Chapter II: Part 2

In coming to speak of Marlowe, I cannot help fearing that I may fail a little in that equanimity which is the first condition of all helpful criticism. Generosity there should be, and enthusiasm there should be, but they should stop short of extravagance. Praise should not weaken into eulogy, nor blame fritter itself away into fault-finding. Goethe tells us that the first thing needful to the critic, as indeed it is to the wise man generally, is to see the thing as it really is; this is the most precious result of all culture, the surest warrant of happiness, or at least of composure. But he also bids us, in judging any work, seek first to discover its beauties, and then its blemishes or defects. Now there are two poets whom I feel that I can never judge without a favorable bias. One is Spenser, who was the first poet I ever read as a boy, not drawn to him by any enchantment of his matter or style, but simply because the first verse of his great poem was,--

“A gentle knight was pricking on the plain,”

and I followed gladly, wishful of adventure. Of course I understood nothing of the allegory, never suspected it, fortunately for me, and am surprised to think how much of the language I understood. At any rate, I grew fond of him, and whenever I see the little brown folio in which I read, my heart warms to it as to a friend of my childhood. With Marlowe it was otherwise. With him I grew acquainted during the most impressible and receptive period of my youth. He was the first man of genius I had ever really known, and he naturally bewitched me. What cared I that they said he was a deboshed fellow? nay, an atheist? To me he was the voice of one singing in the desert, of one who had found the water of life for which I was panting, and was at rest under the palms. How can he ever become to me as other poets are? But I shall try to be lenient in my admiration.

Christopher Marlowe, the son of a shoemaker, was born at Canterbury, in February, 1563, was matriculated at Benet College, Cambridge, in 1580, received his degree of bachelor there in 1583 and of master in 1587. He came early to London, and was already known as a dramatist before the end of his twenty-fourth year. There is some reason for thinking that he was at one time an actor. He was killed in a tavern brawl, by a man named Archer, in 1593, at the age of thirty. He was taxed with atheism, but on inadequate grounds, as it appears to me. That he was said to have written a tract against the Trinity, for which a license to print was refused on the ground of blasphemy, might easily have led to the greater charge. That he had some opinions of a kind unusual then may be inferred, perhaps, from a passage in his “Faust.” Faust asks Mephistopheles how, being damned, he is out of hell. And Mephistopheles answers, “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.” And a little farther on he explains himself thus:--

“Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is there must we ever be;
And, to conclude, when all the earth dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that are not heaven.”

Milton remembered the first passage I have quoted, and puts nearly the same words into the mouth of his Lucifer. If Marlowe was a liberal thinker, it is not strange that in that intolerant age he should have incurred the stigma of general unbelief. Men are apt to blacken opinions which are distasteful to them, and along with them the character of him who holds them.

This at least may be said of him without risk of violating the rule of _ne quid nímis_, that he is one of the most masculine and fecundating natures in the long line of British poets. Perhaps his energy was even in excess. There is in him an Oriental lavishness. He will impoverish a province for a simile, and pour the revenues of a kingdom into the lap of a description. In that delightful story in the book of Esdras, King Darius, who has just dismissed all his captains and governors of cities and satraps, after a royal feast, sends couriers galloping after them to order them all back again, because he has found a riddle under his pillow, and wishes their aid in solving it. Marlowe in like manner calls in help from every the remotest corner of earth and heaven for what seems to us as trivial an occasion. I will not say that he is bombastic, but he constantly pushes grandiosity to the verge of bombast. His contemporaries thought he passed it in his “Tamburlaine.” His imagination flames and flares, consuming what it should caress, as Jupiter did Semele. That exquisite phrase of Hamlet, “the modesty of nature,” would never have occurred to him. Yet in the midst of the hurly-burly there will fall a sudden hush, and we come upon passages calm and pellucid as mountain tarns filled to the brim with the purest distillations of heaven. And, again, there are single verses that open silently as roses, and surprise us with that seemingly accidental perfection, which there is no use in talking about because itself says all that is to be said and more.

There is a passage in “Tamburlaine” which I remember reading in the first course of lectures I ever delivered, thirty-four years ago, as a poet’s feeling of the inadequacy of the word to the idea:--

“If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of their masters’ thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admired themes;
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit;--
If these had made one poem’s period,
And all combined in beauty’s worthiness,
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest.”

Marlowe made snatches at this forbidden fruit with vigorous leaps, and not without bringing away a prize now and then such as only the fewest have been able to reach. Of fine single verses I give a few as instances of this:--

“Sometimes a lovely boy in Dian’s shape,
_With hair that gilds the water as it glides_,
Shall bathe him in a spring.”

Here is a couplet notable for dignity of poise describing Tamburlaine:--

“Of stature tall and straightly fashioned,
Like his desire, lift upward and divine.”

“For every street like to a firmament
Glistered with breathing stars.”

“Unwedded maids
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than have the white breasts of the queen of Love.”

This from “Tamburlaine” is particularly characteristic:--

“Nature
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet’s course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Will us to wear ourselves and never rest
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all.”

