Chapter III: Part 3

“Sir, my love to you has proclaimed you one
Whose word was still led by a noble thought,
And that thought followed by as fair a deed.
Deceive not that opinion. We were students
At Padua together, and have long
To th’ world’s eye shown like friends; was it hearty
On your part to me?

_Erc._ Unfeigned.

_Con._ You are false
To the good thought I held of you, and now
Join the worst part of man to you, your malice,
To uphold that falsehood: sacred innocence
Is fled your bosom. Signior, I must tell you,
To draw the picture of unkindness truly
Is to express two that have dearly loved
And fall’n at variance; ’t is a wonder to me,
Knowing my interest in the fair Jolenta,
That you should love her.

_Erc._ Compare her beauty and my youth together
And you will find the fair effects of love
No miracle at all.”

They fight, and both fall mortally wounded, as it is supposed. Ercole is reported dead, and Contarino dying, having first made a will in favor of Jolenta. Romelio, disguised as a Jew, to avenge the injury to himself in the death of Ercole, and to make sure that Contarino shall not survive to alter his will, gets admission to him by bribing his surgeons, and stabs him. This saves his life by reopening the old wound and letting forth its virus. Of course both he and Ercole recover, and both conceal themselves, though why, it is hard to say, except that they are not wanted again till towards the end of the play. Romelio, unaware of his mother’s passion for Contarino, tells her, as a piece of good news she will be glad to hear, of what he has done. She at once resolves on a most horrible and unnatural revenge. Her speech has a kind of savage grandeur in it which Webster was fond of showing, for he rightly felt that it was his strongest quality, though it often tempted him too far, till it became bestial in its ferocity. It is to be observed that he was on his guard here, and gives us a hint, as you will see, in a highly imaginative passage, that Leonora’s brain was turning:--

“I will make you chief mourner, believe it.
Never was woe like mine. O, that my care
And absolute study to preserve his life
Should be his absolute ruin! Is he gone, then?
There is no plague i’ th’ world can be compar’d
To impossible desire; for they are plagu’d
In the desire itself. Never, O, never
Shall I behold him living, in whose life
I liv’d far sweetlier than in mine own!
A precise curiosity has undone me: why did I not
Make my love known directly? ’T had not been
Beyond example for a matron
To affect i’ th’ honourable way of marriage
So youthful a person. O, I shall run mad!
For as we love our youngest children best,
So the last fruit of our affection,
Wherever we bestow it, is most strong,
Most violent, most unresistible,
Since ’t is indeed our latest harvest-home,
Last merriment ’fore winter; and we widows,
As men report of our best picture-makers,
We love the piece we are in hand with better
Than all the excellent work we have done before.
And my son has depriv’d me of all this! Ha, my son!
I’ll be a Fury to him; like an Amazon lady,
I’d cut off this right pap that gave him suck,
To shoot him dead. I’ll no more tender him,
Than had a wolf stol’n to my teat i’ the night
And robb’d me of my milk; nay, such a creature
I should love better far. Ha, ha! what say you?
I do talk to somewhat, methinks; it may be
My evil Genius. Do not the bells ring?
I have a strange noise in my head: O, fly in pieces!
Come, age, and wither me into the malice
Of those that have been happy! Let me have
One property more than the devil of hell;
Let me envy the pleasure of youth heartily;
Let me in this life fear no kind of ill,
That have no good to hope for; let me die
In the distraction of that worthy princess
Who loathed food, and sleep, and ceremony,
For thought of losing that brave gentleman
She would fain have sav’d, had not a false conveyance
Express’d him stubborn-hearted. Let me sink
Where neither man nor memory may ever find me.”

Webster forestalled Balzac by two hundred years in what he says of a woman’s last passion. The revenge on which she fixes is, at the cost of her own honor, to declare Romelio illegitimate. She says that his true father was one Crispiano, a Spanish gentleman, the friend of her husband. Naturally, when the trial comes on, Crispiano, unrecognized, turns up in court as the very judge who is to preside over it. He first gets the year of the alleged adultery fixed by the oath of Leonora and her maid, and then professes to remember that Crispiano had told him of giving a portrait of himself to Leonora, has it sent for, and, revealing himself, identifies himself by it, saying, prettily enough (those old dramatists have a way of stating dry facts so fancifully as to make them blossom, as it were),

“Behold, I am the shadow of this shadow.”

He then proves an alibi at the date in question by his friend Ariosto, whom meanwhile he has just promoted to the bench in his own place, by virtue of a convenient commission from the king of Spain, which he has in his pocket. At the end of the trial, the counsel for Leonora exclaimed:--

“Ud’s foot, we’re spoiled;
Why, our client is proved an honest woman!”

Which I cite only because it reminds me to say that Webster has a sense of humor more delicate, and a way of showing it less coarse, than most of his brother dramatists. Meanwhile Webster saves Romelio from being hateful beyond possibility of condonation by making him perfectly fearless. He says finely:--

“I cannot set myself so many fathom
Beneath the height of my true heart as fear.
Let me continue
An honest man, which I am very certain
A coward can never be.”

