramatically
appropriate; it is as obvious that these are the mainsprings of the
poet's own ambitious and dissatisfied intelligence, sullen in its
reluctant submission and ardent in its implacable appeal, as that his
earlier undramatic satires were the tumultuous and turbid ebullitions of
a mood as morbid, as restless, and as honest. Coarse, rough, and fierce
as those satires are, inferior alike to Hall's in finish of verse and
to Donne's in weight of matter, it seems to me that Dr. Grosart, their
first careful and critical editor, is right in claiming for them equal
if not superior credit on the score of earnestness. The crude ferocity
of their invective has about it a savor of honesty which atones for many
defects of literary taste and executive art; and after a more thorough
study than such rude and unattractive work seems at first to require or
to deserve, the moral and intellectual impression of the whole will not
improbably be far more favorable than one resulting from a cursory
survey or derived from a casual selection of excerpts. They bring no
manner of support to a monstrous and preposterous imputation which has
been cast upon their author; the charge of having been concerned in a
miserably malignant and stupid attempt at satire under the form of a
formless and worthless drama called "Histriomastix";[1] though his
partnership in another anonymous play--a semi-romantic semi-satirical
comedy called "Jack Drum's Entertainment"--is very much more plausibly
supportable by comparison of special phrases as well as of general
style with sundry mannerisms as well as with the habitual turn of speech
in Marston's acknowledged comedies. There is a certain incomposite and
indigestive vigor in the language of this play which makes the
attribution of a principal share in its authorship neither utterly
discreditable to Marston nor absolutely improbable in itself; and the
satire aimed at Ben Jonson, if not especially relevant to the main
action, is at all events less incongruous and preposterous in its
relation to the rest of the work than the satirical or controversial
part of Dekker's "Satiromastix." But on the whole, if this play be
Marston's, it seems to me the rudest and the poorest he has left us,
except perhaps the comedy of "What you Will," in which several excellent
and suggestive situations are made less of than they should have been,
and a good deal of promising comic invention is wasted for want of a
little more care and a little more conscience in cultivation of material
and composition of parts. The satirical references to Jonson are more
pointed and effective in this comedy than in either of the two plays
last mentioned; but its best claim to remembrance is to be sought in the
admirable soliloquy which relates the seven years' experience of the
student and his spaniel. Marston is too often heaviest when he would
and should be lightest--owing apparently to a certain infusion of
contempt for light comedy as something rather beneath him, not wholly
worthy of his austere and ambitious capacity. The parliament of pages in
this play is a diverting interlude of farce, though a mere irrelevance
and impediment to the action; but the boys are less amusing than their
compeers in the anonymous comedy of "Sir Giles Goosecap," first
published in the year preceding: a work of genuine humor and invention,
excellent in style if somewhat infirm in construction, for a reprint of
which we are indebted to the previous care of Marston's present editor.
Far be it from me to intrude on the barren and boggy province of
hypothetical interpretation and controversial commentary; but I may
observe in passing that the original of Simplicius Faber in "What you
Will" must surely have been the same hanger-on or sycophant of Ben
Jonson's who was caricatured by Dekker in his "Satiromastix" under the
name of Asinius Bubo. The gross assurance of self-complacent duncery,
the apish arrogance and imitative dogmatism of reflected self-importance
and authority at second hand, are presented in either case with such
identity of tone and coloring that we can hardly imagine the satire to
have been equally applicable to two contemporary satellites of the same
imperious and masterful egoist.

[Footnote 1: This abortion of letters is such a very moon-calf, begotten
by malice on idiocy, that no human creature above the intellectual
level of its author will ever dream of attempting to decipher the
insignificant significance which may possibly--though improbably--lie
latent under the opaque veil of its inarticulate virulence.]