One of these verses reminds us of that exquisite one of Shakespeare where he says that Love is

“Still climbing trees in the Hesperides.”

But Shakespeare puts a complexity of meaning into his chance sayings, and lures the fancy to excursions of which Marlowe never dreamt.

But, alas, a voice will not illustrate like a stereopticon, and this tearing away of fragments that seem to bleed with the avulsion is like breaking off a finger from a statue as a specimen.

The impression he made upon the men of his time was uniform; it was that of something new and strange; it was that of genius, in short. Drayton says of him, kindling to an unwonted warmth, as if he loosened himself for a moment from the choking coils of his Polyolbion for a larger breath:--

“Next Marlowe bathèd in the Thespian springs
Had in him those brave translunary things
That the first poets had; his raptures were
All air and fire, which made his verses clear;
For that fine madness still he did retain
Which rightly should possess a poet’s brain.”

And Chapman, taking up and continuing Marlowe’s half-told story of Hero and Leander, breaks forth suddenly into this enthusiasm of invocation:--

“Then, ho! most strangely intellectual fire
That, proper to my soul, hast power to inspire
Her burning faculties, and with the wings
Of thy unsphered flame visit’st the springs
Of spirits immortal, now (as swift as Time
Doth follow motion) find the eternal clime
Of his free soul whose living subject stood
Up to the chin in the Pierian flood.”

Surely Chapman would have sent his soul on no such errand had he believed that the soul of Marlowe was in torment, as his accusers did not scruple to say that it was, sent thither by the manifestly Divine judgment of his violent death.

Yes, Drayton was right in classing him with “the first poets,” for he was indeed such, and so continues,--that is, he was that most indefinable thing, an original man, and therefore as fresh and contemporaneous to-day as he was three hundred years ago. Most of us are more or less hampered by our own individuality, nor can shake ourselves free of that chrysalis of consciousness and give our “souls a loose,” as Dryden calls it in his vigorous way. And yet it seems to me that there is something even finer than that fine madness, and I think I see it in the imperturbable sanity of Shakespeare, which made him so much an artist that his new work still bettered his old. I think I see it even in the almost irritating calm of Goethe, which, if it did not quite make him an artist, enabled him to see what an artist should be, and to come as near to being one as his nature allowed. Marlowe was certainly not an artist in the larger sense, but he was cunning in words and periods and the musical modulation of them. And even this is a very rare gift. But his mind could never submit itself to a controlling purpose, and renounce all other things for the sake of that. His plays, with the single exception of “Edward II.,” have no organic unity, and such unity as is here is more apparent than real. Passages in them stir us deeply and thrill us to the marrow, but each play as a whole is ineffectual. Even his “Edward II.” is regular only to the eye by a more orderly arrangement of scenes and acts, and Marlowe evidently felt the drag of this restraint, for we miss the uncontrollable energy, the eruptive fire, and the feeling that he was happy in his work. Yet Lamb was hardly extravagant in saying that “the death scene of Marlowe’s king moves pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient or modern, with which I am acquainted.” His tragedy of “Dido, Queen of Carthage,” is also regularly plotted out, and is also somewhat tedious. Yet there are many touches that betray his burning hand. There is one passage illustrating that luxury of description into which Marlowe is always glad to escape from the business in hand. Dido tells Æneas:--

“Æneas, I’ll repair thy Trojan ships
Conditionally that thou wilt stay with me,
And let Achates sail to Italy;
I’ll give thee tackling made of rivelled gold,
Wound on the barks of odoriferous trees;
Oars of massy ivory, full of holes
Through which the water shall delight to play;
Thy anchors shall be hewed from crystal rocks
Which, if thou lose, shall shine above the waves;
The masts whereon thy swelling sails shall hang
Hollow pyramides of silver plate;
The sails of folded lawn, where shall be wrought
The wars of Troy, but not Troy’s overthrow;
For ballast, empty Dido’s treasury;
Take what ye will, but leave Æneas here.
Achates, thou shalt be so seemly clad
As sea-born nymphs shall swarm about thy ships
And wanton mermaids court thee with sweet songs,
Flinging in favors of more sovereign worth
Than Thetis hangs about Apollo’s neck,
So that Æneas may but stay with me.”

But far finer than this, in the same costly way, is the speech of Barabas in “The Jew of Malta,” ending with a line that has incorporated itself in the language with the familiarity of a proverb:--

“Give me the merchants of the Indian mines
That trade in metal of the purest mould;
The wealthy Moor that in the Eastern rocks
Without control can pick his riches up,
And in his house heap pearl like pebble-stones,
Receive them free, and sell them by the weight;
Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,
Jacynths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds,
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price
As one of them, indifferently rated,

* * * * *

May serve in peril of calamity
To ransom great kings from captivity.
This is the ware wherein consists my wealth:

* * * * *

Infinite riches in a little room.”

This is the very poetry of avarice.

