Chapter II: Part 2

There is one point, nevertheless, which we may as well speak of here, and shortly; for spoken of it must be as delicately as is possible. The laugh raised at Zeal-for-the-land Busy’s expense, in ‘Bartholomew Fair,’ turns on the Puritan dislike of seeing women’s parts acted by boys. Jonson shirks the question by making poor Busy fall foul of puppets instead of live human beings: but the question is shirked nevertheless. What honest answer he could have given to the Puritans is hard to conceive. Prynne, in his ‘Histriomastix,’ may have pushed a little too far the argument drawn from the prohibition in the Mosaic law: yet one would fancy that the practice was forbidden by Moses’ law, not arbitrarily, but because it was a bad practice, which did harm, as every antiquarian knows that it did; and that, therefore, Prynne was but reasonable in supposing that in his day a similar practice would produce a similar evil. Our firm conviction is that it did so, and that as to the matter of fact, Prynne was perfectly right; and that to make a boy a stage-player was pretty certainly to send him to the devil. Let any man of common sense imagine to himself the effect on a young boy’s mind which would be produced by representing shamelessly before a public audience not merely the language, but the passions, of such women as occur in almost every play. We appeal to common sense—would any father allow his own children to personate, even in private, the basest of mankind? And yet we must beg pardon: for common sense, it is to be supposed, has decided against us, as long as parents allow their sons to act yearly at Westminster the stupid low art of Terence, while grave and reverend prelates and divines look on approving. The Westminster play has had no very purifying influence on the minds of the young gentlemen who personate heathen damsels; and we only ask, What must have been the effect of representing far fouler characters than Terence’s on the minds of uneducated lads of the lower classes? Prynne and others hint at still darker abominations than the mere defilement of the conscience: we shall say nothing of them, but that, from collateral evidence, we believe every word they say; and that when pretty little Cupid’s mother, in Jonson’s Christmas masque, tells how ‘She could have had money enough for him, had she been tempted, and have let him out by the week to the king’s players,’ and how ‘Master Burbadge has been about and about with her for him, and old Mr. Hemings too,’ she had better have tied a stone round the child’s neck, and hove him over London Bridge, than have handed him over to thrifty Burbadge, that he might make out of his degradation more money to buy land withal, and settle comfortably in his native town, on the fruits of others’ sin. Honour to old Prynne, bitter and narrow as he was, for his passionate and eloquent appeals to the humanity and Christianity of England, in behalf of those poor children whom not a bishop on the bench interfered to save; but, while they were writing and persecuting in behalf of baptismal regeneration, left those to perish whom they declared so stoutly to be regenerate in baptism. Prynne used that argument too, and declared these stage-plays to be among the very ‘pomps and vanities which Christians renounced at baptism.’ He may or may not have been wrong in identifying them with the old heathen pantomimes and games of the circus, and in burying his adversaries under a mountain of quotations from the Fathers and the Romish divines (for Prynne’s reading seems to have been quite enormous). Those very prelates could express reverence enough for the Fathers when they found aught in them which could be made to justify their own system, though perhaps it had really even less to do therewith than the Roman pantomimes had with the Globe Theatre: but the Church of England had retained in her Catechism the old Roman word ‘pomps,’ as one of the things which were to be renounced; and as ‘pomps’ confessedly meant at first those very spectacles of the heathen circus and theatre, Prynne could not be very illogical in believing that, as it had been retained, it was retained to testify against something, and probably against the thing in England most like the ‘pomps’ of heathen Rome. Meanwhile, let Churchmen decide whether of the two was the better Churchman—Prynne, who tried to make the baptismal covenant mean something, or Laud, who allowed such a play as ‘The Ordinary’ to be written by his especial _protégé_, Cartwright, the Oxford scholar, and acted before him probably by Oxford scholars, certainly by christened boys. We do not pretend to pry into the counsels of the Most High; but if unfaithfulness to a high and holy trust, when combined with lofty professions and pretensions, does (as all history tells us that it does) draw down the vengeance of Almighty God, then we need look no further than this one neglect of the seventeenth century prelates (whether its cause was stupidity, insincerity, or fear of the monarchs to whose tyranny they pandered), to discover full reason why it pleased God to sweep them out awhile with the besom of destruction.

There is another feature in the plays of the seventeenth century, new, as far as we know, alike to English literature and manners; and that is, the apotheosis of Rakes. Let the faults of the Middle Age, or of the Tudors, have been what they may, that class of person was in their time simply an object of disgust. The word which then signified a Rake is, in the ‘Morte d’Arthur’ (temp. Ed. IV.), the foulest term of disgrace which can be cast upon a knight; whilst even up to the latter years of Elizabeth the contempt of parents and elders seems to have been thought a grievous sin. In Italy, even, fountain of all the abominations of the age, respect for the fifth commandment seems to have lingered after all the other nine had been forgotten; we find Castiglione, in his ‘Corteggiano’ (about 1520), regretting the modest and respectful training of the generation which had preceded him; and to judge from facts, the Puritan method of education, stern as it was, was neither more nor less than the method which, a generation before, had been common to Romanist and to Protestant, Puritan and Churchman.

