A History of Elizabethan Literature Part 12

Another point which has been often, yet perhaps not quite fully, noticed is the distinct and peculiar att.i.tude of Shakespere towards what is in the common sense called morality. n.o.body can possibly call him squeamish: I do not know that even any French naturalist of the latest school has charged the author of _Pericles_, and _Love's Labour Lost_, and _Henry IV._, with that _pruderie bete_ of which they accuse Scott. But he never makes those forms of vice which most trouble and corrupt society triumphant; he never diverges into the morbid pathology of the amatory pa.s.sion, and above all, and most remarkably of all, though I think least remarked, he never makes his personages show the singular toleration of the most despicable immorality which almost all his dramatic contemporaries exhibit. One is constantly astonished at the end of an Elizabethan play, when, after vice has been duly baffled or punished, and virtue rewarded (for they all more or less follow that rule), reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries follow, to observe the complacency with which husbands who have sold their wives' favours, wives who have been at the command of the first comer or the highest bidder, mix cheek by jowl, and apparently unrebuked, with the modest maidens, the virtuous matrons, the faithful lovers of the piece.

Shakespere never does this. Mrs. Quickly is indeed at one time the confidante of Anne Fenton, and at another the complaisant hostess of Doll Tear-sheet, but not in the same play. We do not find Marina's master and mistress rewarded, as they would very likely have been by Fletcher or Middleton, with comfortable if not prominent posts at the court of Pericles, or the Government-house of Mytilene. The ugly and artistically unmanageable situation of the husband who trades in his wife's honour simply does not occur in all the wide license and variety of Shakespere's forty plays. He is in his own sense liberal as the most easy going can demand, but he never mixes vice and virtue. Yet again, while practising this singular moderation in the main element, in the most fertile motives, of tragedy and comedy respectively, he is equally alone in his use in both of the element of humour. And here we are on dangerous ground. To many excellent persons of all times since his own, as well as in it, Shakespere's humour and his use of it have been stumbling-blocks. Some of them have been less able to away with the use, some with the thing.

Shakesperian clowns are believed to be red rags to some experienced playwrights and accomplished wits of our own days: the porter in _Macbeth_, the gravediggers in _Hamlet_, the fool in _Lear_, even the humours in _Love's Labour Lost_ and _The Merchant of Venice_ have offended. I avow myself an impenitent Shakesperian in this respect also. The constant or almost constant presence of that humour which ranges from the sarcastic quintessence of Iago, and the genial quintessence of Falstaff, through the fantasies of Feste and Edgar, down to the sheer nonsense which not unfrequently occurs, seems to me not only delightful in itself, but, as I have hinted already, one of the chief of those spells by which Shakespere has differentiated his work in the sense of universality from that of all other dramatists. I have used the word nonsense, and I may be thought to have partly given up my case by it. But nonsense, as hardly any critic but Hazlitt has had the courage to avow openly, is no small part of life, and it is a part the relish of which Englishmen, as the same great but unequal critic justly maintains, are almost alone in enjoying and recognising. It is because Shakespere dares, and dares very frequently, simply _desipere_, simply to be foolish, that he is so pre-eminently wise. The others try to be always wise, and, alas! it is not necessary to complete the ant.i.thesis.

These three things--restraint in the use of sympathy with suffering, restraint in the use of interest in voluptuous excess, and humour--are, as it seems to me, the three chief distinguis.h.i.+ng points in Shakespere's handling which are not found in any of his contemporaries, for though there is humour in not a few of these, none of them is a perfect humorist in the same sense. Here, as well as in that general range or width of subject and thought which attracted Dryden's eulogium, he stands alone. In other respects he shares the qualities which are perceptible almost throughout this wonderfully fertile department of literature; but he shares them as infinitely the largest shareholder. It is difficult to think of any other poet (for with Homer we are deprived of the opportunity of comparison) who was so completely able to meet any one of his contemporaries on that contemporary's own terms in natural gift. I say natural gift because, though it is quite evident that Shakespere was a man of no small reading, his deficiencies in general education are too constantly recorded by tradition, and rendered too probable by internal evidence, to be ignored or denied by any impartial critic. But it is difficult to mention a quality possessed by any of the school (as it is loosely called), from Marlowe to s.h.i.+rley, which he had not in greater measure; while the infinite qualities which he had, and the others each in one way or another lacked, are evident. On only one subject--religion--is his mouth almost closed; certainly, as the few utterances that touch it show, from no incapacity of dealing with it, and apparently from no other dislike than a dislike to meddle with anything outside of the purely human province of which he felt that he was universal master--in short from an infinite reverence.

It will not be expected that in a book like the present--the whole s.p.a.ce of which might very well be occupied, without any of the undue dilation which has been more than once rebuked, in dealing with Shakespere alone--any attempt should be made to criticise single plays, pa.s.sages, and characters.

It is the less of a loss that in reality, as the wisest commentators have always either begun or ended by acknowledging, Shakespere is your only commentator on Shakespere. Even the pa.s.sages which corrupt printing, or the involved fas.h.i.+on of speaking peculiar to the time, make somewhat obscure at first, will in almost every case yield to the una.s.sisted cogitation of any ordinarily intelligent person; and the results so reached are far more likely to be the true results than the elaborate emendations which delight a certain cla.s.s of editors. A certain amount of mere glossary is of course necessary, but otherwise the fewer corks and bladders the swimmer takes with him when he ventures into "the ocean which is Shakespere," the better.