Let us now look a little more closely at Marlowe as a dramatist. Here also he has an importance less for what he accomplished than for what he suggested to others. Not only do I think that Shakespeare’s verse caught some hints from his, but there are certain descriptive passages and similes of the greater poet which, whenever I read them, instantly bring Marlowe to my mind. This is an impression I might find it hard to convey to another, or even to make definite to myself; but it is an old one, and constantly repeats itself, so that I put some confidence in it. Marlowe’s “Edward II.” certainly served Shakespeare as a model for his earlier historical plays. Of course he surpassed his model, but Marlowe might have said of him as Oderisi, with pathetic modesty, said to Dante of his rival and surpasser, Franco of Bologna, “The praise is now all his, yet mine in part.” But it is always thus. The path-finder is forgotten when the track is once blazed out. It was in Shakespeare’s “Richard II.” that Lamb detected the influence of Marlowe, saying that “the reluctant pangs of abdicating royalty in Edward furnished hints which Shakespeare has scarce improved upon in Richard.” In the parallel scenes of both plays the sentiment is rather elegiac than dramatic, but there is a deeper pathos, I think, in Richard, and his grief rises at times to a passion which is wholly wanting in Edward. Let me read Marlowe’s abdication scene. The irresolute nature of the king is finely indicated. The Bishop of Winchester has come to demand the crown; Edward takes it off, and says:--

“Here, take my crown; the life of Edward too:
Two kings of England cannot reign at once.
But stay awhile: let me be king till night,
That I may gaze upon this glittering crown;
So shall my eyes receive their last content,
My head the latest honor due to it,
And jointly both yield up their wishèd right.
Continue ever, thou celestial sun;
Let never silent night possess this clime;
Stand still, you watches of the element;
All times and seasons, rest you at a stay--
That Edward may be still fair England’s king!
But day’s bright beam doth vanish fast away,
And needs I must resign my wishèd crown.
Inhuman creatures, nursed with tiger’s milk,
Why gape you for your sovereign’s overthrow?--
My diadem, I mean, and guiltless life.
See, monsters, see, I’ll wear my crown again.
What, fear you not the fury of your king?

* * * * *

I’ll not resign, but, whilst I live, be king!”

Then, after a short further parley:--

“Here, receive my crown.
Receive it? No; these innocent hands of mine
Shall not be guilty of so foul a crime:
He of you all that most desires my blood,
And will be called the murderer of a king,
Take it. What, are you moved? Pity you me?
Then send for unrelenting Mortimer,
And Isabel, whose eyes, being turned to steel,
Will sooner sparkle fire than shed a tear.
Yet stay, for rather than I’ll look on them,
Here, here!--Now, sweet God of Heaven,
Make me despise this transitory pomp,
And sit for aye enthronizèd in Heaven!
Come, Death, and with thy fingers close my eyes,
Or, if I live, let me forget myself.”

Surely one might fancy that to be from the prentice hand of Shakespeare. It is no small distinction that this can be said of Marlowe, for it can be said of no other. What follows is still finer. The ruffian who is to murder Edward, in order to evade his distrust, pretends to weep. The king exclaims:--

“Weep’st thou already? List awhile to me,
And then thy heart, were it as Gurney’s is,
Or as Matrevis’, hewn from the Caucasus,
Yet will it melt ere I have done my tale.
This dungeon where they keep me is the sink
Wherein the filth of all the castle falls,
And there in mire and puddle have I stood
This ten days’ space; and, lest that I should sleep,
One plays continually upon a drum;
They give me bread and water, being a king;
So that, for want of sleep and sustenance,
My mind’s distempered and my body numbed,
And whether I have limbs or no I know not.
O, would my blood dropt out from every vein,
As doth this water from my tattered robes!
Tell Isabel the queen I looked not thus,
When, for her sake, I ran at tilt in France,
And there unhorsed the Duke of Clerëmont.”

This is even more in Shakespeare’s early manner than the other, and it is not ungrateful to our feeling of his immeasurable supremacy to think that even he had been helped in his schooling. There is a truly royal pathos in “They give me bread and water”; and “Tell Isabel the queen,” instead of “Isabel my queen,” is the most vividly dramatic touch that I remember anywhere in Marlowe. And that vision of the brilliant tournament, not more natural than it is artistic, how does it not deepen by contrast the gloom of all that went before! But you will observe that the verse is rather epic than dramatic. I mean by this that its every pause and every movement are regularly cadenced. There is a kingly composure in it, perhaps, but were the passage not so finely pathetic as it is, or the diction less naturally simple, it would seem stiff. Nothing is more peculiarly characteristic of the mature Shakespeare than the way in which his verses curve and wind themselves with the fluctuating emotion or passion of the speaker and echo his mood. Let me illustrate this by a speech of Imogen when Pisanio gives her a letter from her husband bidding her meet him at Milford-Haven. The words seem to waver to and fro, or huddle together before the hurrying thought, like sheep when the collie chases them.