That the same noble poet and high-souled humorist was not responsible
for the offence given to Caledonian majesty in the comedy of "Eastward
Ho!" the authentic word of Jonson would be sufficient evidence; but I am
inclined to think it a matter of almost certain likelihood--if not of
almost absolute proof--that Chapman was as innocent as Jonson of a jest
for which Marston must be held responsible--though scarcely, I should
imagine, blamable at the present day by the most rabid of Scottish
provincialists. In the last scene of "The Malcontent" a court lady says
to an infamous old hanger-on of the court: "And is not Signor St. Andrew
a gallant fellow now?" to which the old hag replies: "Honor and he agree
as well together as a satin suit and woollen stockings." The famous
passage in the comedy which appeared a year later must have been far
less offensive to the most nervous patriotism than this; and the
impunity of so gross an insult, so obviously and obtrusively offered, to
the new knightships and lordships of King James's venal chivalry and
parasitic nobility, may naturally have encouraged the satirist to repeat
his stroke next year--and must have astounded his retrospection, when he
found himself in prison, and under threat of worse than imprisonment,
together with his unoffending associates in an admirable and inoffensive
comedy. It is impossible to suppose that he would not have come forward
to assume the responsibility of his own words--as it is impossible to
imagine that Jonson or Chapman would have given up his accomplice to
save himself. But the law of the day would probably have held them all
responsible alike.

In the same year as "Eastward Ho!" appeared the best and completest
piece of work which we owe to the single hand of Marston. A more
brilliant and amusing play than "The Dutch Courtesan," better composed,
better constructed, and better written, it would be difficult to
discover among the best comic and romantic works of its incomparable
period. The slippery and sanguinary strumpet who gives its name to the
play is sketched with such admirable force and freedom of hand as to
suggest the existence of an actual model who may unconsciously have sat
for the part under the scrutiny of eyes as keen and merciless as ever
took notes for a savagely veracious caricature--or for an unscrupulously
moral exposure. The jargon in which her emotions are expressed is as
Shakespearean in its breadth and persistency as that of Dr. Caius or
Captain Fluellen; but the reality of those emotions is worthy of a
less farcical vehicle for the expression of such natural craft and
passion. The sisters, Beatrice and Crispinella, seem at first too
evidently imitated from the characters of Aurelia and Phoenixella in the
earliest surviving comedy of Ben Jonson; but the "comedy daughter," as
Dickens (or Skimpole) would have expressed it, is even more coarsely and
roughly drawn than in the early sketch of the more famous dramatist. On
the other hand, it must be allowed--though it may not be recognized
without a certain sense of surprise--that the nobler and purer type of
womanhood or girlhood which we owe to the hand of Marston is far above
comparison with any which has been accomplished or achieved by the
studious and vehement elaboration of Ben Jonson's. The servility of
subservience which that great dramatist exacts from his typically
virtuous women--from the abject and anaemic wife of a Corvino or a
Fitzdottrel--is a quality which could not coexist with the noble and
loving humility of Marston's Beatrice. The admirable scene in which she
is brought face to face with the impudent pretentions of the woman who
asserts herself to have been preferred by the betrothed lover of the
expectant bride is as pathetic and impressive as it is lifelike and
original; and even in the excess of gentleness and modesty which prompts
the words, "I will love you the better; I cannot hate what he affected,"
there is nothing less noble or less womanly than in the subsequent reply
to the harlot's repeated taunts and inventions of insult: "He did not
ill not to love me, but sure he did not well to mock me: gentle minds
will pity, though they cannot love; yet peace and my love sleep with
him." The powerful soliloquy which closes the scene expresses no more
than the natural emotion of the man who has received so lovely a
revelation of his future bride's invincible and single-hearted love:

   Cannot that woman's evil, jealousy,
   Despite disgrace, nay, which is worse, contempt,
   Once stir thy faith?

Coarse as is often the language of Marston's plays and satires, the man
was not coarse-minded--not gross of spirit nor base of nature--who could
paint so delicately and simply a figure so beautiful in the tenderness
of its purity.