There are, however, certain common errors, some of which have survived even the last century of Shakespere-study and Shakespere-wors.h.i.+p, which must perhaps be discussed. For in the case of the greatest writers, the business of the critic is much more to shovel away the rubbish of his predecessors than to attempt any acc.u.mulation of his own. The chief of these errors--or rather that error which practically swallows up all the others and can produce them again at any time--is that Shakespere was, if not exactly an inspired idiot, at any rate a mainly tentative if not purely unconscious artist, much of whose work is only not bad as art, while most, if not all of it, was originally produced with a minimum of artistic consciousness and design. This enormous error, which is protean in form, has naturally induced the counter error of a too great insistence on the consciousness and elaboration of Shakespere's art. The most elaborate theories of this art have been framed--theories involving the construction of perhaps as much baseless fabric as anything else connected with the subject, which is saying a great deal. It appears to me in the highest degree improbable that Shakespere had before him consciously more than three purposes; but these three I think that he constantly had, and that he was completely successful in achieving them. The first was to tell in every play a dramatically complete story; the second was to work that story out by the means of purely human and probable characters; and the third was to give such form and ornaments to the working out as might please the playgoers of his day.

In pursuing the first two he was the poet or dramatist of all time. In pursuing the third he was the intelligent playwright. But (and here is the source of the common error) it by no means follows that his attention, and his successful attention, to his third purpose in any way interferes with, or degrades, his excellence as a pursuer of the first two. In the first place, it can escape no careful student that the merely playwright part of Shakespere's work is (as is the case with no other dramatic author whatever) singularly separable. No generation since his death has had the slightest difficulty in adapting by far the greater part of his plays to use and popularity in its own day, though the adaptation may have varied in liberty and in good taste with the standards of the time. At the present day, while almost all other old dramatists have ceased to be acted at all, or are acted merely as curiosities, the adaptation of Shakespere has become more and more a process of simple omission (without the addition or alteration of anything) of parts which are either unsuited to modern manners or too long for modern patience. With the two usual exceptions, _Pericles_ and _t.i.tus Andronicus_ (which, despite the great beauty of parts, are evidently less Shakesperian as wholes than any others), there is not a single play of the whole number that could not be--there are not many that have not been--acted with success in our time. It would be difficult to find a stronger differentia from the work of the mere playwright, who invariably thinks first of the temporary conditions of success, and accordingly loses the success which is not temporary. But the second great difference of Shakespere is, that even what may be in comparison called the ephemeral and perishable parts of him have an extraordinary vitality, if not theatrical yet literary, of their own. The coa.r.s.er scenes of _Measure for Measure_ and _The Comedy of Errors_, the satire on fleeting follies in _Love's Labour Lost_, the uncomelier parts of _All's Well that Ends Well_, the Doll Tear-sheet business of _Henry IV._, the comic by-play of _Troilus and Cressida_, may seem mere wood, hay, and stubble in comparison with the n.o.bler portions. Yet the fire of time has not consumed them: they are as delightful as ever in the library if not on the stage.

Little or nothing need be said in defence of Shakespere as an artist from the attacks of the older or Unity criticism. That maleficent giant can now hardly grin at the pilgrims whom he once hara.s.sed. But there are many persons who, not dreaming of the Unities, still object in language less extravagant than Voltaire's or George the Third's, but with hardly less decision, to the "sad stuff," the _fumier_ of Shakespere's admixture of comedy with tragedy, of his digressions and episodes, of his multifarious underplots and minor groups, and ramifications of interest or intrigue. The reply to this is not (as it might be, if any reply were not superfluous, in the case of the Unity objection) a reply of demonstration. If any person experienced in literature, and with an interest in it, experienced in life and with an interest in that, a.s.serts that Caliban and Trinculo interfere with his enjoyment of Ferdinand and Miranda; that the almost tragedy of Hero is marred for him by the comedy of Beatrice and the farce of Dogberry; that he would have preferred _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ without the tedious brief effort of Quince and his companions; that the solemnity and pa.s.sion of _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ cause in him a revulsion against the porter and the gravedigger; that the Fool and Edgar are out of place in _Lear_,--it is impossible to prove to him by the methods of any Euclid or of any Aldrich that he is wrong. The thing is essentially, if not wholly, a matter of taste. It is possible, indeed, to point out, as in the case of the Unities, that the objectors, if they will maintain their objection, must deny the position that the dramatic art holds up the mirror to Nature, and that if they deny it, the burden--a burden never yet successfully taken up by any one--of framing a new definition rests upon them. But this is only a partial and somewhat inconclusive argument, and the person who genuinely dislikes these peculiarities of Shakespere is like a man who genuinely dislikes wine or pictures or human faces, that seem delightful and beautiful to others. I am not aware of any method whereby I can prove that the most perfect claret is better than zoedone in flavour, or that the most exquisite creation of Botticelli or Leonardo is more beautiful than the cuts on the sides of railway novels. Again, it is matter of taste.

It will be seen that I am not for my part afraid to avow myself a thoroughgoing Shakesperian, who accepts the weak points of his master as well as the strong. It is often forgotten (indeed I do not know where I have seen it urged) that there is in Shakespere's case an excuse for the thousand lines that good Ben Jonson would have liked him to blot,--an excuse which avails for no one else. No one else has his excuse of universality; no one else has attempted to paint, much less has painted, the whole of life. It is because Shakespere has attempted this, and, in the judgment of at least some, has succeeded in it, that the spots in his sun are so different from the spots in all other suns. I do not know an unnatural character or an unnatural scene in Shakespere, even among those which have most evidently been written to the gallery. Everything in him pa.s.ses, in some mysterious way, under and into that "species of eternity"

which transforms all the great works of art, which at once prevents them from being mere copies of Nature, and excuses whatever there is of Nature in them that is not beautiful or n.o.ble. If this touch is wanting anywhere (and it is wanting very seldom), that, I take it, is the best, indeed the only, sign that that pa.s.sage is not Shakespere's,--that he had either made use of some other man's work, or that some other man had made use of his.