The last words convey an important and even profound truth. And let me say now, once for all, that Webster abounds, more than any of his contemporaries except Chapman, in these metaphysical apothegms, and that he introduces them naturally, while Chapman is too apt to drag them in by the ears. Here is another as good, I am tempted to say, as many of Shakespeare’s, save only in avarice of words. When Leonora is suborning Winifred, her maid, to aid her in the plot against her son, she says:--

“Come hither:
I have a weighty secret to impart,
But I would have thee first confirm to me
How I may trust that thou canst keep my counsel
Beyond death.

_Win._ Why, mistress, ’t is your only way
To enjoin me first that I reveal to you
The worst act I e’er did in all my life;
One secret so shall bind another.

_Leon._ Thou instruct’st me
Most ingeniously; for indeed it is not fit,
Where any act is plotted that is naught,
Any of counsel to it should be good;
And, in a thousand ills have happ’d i’ th’ world,
The intelligence of one another’s shame
Hath wrought far more effectually than the tie
Of conscience or religion.”

The plot has other involutions of so unpleasant a nature now through change of manners that I shall but allude to them. They are perhaps intended to darken Romelio’s character to the proper Websterian sable, but they certainly rather make an eddy in the current of the action than hasten it as they should.

I have briefly analyzed this play because its plot is not a bad sample of a good many others, and because the play itself is less generally known than Webster’s deservedly more famous “Vittoria Corombona” and the “Duchess of Malfi.” Before coming to these, I will mention his “Appius and Virginia,” a spirited, well-constructed play (for here the simplicity of the incidents kept him within bounds), and, I think, as good as any other founded on a Roman story except Shakespeare’s. It is of a truly Roman temper, and perhaps, therefore, incurs a suspicion of being cast iron. Webster, like Ben Jonson, knew, theoretically at least, how a good play should be put together. In his preface to “The Devil’s Law-Case” he says: “A great part of the grace of this lay in action; yet can no action ever be gracious, where the decency of the language and ingenious structure of the scene arrive not to make up a perfect harmony.”

“The White Devil, or Vittoria Corombona,” produced in 1612, and the “Duchess of Malfi,” in 1616, are the two works by which Webster is remembered. In these plays there is almost something like a fascination of crime and horror. Our eyes dazzle with them. The imagination that conceived them is a ghastly imagination. Hell is naked before it. It is the imagination of nightmare, but of no vulgar nightmare. I would rather call it fantasy than imagination, for there is something fantastic in its creations, and the fantastic is dangerously near to the grotesque, while the imagination, where it is most authentic, is most serene. Even to elicit strong emotion, it is the still small voice that is most effective; nor is Webster unaware of this, as I shall show presently. Both these plays are full of horrors, yet they do move pity and terror strongly also. We feel that we are under the control of a usurped and illegitimate power, but it is power. I remember seeing a picture in some Belgian church where an angel makes a motion to arrest the hand of the Almighty just as it is stretched forth in the act of the creation. If the angel foresaw that the world to be created was to be such a one as Webster conceived, we can fully understand his impulse. Through both plays there is a vapor of fresh blood and a scent of church-yard mould in the air. They are what children call _creepy_. Ghosts are ready at any moment: they seem, indeed, to have formed a considerable part of the population in those days. As an instance of the almost ludicrous way in which they were employed, take this stage direction from Chapman’s “Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois.” “Music, and the ghost of Bussy enters leading the ghosts of the Guise, Monsieur, Cardinal Guise, and Chatillon; they dance about the body and _exeunt_.” It is fair to say that Webster’s ghosts are far from comic.

Let me briefly analyze “The White Devil.” Vittoria Corombona, a beautiful woman, is married to Camillo, whom she did not love. She becomes the paramour of the Duke of Brachiano, whose Duchess is the sister of Francesco de’ Medici and of Cardinal Monticelso. One of the brothers of Vittoria, Flamineo, is secretary to Brachiano, and contrives to murder Camillo for them. Vittoria, as there is no sufficient proof to fix the charge of murder upon her, is tried for incontinency, and sent to a house of Convertites, whence Brachiano spirits her away, meaning to marry her. In the mean while Brachiano’s Duchess is got out of the way by poison; the lips of his portrait, which she kisses every night before going to bed, having been smeared with a deadly drug to that end. There is a Count Ludovico, who had proffered an unholy love to the Duchess, but had been repulsed by her, and he gladly offers himself as the minister of vengeance. Just as Brachiano is arming for a tournament arranged for the purpose by his brother-in-law, the Duke of Florence, Ludovico poisons his helmet, so that he shortly dies in torture. Ludovico then murders Vittoria, Zanche, her Moorish maid, and Flamineo, and is himself shot by the guards of the young Duke Giovanni, son of Brachiano, who break in upon him just as he has completed his butchery. There are but four characters in the play unstained with crime--Cornelia, Vittoria’s mother; Marcello, her younger son; the Duchess of Brachiano; and her son, the young Duke. There are three scenes in the play remarkable for their effectiveness, or for their power in different ways--the trial scene of Vittoria, the death scene of Brachiano, and that of Vittoria. There is another--the burial of Marcello--which is pathetic as few men have known how to be so simply and with so little effort as Webster.