The farcical underplot of this play is worthy of Molière in his broader
mood of farce. Hardly any Jourdain or Pourceaugnac, any George Dandin
or Comtesse d'Escarbagnas of them all, undergoes a more grotesque
experience or plays a more ludicrous part than is devised for Mr. and
Mrs. Mulligrub by the ingenuity of the indefatigable Cocledemoy--a
figure worthy to stand beside any of the tribe of Mascarille as _fourbum
imperator_. The animation and variety of inventive humor which keep
the reader's laughing attention awake and amused throughout these
adventurous scenes of incident and intrigue are not more admirable than
the simplicity and clearness of evolution or composition which recall
and rival the classic masterpieces of Latin and French comedy. There
is perhaps equal fertility of humor, but there certainly is not equal
harmony of structure in the play which Marston published next
year--"Parasitaster; or, the Fawn"; a name probably suggested by that of
Ben Jonson's "Poetaster," in which the author had himself been the
subject of a greater man's rage and ridicule. The wealth and the waste
of power displayed and paraded in this comedy are equally admirable and
lamentable; for the brilliant effect of its various episodes and
interludes is not more obvious than the eclipse of the central interest,
the collapse of the serious design, which results from the agglomeration
of secondary figures and the alternations of perpetual by-play. Three or
four better plays might have been made out of the materials here hurled
and huddled together into one. The Isabelle of Molière is not more
amusing or more delightful in her audacity of resource, in her
combination of loyalty with duplicity, innocence with intrigue, than the
daring and single-hearted young heroine of this play; but the "École des
Maris" is not encumbered with such a crowd of minor interests and
characters, of subordinate humors and complications, as the reader of
Marston's comedy finds interposed and intruded between his attention and
the main point of interest. He would fain see more of Dulcimel and
Tiberio, the ingenious and enterprising princess, the ingenuous and
responsive prince; he is willing to see as much as is shown him of their
fathers, the masquerading philosopher and the self-complacent dupe;
Granuffo, the patrician prototype of Captain John Bunsby, may take a
seat in the chambers of his memory beside the commander of the Cautious
Clara; the humors of a jealous foul-minded fool and a somewhat
audaciously virtuous wife may divert him by the inventive and vigorous
exposure of their various revolutions and results; but the final
impression is one of admiring disappointment and possibly ungrateful
regret that so much energetic satire and so much valuable time should
have been spent on the somewhat nauseous follies of "sickly knights" and
"vicious braggarts" that the really admirable and attractive parts of
the design are cramped and crowded out of room for the due development
of their just and requisite proportions.

A more eccentric, uneven, and incomposite piece of work than "The
Insatiate Countess" it would be difficult to find in English or in other
literature. The opening scene is picturesque and impressive; the closing
scene of the serious part is noble and pathetic; but the intervening
action is of a kind which too often aims at the tragic and hits the
burlesque. The incessant inconstancy of passion which hurries the
fantastic heroine through such a miscellaneous multitude of improvised
intrigues is rather a comic than a tragic motive for the conduct of a
play; and the farcical rapidity with which the puppets revolve makes it
impossible for the most susceptible credulity to take any real interest
or feel any real belief in the perpetual rotation of their feverish
moods and motives, their irrational doings and sufferings. The humor of
the underplot constantly verges on horse-play, and is certainly neither
delicate nor profound; but there is matter enough for mirth in it to
make the reader duly grateful for the patient care and admirable insight
which Mr. Bullen has brought to bear upon the really formidable if
apparently trivial task of reducing the chaotic corruption and confusion
of the text to reasonable form and comprehensible order. William
Barkstead, a narrative poet of real merit, and an early minister at the
shrine of Shakespeare, has been credited with the authorship of this
play: I am inclined to agree with the suggestion of its latest
editor--its first editor in any serious sense of the word--that both he
and Marston may have had a hand in it. His "Myrrha" belongs to the same
rather morbid class of poems as Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" and
Marston's "Pygmalion's Image." Of the three Shakespeare's is not more
certainly the finest in occasional touches of picturesque poetry than it
is incomparably the most offensive to good taste and natural instinct on
the score of style and treatment. Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" can only
be classed with these elaborate studies of sensual aberration or excess
by those "who can see no difference between Titian and French
photographs." (I take leave, for once in a way, to quote from a private
letter--long since addressed to the present commentator by the most
illustrious of writers on art.)