“O, for a horse with wings!--Hear’st thou, Pisanio?
He is at Milford-Haven: read, and tell me
How far ’t is thither. If one of mean affairs
May plod it in a week, why may not I
Glide thither in a day?--Then, true Pisanio--
Who long’st like me to see thy lord; who long’st
O, let me ’bate--but not like me--yet long’st--
But in a fainter kind:--O, not like me;
For mine’s beyond beyond: say, and speak thick,--
Love’s counsellor should fill the bores of hearing,
To the smothering of the sense,--how far it is
To this same blessed Milford: and, by the way,
Tell me how Wales was made so happy as
To inherit such a haven: but, first of all,
How we may steal from hence.”

The whole speech is breathless with haste, and is in keeping not only with the feeling of the moment, but with what we already know of the impulsive character of Imogen. Marlowe did not, for he could not, teach Shakespeare this secret, nor has anybody else ever learned it.

There are, properly speaking, no characters in the plays of Marlowe--but personages and interlocutors. We do not get to know them, but only to know what they do and say. The nearest approach to a character is Barabas, in “The Jew of Malta,” and he is but the incarnation of the popular hatred of the Jew. There is really nothing human in him. He seems a bugaboo rather than a man. Here is his own account of himself:--

“As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls;
Sometimes I go about and poison wells;
And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,
I am content to lose some of my crowns,
That I may, walking in my gallery,
See ’em go pinioned by my door along;
Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practise first upon the Italian;
There I enriched the priests with burials,
And always kept the sexton’s arms in ure
With digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells;
And, after that, was I an engineer,
And in the wars ’twixt France and Germany,
Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth,
Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems.
Then, after that, was I an usurer,
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I filled the jails with bankrupts in a year.
And with young orphans planted hospitals;
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.
But mark how I am blest for plaguing them--
I have as much coin as will buy the town.”

Here is nothing left for sympathy. This is the mere lunacy of distempered imagination. It is shocking, and not terrible. Shakespeare makes no such mistake with Shylock. His passions are those of a man, though of a man depraved by oppression and contumely; and he shows sentiment, as when he says of the ring that Jessica had given for a monkey: “It was my turquoise. I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor.” And yet, observe the profound humor with which Shakespeare makes him think first of its dearness as a precious stone and then as a keepsake. In letting him exact his pound of flesh, he but follows the story as he found it in Giraldi Cinthio, and is careful to let us know that this Jew had good reason, or thought he had, to hate Christians. At the end, I think he meant us to pity Shylock, and we do pity him. And with what a smiling background of love and poetry does he give relief to the sombre figure of the Jew! In Marlowe’s play there is no respite. And yet it comes nearer to having a connected plot, in which one event draws on another, than any other of his plays. I do not think Milman right in saying that the interest falls off after the first two acts. I find enough to carry me on to the end, where the defiant death of Barabas in a caldron of boiling oil he had arranged for another victim does something to make a man of him. But there is no controlling reason in the piece. Nothing happens because it must, but because the author wills it so. The conception of life is purely arbitrary, and as far from nature as that of an imaginative child. It is curious, however, that here, too, Marlowe should have pointed the way to Shakespeare. But there is no resemblance between the Jew of Malta and the Jew of Venice, except that both have daughters whom they love. Nor is the analogy close even here. The love which Barabas professes for his child fails to humanize him to us, because it does not prevent him from making her the abhorrent instrument of his wanton malice in the death of her lover, and because we cannot believe him capable of loving anything but gold and vengeance. There is always something extravagant in the imagination of Marlowe, but here it is the extravagance of absurdity. Generally he gives us an impression of power, of vastness, though it be the vastness of chaos, where elemental forces hurtle blindly one against the other. But they are elemental forces, and not mere stage properties. Even Tamburlaine, if we see in him--as Marlowe, I think, meant that we should see--the embodiment of brute force, without reason and without conscience, ceases to be a blusterer, and becomes, indeed, as he asserts himself, the scourge of God. There is an exultation of strength in this play that seems to add a cubit to our stature. Marlowe had found the way that leads to style, and helped others to find it, but he never arrived there. He had not self-denial enough. He can refuse nothing to his fancy. He fails of his effect by over-emphasis, heaping upon a slender thought a burthen of expression too heavy for it to carry. But it is not with fagots, but with priceless Oriental stuffs, that he breaks their backs.

Marlowe’s “Dr. Faustus” interests us in another way. Here he again shows himself as a precursor. There is no attempt at profound philosophy in this play, and in the conduct of it Marlowe has followed the prose history of Dr. Faustus closely, even in its scenes of mere buffoonery. Disengaged from these, the figure of the protagonist is not without grandeur. It is not avarice or lust that tempts him at first, but power. Weary of his studies in law, medicine, and divinity, which have failed to bring him what he seeks, he turns to necromancy:--

“These metaphysics of magicians
And necromantic books are heavenly.

* * * * *

Oh, what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honor, of omnipotence,
Is promised to the studious artisan!
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command. Emperors and kings
Are but obeyèd in their several provinces,
Nor can they raise the winds or rend the clouds;
But his dominion that exceeds in this
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man;
A sound magician is a mighty god:
Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity.”