“_Fran. de’ Med._ Your reverend mother
Is grown a very old woman in two hours.
I found them winding of Marcello’s corse;
And there is such a solemn melody,
’Tween doleful songs, tears, and sad elegies--
Such as old grandams watching by the dead
Were wont to outwear the nights with--that, believe me,
I had no eyes to guide me forth the room,
They were so o’ercharg’d with water.

_Flam._ I will see them.

_Fran. de’ Med._ ’T were much uncharity in you, for your sight
Will add unto their tears.

_Flam._ I will see them:
They are behind the traverse; I’ll discover
Their superstitious howling.

[_Draws the curtain._ Cornelia, Zanche, _and three other_
Ladies _discovered winding_ Marcello’s _corse_. _A song._

_Cor._ This rosemary is wither’d; pray, get fresh;
I would have these herbs grow up in his grave
When I am dead and rotten. Reach the bays;
I’ll tie a garland here about his head;
’T will keep my boy from lightning. This sheet
I have kept this twenty year, and every day
Hallow’d it with my prayers. I did not think
He should have wore it.

_Zanche._ Look you who are yonder.

_Cor._ O, reach me the flowers.

_Zanche._ Her ladyship’s foolish.

_Lady._ Alas, her grief
Hath turn’d her child again!

_Cor._ You ’re very welcome:
There’s rosemary for you; and rue for you;

[_To_ Flamineo.

Heart’s-ease for you; I pray make much of it:
I have left more for myself.

_Fran. de’ Med._ Lady, who’s this?

_Cor._ You are, I take it, the grave-maker.

_Flam._ So.

_Zanche._ ’T is Flamineo.

_Cor._ Will you make me such a fool? Here’s a white hand:
Can blood so soon be wash’d out? Let me see:
When screech-owls croak upon the chimney-tops,
And the strange cricket i’ the oven sings and hops,
When yellow spots do on your hands appear,
Be certain then you of a corse shall hear.
Out upon ’t, how ’t is speckled! h’as handled a toad, sure.
Cowslip-water is good for the memory:
Pray, buy me three ounces of ’t.

_Flam._ I would I were from hence.

_Cor._ Do you hear, sir?
I’ll give you a saying which my grandmother
Was wont, when she heard the bell toll, to sing o’er
Unto her lute.

_Flam._ Do, an you will, do.

_Cor._ ‘Call for the robin-redbreast and the wren,

[Cornelia _doth this in several forms of distraction_.

Since o’er shady groves they hover,
And with leaves and flowers do cover
The friendless bodies of unburied men.
Call unto his funeral dole
The ant, the field-mouse, and the mole,
To rear him hillocks that shall keep him warm,
And (when gay tombs are robb’d) sustain no harm,
But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men,
For with his nails he’ll dig them up again.’
They would not bury him ’cause he died in a quarrel;
But I have an answer for them:
‘Let holy church receive him duly,
Since he paid the church-tithes truly.’
His wealth is summ’d, and this is all his store;
This poor men get, and great men get no more.
Now the wares are gone, we may shut up shop.
Bless you all, good people!

[_Exeunt_ Cornelia, Zanche, _and_ Ladies.

_Flam._ I have a strange thing in me, to the which
I cannot give a name, without it be
Compassion. I pray, leave me.”

In the trial scene the defiant haughtiness of Vittoria, entrenched in her illustrious birth, against the taunts of the Cardinal, making one think of Browning’s Ottima, “magnificent in sin,” excites a sympathy which must check itself if it would not become admiration. She dies with the same unconquerable spirit, not shaming in death at least the blood of the Vitelli that ran in her veins. As to Flamineo, I think it plain that but for Iago he would never have existed; and it has always interested me to find in Webster more obvious reminiscences of Shakespeare, without conscious imitation of him, than in any other dramatist of the time. Indeed, the style of Shakespeare cannot be imitated, because it is the expression of his individual genius. Coleridge tells us that he thought he was copying it when writing the tragedy of “Remorse,” and found, when all was done, that he had reproduced Massinger instead. Iago seems to me one of Shakespeare’s most extraordinary divinations. He has embodied in him the corrupt Italian intellect of the Renaissance. Flamineo is a more degraded example of the same type, but without Iago’s motives of hate and revenge. He is a mere incarnation of selfish sensuality. These two tragedies of “Vittoria Corombona” and the “Duchess of Malfi” are, I should say, the most vivid pictures of that repulsively fascinating period that we have in English. Alfred de Musset’s “Lorenzaccio” is, however, far more terrible, because there the horror is moral wholly, and never physical, as too often in Webster.