There are some pretty verses and some ingenious touches in Marston's
"Entertainment," offered to Lady Derby by her daughter and son-in-law;
but the Latinity of his city pageant can scarcely have satisfied the
pupil of Buchanan, unless indeed the reputation of King James's tutor
as a Latin versifier or master of prosody has been scandalously usurped
under the falsest of pretences: a matter on which I am content to accept
the verdict of Landor. His contribution to Sir Robert Chester's
problematic volume may perhaps claim the singular distinction of being
more incomprehensible, more crabbed, more preposterous, and more
inexplicable than any other copy of verses among the "divers poetical
essays--done by the best and chiefest of our modern writers, with their
names subscribed to their particular works," in which Marston has the
honor to stand next to Shakespeare; and however far he may be from any
pretention to rival the incomparable charm of Shakespeare's opening
quatrain--incomparable in its peculiar melody and mystery except with
other lyrics of Shakespeare's or of Shelley's, it must, I think, be
admitted that an impartial student of both effusions will assign to
Marston rather than to Shakespeare the palm of distinction on the score
of tortuous obscurity and enigmatic verbiage. It may be--as it seems
to me--equally difficult to make sense of the greater and the lesser
poet's riddles and rhapsodies; but on the whole I cannot think that
Shakespeare's will be found so desperately indigestible by the ordinary
intelligence of manhood as Marston's. "The turtles fell to work, and
ate each other up," in a far more comprehensible and reasonable poem of
Hood's; and most readers of Chester's poem and the verses appended to it
will be inclined to think that it might have been as well--except for a
few lines of Shakespeare's and of Jonson's which we could not willingly
spare--if the Phoenix and Turtle had set them the example.

If the apparently apocryphal Mountebank's Masque be really the work of
Marston--and it is both coarse enough and clever enough to deserve the
attribution of his authorship--there is a singular echo in it from the
opening of Jonson's "Poetaster," the furious dramatic satire which
blasted for upward of two centuries the fame or the credit of the poet
to whose hand this masque has been hitherto assigned. In it, after a
full allowance of rough and ribald jocosity, the presence of a poet
becomes manifest with the entrance of an allegoric figure whose
declamatory address begins with these words:

   Light, I salute thee; I, Obscurity,
   The son of Darkness and forgetful Lethe;
   I, that envy thy brightness, greet thee now,
   Enforced by Fate.

Few readers of these lines will forget the verses with which Envy plays
prologue to "Poetaster; or, his Arraignment":

   Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves,
   Wishing thy golden splendor pitchy darkness.

Whoever may be the author of this masque, there are two or three
couplets well worth remembrance in one of the two versions of its text:

   It is a life is never ill
   To lie and sleep in roses still.

       *       *       *       *       *

   Who would not hear the nightingale still sing,
   Or who grew ever weary of the spring?
   The day must have her night, the spring her fall,
   All is divided, none is lord of all.

These verses are worthy of a place in any one of Mr. Bullen's beautiful
and delightful volumes of lyrics from Elizabethan song-books; and higher
praise than this no lyrical poet could reasonably desire.

An inoffensive monomaniac, who thought fit to reprint a thing in
dramatic or quasi-dramatic form to which I have already referred in
passing--"Histriomastix; or, the Player Whipt"--thought likewise fit to
attribute to John Marston, of all men on earth, a share in the
concoction of this shapeless and unspeakable piece of nonsense. The fact
that one of the puppets in the puppet-show is supposed to represent a
sullen scholar, disappointed, impoverished, and virulent, would have
suggested to a rational reader that the scribbler who gave vent to the
impotence of his rancor in this hopeless ebullition of envious despair
had set himself to ape the habitual manner of Jonson and the occasional
manner of Marston with about as much success as might be expected from a
malignant monkey when attempting to reproduce in his grimaces the
expression of human indignation and contempt. But to students of natural
or literary history who cannot discern the human from the simious
element it suggests that the man thus imitated must needs have been the
imitator of himself; and the fact that the whole attempt at satire is
directed against dramatic poetry--that all the drivelling venom of a
dunce's denunciation, all the virulent slaver of his grovelling
insolence, is aimed at the stage for which Marston was employed in
writing--weighs nothing in the scales of imbecility against the
consideration that Marston's or Jonson's manner is here and there more
or less closely imitated; that we catch now and then some such echo of
his accent, some such savor of his style, as may be discovered or
imagined in the very few scattered lines which show any glimmer of
capacity for composition or versification. The eternal theme of envy,
invented by Jonson and worked to death by its inventor, was taken up
again by Marston and treated with a vigorous acerbity not always
unworthy of comparison with Jonson's; the same conception inspired with
something of eloquence the malignant idiocy of the satirical dunce who
has left us, interred and embedded in a mass of rubbish, a line or two
like these which he has put into the mouth of his patron saint or
guardian goddess, the incarnate essence of Envy:

   Turn, turn, thou lackey to the winged time!
   I envy thee in that thou art so slow,
   And I so swift to mischief.