But with the Stuart era (perhaps at the end of Elizabeth’s reign) fathers became gradually personages who are to be disobeyed, sucked of their money, fooled, even now and then robbed and beaten, by the young gentlemen of spirit; and the most Christian kings, James and Charles, with their queens and court, sit by to see ruffling and roystering, beating the watch and breaking windows, dicing, drinking, duelling, and profligacy (provided the victim be not a woman of gentle birth), set forth not merely as harmless amusements for young gentlemen, but (as in Beaumont and Fletcher’s play of ‘Monsieur Thomas’) virtues without which a man is despicable. On this point, as on many others, those who have, for ecclesiastical reasons, tried to represent the first half of the seventeenth century as a golden age have been altogether unfair. There is no immorality of the court plays of Charles II.’s time which may not be found in those of Charles I.’s. Sedley and Etherege are not a whit worse, but only more stupid, than Fletcher or Shirley; and Monsieur Thomas is the spiritual father of all Angry lads, Rufflers, Blades, Bullies, Mohocks, Corinthians, and Dandies, down to the last drunken clerk who wrenched off a knocker, or robbed his master’s till to pay his losses at a betting-office. True; we of this generation can hardly afford to throw stones. The scapegrace ideal of humanity has enjoyed high patronage within the last half century; and if Monsieur Thomas seemed lovely in the eyes of James and Charles, so did Jerry and Corinthian Tom in those of some of the first gentlemen of England. Better days, however, have dawned; ‘Tom and Jerry,’ instead of running three hundred nights, would be as little endured on the stage as ‘Monsieur Thomas’ would be; the heroes who aspire toward that ideal are now consigned by public opinion to Rhadamanthus and the treadmill; while if, like Monsieur Thomas, they knocked down their own father, they would, instead of winning a good wife, be ‘cut’ by braver and finer gentlemen than Monsieur Thomas himself: but what does this fact prove save that England has at last discovered that the Puritan opinion of this matter (as of some others) was the right one?

There is another aspect in which we must look at the Stuart patronage of profligate scapegraces on the stage. They would not have been endured on the stage had they not been very common off it; and if there had not been, too, in the hearts of spectators some lurking excuse for them: it requires no great penetration to see what that excuse must have been. If the Stuart age, aristocracy, and court were as perfect as some fancy them, such fellows would have been monstrous in it and inexcusable, probably impossible. But if it was (as it may be proved to have been) an utterly deboshed, insincere, decrepit, and decaying age, then one cannot but look on Monsieur Thomas with something of sympathy as well as pity. Take him as he stands; he is a fellow of infinite kindliness, wit, spirit, and courage, but with nothing on which to employ those powers. He would have done his work admirably in an earnest and enterprising age as a Hudson’s Bay Company clerk, an Indian civilian, a captain of a man-of-war—anything where he could find a purpose and a work. Doubt it not. How many a Monsieur Thomas of our own days, whom a few years ago one had rashly fancied capable of nothing higher than coulisses and cigars, private theatricals and white kid gloves, has been not only fighting and working like a man, but meditating and writing homeward like a Christian, through the dull misery of those trenches at Sevastopol; and has found, amid the Crimean snows, that merciful fire of God, which could burn the chaff out of his heart and thaw the crust of cold frivolity into warm and earnest life. And even at such a youth’s worst, reason and conscience alike forbid us to deal out to him the same measure as we do to the offences of the cool and hoary profligate, or to the darker and subtler spiritual sins of the false professor. But if the wrath of God be not unmistakably and practically revealed from heaven against youthful profligacy and disobedience in after sorrow and shame of some kind or other, against what sin is it revealed? It was not left for our age to discover that the wages of sin is death: but Charles, his players and his courtiers, refused to see what the very heathen had seen, and so had to be taught the truth over again by another and a more literal lesson; and what neither stage-plays nor sermons could teach them, sharp shot and cold steel did.

‘But still the Puritans were barbarians for hating Art altogether.’ The fact was, that they hated what art they saw in England, and that this was low art, bad art, growing ever lower and worse. If it be said that Shakspeare’s is the very highest art, the answer is, that what they hated in him was not his high art, but his low art, the foul and horrible elements which he had in common with his brother play-writers. True, there is far less of these elements in Shakspeare than in any of his compeers: but they are there. And what the Puritans hated in him was exactly what we have to expunge before we can now represent his plays. If it be said that they ought to have discerned and appreciated the higher elements in him, so ought the rest of their generation. The Puritans were surely not bound to see in Shakspeare what his patrons and brother poets did not see. And it is surely a matter of fact that the deep spiritual knowledge which makes, and will make, Shakspeare’s plays (and them alone of all the seventeenth century plays) a heritage for all men and all ages, quite escaped the insight of his contemporaries, who probably put him in the same rank which Webster, writing about 1612, has assigned to him.

‘I have ever cherished a good opinion of other men’s witty labours,
especially of that full and heightened style of Master Chapman; the
laboured and understanding works of Mr. Jonson; the no less witty
composures of the both wittily excellent Mr. Beaumont and Mr.
Fletcher; and lastly (without wrong last to be named), the right
happy and copious industry of Shakspeare, Mr. Dekker, and Mr.
Heywood.’