There is something in Webster that reminds me of Victor Hugo. There is the same confusion at times of what is big with what is great, the same fondness for the merely spectacular, the same insensibility to repulsive details, the same indifference to the probable or even to the natural, the same leaning toward the grotesque, the same love of effect at whatever cost; and there is also the same impressiveness of result. Whatever other effect Webster may produce upon us, he never leaves us indifferent. We may blame, we may criticise, as much as we will; we may say that all this ghastliness is only a trick of theatrical blue-light; we shudder, and admire nevertheless. We may say he is melodramatic, that his figures are magic-lantern pictures that waver and change shape with the curtain on which they are thrown: it matters not; he stirs us with an emotion deeper than any mere artifice could stir.

IV

CHAPMAN

As I turn from one to another of the old dramatists, and see how little is known about their personal history, I find a question continually coming back, invincible as a fly with a strong sense of duty, which I shall endeavor to fan away by a little discussion. This question is whether we gain or lose by our ignorance of the personal details of their history. Would it make any difference in our enjoyment of what they wrote, if we had the means of knowing that one of them was a good son, or the other a bad husband? that one was a punctual paymaster, and that the other never paid his washer-woman for the lustration of the legendary single shirt without which he could not face a neglectful world, or hasten to the theatre with the manuscript of the new play for which posterity was to be more thankful than the manager? Is it a love of knowledge or of gossip that renders these private concerns so interesting to us, and makes us willing to intrude on the awful seclusion of the dead, or to flatten our noses against the windows of the living? The law is more scrupulous than we in maintaining the inviolability of private letters. Are we to profit by every indiscretion, by every breach of confidence? Of course, in whatever the man himself has made a part of the record we are entitled to find what intimations we can of his genuine self, of the real man, veiled under the draperies of convention and circumstance, who was visible for so many years, yet perhaps never truly seen, obscurely known to himself, conjectured even by his intimates, and a mere name to all beside. And yet how much do we really know even of men who profess to admit us to every corner of their nature--of Montaigne? of Rousseau? As in the box under the table at which the automaton chess-player sat, there is always a closet within that which is so frankly opened to us, and into this the enigma himself absconds while we are staring at nothing in the other. Even in autobiographies, it is only by inadvertencies, by unconscious betrayals when the author is off his guard, that we make our discoveries. In a man’s works we read between the lines, not always wisely. No doubt there is an intense interest in watching the process by which a detective critic like Sainte-Beuve dogs his hero or his victim, as the case may be, with tireless sympathy or vindictive sagacity, tracking out clew after clew, and constructing out of the life a comment on the works, or, again, from the works divining the character. But our satisfaction depends upon the bias with which the inquisition is conducted, and, after assisting at this process in the case of Châteaubriand, for example, are we sure that we know the man better, or only what was morbid in the man, which, perhaps, it was not profitable for us to know?

But is it not after the discreditable particulars which excite a correspondingly discreditable curiosity that we are eager, and these that we read with greatest zest? So it should seem if we judged by the fact that biography, and especially that of men of letters, tends more and more towards these indecent exposures. The concern of the biographer should be with the mind, and not with the body of his victim. We are willing to be taken into the parlor and the library, but may fairly refuse to be dragged down to the kitchen or to look into the pantry. Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” does not come under this condemnation, being mainly a record of the great doctor’s opinions, and, since done with his own consent, is almost to be called autobiographical. There are certain memoirs after reading which one blushes as if he had not only been peeping through a key-hole, but had been caught in the act. No doubt there is a fearful truth in Shakespeare’s saying,--

“The evil that men do lives after them,”

but I should limit it to the evil done by otherwise good men, for it is only in this kind of evil that others will seek excuse for what they are tempted to do, or palliation for what they have already done. I like to believe, and to think I see reason for believing, that it is the good that is in men which is immortal, and beneficently immortal, and that the sooner the perishable husk in which it was enveloped is suffered to perish and crumble away, the sooner we shall know them as they really were. I remember how Longfellow used to laugh in his kindly way when he told the story of the French visitor who asked him for some _révélations intimes_ of his domestic life, to be published in a Paris newspaper. No man would have lost less by the most staring light that could have been admitted to those sacred retreats, but he shrank instinctively from being an accomplice to its admission. I am not sure that I ought to be grateful for the probable identification of the Dark Lady to whom twenty-five of Shakespeare’s sonnets are addressed, much as I should commend the research and acuteness that rendered it possible. We had, indeed, more than suspected that these sonnets had an address within the bills of mortality, for no such red-blooded flame as this sometimes is ever burned on the altar of the Ideal. But whoever she was, she was unembodied so long as she was nameless, she moved about in a world not realized, sacred in her inaccessibility, a fainter image of that image of her which had been mirrored in the poet’s eyes; and this vulgarization of her into flesh and blood seems to pull down the sonnets from heaven’s sweetest air to the turbid level of our earthier apprehension. Here is no longer an object for the upward, but for the furtive and sidelong glance. A gentleman once told me that being compelled to part with some family portraits, he requested a dealer to price that of a collateral ancestress by Gainsborough. He thought the sum offered surprisingly small, and said so.