If such pa.s.sages were of more frequent occurrence, this argument might be called a circular one. But the proportion of such pa.s.sages as I at least should exclude is so small, and the difference between them and the rest is so marked, that no improper begging of the question can be justly charged.

The plays in the _Globe_ edition contain just a thousand closely-printed pages. I do not think that there are fifty in all, perhaps not twenty--putting sc.r.a.ps and patches together--in which the Shakesperian touch is wanting, and I do not think that that touch appears outside the covers of the volume once in a thousand pages of all the rest of English literature. The finest things of other men,--of Marlowe, of Fletcher, of Webster (who no doubt comes nearest to the Shakesperian touch, infinitely as he falls short of the Shakesperian range),--might conceivably be the work of others. But the famous pa.s.sages of Shakespere, too numerous and too well known to quote, could be no one else's. It is to this point that aesthetic criticism of Shakespere is constantly coming round with an almost monotonous repet.i.tion. As great as all others in their own points of greatness; holding points of greatness which no others even approach; such is Shakespere.

There is a certain difficulty--most easily to be appreciated by those who have most carefully studied the literature of the period in question, and have most fully perceived the mistakes which confusion of exact date has induced in the consideration of the very complex subject before us--in selecting dramatists to group with Shakespere. The obvious resource of taking him by himself would frustrate the main purpose of this volume, which is to show the general movement at the same time as the individual developments of the literature of 1560-1660. In one sense Shakespere might be included in any one of three out of the four chapters which we have here devoted to the Elizabethan dramatists. His earliest known, and probably much of his unknown work coincides with the period of tentative; and his latest work overlaps very much of that period of ripe and somewhat over-ripe performance, at the head of which it has here been thought good to set Beaumont and Fletcher. But there is a group of four notable persons who appear to have especial rights to be cla.s.sed with him, if not in greatness, yet in character of work, and in the influences which played on that work. They all, like him, took an independent part in the marvellous wit-combat of the last decade of Elizabeth, and they all like him survived, though for different lengths of time, to set an example to the third generation. They are all, even the meanest of them, distinctly great men, and free alike from the immaturity, visible even in Lyly and Marlowe, which marked some of their older contemporaries, and from the decadence, visible even in Fletcher and Ma.s.singer, which marred their younger followers.

Furthermore, they were mixed up, as regards one another, in an inextricable but not uninteresting series of broils and friends.h.i.+ps, to some part of which Shakespere himself may have been by no means a stranger. These reasons have seemed sufficient for separating them from the rest, and grouping them round the captain. They are Benjamin Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, and Thomas Dekker.

The history of Ben Jonson (the literary history that is to say, for the known facts of his life are simple enough) is curious and perhaps unique.

Nothing is really known of his family; but as, at a time when Scotchmen were not loved in England, he maintained his Annandale origin, there should be, especially after Mr. Symonds's investigations as to his career, no doubt that he at least believed himself to be of Border extraction, as was also, it may be remembered, his great disciple, panegyrist, slanderer, and (with the subst.i.tution of an easy for a rugged temper), a.n.a.logue, John Dryden. The fact of these two typical Englishmen being of half or whole Scotch descent will not surprise any one who does not still ignore the proper limits of England. n.o.body doubts that his father (or rather stepfather, for he was a posthumous child, born 1573, and his mother married again) was a bricklayer, or that he went to Westminster School; it seems much more dubious whether he had any claim to anything but an honorary degree from either university, though he received that from both.

Probably he worked at bricklaying, though the taunts of his rivals would, in face of the undoubted fact of his stepfather's profession, by no means suffice to prove it. Certainly he went through the chequered existence of so many Elizabethan men of letters; was a soldier in Flanders, an actor, a duellist (killing his man, and escaping consequences only by benefit of clergy), a convert to Romanism, a "revert" to the Anglican Church, a married man, a dramatist. The great play of _Every Man in his Humour_, afterwards very much altered, was perhaps acted first at the Rose Theatre in 1596, and it established Jonson's reputation, though there is no reasonable doubt that he had written other things. His complicated a.s.sociations and quarrels with Dekker, Marston, Chapman, and others, have occupied the time of a considerable number of persons; they lie quite beyond our subject, and it may be observed without presumption that their direct connection, even with the literary work (_The Poetaster_, _Satiromastix_, and the rest) which is usually linked to them, will be better established when critics have left off being uncertain whether _A_ was _B_, or _B_, _C_. Even the most famous story of all (the disgrace of Jonson with others for _Eastward Ho!_ as a libel against the Scots, for which he was imprisoned, and, being threatened with mutilation, was by his Roman mother supplied with poison), though told by himself, does not rest on any external evidence. What is certain is that Jonson was in great and greater request, both as a writer of masks and other _divertiss.e.m.e.nts_ for the Court, and as a head and chief of literary conviviality at the "Mermaid," and other famous taverns. Here, as he grew older, there grew up round him that "Tribe of Ben," or admiring clique of young literary men, which included almost all the most remarkable poets, except Milton, of the late Jacobean and early Caroline period, and which helped to spread his fame for at least two generations, and (by Waller's influence on Saint-Evremond) to make him the first English man of letters who was introduced by a great critic of the Continent to continental attention as a worker in the English vernacular. At last he was made Poet Laureate, and in 1618 he took a journey to Scotland, and stayed there for some time with Drummond of Hawthornden. The celebrated conversations noted by the host have been the very centre battle-ground of all fights about Ben Jonson's character. It is sufficient here to say that though Ben's chief defender, Gifford, may have been too hard on Drummond, it is difficult, if not impossible, to think that the "Notes of Conversations" were made in a friendly spirit. They contain for their bulk an extraordinary amount of interesting matter, and much sound criticism; but which of us in modern days would care to have such "notes" taken? A man thinks that there are faults in a friend's work, and in the usual exaggeration of conversation he says that it is "rubbish." The Drummonds of this world note it down and it pa.s.ses as a deliberate judgment. He must be a fortunate man, or an exceptional recluse, who has not found some good-natured friend antic.i.p.ate Drummond, and convey the crude expression (probably heightened in conveyance) direct to the person concerned. After this visit (which must have been at the end of 1618) Jonson suffered the calamity of having his study destroyed by fire, and lost much MS. work. He lived many years longer and retained his literary primacy, but was unfortunate in money matters, and even in reception of his work by the public, though the literary men of his day made no mistake about him. He died in 1637, and the last of the many stories cl.u.s.tering round his name is the famous one of the inscription, "O rare Ben Jonson!" A year later, a _tombeau_, or collection of funeral poems, ent.i.tled _Jonsonus Virbius_, showed the estimate entertained of him by the best and brightest wits of the time.