While Webster, then, one of the best poets of the time, sees nothing in Shakspeare beyond the same ‘happy and copious industry’ which he sees in Dekker and Heywood,—while Cartwright, perhaps the only young poet of real genius in Charles the First’s reign, places Fletcher’s name ‘’Twixt Jonson’s grave and Shakspeare’s lighter sound,’ and tells him that

‘Shakspeare to thee was dull, whose best wit lies
I’ th’ ladies’ questions, and the fool’s replies.

* * * * *

Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call.

* * * * *

Nature was all his art; thy vein was free
As his, but without his scurrility;’ {46}

while even Milton, who, Puritan as he was, loved art with all his soul, only remarks on Shakspeare’s marvellous lyrical sweetness, ‘his native wood-notes wild’; what shame to the Puritans if they, too, did not discover the stork among the cranes?

An answer has often been given to arguments of this kind, which deserves a few moments’ consideration. It is said, ‘the grossness of the old play-writers was their misfortune, not their crime. It was the fashion of the age. It is not our fashion, certainly; but they meant no harm by it. The age was a free-spoken one; and perhaps none the worse for that.’ Mr. Dyce, indeed, the editor of Webster’s plays, seems inclined to exalt this habit into a virtue. After saying that the licentious and debauched are made ‘as odious in representation as they would be if they were actually present’—an assertion which must be flatly denied, save in the case of Shakspeare, who seldom or never, to our remembrance, seems to forget that the wages of sin is death, and who, however coarse he may be, keeps stoutly on the side of virtue—Mr. Dyce goes on to say, that ‘perhaps the language of the stage is purified in proportion as our morals are deteriorated; and we dread the mention of the vices which we are not ashamed to practise; while our forefathers, under the sway of a less fastidious but a more energetic principle of virtue, were careless of words, and only considerate of actions.’

To this clever piece of special pleading we can only answer that the fact is directly contrary; that there is a mass of unanimous evidence which cannot be controverted to prove that England, in the first half of the seventeenth century was far more immoral than in the nineteenth; that the proofs lie patent to any dispassionate reader: but that these pages will not be defiled by the details of them.

Let it be said that coarseness was ‘the fashion of the age.’ The simple question is, was it a good fashion or a bad? It is said—with little or no proof—that in simple states of society much manly virtue and much female purity have often consisted with very broad language and very coarse manners. But what of that? Drunkards may very often be very honest and brave men. Does that make drunkenness no sin? Or will honesty and courage prevent a man’s being the worse for hard drinking? If so, why have we given up coarseness of language? And why has it been the better rather than the worse part of the nation, the educated and religious rather than the ignorant and wicked, who have given it up? Why? Simply because this nation, and all other nations on the Continent, in proportion to their morality, have found out that coarseness of language is, to say the least, unfit and inexpedient; that if it be wrong to do certain things, it is also, on the whole, right not to talk of them; that even certain things which are right and blessed and holy lose their sanctity by being dragged cynically to the light of day, instead of being left in the mystery in which God has wisely shrouded them. On the whole, one is inclined to suspect the defence of coarseness as insincere. Certainly, in our day, it will not hold. If any one wishes to hear coarse language in ‘good society’ he can hear it, I am told, in Paris: but one questions whether Parisian society be now ‘under the sway of a more energetic principle of virtue’ than our own. The sum total of the matter seems to be, that England has found out that on this point again the old Puritans were right. And quaintly enough, the party in the English Church who hold the Puritans most in abhorrence are the most scrupulous now upon this very point; and, in their dread of contaminating the minds of youth, are carrying education, at school and college, to such a more than Puritan precision that with the most virtuous and benevolent intentions they are in danger of giving lads merely a conventional education,—a hot-house training which will render them incapable hereafter of facing either the temptations or the labour of the world. They themselves republished Massinger’s ‘Virgin Martyr,’ because it was a pretty Popish story, probably written by a Papist—for there is every reason to believe that Massinger was one—setting forth how the heroine was attended all through by an angel in the form of a page, and how—not to mention the really beautiful ancient fiction about the fruits which Dorothea sends back from Paradise—Theophilus overcomes the devil by means of a cross composed of flowers. Massinger’s account of Theophilus’ conversation will, we fear, make those who know anything of that great crisis of the human spirit suspect that Massinger’s experience thereof was but small: but the fact which is most noteworthy is this—that the ‘Virgin Martyr’ is actually one of the foulest plays known. Every pains has been taken to prove that the indecent scenes in the play were not written by Massinger, but by Dekker; on what grounds we know not. If Dekker assisted Massinger in the play, as he is said to have done, we are aware of no canons of internal criticism which will enable us to decide, as boldly as Mr. Gifford does, that all the indecency is Dekker’s, and all the poetry Massinger’s. He confesses—as indeed he is forced to do—that ‘Massinger himself is not free from dialogues of low wit and buffoonery’; and then, after calling the scenes in question ‘detestable ribaldry, ‘a loathsome sooterkin, engendered of filth and dulness,’ recommends them to the reader’s supreme scorn and contempt,—with which feelings the reader will doubtless regard them: but he will also, if he be a thinking man, draw from them the following conclusions: that even if they be Dekker’s—of which there is no proof—Massinger was forced, in order to the success of his play, to pander to the public taste by allowing Dekker to interpolate these villanies; that the play which, above all others of the seventeenth century, contains the most supralunar rosepink of piety, devotion, and purity, also contains the stupidest abominations of any extant play; and lastly, that those who reprinted it as a sample of the Christianity of that past golden age of High-churchmanship, had to leave out one-third of the play, for fear of becoming amenable to the laws against abominable publications.