“I beg your pardon for asking the question,” said the dealer, “but business is business. You are not, I understand, a direct descendant of this lady. Was her name ever connected with any scandal? If so, I could double my offer.”

Somewhere in our in-human nature there must be an appetite for these unsavory personalities, but they are degrading in a double sense--degrading to him whose secret is betrayed, and to him who consents to share in the illicit knowledge of it. These things are none of our business, and yet it is remarkable how scrupulously exact even those most neglectful in their own affairs are in attending to the business of other people. I think, on the whole, that it is fortunate for us that our judgment of what the old dramatists did should be so little disturbed by any misinformation as to what they were, for to be imperfectly informed is to be misinformed, and even to look through contemporary eyes is to look through very crooked glass. Sometimes we may draw a pretty infallible inference as to a man’s temperament, though not as to his character, from his writings. And this, I think, is the case with Chapman.

George Chapman was born at Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, in 1559 probably, though Anthony Wood makes him two years older, and died in London on the 12th of May, 1634. He was buried in the church-yard of St. Giles in the Fields, where the monument put up over him by Inigo Jones is still standing. He was five years older than Shakespeare, whom he survived for nearly twenty years, and fifteen years older than Ben Jonson, who out-lived him three years. There is good ground for believing that he studied at both Universities, though he took a degree at neither. While there he is said to have devoted himself to the classics, and to have despised philosophy. This contempt, however, seems to me somewhat doubtful, for he is certainly the most obtrusively metaphysical of all our dramatists. After leaving the University, he is supposed to have travelled, which is as convenient a way as any other to fill up the gap of sixteen years between 1578, when he ended his academic studies, and 1594, when we first have notice of him in London, during which period he vanishes altogether. Whether he travelled in France and Italy or not, he seems to have become in some way familiar with the languages of those countries, and there is some reason for thinking that he understood German also. We have two glimpses of him during his life in London. In 1605 he, with Jonson and Marston, produced a play called “Eastward Ho!” Some “injurious reflections” on the Scottish nation in it angered King James, and the authors were imprisoned for a few days in the Fleet. Again, in 1606, the French ambassador, Beaumont, writes to his master: “I caused certain players to be forbid from acting ‘The History of the Duke of Biron;’ when, however, they saw that the whole court had left town, they persisted in acting it; nay, they brought upon the stage the Queen of France and Mlle, de Verneuil. The former having first accosted the latter with very hard words, gave her a box on the ear. At my suit three of them were arrested; but the principal person, the author, escaped.” This was Chapman’s tragedy, and in neither of the editions printed two years later does the objectionable passage appear. It is curious that this interesting illustration of the history of the English stage should have been unearthed from the French archives by Von Raumer in his “History of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.”

Chapman was a man of grave character and regular life. We may, perhaps, infer from some passages in his plays that he heartily hated Puritans. There are other passages that might lead one to suspect him of a leaning towards Catholicism, or at least of regretting the schism of the Reformation. The scene of “Byron’s Conspiracy” and “Byron’s Tragedy” is laid in France, to be sure, in the time of Henry IV., but not to mention that Chapman’s characters are almost always the mere mouth-pieces of his own thought, there is a fervor in the speeches to which I have alluded which gives to them an air of personal conviction. In “Byron’s Tragedy” there is a eulogy of Philip II. and his policy very well worth reading by those who like to keep their minds judicially steady, for it displays no little historical insight. It certainly shows courage and independence to have written such a vindication only eighteen years after the Armada, and when national prejudice against Spain was so strong.

Chapman’s friendships are the strongest testimonials we have of his character. Prince Henry, whose untimely death may have changed the course of English history, and with it that of our own, was his patron. So was Carr, Earl of Somerset, whom he did not desert in ill fortune. Inigo Jones was certainly his intimate friend; and he is said to have been, though it seems doubtful, on terms of friendly intercourse with Bacon. In dedicating his “Byron’s Conspiracy” to Sir Thomas Walsingham, he speaks as to an old friend. With his fellow-poets he appears to have been generally on good terms. His long life covered the whole of the Elizabethan age of literature, and before he died he might have read the earlier poems of Milton.