His good angel intervenes, but the evil spirit at the other ear tempts him with power again:--

“Be thou on earth as Jove is in the sky,
Lord and commander of these elements.”

Ere long Faustus begins to think of power for baser uses:--

“How am I glutted with conceit of this!
Shall I make spirits fetch me what I please,
Resolve me of all ambiguities,
Perform what desperate enterprise I will?
I’ll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates;
I’ll have them read me strange philosophy,
And tell the secrets of all foreign kings.”

And yet it is always to the pleasures of the intellect that he returns. It is when the good and evil spirits come to him for the second time that wealth is offered as a bait, and after Faustus has signed away his soul to Lucifer, he is tempted even by more sensual allurements. I may be reading into the book what is not there, but I cannot help thinking that Marlowe intended in this to typify the inevitably continuous degradation of a soul that has renounced its ideal, and the drawing on of one vice by another, for they go hand in hand like the Hours. But even in his degradation the pleasures of Faustus are mainly of the mind, or at worst of a sensuous and not sensual kind. No doubt in this Marlowe is unwittingly betraying his own tastes. Faustus is made to say:--

“And long ere this I should have slain myself
Had not sweet pleasure conquered deep despair.
Have I not made blind Homer sing to me
Of Alexander’s love and Œnon’s death?
And hath not he that built the walls of Thebes
With ravishing sound of his melodious harp
Made music with my Mephistophilis?
Why should I die, then? basely why despair?”

This employment of the devil in a duet seems odd. I remember no other instance of his appearing as a musician except in Burns’s “Tam o’ Shanter.” The last wish of Faustus was Helen of Troy. Mephistophilis fetches her, and Faustus exclaims:

“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships,
And burned the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!

* * * * *

Here will I dwell, for Heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena:

* * * * *

Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.”

No such verses had ever been heard on the English stage before, and this was one of the great debts our language owes to Marlowe. He first taught it what passion and fire were in its veins. The last scene of the play, in which the bond with Lucifer becomes payable, is nobly conceived. Here the verse rises to the true dramatic sympathy of which I spoke. It is swept into the vortex of Faust’s eddying thought, and seems to writhe and gasp in that agony of hopeless despair:--

“Ah, Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damned perpetually!
Stand still, ye ever-moving spheres of Heaven,
That time may cease and midnight never come;
Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.
Oh, I’ll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul--half a drop; ah, my Christ!
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
Yet will I call on Him. Oh, spare me, Lucifer!
Where is it now? ’T is gone; and see where God
Stretcheth out His arm and bends His ireful brows!
Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
No? No?
Then will I headlong run into the earth.
Earth, gape! Oh no, it will not harbor me!

* * * * *

Ah! half the hour is past; ’t will all be past anon.
O God,
If Thou wilt not have mercy on my soul,
Yet, for Christ’s sake, whose blood hath ransomed me,
Impose some end to my incessant pain;
Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years--
A hundred thousand--and at last be saved!
Oh, no end’s limited to damnèd souls.
Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul?
Or why was this immortal that thou hast?
Ah, Pythagoras’ metempsychosis, were that true,
This soul should fly from me, and I be changed
Unto some brutish beast! All beasts are happy,
For when they die
Their souls are soon dissolved in elements;
But mine must live still to be plagued in Hell!
Cursed be the parents that engendered me!
No, Faustus, curse thyself, curse Lucifer,
That hath deprived thee of the joys of Heaven.
Oh, it strikes! it strikes! Now, body, turn to air,
Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to Hell.
O soul, be changed to little waterdrops
And fall into the ocean; ne’er be found!
My God, my God, look not so fierce on me!
Adders and serpents, let me breathe awhile.
Ugly Hell, gape not. Come not, Lucifer!
I’ll burn my books. Ah, Mephistophilis!”

It remains to say a few words of Marlowe’s poem of “Hero and Leander,” for in translating it from Musæus he made it his own. It has great ease and fluency of versification, and many lines as perfect in their concinnity as those of Pope, but infused with a warmer coloring and a more poetic fancy. Here is found the verse that Shakespeare quotes somewhere. The second verse of the following couplet has precisely Pope’s cadence:--

“Unto her was he led, or rather drawn,
By those white limbs that sparkled through the lawn.”

It was from this poem that Keats caught the inspiration for his “Endymion.” A single passage will serve to prove this:--

“So fair a church as this had Venus none:
The walls were of discolored jasper stone,
Wherein was Proteus carved; and overhead
A lively vine of green sea-agate spread,
Where by one hand light-headed Bacchus hung,
And with the other wine from grapes outwrung.”

Milton, too, learned from Marlowe the charm of those long sequences of musical proper names of which he made such effective use. Here are two passages which Milton surely had read and pondered:--

“So from the East unto the furthest West
Shall Tamburlaine extend his puissant arm;
The galleys and those pilling brigantines
That yearly sail to the Venetian gulf,
And hover in the straits for Christians’ wreck,
Shall lie at anchor in the isle Asant,
Until the Persian fleet and men of war
Sailing along the Oriental sea
Have fetched about the Indian continent,
Even from Persepolis to Mexico,
And thence unto the straits of Jubaltar.”