No one denies that there are nobler words than any that we have quoted, in Jonson, in Fletcher, or in Massinger; but there is hardly a play (perhaps none) of theirs in which the immoralities of which we complain do not exist,—few of which they do not form an integral part; and now, if this is the judgment which we have to pass on the morality of the greater poets, what must the lesser ones be like?

Look, then, at Webster’s two masterpieces, ‘Vittoria Corrombona’ and the ‘Duchess of Malfi.’ A few words spent on them will surely not be wasted; for they are pretty generally agreed to be the two best tragedies written since Shakspeare’s time.

The whole story of ‘Vittoria Corrombona’ is one of sin and horror. The subject-matter of the play is altogether made up of the fiercest and the basest passions. But the play is not a study of those passions from which we may gain a great insight into human nature. There is no trace—nor is there, again, in the ‘Duchess of Malfi’—of that development of human souls for good or evil which is Shakspeare’s especial power—the power which, far more than any accidental ‘beauties,’ makes his plays, to this day, the delight alike of the simple and the wise, while his contemporaries are all but forgotten. The highest aim of dramatic art is to exhibit the development of the human soul; to construct dramas in which the conclusion shall depend, not on the events, but on the characters; and in which the characters shall not be mere embodiments of a certain passion, or a certain ‘humour’: but persons, each unlike all others; each having a destiny of his own by virtue of his own peculiarities, and of his own will; and each proceeding toward that destiny as he shall conquer, or yield to, circumstances; unfolding his own strength and weakness before the eyes of the audience; and that in such a way that, after his first introduction, they should be able (in proportion to their knowledge of human nature) to predict his conduct under those circumstances. This is indeed ‘high art’: but we find no more of it in Webster than in the rest. His characters, be they old or young, come on the stage ready-made, full grown, and stereotyped; and therefore, in general, they are not characters at all, but mere passions or humours in human form. Now and then he essays to draw a character: but it is analytically, by description, not synthetically and dramatically, by letting the man exhibit himself in action; and in the ‘Duchess of Mall’ he falls into the great mistake of telling, by Antonio’s mouth, more about the Duke and the Cardinal than he afterwards makes them act. Very different is Shakspeare’s method of giving, at the outset, some single delicate hint about his personages which will serve as a clue to their whole future conduct; thus ‘showing the whole in each part,’ and stamping each man with a personality, to a degree which no other dramatist has ever approached.

But the truth is, the study of human nature is not Webster’s aim. He has to arouse terror and pity, not thought, and he does it in his own way, by blood and fury, madmen and screech-owls, not without a rugged power. There are scenes of his, certainly, like that of Vittoria’s trial, which have been praised for their delineation of character: but it is one thing to solve the problem, which Shakspeare has so handled in ‘Lear,’ ‘Othello,’ and ‘Richard the Third,’—‘Given a mixed character, to show how he may become criminal,’ and to solve Webster’s ‘Given a ready-made criminal, to show how he commits his crimes.’ To us the knowledge of character shown in Vittoria’s trial scene is not an insight into Vittoria’s essential heart and brain, but a general acquaintance with the conduct of all bold bad women when brought to bay. Poor Elia, who knew the world from books, and human nature principally from his own loving and gentle heart, talks of Vittoria’s ‘innocence—resembling boldness’ {53}—and ‘seeming to see that matchless beauty of her face, which inspires such gay confidence in her,’ and so forth.

Perfectly just and true, not of Vittoria merely, but of the average of bad young women in the presence of a police magistrate: yet amounting in all merely to this, that the strength of Webster’s confest master-scene lies simply in intimate acquaintance with vicious nature in general. We will say no more on this matter, save to ask, _Cui bono_? Was the art of which this was the highest manifestation likely to be of much use to mankind, much less able to excuse its palpably disgusting and injurious accompaniments?

The ‘Duchess of Malfi’ is certainly in a purer and loftier strain: but in spite of the praise which has been lavished on her, we must take the liberty to doubt whether the poor Duchess is a ‘person’ at all. General goodness and beauty, intense though pure affection for a man below her in rank, and a will to carry out her purpose at all hazards, are not enough to distinguish her from thousands of other women: but Webster has no such purpose. What he was thinking and writing of was not truth, but effect; not the Duchess, but her story; not her brothers, but their rage; not Antonio, her major-domo and husband, but his good and bad fortunes; and thus he has made Antonio merely insipid, the brothers merely unnatural, and the Duchess (in the critical moment of the play) merely forward. That curious scene, in which she acquaints Antonio with her love for him and makes him marry her, is, on the whole, painful. Webster himself seems to have felt that it was so; and, dreading lest he had gone too far, to have tried to redeem the Duchess at the end by making her break down in two exquisite lines of loving shame: but he has utterly forgotten to explain or justify her love by giving to Antonio (as Shakspeare would probably have done) such strong specialties of character as would compel, and therefore excuse, his mistress’s affection. He has plenty of time to do this in the first scenes,—time which he wastes on irrelevant matter; and all that we gather from them is that Antonio is a worthy and thoughtful person. If he gives promise of being more, he utterly disappoints that promise afterwards. In the scene in which the Duchess tells her love, he is far smaller, rather than greater, than the Antonio of the opening scene: though (as there) altogether passive. He hears his mistress’s declaration just as any other respectable youth might; is exceedingly astonished, and a good deal frightened; has to be talked out of his fears till one naturally expects a revulsion on the Duchess’s part into something like scorn or shame (which might have given a good opportunity for calling out sudden strength in Antonio): but so busy is Webster with his business of drawing mere blind love, that he leaves Antonio to be a mere puppet, whose worthiness we are to believe in only from the Duchess’s assurance to him that he is the perfection of all that a man should be; which, as all lovers are of the same opinion the day before the wedding, is not of much importance.