He wrote seven comedies and eight tragedies that have come down to us, and probably others that have perished. Nearly all his comedies are formless and coarse, but with what seems to me a kind of stiff and wilful coarseness, as if he were trying to make his personages speak in what he supposed to be their proper dialect, in which he himself was unpractised, having never learned it in those haunts, familiar to most of his fellow-poets, where it was vernacular. His characters seem, indeed, types, and he frankly proclaims himself an idealist in the dedication of “The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois” to Sir Thomas Howard, where he says, “And for the authentical truth of either person or action, who (worth the respecting) will expect it in a Poem whose subject is not truth, but things like truth?” Of his comedies, “All Fools” is by general consent the best. It is less lumpish than the others, and is, on the whole, lively and amusing. In his comedies he indulges himself freely in all that depreciation of woman which had been so long traditional with the sex which has the greatest share in making them what they are. But he thought he was being comic, and there is, on the whole, no more depressing sight than a naturally grave man under that delusion. His notion of love, too, is coarse and animal, or rather the notion he thinks proper to express through his characters. And yet in his comedies there are two passages, one in praise of love, and the other of woman, certainly among the best of their kind. The first is a speech of Valerio in “All Fools:”--

“I tell thee love is Nature’s second sun
Causing a spring of virtues where he shines;
And as without the sun, the world’s great eye,
All colors, beauties, both of art and nature,
Are given in vain to men, so without love
All beauties bred in women are in vain,
All virtues born in men lie buried;
For love informs them as the sun doth colors;
And as the sun, reflecting his warm beams
Against the earth, begets all fruits and flowers,
So love, fair shining in the inward man,
Brings forth in him the honorable fruits
Of valor, wit, virtue, and haughty thoughts,
Brave resolution and divine discourse:
O, ’t is the paradise, the heaven of earth!
And didst thou know the comfort of two hearts
In one delicious harmony united;
As to enjoy one joy, think both one thought,
Live both one life and therein double life,

* * * * *

Thou wouldst abhor thy tongue for blasphemy.”

And now let me read to you a passage in praise of women from “The Gentleman Usher.” It is not great poetry, but it has fine touches of discrimination both in feeling and expression:--

“Let no man value at a little price
A virtuous woman’s counsel; her winged spirit
Is feathered oftentimes with heavenly words,
And, like her beauty, ravishing and pure;
The weaker body still the stronger soul.

* * * * *

O what a treasure is a virtuous wife,
Discreet and loving! not one gift on earth
Makes a man’s life so highly bound to heaven;
She gives him double forces, to endure
And to enjoy, by being one with him.”

Then, after comparing her with power, wealth, music, and delicate diet, which delight but imperfectly,--

“But a true wife both sense and soul delights,
And mixeth not her good with any ill.
All store without her leaves a man but poor,
And with her poverty is exceeding store.”

Chapman himself, in a passage of his “Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois,” condemns the very kind of comedy he wrote as a concession to public taste:--

“Nay, we must now have nothing brought on stages
But puppetry, and pied ridiculous antics;
Men thither come to laugh and feed fool-fat,
Check at all goodness there as being profaned;
When wheresoever goodness comes, she makes
The place still sacred, though with other feet
Never so much ’t is scandaled and polluted.
Let me learn anything that fits a man,
In any stables shown, as well as stages.”

Of his tragedies, the general judgment has pronounced “Byron’s Conspiracy” and “Byron’s Tragedy” to be the finest, though they have less genuine poetical ecstasy than his “d’Ambois.” The “Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France,” is almost wholly from his hand, as all its editors agree, and as is plain from internal evidence, for Chapman has some marked peculiarities of thought and style which are unmistakable. Because Shirley had some obscure share in it, it is printed with his works, and omitted by the latest editor of Chapman. Yet it is far more characteristic of him than “Alphonsus,” or “Cæsar and Pompey.” The character of Chabot has a nobility less prompt to vaunt itself, less conscious of itself, less obstreperous, I am tempted to say, than is common with Chapman. There is one passage in the play which I will quote, because of the plain allusion in it to the then comparatively recent fate of Lord Bacon. I am not sure whether it has been before remarked or not. The Lord Chancellor of France is impeached of the same crimes with Bacon. He is accused also of treacherous cruelty to Chabot, as Bacon was reproached for ingratitude to Essex. He is sentenced like him to degradation of rank, to a heavy fine, and to imprisonment at the King’s pleasure. Like Bacon, again, he twice confesses his guilt before sentence is passed on him, and throws himself on the King’s mercy:--

“Hear me, great Judges; if you have not lost
For my sake all your charities, I beseech you
Let the King know my heart is full of penitence;
Calm his high-going sea, or in that tempest
I ruin to eternity. O, my lords,
Consider your own places and the helms
You sit at; while with all your providence
You steer, look forth and see devouring quicksands!
My ambition now is punished, and my pride
Of state and greatness falling into nothing;
I, that had never time, through vast employments,
To think of Heaven, feel His revengeful wrath
Boiling my blood and scorching up my entrails.
There’s doomsday in my conscience, black and horrid,
For my abuse of justice; but no stings
Prick with that terror as the wounds I made
Upon the pious Admiral. Some good man
Bear my repentance thither; he is merciful,
And may incline the King to stay his lightning,
Which threatens my confusion, that my free
Resign of title, office, and what else
My pride look’d at, would buy my poor life’s safety;
Forever banish me the Court, and let
Me waste my life far-off in some mean village.”