His life was thus a life of struggle, for he was never rich, and lived for the most part on the most unsatisfactory of all sources of income--casual bounties from the king and others. It is not improbable that his favour with the Court and with Templar society (which was then very unpopular with the middle cla.s.ses), had something to do with the ill-reception of his later plays. But his literary influence was very great, and with Donne he determined much of the course of English poetry for many years, and retained a great name even in the comparative eclipse of the "Giant Race"

after the Restoration. It was only when the study of Shakespere became a favourite subject with persons of more industry than intelligence in the early eighteenth century, that a singular fabric of myth grew up round Ben Jonson. He was pictured as an incarnation of envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, directed in the first place towards Shakespere, and then towards all other literary craftsmen. William Gifford, his first competent editor, set himself to work to destroy this, and undoubtedly succeeded. But the acrimony with which Gifford tinctured all his literary polemic perhaps rather injured his treatment of the case; even yet it may be doubted whether Ben Jonson has attained anything like his proper place in English literary history.

Putting aside the abiding influence of a good long-continued course of misrepresentation, it is still not difficult to discover the source of this under-estimate, without admitting the worst view or even any very bad view of Ben Jonson's character, literary and personal. It may be granted that he was rough and arrogant, a scholar who pushed scholars.h.i.+p to the verge of pedantry, a critic who sometimes forgot that though a schoolmaster may be a critic, a critic should not be merely a schoolmaster. His work is saturated with that contempt of the _profanum vulgus_ which the _profanum vulgus_ (humanly enough) seldom fails to return. Moreover, it is extremely voluminous, and it is by no means equal. Of his eighteen plays, three only--_Every Man in his Humour_, _The Alchemist_, and the charming fragment of _The Sad Shepherd_--can be praised as wholes. His lovely _Masques_ are probably unread by all but a few scores, if so many, in each generation.

His n.o.ble sinewy prose is, for the most part, unattractive in subject. His minor poems, though not a few of them are known even to smatterers in literature, are as a whole (or at least it would seem so) unknown. Yet his merits are extraordinary. "Never" in his plays (save _The Sad Shepherd_) "tender," and still more rarely "sublime," he yet, in words much better applied to him than to his pupil Dryden, "wrestles with and conquers time."

Even his enemies admit his learning, his vigour, his astonis.h.i.+ng power of work. What is less generally admitted, despite in one case at least the celebrity of the facts that prove it, is his observation, his invention, and at times his anomalous and seemingly contradictory power of grace and sweetness. There is no more singular example of the proverb, "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong sweetness," which has been happily applied to Victor Hugo, than the composition, by the rugged author of _Seja.n.u.s_ and _Catiline_, of _The Devil is an a.s.s_ and _Bartholomew Fair_, of such things as

"Here lies to each her parents ruth;"

or the magnificent song,

"Drink to me only with thine eyes;"

or the crown and flower of all epitaphs,

"Underneath this sable herse."[33]

[33] Ben is sometimes deprived of this, _me judice_, most irreligiously.

But these three universally-known poems only express in quintessence a quality of Jonson's which is spread all about his minor pieces, which appears again perfectly in _The Sad Shepherd_, and which he seems to have kept out of his plays proper rather from bravado than for any other reason.

His prose will be noticed separately in the next chapter, but it may be observed here that it is saturated with the same literary flavour which pervades all his work. None of his dramatic fellows wrote anything that can compare to it, just as none of them wrote anything that surpa.s.ses the songs and s.n.a.t.c.hes in his plays, and the best things in his miscellaneous works.

The one t.i.tle which no competent criticism has ever grudged him is that of best epitaph-writer in the English language, and only those who have failed to consider the difficulties and the charm of that cla.s.s of composition will consider this faint praise. Nevertheless, it was no doubt upon drama that Jonson concentrated his powers, and the unfavourable judgments which have been delivered on him chiefly refer to this.