Neither in his subsequent misfortunes does Antonio make the least struggle to prove himself worthy of his mistress’s affection. He is very resigned and loving, and so forth. To win renown by great deeds, and so prove his wife in the right to her brothers and all the world, never crosses his imagination. His highest aim (and that only at last) is slavishly to entreat pardon from his brothers-in-law for the mere offence of marrying their sister; and he dies by an improbable accident, the same pious and respectable insipidity which he has lived,—‘_ne valant pas la peine qui se donne pour lui_.’ The prison-scenes between the Duchess and her tormentors are painful enough, if to give pain be a dramatic virtue; and she appears in them really noble; and might have appeared far more so, had Webster taken half as much pains with her as he has with the madmen, ruffians, ghosts, and screech-owls in which his heart really delights. The only character really worked out so as to live and grow under his hand is Bosola, who, of course, is the villain of the piece, and being a rough fabric, is easily manufactured with rough tools. Still, Webster has his wonderful touches here and there—

‘_Cariola_. Hence, villains, tyrants, murderers! Alas
What will you do with my lady? Call for help!
_Duchess_. To whom? to our next neighbours? they are mad folk.
Farewell, Cariola.
I pray thee look thou giv’st my little boy
Some syrup for his cold; and let the girl
Say her prayers ere she sleep.—Now, what you please;
What death?’

And so the play ends, as does ‘Vittoria Corrombona,’ with half a dozen murders _coram populo_, howls, despair, bedlam, and the shambles; putting the reader marvellously in mind of that well-known old book of the same era, ‘Reynolds’s God’s Revenge,’ in which, with all due pious horror and bombastic sermonising, the national appetite for abominations is duly fed with some fifty unreadable Spanish histories, French histories, Italian histories, and so forth, one or two of which, of course, are known to have furnished subjects for the playwrights of the day.

The next play-writer whom we are bound to notice is James Shirley, one of the many converts to Romanism which those days saw. He appears, up to the breaking out of the Civil War, to have been the Queen’s favourite poet; and, according to Laugbaine, he was ‘one of such incomparable parts that he was the chief of the second-rate poets, and by some has been thought even equal to Fletcher himself.’

We must entreat the reader’s attention while we examine Shirley’s ‘Gamester.’ Whether the examination be a pleasant business or not, it is somewhat important; ‘for,’ says Mr. Dyce, ‘the following memorandum respecting it occurs in the office-book of the Master of the Records:—“On Thursday night, 6th of February, 1633, ‘The Gamester’ was acted at Court, made by Sherley out of a plot of the king’s, given him by mee, and well likte. The king sayd it was the best play he had seen for seven years.”’

This is indeed important. We shall now have an opportunity of fairly testing at the same time the taste of the Royal Martyr and the average merit, at least in the opinion of the Caroline court, of the dramatists of that day.

The plot which Charles sent to Shirley as a fit subject for his muse is taken from one of those collections of Italian novels of which we have already had occasion to speak, and occurs in the second part of the ‘Ducento Novelle’ of Celio Malespini; and what it is we shall see forthwith.