This is still more Miltonic:--

“As when the seaman sees the Hyades
Gather an army of Cimmerian clouds,
Auster and Aquilon with wingèd steeds,

* * * * *

All fearful folds his sails and sounds the main.”

Spenser, too, loved this luxury of sound, as he shows in such passages as this:--

“Now was Aldebaran uplifted high
Above the starry Cassiopeia’s chair.”

And I fancy he would have put him there to make music, even had it been astronomically impossible, but he never strung such names in long necklaces, as Marlowe and Milton were fond of doing.

Was Marlowe, then, a great poet? For such a title he had hardly range enough of power, hardly reach enough of thought. But surely he had some of the finest qualities that go to the making of a great poet; and his poetic instinct, when he had time to give himself wholly over to its guidance, was unerring. I say when he had time enough, for he, too, like his fellows, was forced to make the daily task bring in the daily bread. We have seen how fruitful his influence has been, and perhaps his genius could have no surer warrant than that the charm of it lingered in the memory of poets, for theirs is the memory of mankind. If we allow him genius, what need to ask for more? And perhaps it would be only to him among the group of dramatists who surrounded Shakespeare that we should allow it. He was the herald that dropped dead in announcing the victory in whose fruits he was not to share.

III

WEBSTER

In my first lecture I spoke briefly of the deficiency in respect of Form which characterizes nearly all the dramatic literature of which we are taking a summary survey, till the example of Shakespeare and the precepts of Ben Jonson wrought their natural effect. Teleology, or the argument from means to end, the argument of adaptation, is not so much in fashion in some spheres of thought and speculation as it once was, but here it applies admirably. We have a piece of work, and we know the maker of it. The next question that we ask ourselves is the very natural one--how far it shows marks of intelligent design. In a play we not only expect a succession of scenes, but that each scene should lead, by a logic more or less stringent, if not to the next, at any rate to something that is to follow, and that all should contribute their fraction of impulse towards the inevitable catastrophe. That is to say, the structure should be organic, with a necessary and harmonious connection and relation of parts, and not merely mechanical, with an arbitrary or haphazard joining of one part to another. It is in the former sense alone that any production can be called a work of art.

And when we apply the word Form in this sense to some creation of the mind, we imply that there is a life, or, what is still better, a soul in it. That there is an intimate relation, or, at any rate, a close analogy, between Form in this its highest attribute and Imagination, is evident if we remember that the Imagination is the shaping faculty. This is, indeed, its preëminent function, to which all others are subsidiary. Shakespeare, with his usual depth of insight and the precision that comes of it, tells us that “imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown.” In his maturer creations there is generally some central thought about which the action revolves like a moon, carried along with it in its appointed orbit, and permitted the gambol of a Ptolemaic epicycle now and then. But the word Form has also more limited applications, as, for example, when we use it to imply that nice sense of proportion and adaptation which results in Style. We may apply it even to the structure of a verse, or of a short poem in which every advantage has been taken of the material employed, as in Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” which seems as perfect in its outline as the thing it so lovingly celebrates. In all these cases there often seems also to be something intuitive or instinctive in the working of certain faculties of the poet, and to this we unconsciously testify when we call it genius. But in the technic of this art, perfection can be reached only by long training, as was evident in the case of Coleridge. Of course, without the genius all the training in the world will produce only a mechanical and lifeless result; but even if the genius is there, there is nothing too seemingly trifling to deserve its study. The “Elegy in a Country Church-yard” owes much of the charm that makes it precious, even with those who perhaps undervalue its sentiment, to Gray’s exquisite sense of the value of vowel sounds.

Let us, however, come down to what is within the reach and under the control of talent and of a natural or acquired dexterity. And such a thing is the plot or arrangement of a play. In this part of their business our older playwrights are especially unskilled or negligent. They seem perfectly content if they have a story which they can divide at proper intervals by acts and scenes, and bring at last to a satisfactory end by marriage or murder, as the case may be. A certain variety of characters is necessary, but the motives that compel and control them are almost never sufficiently apparent. And this is especially true of the dramatic motives, as distinguished from the moral. The personages are brought in to do certain things and perform certain purposes of the author, but too often there seems to be no special reason why one of them should do this or that more than another. They are servants of all work, ready to be villains or fools at a moment’s notice if required. The obliging simplicity with which they walk into traps which everybody can see but themselves, is sometimes almost delightful in its absurdity. Ben Jonson was perfectly familiar with the traditional principles of construction. He tells us that the fable of a drama (by which he means the plot or action) should have a beginning, a middle, and an end; and that “as a body without proportion cannot be goodly, no more can the action, either in comedy or tragedy, without his fit bounds.” But he goes on to say “that as every bound, for the nature of the subject, is esteemed the best that is largest, till it can increase no more; so it behoves the action in tragedy or comedy to be let grow till the necessity ask a conclusion; wherein two things are to be considered--first, that it exceed not the compass of one day; next, that there be place left for digression and art.” The weakness of our earlier playwrights is that they esteemed those bounds best that were largest, and let their action grow till they had to stop it.