After the Chancellor’s sentence, his secretary says:--

“I could have wished him fall on softer ground
For his good parts.”

Bacon’s monument, in St. Michael’s Church at St. Alban’s, was erected by _his_ secretary, Sir Thomas Meautys. Bacon did not appear at his trial; but there are several striking parallels between his letters of confession and the speech you have just heard.

Another posthumously published tragedy of Chapman’s, the “Revenge for Honor,” is, in conception, the most original of them all, and the plot seems to be of his own invention. It has great improbabilities, but as the story is Oriental, we find it easier to forgive them. It is, on the whole, a very striking play, and with more variety of character in it than is common with Chapman.

In general he seems to have been led to the choice of his heroes (and these sustain nearly the whole weight of the play in which they figure) by some half-conscious sympathy of temperament. They are impetuous, have an overweening self-confidence, and an orotund way of expressing it that fitted them perfectly to be the mouth-pieces for an eloquence always vehement and impassioned, sometimes rising to a sublimity of self-assertion. Where it is fine, it is nobly fine, but too often it raves itself into a kind of fury recalling Hamlet’s word “robustious,” and seems to be shouted through a speaking-trumpet in a gale of wind. He is especially fond of describing battles, and the rush of his narration is then like a charge of cavalry. Of his first tragedy, “Bussy d’Ambois,” Dryden says, with that mixture of sure instinct and hasty judgment which makes his prose so refreshing: “I have sometimes wondered in the reading what has become of those glaring colors which amazed me in ‘Bussy d’Ambois’ upon the theatre; but when I had taken up what I supposed a falling star, I found I had been cozened with a jelly, nothing but a cold dull mass, which glittered no longer than it was shooting; a dwarfish thought dressed up in gigantic words, repetition in abundance, looseness of expression, and gross hyperbole; the sense of one line expanded prodigiously into ten; and, to sum up all, incorrect English, and a hideous mingle of false poetry and true nonsense; or, at best, a scantling of wit which lay gasping for life and groaning beneath a heap of rubbish.”

There _is_ hyperbole in Chapman, and perhaps Dryden saw it the more readily and disliked it the more that his own tragedies are full of it. But Dryden was always hasty, not for the first time in speaking of Chapman. I am pretty safe in saying that he had probably only run his eye over “Bussy d’Ambois,” and that it did not happen to fall on any of those finely inspired passages which are not only more frequent in it than in any other of Chapman’s plays, but of a more purely poetical quality. Dryden was irritated by a consciousness of his own former barbarity of taste, which had led him to prefer Sylvester’s translation of Du Bartas. What he says as to the success of “Bussy d’Ambois” on the stage is interesting.

In saying that the sense of “one line is prodigiously expanded into ten,” Dryden certainly puts his finger on one of Chapman’s faults. He never knew when to stop. But it is not true that the sense is expanded, if by that we are to understand that Chapman watered his thought to make it fill up. There is abundance of thought in him, and of very suggestive thought too, but it is not always in the right place. He is the most sententious of our poets--sententious to a fault, as we feel in his continuation of “Hero and Leander.” In his annotations to the sixteenth book of his translation of the Iliad, he seems to have been thinking of himself in speaking of Homer. He says: “And here have we ruled a case against our plain and smug writers, that, because their own unwieldiness will not let them rise themselves, would have every man grovel like them.... But herein this case is ruled against such men that they affirm these hyperthetical or superlative sort of expressions and illustrations are too bold and bumbasted, and out of that word is spun that which they call our fustian, their plain writing being stuff nothing so substantial, but such gross sowtege or hairpatch as every goose may eat oats through.... But the chief end why I extend this annotation is only to entreat your note here of Homer’s manner of writing, which, to utter his after-store of matter and variety, is so presse and puts on with so strong a current that it far overruns the most laborious pursuer if he have not a poetical foot and Poesy’s quick eye to guide it.”

Chapman has indeed a “great after-store of matter” which encumbers him, and does sometimes “far overrun the most laborious pursuer,” but many a poetical foot, with Poesy’s quick eye to guide it, has loved to follow. He has kindled an enthusiasm of admiration such as no other poet of his day except Shakespeare has been able to kindle. In this very play of “Bussy d’Ambois” there is a single line of which Charles Lamb says that “in all poetry I know nothing like it.” When Chapman _is_ fine, it is in a way all his own. There is then an incomparable amplitude in his style, as when, to quote a phrase from his translation of Homer, the Lightener Zeus “lets down a great sky out of heaven.” There is a quality of northwestern wind in it, which, if sometimes too blusterous, is yet taken into the lungs with an exhilarating expansion. Hyperbole is overshooting the mark. No doubt Chapman sometimes did this, but this excess is less depressing than its opposite, and at least proves vigor in the bowman. His bow was like that of Ulysses, which none could bend but he, and even where the arrow went astray, it sings as it flies, and one feels, to use his own words, as if it were

“the shaft
Shot at the sun by angry Hercules,
And into splinters by the thunder broken.”