The play opens with a scene between one Wilding and his ward Penelope, in which he attempts to seduce the young lady, in language which has certainly the merit of honesty. She refuses him, but civilly enough; and on her departure Mrs. Wilding enters, who, it seems, is the object of her husband’s loathing, though young, handsome, and in all respects charming enough. After a scene of stupid and brutal insults, he actually asks her to bring Penelope to him, at which she naturally goes out in anger; and Hazard, the gamester, enters,—a personage without a character, in any sense of the word. There is next some talk against duelling, sensible enough, which arises out of a bye-plot,—one Delamere having been wounded in a duel by one Beaumont, mortally as is supposed. This bye-plot runs through the play, giving an opportunity for bringing in a father of the usual play-house type,—a Sir Richard Hurry, who is, of course, as stupid, covetous, proud, and tyrannical and unfeeling, as play-house fathers were then bound to be: but it is a plot of the most commonplace form, turning on the stale trick of a man expecting to be hanged for killing some one who turns out after all to have recovered, and having no bearing whatsoever on the real plot, which is this,—Mrs. Wilding, in order to win back her husband’s affections, persuades Penelope to seem to grant his suit; while Mrs. Wilding herself is in reality to supply her niece’s place, and shame her husband into virtue. Wilding tells Hazard of the good fortune which he fancies is coming, in scenes of which one can only say, that if they are not written for the purpose of exciting the passions, it is hard to see why they were written at all. But, being with Hazard in a gambling-house at the very hour at which he is to meet Penelope, and having had a run of bad luck, he borrows a hundred pounds of Hazard, stays at the table to recover his losses, and sends Hazard to supply his place with the supposed Penelope. A few hours before Penelope and Hazard have met for the first time, and Penelope considers him, as she says to herself aside, ‘a handsome gentleman.’ He begins, of course, talking foully to her; and the lady, so far from being shocked at the freedom of her new acquaintance, pays him back in his own coin in such good earnest that she soon silences him in the battle of dirt-throwing. Of this sad scene it is difficult to say whether it indicates a lower standard of purity and courtesy in the poet, in the audience who endured it, or in the society of which it was, of course, intended to be a brilliant picture. If the cavaliers and damsels of Charles the First’s day were in the habit of talking in that way to each other (and if they had not been, Shirley would not have dared to represent them as doing so), one cannot much wonder that the fire of God was needed to burn up (though, alas! only for a while) such a state of society; and that when needed the fire fell.

The rest of the story is equally bad. Hazard next day gives Wilding descriptions of his guilt, and while Wilding is in the height of self-reproach at having handed over his victim to another, his wife meets him and informs him that she herself and not Penelope has been the victim. Now comes the crisis of the plot, the conception which so delighted the taste of the Royal Martyr. Wilding finds himself, as he expresses it, ‘fitted with a pair of horns of his own making;’ and his rage, shame, and base attempts to patch up his own dishonour by marrying Penelope to Hazard (even at the cost of disgorging the half of her portion, which he had intended to embezzle) furnish amusement to the audience to the end of the play; at last, on Hazard and Penelope coming in married, Wilding is informed that he has been deceived, and that his wife is unstained, having arranged with Hazard to keep up the delusion in order to frighten him into good behaviour; whereupon Mr. Wilding promises to be a good husband henceforth, and the play ends.

Throughout the whole of this farrago of improbable iniquity not a single personage has any mark of personal character, or even of any moral quality, save (in Mrs. Wilding’s case) that of patience under injury. Hazard ‘The Gamester’ is chosen as the hero, for what reason it is impossible to say; he is a mere nonentity, doing nothing which may distinguish him from any other gamester and blackguard, save that he is, as we are told,

‘A man careless
Of wounds; and though he have not had the luck
To kill so many as another, dares
Fight with all them that have.’

He, nevertheless, being in want of money, takes a hundred pounds from a foolish old city merchant (city merchants are always fools in the seventeenth century) to let his nephew, young Barnacle, give him a box on the ear in a tavern, and (after the young cit has been transformed into an intolerable bully by the fame so acquired) takes another hundred pounds from the repentant uncle for kicking the youth back into his native state of peaceful cowardice. With the exception of some little humour in these scenes with young Barnacle, the whole play is thoroughly stupid. We look in vain for anything like a reflection, a sentiment, even a novel image. Its language, like its morality, is all but on a level with the laboured vulgarities of the ‘Relapse’ or the ‘Provoked Wife,’ save that (Shirley being a confessed copier of the great dramatists of the generation before him) there is enough of the manner of Fletcher and Ben Jonson kept up to hide, at first sight, the utter want of anything like their matter; and as one sickens at the rakish swagger and the artificial smartness of his coxcombs, one regrets the racy and unaffected blackguardism of the earlier poets’ men.

This, forsooth, is the best comedy which Charles had heard for seven years, and the plot, which he himself furnished for the occasion, fitted to an English audience by a Romish convert.

And yet there is one dramatist of that fallen generation over whose memory one cannot but linger, fancying what he would have become, and wondering why so great a spirit was checked suddenly ere half developed by a fever which carried him off, with several other Oxford worthies, in 1643, when he was at most thirty-two (and according to one account only twenty-eight) years old. Let which of the two dates be the true one, Cartwright must always rank among our wondrous youths by the side of Prince Henry, the Admirable Crichton, and others, of whom one’s only doubt is, whether they were not too wondrous, too precociously complete for future development. We find Dr. Fell, some time Bishop of Oxford, saying that ‘Cartwright was the utmost man could come to’; we read how his body was as handsome as his soul; how he was an expert linguist, not only in Greek and Latin, but in French and Italian, an excellent orator, admirable poet; how Aristotle was no less known to him than Cicero and Virgil, and his metaphysical lectures preferred to those of all his predecessors, the Bishop of Lincoln only excepted; and his sermons as much admired as his other composures; and how one fitly applied to him that saying of Aristotle concerning Œschron the poet, that ‘he could not tell what Œschron could not do.’ We find pages on pages of high-flown epitaphs and sonnets on him, in which the exceeding bad taste of his admirers makes one inclined to doubt the taste of him whom they so bedaub with praise; and certainly, in spite of all due admiration for the Crichton of Oxford, one is unable to endorse Mr. Jasper Mayne’s opinion, that

‘In thee Ben Jonson still held Shakspeare’s style’;

or that he possest

‘Lucan’s bold heights match’d to staid Virgil’s care,
Martial’s quick salt, joined to Musæus’ tongue.’