A good deal of controversy has arisen out of the attribution to him, which is at least as old as _The Return from Parna.s.sus_, of being minded to cla.s.sicise the English drama. It is certain that he set a value on the Unities which no other English dramatist has set, and that in _The Alchemist_ at least he has given something like a perfect example of them, which is at the same time an admirable play. Whether this attention is at all responsible for the defects which are certainly found in his work is a very large question. It cannot be denied that in that work, with perhaps the single exception just mentioned, the reader (it is, except in the case of _Every Man in his Humour_, generations since the playgoer had any opportunity of judging) finds a certain absence of sympathetic attraction, as well as, for all the formal unity of the pieces, a lack of that fusing poetic force which makes detail into a whole. The amazing strength of Jonson's genius, the power with which he has compelled all manner of unlikely elements into his service, is evident enough, but the result usually wants charm. The drawbacks are (always excepting _The Alchemist_) least perceptible in _Every Man in his Humour_, the first sprightly runnings (unless _The Case is Altered_ is older) of Jonson's fancy, the freshest example of his sharp observation of "humours." Later he sometimes overdid this observation, or rather he failed to bring its results sufficiently into poetic or dramatic form, and, therefore, is too much for an age and too little for all time. But _Every Man in his Humour_ is really charming. Bobadil, Master Stephen, and Kitely attain to the first rank of dramatic characters, and others are not far behind them in this respect.

The next play, _Every Man out of his Humour_, is a great contrast, being, as even the doughty Gifford admits, distinctly uninteresting as a whole, despite numerous fine pa.s.sages. Perhaps a little of its want of attraction must be set down to a pestilent habit of Jonson's, which he had at one time thought of applying to _Every Man in his Humour_, the habit of giving foreign, chiefly Italian, appellations to his characters, describing, and as it were labelling them--Deliro, Macilente, and the like. This gives an air of unreality, a figurehead and type character. _Cynthia's Revels_ has the same defects, but is to some extent saved by its sharp raillery of euphuism. With _The Poetaster_ Jonson began to rise again. I think myself that the personages and machinery of the Augustan Court would be much better away, and that the implied satire on contemporaries would be tedious if it could not, as it fortunately can, be altogether neglected. But in spite of these drawbacks, the piece is good. Of _Seja.n.u.s_ and Jonson's later Roman play _Catiline_ I think, I confess, better than the majority of critics appear to think. That they have any very intense tragic interest will, indeed, hardly be pretended, and the unfortunate but inevitable comparison with _Coriola.n.u.s_ and _Julius Caesar_ has done them great and very unjust harm. Less human than Shakespere's "G.o.dlike Romans" (who are as human as they are G.o.dlike), Jonson's are undoubtedly more Roman, and this, if it is not entirely an attraction, is in its way a merit. But it was not till after _Seja.n.u.s_ that the full power of Jonson appeared. His three next plays, _Volpone_, _Epicene_, and _The Alchemist_, could not have been written by any one but himself, and, had they not been written, would have left a gap in English which nothing from any other literature could supply.

If his att.i.tude had been a little less virtuous and a little more sarcastic, Jonson would in these three plays have antic.i.p.ated Swift. Of the three, I prefer the first and the last--the last being the best of all.

_Epicene_ or the _Silent Woman_ was specially liked by the next generation because of its regularity, and of the skill with which the various humours are all wrought into the main plot. Both these things are undeniable, and many of the humours are in themselves amusing enough. But still there is something wanting, which is supplied in _Volpone_ and _The Alchemist_. It has been asked whether that disregard of probability, which is one of Jonson's greatest faults, does not appear in the recklessness with which "The Fox" exposes himself to utter ruin, not so much to gratify any sensual desire or obtain any material advantage, as simply to indulge his combined hypocrisy and cynicism to the very utmost. The answer to this question will very much depend on each reader's taste and experience. It is undeniable that there have been examples of perverse indulgence in wickedness for wickedness' sake, which, rare as they are, go far to justify the creation of Volpone. But the unredeemed villany of the hero, with whom it is impossible in any way to sympathise, and the sheer brutality of the fortune-hunting dupes who surround him, make it easier to admire than to like the play. I have little doubt that Jonson was to some extent sensible of this, for the comic episode or underplot of Sir Politick and Lady Would-be is very much more loosely connected with the centre interest (it is only by courtesy that it can be said to be connected at all), than is usual with him, and this is an argument in favour of its having been introduced as a makeweight.

From the drawbacks of both these pieces _The Alchemist_ is wholly free.

Jonson here escaped his usual pitfall of the unsympathetic, for the vices and follies he satirises are not loathsome, only contemptible at worst, and not always that. He found an opportunity of exercising his extraordinary faculty of concentration as he nowhere else did, and has given us in Sir Epicure Mammon a really magnificent picture of concupiscence, of sensual appet.i.te generally, sublimed by heat of imagination into something really poetic. The triumvirate of adventurers, Subtle, Dol and Face (for Dol has virile qualities), are not respectable, but one does not hate them; and the gulls are perfection. If any character could be spared it is the "Angry Boy," a young person whose humours, as Jonson himself admits of another character elsewhere, are "more tedious than diverting." _The Alchemist_ was followed by _Catiline_, and _Catiline_ by _Bartholomew Fair_, a play in which singularly vivid and minute pictures of manners, very amusing sketches of character, and some capital satire on the Puritans, do not entirely redeem a profusion of the coa.r.s.est possible language and incident.

_The Devil is an a.s.s_ comes next in time, and though no single character is the equal of Zeal-of-the-land Busy in _Bartholomew Fair_, the play is even more amusing. The four last plays, _The Staple of News_, _The Magnetic Lady_, _The New Inn_, and _The Tale of a Tub_, which Jonson produced after long absence from the stage, were not successful, and were both unkindly and unjustly called by Dryden "Ben's dotages." As for the charming _Sad Shepherd_, it was never acted, and is now unfinished, though it is believed that the poet completed it. It stands midway as a pastoral _Feerie_ between his regular plays and the great collection of ingenious and graceful masques and entertainments, which are at the top of all such things in England (unless _Comus_ be called a masque), and which are worth comparing with the ballets and spectacle pieces of Moliere. Perhaps a complete survey of Jonson's work indicates, as his greatest defect, the want of pa.s.sion. He could be vigorous, he could be dignified, he could be broadly humorous, and, as has been said, he could combine with these the apparently incompatible, or, at least, not closely-connected faculty of grace. Of pa.s.sion, of rapture, there is no trace in him, except in the single instance--in fire mingled with earth--of Sir Epicure Mammon. But the two following pa.s.sages--one from _Seja.n.u.s_, one from _The Sad Shepherd_--will show his dignity and his pathos. No extract in brief could show his humour:--

_Arr._ "I would begin to study 'em,[34] if I thought They would secure me. May I pray to Jove In secret and be safe? ay, or aloud, With open wishes, so I do not mention Tiberius or Seja.n.u.s? Yes I must, If I speak out. 'Tis hard that. May I think And not be racked? What danger is't to dream, Talk in one's sleep or cough? Who knows the laws?