But the entire affair is obviously an effusion and an example of the
same academic sagacity or lucidity of appreciation which found utterance
in other contemporary protests of the universities against the universe.
In that abyss of dulness "The Return from Parnassus," a reader or a
diver who persists in his thankless toil will discover this pearl of a
fact--that men of culture had no more hesitation in preferring Watson to
Shakespeare than they have in preferring Byron to Shelley. The author of
the one deserves to have been the author of the other. Nobody can have
been by nature such a fool as to write either: art, education,
industry, and study were needful to achieve such composite perfection of
elaborate and consummate idiocy.

There is a good deal of bad rubbish, and there is some really brilliant
and vigorous writing, in the absurdly named and absurdly constructed
comedy of "Jack Drum's Entertainment"; but in all other points--in plot,
incident, and presentation of character--it is so scandalously beneath
contempt that I am sorry to recognize the hand of Marston in a play
which introduces us to a "noble father," the model of knightly manhood
and refined good sense, who on the news of a beloved daughter's
disappearance instantly proposes to console himself with a heavy
drinking-bout. No graver censure can be passed on the conduct of the
drama than the admission that this monstrous absurdity is not out of
keeping with the rest of it. There is hardly a single character in all
its rabble rout of lunatics who behaves otherwise than would beseem a
probationary candidate for Bedlam. Yet I fear there is more serious
evidence of a circumstantial kind in favor of the theory which would
saddle the fame of Marston with the charge of its authorship than such
as depends on peculiarities of metre and eccentricities of phrase. Some
other poet--though I know of none such--may have accepted and adopted
his theory that "vengeance" must count in verse as a word of three
syllables: I can hardly believe that the fancy would sound sweet in any
second man's ear: but this speciality is not more characteristic than
other and more important qualities of style--the peculiar abruptness,
the peculiar inflation, the peculiar crudity--which denote this comedy
as apparently if not evidently Marstonian. On the other hand, if it were
indeed his, it is impossible to conjecture why his name should have been
withheld from the title-page; and it must not be forgotten that even our
own day is not more fertile than was Marston's in the generation of that
slavish cattle which has always since the age of Horace fed ravenously
and thievishly on the pasture-land of every poet who has discovered or
reclaimed a field or a province of his own.

But our estimate of John Marston's rank or regiment in the noble army of
contemporary poets will not be in any way affected by acceptance or
rejection of any apocryphal addition to the canon of his writings. For
better and for worse, the orthodox and undisputed roll of them will
suffice to decide that question beyond all chance of intelligent or
rational dispute. His rank is high in his own regiment; and the colonel
of that regiment is Ben Jonson. At first sight he may seem rather to
belong to that brighter and more famous one which has Webster among its
captains, Dekker among its lieutenants, Heywood among its privates, and
Shakespeare at its head. Nor did he by any means follow the banner of
Jonson with such automatic fidelity as that imperious martinet of genius
was wont to exact from those who came to be "sealed of the tribe of
Ben." A rigid critic--a critic who should push rigidity to the verge of
injustice--might say that he was one of those recruits in literature
whose misfortune it is to fall between two stools--to halt between two
courses. It is certain that he never thoroughly mastered either the
cavalry drill of Shakespeare or the infantry drill of Jonson. But it is
no less certain that the few finest passages which attest the power and
the purity of his genius as a poet are above comparison with any such
examples of tragic poetry as can be attributed with certainty or with
plausibility to the hand which has left us no acknowledged works in that
line except "Sejanus his Fall" and "Catiline his Conspiracy." It is
superfluous to add that "Volpone" was an achievement only less far out
of his reach than "Hamlet." But this is not to say or to imply that he
does not deserve an honorable place among English poets. His savage and
unblushing violence or vehemence of satire has no taint of gloating
or morbid prurience in the turbid flow of its fitful and furious
rhetoric. The restless rage of his invective is as far as human
utterance can find itself from the cynical infidelity of an Iago. Of him
we may say with more rational confidence what was said of that more
potent and more truculent satirist:

   An honest man he is, and hates the slime
   That sticks on filthy deeds.