This superabundance of eulogy, when we remember the men and the age from which it comes, tempts one to form such a conception of Cartwright as, indeed, the portrait prefixed to his works (ed. 1651) gives us; the offspring of an over-educated and pedantic age, highly stored with everything but strength and simplicity; one in whom genius has been rather shaped (perhaps cramped) than developed: but genius was present, without a doubt, under whatsoever artificial trappings; and Ben Jonson spoke but truth when he said, ‘My son Cartwright writes all like a man.’ It is impossible to open a page of ‘The Lady Errant,’ ‘The Royal Slave,’ ‘The Ordinary,’ or ‘Love’s Convert,’ without feeling at once that we have to do with a man of a very different stamp from any (Massinger perhaps alone excepted) who was writing between 1630 and 1640. The specific gravity of the poems, so to speak, is far greater than that of any of his contemporaries; everywhere is thought, fancy, force, varied learning. He is never weak or dull; though he fails often enough, is often enough wrong-headed, fantastical, affected, and has never laid bare the deeper arteries of humanity, for good or for evil. Neither is he altogether an original thinker; as one would expect, he has over-read himself: but then he has done so to good purpose. If he imitates, he generally equals. The table of fare in ‘The Ordinary’ smacks of Rabelais or Aristophanes: but then it is worthy of either; and if one cannot help suspecting that ‘The Ordinary’ never would have been written had not Ben Jonson written ‘The Alchemist,’ one confesses that Ben Jonson need not have been ashamed to have written the play himself: although the plot, as all Cartwright’s are, is somewhat confused and inconsequent. If he be Platonically sentimental in ‘Love’s Convert,’ his sentiment is of the noblest and the purest; and the confest moral of the play is one which that age needed, if ever age on earth did.

‘’Tis the good man’s office
To serve and reverence woman, as it is
The fire’s to burn; for as our souls consist
Of sense and reason, so do yours, more noble,
Of sense and love, which doth as easily calm
All your desires, as reason quiets ours. . . .
Love, then, doth work in you, what Reason doth
In us; here only lies the difference,—
Ours wait the lingering steps of Age and Time;
But the woman’s soul is ripe when it is young;
So that in us what we call learning, is
Divinity in you, whose operations,
Impatient of delay, do outstrip time.’

For the sake of such words, in the midst of an evil and adulterous generation, we will love young Cartwright, in spite of the suspicion that, addressed as the play is to Charles, and probably acted before his queen, the young rogue had been playing the courtier somewhat, and racking his brains for pretty sayings which would exhibit as a virtue that very uxoriousness of the poor king which at last cost him his head. The ‘Royal Slave,’ too, is a gallant play, right-hearted and lofty from beginning to end, though enacted in an impossible court-cloud-world, akin to that in which the classic heroes and heroines of Corneille and Racine call each other Monsieur and Madame.

As for his humour; he, alas! can be dirty like the rest, when necessary: but humour he has of the highest quality. ‘The Ordinary’ is full of it; and Moth, the Antiquary, though too much of a lay figure, and depending for his amusingness on his quaint antiquated language, is such a sketch as Mr. Dickens need not have been ashamed to draw.

The ‘Royal Slave’ seems to have been considered, both by the Court and by his contemporaries, his masterpiece. And justly so; yet our pleasure at Charles’s having shown, for once, good taste, is somewhat marred by Langbaine’s story, that the good acting of the Oxford scholars, ‘stately scenes, and richness of the Persian habits,’ had as much to do with the success of the play as its ‘stately style,’ and ‘the excellency of the songs, which were set by that admirable composer, Mr. Henry James.’ True it is, that the songs are excellent, as are all Cartwright’s; for grace, simplicity, and sweetness, equal to any (save Shakspeare’s) which the seventeenth century produced: but curiously enough, his lyric faculty seems to have exhausted itself in these half-dozen songs. His minor poems are utterly worthless, out Cowleying Cowley in frigid and fantastic conceits; and his varied addresses to the king and queen are as bombastic and stupid and artificial as anything which bedizened the reigns of Charles II. or his brother.

Are we to gather from this fact that Cartwright was not really an original genius, but only a magnificent imitator; that he could write plays well, because others had written them well already, but only for that reason; and that for the same reason, when he attempted detached lyrics and addresses, he could only follow the abominable models which he saw around him? We know not; for surely in Jonson and Shakspeare’s minor poems he might have found simpler and sweeter types; and even in those of Fletcher, who appears, from his own account, to have been his especial pattern. Shakspeare however, as we have seen, he looked down on; as did the rest of his generation.

Cartwright, as an Oxford scholar, is of course a worshipper of Charles, and a hater of Puritans. We do not wish to raise a prejudice against so young a man by quoting any of the ridiculous, and often somewhat abject, rant with which he addresses their majesties on their return from Scotland, on the queen’s delivery, on the birth of the Duke of York, and so forth; for in that he did but copy the tone of grave divines and pious prelates; but he, unfortunately for his fame, is given (as young geniuses are sometimes) to prophecy; and two of his prophecies, at least, have hardly been fulfilled. He was somewhat mistaken when, on the birth of the Duke of York, he informed the world that

‘The state is now past fear; and all that we
Need wish besides is perpetuity’;

and after indulging in various explanations of the reason why ‘Nature’ showed no prodigies at the birth of the future patron of Judge Jeffreys, which, if he did not believe them, are lies, and if he did, are very like blasphemies, declares that the infant is

‘A son of Mirth,
Of Peace and Friendship; ’tis a quiet birth.’