May I shake my head without a comment? Say It rains, or it holds up, and not be thrown Upon the Gemonies? These now are things, Whereon men's fortune, yea, their fate depends.

Nothing hath privilege 'gainst the violent ear.

No place, no day, no hour, we see, is free, Not our religious and most sacred times From some one kind of cruelty: all matter, Nay, all occasion pleaseth. Madmen's rage, The idleness of drunkards, women's nothing, Jester's simplicity, all, all is good That can be catcht at. Nor is now the event Of any person, or for any crime To be expected; for 'tis always one: Death, with some little difference of place Or time. What's this? Prince Nero, guarded!"

[34] To wit the "arts" of suffering and being silent, by which his interlocutor Lepidus has explained his own safety from delation.

_aeg._ "A spring, now she is dead! of what? of thorns, Briars and brambles? thistles, burs and docks?

Cold hemlock, yews? the mandrake, or the box?

These may grow still: but what can spring beside?

Did not the whole earth sicken when she died As if there since did fall one drop of dew, But what was wept for her! or any stalk Did bear a flower, or any branch a bloom, After her wreath was made! In faith, in faith, You do not fair to put these things upon me, Which can in no sort be: Earine Who had her very being and her name With the first knots or buddings of the spring, Born with the primrose and the violet Or earliest roses blown: when Cupid smiled And Venus led the Graces out to dance, And all the flowers and sweets in nature's lap Leaped out and made their solemn conjuration To last but while she lived! Do not I know How the vale withered the same day? how Dove, Dean, Eye, and Erwash, Idel, Snite and Soare Each broke his urn, and twenty waters more That swelled proud Trent, shrunk themselves dry, that since No sun or moon, or other cheerful star, Looked out of heaven, but all the cope was dark As it were hung so for her exequies!

And not a voice or sound to ring her knell But of that dismal pair, the screeching owl And buzzing hornet! Hark! hark! hark! the foul Bird! how she flutters with her wicker wings!

Peace! you shall hear her screech.

_Cla._ Good Karolin, sing, Help to divert this phant'sy.

_Kar._ All I can:

_Sings while aeg. reads the song._

'Though I am young and cannot tell Either what Death or Love is well, Yet I have heard they both bear darts And both do aim at human hearts: And then again, I have been told, Love wounds with heat, as Death with cold; So that I fear they do but bring Extremes to touch and mean one thing.

'As in a ruin we it call One thing to be blown up, or fall; Or to our end, like way may have, By a flash of lightning or a wave: So Love's inflamed shaft or brand May kill as soon as Death's cold hand, Except Love's fires the virtue have To fright the frost out of the grave.'"

Of no two contemporary men of letters in England can it be said that they were, intellectually speaking, so near akin as Ben Jonson and George Chapman. The translator of Homer was a good deal older than Jonson, and exceedingly little is known of his life. He was pretty certainly born near Hitchin in Hertfords.h.i.+re, the striking situation of which points his reference to it even in these railroad days. The date is uncertain--it may have been 1557, and was certainly not later than 1559--so that he was the oldest of the later Elizabethan school who survived into the Caroline period. He perhaps entered the University of Oxford in 1574. His first known work, _The Shadow of Night_, dates from 1594; and a reference of Meres's shows that he was known for tragedy four years later. In 1613 he, Jonson (a constant friend of his whose mutual fidelity refutes of itself the silly calumnies as to Jonson's enviousness, for of Chapman only, among his colleagues, was he likely to be jealous), and Marston were partners in the venture of _Eastward Ho!_ which, for some real or fancied slight on Scotland, exposed the authors to danger of the law. He was certainly a _protege_ of Prince Henry, the English Marcellus, and he seems to have received patronage from a much less blameless patron, Carr, Earl of Somerset. His literary activity was continuous and equal, but it was in his later days that he attempted and won the crown of the greatest of English translators. "Georgius Chapmannus, Homeri metaphrastes" the posy of his portrait runs, and he himself seems to have quite sunk any expectation of fame from his original work in the expectation of remembrance as a translator of the Prince of Poets. Many other interesting traits suggest, rather than ascertain, themselves in reference to him, such as his possible connection with the early despatch of English troupes of players to Germany, and his adoption of contemporary French subjects for English tragedy. But of certain knowledge of him we have very little. What is certain is that, like Drayton (also a friend of his), he seems to have lived remote and afar from the miserable quarrels and jealousies of his time; that, as has been already shown by dates, he was a kind of English Fontenelle in his overlapping of both ends of the great school of English poets; and that absolutely no base personal gossip tarnishes his poetical fame. The splendid sonnet of Keats testifies to the influence which his work long had on those Englishmen who were unable to read Homer in the original. A fine essay of Mr. Swinburne's has done, for the first time, justice to his general literary powers, and a very ingenious and, among such hazardous things, unusually probable conjecture of Mr. Minto's identifies him with the "rival poet" of Shakespere's _Sonnets_. But these are advent.i.tious claims to fame. What is not subject to such deduction is the a.s.sertion that Chapman was a great Englishman who, while exemplifying the traditional claim of great Englishmen to originality, independence, and versatility of work, escaped at once the English tendency to lack of scholars.h.i.+p, and to ignorance of contemporary continental achievements, was entirely free from the fatal Philistinism in taste and in politics, and in other matters, which has been the curse of our race, was a Royalist, a lover, a scholar, and has left us at once one of the most voluminous and peculiar collections of work that stand to the credit of any literary man of his country. It may be that his memory has gained by escaping the danger of such revelations or scandals as the Jonson confessions to Drummond, and that the lack of attraction to the ordinary reader in his work has saved him from that comparison which (it has perhaps been urged _ad nauseam_) is the bane of just literary judgment. To those who always strive to waive all such considerations, these things will make but little difference.