Many of Shakespeare’s contemporary poets must have had every advantage that he had in practical experience of the stage, and all of them had probably as familiar an intercourse with the theatre as he. But what a difference between their manner of constructing a play and his! In all his dramatic works his skill in this is more or less apparent. In the best of them it is unrivalled. From the first scene of them he seems to have beheld as from a tower the end of all. In “Romeo and Juliet,” for example, he had his story before him, and he follows it closely enough; but how naturally one scene is linked to the next, and one event leads to another! If this play were meant to illustrate anything, it would seem to be that our lives were ruled by chance. Yet there is nothing left to chance in the action of the play, which advances with the unvacillating foot of destiny. And the characters are made to subordinate themselves to the interests of the play as to something in which they have all a common concern. With the greater part of the secondary dramatists, the characters seem like unpractised people trying to walk the deck of a ship in rough weather, who start for everywhere to bring up anywhere, and are hustled against each other in the most inconvenient way. It is only when the plot is very simple and straightforward that there is any chance of smooth water and of things going on without falling foul of each other. Was it only that Shakespeare, in choosing his themes, had a keener perception of the dramatic possibilities of a story? This is very likely, and it is certain that he preferred to take a story ready to his hand rather than invent one. All the good stories, indeed, seem to have invented themselves in the most obliging manner somewhere in the morning of the world, and to have been camp-followers when the famous march of mind set out from the farthest East. But where he invented his plot, as in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the “Tempest,” he is careful to have it as little complicated with needless incident as possible.

These thoughts were suggested to me by the gratuitous miscellaneousness of plot (if I may so call it) in some of the plays of John Webster, concerning whose works I am to say something this evening, a complication made still more puzzling by the motiveless conduct of many of the characters. When he invented a plot of his own, as in his comedy of “The Devil’s Law Case,” the improbabilities become insuperable, by which I mean that they are such as not merely the understanding but the imagination cannot get over. For mere common-sense has little to do with the affair. Shakespeare cared little for anachronisms, or whether there were seaports in Bohemia or not, any more than Calderon cared that gunpowder had not been invented centuries before the Christian era when he wanted an arquebus to be fired, because the noise of a shot would do for him what a silent arrow would not do. But, if possible, the understanding should have as few difficulties put in its way as possible. Shakespeare is careful to place his Ariel in the not yet wholly disenchanted Bermudas, near which Sir John Hawkins had seen a mermaid not many years before, and lays the scene for his Oberon and Titania in the dim remoteness of legendary Athens, though his clowns are unmistakably English, and though he knew as well as we do that Puck was a British goblin. In estimating material improbability as distinguished from moral, however, we should give our old dramatists the benefit of the fact that all the world was a great deal farther away in those days than in ours, when the electric telegraph puts our button into the grip of whatever commonplace our planet is capable of producing.

Moreover, in respect of Webster as of his fellows, we must, in order to understand them, first naturalize our minds in _their_ world. Chapman makes Byron say to Queen Elizabeth:--

“These stars,
Whose influences for this latitude
Distilled, and wrought in with this temperate air,
And this division of the elements,
Have with your reign brought forth more worthy spirits
For counsel, valour, height of wit, and art,
Than any other region of the earth,
Or were brought forth to all your ancestors.”

And this is apt to be the only view we take of that Golden Age, as we call it fairly enough in one, and that, perhaps, the most superficial, sense. But it was in many ways rude and savage, an age of great crimes and of the ever-brooding suspicion of great crimes. Queen Elizabeth herself was the daughter of a king as savagely cruel and irresponsible as the Grand Turk. It was an age that in Italy could breed a Cenci, and in France could tolerate the massacre of St. Bartholomew as a legitimate stroke of statecraft. But when we consider whether crime be a fit subject for tragedy, we must distinguish. Merely as crime, it is vulgar, as are the waxen images of murderers with the very rope round their necks with which they were hanged. Crime becomes then really tragic when it merely furnishes the theme for a profound psychological study of motive and character. The weakness of Webster’s two greatest plays lies in this--that crime is presented as a spectacle, and not as a means of looking into our own hearts and fathoming our own consciousness.