We may wish that he had not been so much given to trampling and stamping
on that slime as to evoke such malodorous exhalations as infect the
lower and shallower reaches of the river down which he proceeds to steer
us with so strenuous a hand. But it is in a spirit of healthy disgust,
not of hankering delight, that he insists on calling the indignant
attention of his readers to the baser and fouler elements of natural or
social man as displayed in the vicious exuberance or eccentricity of
affectation or of self-indulgence. His real interest and his real
sympathies are reserved for the purer and nobler types of womanhood and
manhood. In his first extant tragedy, crude and fierce and coarse and
awkward as is the general treatment of character and story, the sketch
of Mellida is genuinely beautiful in its pathetic and subdued
simplicity; though certainly no such tender and gentle figure was ever
enchased in a stranger or less attractive setting. There is an odd
mixture of care and carelessness in the composition of his plays which
is exemplified by the fact that another personage in the first part of
the same dramatic poem was announced to reappear in the second part as
a more important and elaborate figure; but this second part opens with
the appearance of his assassin, red-handed from the murder: and the
two parts were published in the same year. And indeed, except in
"Parasitaster" and "The Dutch Courtesan," a general defect in his
unassisted plays is the headlong confusion of plot, the helter-skelter
violence of incident, which would hardly have been looked for in the
work of a professional and practised hand. "What you Will" is modestly
described as "a slight-writ play": but slight and slovenly are not the
same thing; nor is simplicity the equivalent of incoherence. I have
already observed that Marston is apt to be heaviest when he aims at
being lightest; not, like Ben Jonson, through a laborious and
punctilious excess of conscience which is unwilling to let slip any
chance of effect, to let pass any detail of presentation; but rather,
we are tempted to suspect, through a sardonic sense of scorn for the
pefunctory task on which his ambitious and impatient hand is for the
time employed. Now and then, however--or perhaps it would be more
accurate to say once or twice--a gayer note is struck with a lighter
touch than usual: as, for instance, in the excellent parody of Lyly put
into the mouth of an idiot in the first scene of the fifth act of the
first part of "Antonio and Mellida." "You know, the stone called
_lapis_, the nearer it comes to the fire, the hotter it is; and the bird
which the geometricians call _avis_, the farther it is from the earth,
the nearer it is to the heaven; and love, the nigher it is to the flame,
the more remote (there's a word, remote!)--the more remote it is from
the frost." Shakespeare and Scott have condescended to caricature the
style or the manner of the inventor of euphuism: I cannot think their
burlesque of his elaborate and sententious triviality so happy, so
humorous, or so exact as this. But it is not on his capacity as a
satirist or humorist, it is on his occasionally triumphant success as a
serious or tragic poet, that the fame of Marston rests assuredly
established. His intermittent power to rid himself for a while of his
besetting faults, and to acquire or assume for a moment the very
excellences most incompatible with these, is as extraordinary for the
completeness as for the transience of its successful effects. The brief
fourth act of "Antonio and Mellida" is the most astonishing and
bewildering production of belated human genius that ever distracted or
discomfited a student. Verses more delicately beautiful followed by
verses more simply majestic than these have rarely if ever given
assurance of eternity to the fame of any but a great master in song:

   Conceit you me: as having clasped a rose
   Within my palm, the rose being ta'en away,
   My hand retains a little breath of sweet,
   So may man's trunk, his spirit slipped away,
   Hold still a faint perfume of his sweet guest.
   'Tis so: for when discursive powers fly out,
   And roam in progress through the bounds of heaven,
   The soul itself gallops along with them
   As chieftain of this winged troop of thought,
   Whilst the dull lodge of spirit standeth waste
   Until the soul return.

Then follows a passage of sheer gibberish; then a dialogue of the
noblest and most dramatic eloquence; then a chaotic alternation of sense
and nonsense, bad Italian and mixed English, abject farce and dignified
rhetoric, spirited simplicity and bombastic jargon. It would be more and
less than just to take this act as a sample or a symbol of the author's
usual way of work; but I cannot imagine that a parallel to it, for evil
and for good, could be found in the works of any other writer.