The only complete edition of Chapman's works dates from our own days, and its three volumes correspond to a real division of subject. Although, in common with all these writers, Chapman has had much uncertain and some improbable work fathered on him, his certain dramas supply one of the most interesting studies in our period. As usual with everyone except Shakespere and (it is a fair reason for the relatively disproportionate estimate of these so long held) Beaumont and Fletcher, they are extremely unequal. Not a certain work of Chapman is void of interest. The famous _Eastward Ho!_ (one of the liveliest comedies of the period dealing with London life) was the work of three great writers, and it is not easy to distribute its collaboration. That it is not swamped with "humours" may prove that Jonson's learned sock was put on by others. That it is neither grossly indecent nor extravagantly sanguinary, shows that Marston had not the chief hand in it, and so we are left to Chapman. What he could do is not shown in the list of his own certain plays till _All Fools_. _The Blind Beggar of Alexandria_ (1596?) and _An Humorous Day's Mirth_ show that singular promiscuousness--that heaping together of scenes without order or connection--which we have noticed in the first dramatic period, not to mention that the way in which the characters speak of themselves, not as "I" but by their names in the third person, is also unmistakable. But _All Fools_ is a much more noteworthy piece, and though Mr. Swinburne may have praised it rather highly, it would certainly take place in a collection of the score best comedies of the time not written by Shakespere. _The Gentleman Usher_ and _Monsieur d'Olive_ belong to the same school of humorous, not too pedantic comedy, and then we come to the strange series of Chapman's French tragedies, _Bussy d'Ambois_, _The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois_, _Byron's Conspiracy_, _The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron_, and _The Tragedy of Philip Chabot, Admiral of France_. These singular plays stand by themselves. Whether the strong influence which Marlowe exercised on Chapman led the later poet (who it must be remembered was not the younger) to continue _The Ma.s.sacre of Paris_, or what other cause begat them, cannot now be a.s.serted or even guessed without lost labour. A famous criticism of Dryden's attests his attention to them, but does not, perhaps, to those who have studied Dryden deeply, quite express the influence which Chapman had on the leader of post-Restoration tragedy. As plays, the whole five are models of what plays should not be; in parts, they are models of what plays should be. Then Chapman returned to the humour-comedy and produced two capital specimens of it in _May-Day_ and _The Widow's Tears_.

_Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany_, which contains long pa.s.sages of German, and _Revenge for Honour_, two tragedies which were not published till long after Chapman's death, are to my mind very dubiously his. Mr. Swinburne, in dealing with them, availed himself of the hypothesis of a mellowing, but at the same time weakening of power by age. It may be so, and I have not the slightest intention of p.r.o.nouncing decidedly on the subject. They bear to my mind much more mark of the decadent period of Charles I., when the secret of blank verse was for a time lost, and when even men who had lived in personal friends.h.i.+p with their great predecessors lapsed into the slipshod stuff that we find in Davenant, in his followers, and among them even in the earlier plays of Dryden. It is, of course, true that this loosening and slackening of the standard betrays itself even before the death of Chapman, which happened in 1634. But I cannot believe that the author of _Bussy d'Ambois_ (where the verse is rude enough but never lax) and the contemporary or elder of Shakespere, Marlowe, and all the great race, could ever have been guilty of the slovenliness which, throughout, marks _Revenge for Honour_.

The second part of Chapman's work, his original verse, is much inferior in bulk and in interest of matter to the first and third. Yet, is it not perhaps inferior to either in giving evidence of the author's peculiarities; while the very best thing he ever wrote (a magnificent pa.s.sage in _The Tears of Peace_) is contained in it. Its component parts are, however, sufficiently odd. It opens with a strange poem called _The Shadow of Night_, which Mr. Swinburne is not wrong in cla.s.sing among the obscurest works in English. The mischievous fas.h.i.+on of enigmatic writing, already glanced at in the section on satire, was perhaps an offshoot of euphuism; and certainly Chapman, who never exhibits much taint of euphuism proper, here out-Herods Herod and out-Tourneurs Tourneur. It was followed by an equally singular attempt at the luscious school of which _Venus and Adonis_ is the most famous. _Ovid's Banquet of Sense_ has received high praise from critics whom I esteem. For my own part I should say that it is the most curious instance of a radically unpa.s.sionate nature, trying to lash itself into pa.s.sion, that our language contains. Then Chapman tried an even bolder flight in the same dialect--the continuation of Marlowe's unfinished _Hero and Leander_. In this attempt, either by sheer force of his sinewy athletics, or by some inspiration derived from the "Dead Shepherd," his predecessor, he did not fail, curious as is the contrast of the two parts. _The Tears of Peace_, which contains his finest work, is in honour of Prince Henry--a worthy work on a worthy subject, which was followed up later by an epicedium on the prince's lamented death. Besides some epigrams and sonnets, the chief other piece of this division is the disastrous _Andromeda Liberata_, which unluckily celebrates the nuptials--stained with murder, adultery, and crime of all sorts--of Frances Howard and Robert Carr. It is in Chapman's most allusive and th.o.r.n.i.e.s.t style, but is less interesting intrinsically than as having given occasion to an indignant prose vindication by the poet, which, considering his self-evident honesty, is the most valuable doc.u.ment in existence for explaining the apparently grovelling panegyric of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. It makes clear (what indeed an intelligent reader might gather for himself) that the traditional respect for rank and station, uniting with the tendency to look for patterns and precedents in the cla.s.sics for almost everything, made of these panegyrics a kind of school exercise, in which the excellence of the subject was taken for granted, and the utmost hyperbole of praise was only a "common form" of composition, to which the poet imparted or added what grace of style or fancy he could, with hardly a notion of his ascriptions being taken literally.