The scene of “The Devil’s Law Case” is Naples, then a viceroyalty of Spain, and our ancestors thought anything possible in Italy. Leonora, a widow, has a son and daughter, Romelio and Jolenta. Romelio is a rich and prosperous merchant. Jolenta is secretly betrothed to Contarino, an apparently rather spendthrift young nobleman, who has already borrowed large sums of money of Romelio on the security of his estates. Romelio is bitterly opposed to his marrying Jolenta, for reasons known only to himself; at least, no reason appears for it, except that the play could not have gone on without it. The reason he assigns is that he has a grudge against the nobility, though it appears afterwards that he himself is of noble birth, and asserts his equality with them. When Contarino, at the opening of the play, comes to urge his suit, and asks him how he looks upon it, Romelio answers:--

“Believe me, sir, as on the principal column
To advance our house; why, you bring honor with you,
Which is the soul of wealth. I shall be proud
To live to see my little nephews ride
O’ the upper hand of their uncles, and the daughters
Be ranked by heralds at solemnities
Before the mother; and all this derived
From your nobility. Do not blame me, sir,
If I be taken with ’t exceedingly;
For this same honor with us citizens
Is a thing we are mainly fond of, especially
When it comes without money, which is very seldom.
But as you do perceive my present temper,
Be sure I’m yours.”

And of this Contarino was sure, the irony of Romelio’s speech having been so delicately conveyed that he was unable to perceive it.

A little earlier in this scene a speech is put into the mouth of Romelio so characteristic of Webster’s more sententious style that I will repeat it:--

“O, my lord, lie not idle:
The chiefest action for a man of great spirit
Is never to be out of action. We should think
The soul was never put into the body,
Which has so many rare and curious pieces
Of mathematical motion, to stand still.
Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds;
I’ th’ trenches for the soldiers, i’ th’ wakeful study
For the scholar, in the furrows of the sea
For men of our profession, of all which
Arise and spring up honour.”

This recalls to mind the speech of Ulysses to Achilles in “Troilus and Cressida,” a piece of eloquence which, for the impetuous charge of serried argument and poetic beauty of illustration, grows more marvellous with every reading. But it is hardly fair to any other poet to let him remind us of Shakespeare.

Contarino, on leaving Romelio, goes to Leonora, the mother, who immediately conceives a violent passion for him. He, by way of a pretty compliment, tells her that he has a suit to her, and that it is for her picture. By this he meant her daughter, but with the flattering implication that you would not know the parent from the child. Leonora, of course, takes him literally, is gracious accordingly, and Contarino is satisfied that he has won her consent also. This scene gives occasion for a good example of Webster’s more playful style, which is perhaps worth quoting. Still apropos of her portrait, Leonora says:--

“You will enjoin me to a strange punishment.
With what a compelled face a woman sits
While she is drawing! I have noted divers
Either to feign smiles, or suck in the lips
To have a little mouth; ruffle the cheeks
To have the dimple seen; and so disorder
The face with affectation, at next sitting
It has not been the same: I have known others
Have lost the entire fashion of their face
In half an hour’s sitting....
But indeed
If ever I would have mine drawn to th’ life,
I’d have a painter steal it at such a time
I were devoutly kneeling at my prayers;
There’s then a heavenly beauty in ’t; the soul
Moves in the superficies.”

The poet shows one of his habitual weaknesses here in being so far tempted by the chance of saying a pretty thing as to make somebody say it who naturally would not. There is really a worse waste than had it been thrown away. I am inclined to think men as vain about their portraits as Leonora makes women to be, or else the story of Cromwell’s wart would not be so famous. However, Contarino goes away satisfied with the result of his embassy, saying to himself:--

“She has got some intelligence how I intend to marry
Her daughter, and ingenuously perceived
That by her picture, which I begged of her,
I meant the fair Jolenta.”

There is no possible reason why he should not have conveyed this intelligence to her himself, and Leonora must have been ingenious indeed to divine it, except that the plot would not allow it. Presently another match is found for Jolenta in Ercole, which Romelio favors for reasons again known only to himself, though he is a noble quite as much as Contarino. Ercole is the pattern of a chivalrous gentleman. Though he at once falls in love with Jolenta, according to Marlowe’s rule that “he never loved that loved not at first sight,” and though Romelio and the mother both urge the immediate signing of the contract, he refuses.

“Lady, I will do
A manly office for you; I will leave you
To th’ freedom of your own soul; may it move
Whither Heaven and you please!

* * * * *

I’ll leave you, excellent lady, and withal
Leave a heart with you so entirely yours
That I protest, had I the least of hope
To enjoy you, though I were to wait the time
That scholars do in taking their degree
In the noble arts, ’t were nothing: howsoe’er,
He parts from you, that will depart from life
To do you any service; and so humbly
I take my leave.”

Never, I think, was more delicate compliment paid to a woman than in that fine touch which puts the service of her on a level with the “noble arts.” On this ground of sentiment idealized by devotion, Webster always moves with the assured ease and dignified familiarity of a thorough gentleman.

Ercole’s pretension to the hand of Jolenta leads, of course, to a duel with Contarino. They had been fellow-students together at Padua, and the scene in which the preliminaries of the duel are arranged is pitched on as nobly grave a key as can be conceived. Lamb very justly calls it “the model of a well-arranged and gentlemanlike difference.” There is no swagger and no bravado in it, as is too commonly apt to be the case in the plays of that age. There is something Spanish in its dignity. To show what its tone is, I quote the opening. It is Contarino who first speaks.