The Muse of this poet is no maiden of such pure and august beauty as
enthralls us with admiration of Webster's; she has not the
gypsy-brightness and vagrant charm of Dekker's, her wild soft glances
and flashing smiles and fading traces of tears; she is no giddy girl,
but a strong woman with fine irregular features, large and luminous
eyes, broad intelligent forehead, eyebrows so thick and close together
that detraction might call her beetle-browed, powerful mouth and chin,
fine contralto voice (with an occasional stammer), expression
alternately repellent and attractive, but always striking and sincere.
No one has ever found her lovely; but there are times when she has a
fascination of her own which fairer and more famous singers might envy
her; and the friends she makes are as sure to be constant as she, for
all her occasional roughness and coarseness, is sure to be loyal in the
main to the nobler instincts of her kind and the loftier traditions of
her sisterhood.



THOMAS MIDDLETON


If it be true, as we are told on high authority, that the greatest glory
of England is her literature and the greatest glory of English
literature is its poetry, it is not less true that the greatest glory of
English poetry lies rather in its dramatic than its epic or its lyric
triumphs. The name of Shakespeare is above the names even of Milton and
Coleridge and Shelley: and the names of his comrades in art and their
immediate successors are above all but the highest names in any other
province of our song. There is such an overflowing life, such a superb
exuberance of abounding and exulting strength, in the dramatic poetry of
the half-century extending from 1590 to 1640, that all other epochs of
English literature seem as it were but half awake and half alive by
comparison with this generation of giants and of gods. There is more sap
in this than in any other branch of the national bay-tree: it has an
energy in fertility which reminds us rather of the forest than the
garden or the park. It is true that the weeds and briers of the
underwood are but too likely to embarrass and offend the feet of the
rangers and the gardeners who trim the level flower-plots or preserve
the domestic game of enclosed and ordered lowlands in the tamer demesnes
of literature. The sun is strong and the wind sharp in the climate which
reared the fellows and the followers of Shakespeare. The extreme
inequality and roughness of the ground must also be taken into account
when we are disposed, as I for one have often been disposed, to wonder
beyond measure at the apathetic ignorance of average students in regard
of the abundant treasure to be gathered from this wildest and most
fruitful province in the poetic empire of England. And yet, since
Charles Lamb threw open its gates to all comers in the ninth year of the
nineteenth century, it cannot but seem strange that comparatively so few
should have availed themselves of the entry to so rich and royal an
estate. The subsequent labors of Mr. Dyce made the rough ways plain and
the devious paths straight for all serious and worthy students. And now
again Mr. Bullen has taken up a task than which none more arduous and
important, none worthier of thanks and praise, can be undertaken by an
English scholar. In his beautiful and valuable edition of Marlowe there
are but two points to which exception may be taken. It was, I think, a
fault of omission to exclude the apocryphal play of "Lust's Dominion"
from a place in the appendix: it was, I am certain, a fault of
commission to admit instead of it the much bepuffed and very puffy
rubbish of the late Mr. Home. That clever, versatile, and energetic
writer never went so far out of his depth or floundered so pitifully in
such perilous waters as when he ventured to put verses of his own into
the mouth of Christopher Marlowe. These errors we must all hope to see
rectified in a second issue of the text: and meantime we can but welcome
with all possible gratitude and applause the magnificent series of old
plays by unknown writers which we owe to the keen research and the fine
appreciation of Marlowe's latest editor. Of these I may find some future
occasion to speak: my present business is with the admirable poet who
has been promoted to the second place in Mr. Bullen's collection of the
English dramatists.

The selection of Middleton for so distinguished a place of honor may
probably not approve itself to the judgment of all experts in dramatic
literature. Charles Lamb, as they will all remember, would have advised
the editor "to begin with the collected plays of Heywood": which as yet,
like the plays of Dekker and of Chapman, remain unedited in any serious
or scholarly sense of the term. The existing reprints merely reproduce,
without adequate elucidation or correction, the corrupt and chaotic text
of the worst early editions: while Middleton has for upward of half a
century enjoyed the privilege denied to men who are usually accounted
his equals if not his superiors in poetic if not in dramatic genius.
Even for an editor of the ripest learning and the highest ability there
is comparatively little to do where Mr. Dyce has been before him in the
field. However, we must all give glad and grateful welcome to a new
edition of a noble poet who has never yet received his full meed of
praise and justice: though our gratitude and our gladness may be
quickened and dilated by the proverbial sense of further favors to come.

The first word of modern trib

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