But if Chapman's dramas have been greatly undervalued, and if his original poems are an invaluable help to the study of the time, there is no doubt that it is as a translator that he made and kept the strongest hold on the English mind. He himself spoke of his Homeric translations (which he began as early as 1598, doing also Hesiod, some Juvenal, and some minor fragments, Pseudo-Virgilian, Petrarchian and others) as "the work that he was born to do." His version, with all its faults, outlived the popularity even of Pope, was for more than two centuries the resort of all who, unable to read Greek, wished to know what the Greek was, and, despite the finical scholars.h.i.+p of the present day, is likely to survive all the attempts made with us. I speak with all humility, but as having learnt Homer from Homer himself, and not from any translation, prose or verse. I am perfectly aware of Chapman's outrageous liberties, of his occasional unfaithfulness (for a libertine need not necessarily be unfaithful in translation), and of the condescension to his own fancies and the fancies of his age, which obscures not more perhaps than some condescensions which nearness and contemporary influences prevent some of us from seeing the character of the original.

But at the same time, either I have no skill in criticism, and have been reading Greek for fifty years to none effect, or Chapman is far nearer Homer than any modern translator in any modern language. He is nearer in the Iliad than in the Odyssey--an advantage resulting from his choice of vehicle. In the Odyssey he chose the heroic couplet, which never can give the rise and fall of the hexameter. In the Iliad, after some hesitation between the two (he began as early as 1598), he preferred the fourteener, which, at its best, is the hexameter's nearest subst.i.tute. With Chapman it is not always at its best--very far from it. If he never quite relapses into the sheer doggerel of the First Period, he sometimes comes perilously near to it. But he constantly lifts his wings and soars in a quite different measure which, when he keeps it up for a little, gives a narrative vehicle unsurpa.s.sed, and hardly equalled, in English poetry for variation of movement and steady forward flow combined. The one point in which the Homeric hexameter is unmatched among metres is its combination of steady advance with innumerable ripples and eddies in its course, and it is here that Chapman (though of course not fully) can partly match it. It is, however, one of the testimonies to the supreme merit of the Homeric poems that every age seems to try to imitate them in its own special mannerisms, and that, consequently, no age is satisfied with the attempts of another.

It is a second, that those who know the original demur at all.

The characteristics of Chapman, then, are very much those of Jonson with a difference. Both had the same incapacity of unlaboured and forceless art, the same insensibility to pa.s.sion, the same inability to rise above mere humours and contemporary oddities into the region of universal poetry. Both had the same extensive learning, the same immense energy, the same (if it must be said) arrogance and contempt of the vulgar. In casual strokes, though not in sustained grasp, Chapman was Jonson's superior; but unlike Jonson he had no lyric gift, and unlike Jonson he let his learning and his ambitious thought clog and obscure the flow of his English. Nor does he show in any of his original work the creative force of his younger friend.

With the highest opinion reasonably possible of Chapman's dramas, we cannot imagine him for a moment composing a _Volpone_ or an _Alchemist_--even a _Bartholomew Fair_; while he was equally, or still more, incapable of Jonson's triumphs in epigram and epitaph, in song and ode. A certain shapelessness is characteristic of everything that Chapman did--an inability, as Mr. Swinburne (to whom every one who now writes on Chapman must acknowledge indebtedness), has said, "to clear his mouth of pebbles, and his brow of fog." His long literary life, which must have exceeded half a century, and his great learning, forbid our setting this down as it may be set in the case of many of his contemporaries, and especially in the case of those two to whom we are now coming, as due to youth, to the imperfect state of surrounding culture, to want of time for perfecting his work, and so forth. He is the "Begue de Vilaines," the heroic Stammerer of English literature--a man who evidently had some congenital defect which all his fire and force, all his care and curiosity, could not overcome. Yet are his doings great, and it is at least probable that if he had felt less difficulty in original work, he would not have been prompted to set about and finish the n.o.ble work of translation which is among the best products of an unsatisfactory kind, and which will outlive the cavils of generations of etymologists and aorist-grinders. He has been so little read that four specimens of his different manners--the early "tenebrous" style of _The Shadow of Night_, the famous pa.s.sage from _Bussy d'Ambois_ which excited Lamb's enthusiasm, and a sample from both _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_--may be given:

"In this vast thicket (whose description's task The pens of fairies and of fiends would ask: So more than human-thoughted horrible) The souls of such as lived implausible, In happy empire of this G.o.ddess' glories, And scorned to crown her fanes with sacrifice,[35]

Did ceaseless walk; exspiring fearful groans, Curses and threats for their confusions.

Her darts, and arrows, some of them had slain: Others her dogs eat, painting her disdain, After she had transformed them into beasts: Others her monsters carried to their nests, Rent them in pieces, and their spirits sent To this blind shade, to wail their banishment.