Nor, again, if spirits in the other world have knowledge of human affairs, can Mr. Cartwright be now altogether satisfied with his rogue’s augury as to the capacities of the New England Puritans, when he intends to pick pockets in the New World, having made the Old too hot to hold him—

‘They are good silly people; souls that will
Be cheated without trouble: one eye is
Put out with zeal, th’ other with ignorance,
And yet they think they’re eagles.’

Whatsoever were the faults of the Pilgrim Fathers (and they were many), silliness was certainly not among them. But such was the court fashion. Any insult, however shallow, ribald, and doggrel (and all these terms are just of the mock-Puritan ballad which Sir Christopher sings in ‘The Ordinary,’ just after an epithalamium so graceful and melodious, though a little warm in tone, as to be really out of place in such a fellow’s mouth), passes current against men who were abroad the founders of the United States, and the forefathers of the acutest and most enterprising nation on earth; and who at home proved themselves, by terrible fact, not only the physically stronger party, but the more cunning. But so it was fated to be. A deep mist of conceit, fed by the shallow breath of parasites, players, and pedants, wrapt that unhappy court in blind security, till ‘the breaking was as the swelling out of a high wall, which cometh suddenly in an instant.’

* * * * *

But, after all, what Poetry and Art there was in that day, good or bad, all belonged to the Royalists.

All? There are those who think that, if mere concettism be a part of poetry, Quarles is as great a poet as Cowley or George Herbert, Vaughan or Withers. On this question, and on the real worth of the seventeenth century lyrists, a great deal has to be said hereafter. Meanwhile, there are those, too, who believe John Bunyan, considered simply as an artist, to be the greatest dramatic author whom England has seen since Shakspeare; and there linger, too, in the libraries and the ears of men, words of one John Milton. He was no rigid hater of the beautiful, merely because it was heathen and Popish; no more, indeed, were many highly-educated and highly-born gentlemen of the Long Parliament: no more was Cromwell himself, whose delight was (if we may trust that double renegade Waller) to talk over with him the worthies of Rome and Greece, and who is said to have preserved for the nation Raphael’s cartoons and Andrea Mantegna’s triumph when Charles’s pictures were sold. But Milton had steeped his whole soul in romance. He had felt the beauty and glory of the chivalrous Middle Age as deeply as Shakspeare himself: he had as much classical lore as any Oxford pedant. He felt to his heart’s core (for he sang of it, and had he not felt it he would only have written of it) the magnificence and worth of really high art, of the drama when it was worthy of man and of itself.

‘Of gorgeous tragedy,
Presenting Thebes’ or Pelops’ line,
Or the Tale of Troy divine,
Or what, though rare, of later age,
Ennobled hath the buskin’d stage.’

No poet, perhaps, shows wider and truer sympathy with every form of the really beautiful in art, nature, and history: and yet he was a Puritan.

Yes, Milton was a Puritan; one who, instead of trusting himself and his hopes of the universe to second-hand hearsays, systems, and traditions, had looked God’s Word and his own soul in the face, and determined to act on that which he had found. And therefore it is that to open his works at any stray page, after these effeminate Carolists, is like falling asleep in a stifling city drawing-room, amid Rococo French furniture, not without untidy traces of last night’s ball, and awaking in an Alpine valley, amid the scent of sweet cyclamens and pine boughs, to the music of trickling rivulets and shouting hunters, beneath the dark cathedral aisles of mighty trees, and here and there, above them and beyond, the spotless peaks of everlasting snow; while far beneath your feet—

‘The hemisphere of earth, in clearest ken,
Stretched to the amplest reach of prospect, lies.’

Take any—the most hackneyed passage of ‘Comus,’ the ‘Allegro,’ the ‘Penseroso,’ the ‘Paradise Lost,’ and see the freshness, the sweetness, the simplicity which is strangely combined with the pomp, the self-restraint, the earnestness of every word; take him even, as an _experimentum crucis_, when he trenches upon ground heathen and questionable, and tries the court poets at their own weapons—

‘Or whether (as some sager sing),
The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
Zephyr, with Aurora playing,
As he met her once a-Maying,
There on beds of violets blue,
And fresh-blown roses washed in dew—’

but why quote what all the world knows?—where shall we find such real mirth, ease, sweetness, dance and song of words in anything written for five and twenty years before him? True, he was no great dramatist. He never tried to be one; but there was no one in his generation who could have written either ‘Comus’ or ‘Samson Agonistes.’ And if, as is commonly believed, and as his countenance seems to indicate, he was deficient in humour, so were his contemporaries, with the sole exception of Cartwright. Witty he could be, and bitter; but he did not live in a really humorous age: and if he has none of the rollicking fun of the foxhound puppy, at least he has none of the obscene gibber of the ape.