Dryden taxes Chapman with “incorrect English.” This is altogether wrong. His English is of the best, and far less licentious than Dryden’s own, which was also the best of its kind. Chapman himself says (or makes Montsurry in “Bussy d’Ambois” say for him):--

“Worthiest poets
Shun common and plebeian forms of speech,
Every illiberal and affected phrase,
To clothe their matter, and together tie
Matter and form with art and decency.”

And yet I should say that if Chapman’s English had any fault, it comes of his fondness for homespun words, and for images which, if not essentially vulgar, become awkwardly so by being forced into company where they feel themselves out of place. For example, in the poem which prefaces his Homer, full of fine thought, fitly uttered in his large way, he suddenly compares the worldlings he is denouncing to “an itching horse leaning to a block or a May-pole.” He would have justified himself, I suppose, by Homer’s having compared Ajax to an ass, for I think he really half believed that the spirit of Homer had entered into him and replaced his own. So in “Bussy,”--

“Love is a razor cleansing if well used,
But fetcheth blood still being the least abused.”

But I think the incongruity is to be explained as an unconscious reaction (just as we see men of weak character fond of strong language) against a partiality he felt in himself for costly phrases. His fault is not the purple patch upon frieze, but the patch of frieze upon purple. In general, one would say that his style was impetuous like the man himself, and wants the calm which is the most convincing evidence of great power that has no misgivings of itself. I think Chapman figured forth his own ideal in his “Byron:”--

“Give me a spirit that on this life’s rough sea
Loves to have his sails filled with a lusty wind,
Even till his sail-yards tremble, his masts crack,
And his rapt ship run on her side so low
That she drinks water and her keel ploughs air.
There is no danger to a man that knows
What life and death is; there’s not any law
Exceeds his knowledge; neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law.”

Professor Minto thinks that the rival poet of whom Shakespeare speaks in his eighty-sixth sonnet was Chapman, and enough confirmation of this theory may be racked out of dates and other circumstances to give it at least some probability. However this may be, the opening line of the sonnet contains as good a characterization of Chapman’s style as if it had been meant for him:--

“Was it the proud full sail of his great verse?”

I have said that Chapman was generally on friendly terms with his brother poets. But there is a passage in the preface to the translation of the Iliad which marks an exception. He says: “And much less I weigh the frontless detractions of some stupid ignorants, that, no more knowing me than their beastly ends, and I ever (to my knowledge) blest from their sight, whisper behind me vilifyings of my translation, out of the French affirming them, when, both in French and all other languages but his own, our with-all-skill-enriched Poet is so poor and unpleasing that no man can discern from whence flowed his so generally given eminence and admiration.” I know not who was intended, but the passage piques my curiosity. In what is said about language there is a curious parallel with what Ben Jonson says of Shakespeare, and the “generally given eminence and admiration” applies to him also. The “with-all-skill-enriched” reminds me of another peculiarity of Chapman--his fondness for compound words. He seems to have thought that he condensed more meaning into a phrase if he dovetailed all its words together by hyphens. This sometimes makes the verses of his translation of Homer difficult to read musically, if not metrically.

Chapman has been compared with Seneca, but I see no likeness in their manner unless we force an analogy between the rather braggart Hercules of the one and d’Ambois of the other. The most famous passage in Seneca’s tragedies is, I suppose, the answer of Medea when asked what remains to her in her desertion and danger: “_Medea superest_.” This is as unlike Chapman as he is unlike Marlowe or Webster. His genius never could have compressed itself into so laconic a casket. Here would have been a chance for him to dilate like Teneriffe or Atlas, and he would have done it ample justice. If ever there was a case in which Buffon’s saying that the style is the man fitted exactly, it is in that of Chapman. Perhaps I ought to have used the word “mannerism” instead of “style,” for Chapman had not that perfect control of his matter which “style” implies. On the contrary, his matter seems sometimes to do what it will with him, which is the characteristic of mannerism. I can think of no better example of both than Sterne, alternately victim of one and master of the other. His mannerism at last becomes irritating affectation, but when he throws it off, his style is perfect in simplicity of rhythm. There is no more masterly page of English prose than that in the “Sentimental Journey” describing the effect of the chorus, “O Cupid, King of Gods and Men,” on the people of Abdera.

As a translator, and he translated a great deal besides Homer, Chapman has called forth the most discordant opinions. It is plain from his prefaces and annotations that he had discussed with himself the various theories of translation, and had chosen that which prefers the spirit to the letter. “I dissent,” he says, speaking of his translation of the Iliad, “from all other translators and interpreters that ever essayed exposition of this miraculous poem, especially where the divine rapture is most exempt from capacity in grammarians merely and grammatical critics, and where the inward sense or soul of the sacred muse is only within eyeshot of a poetical spirit’s inspection.” This rapture, however, is not to be found in his translation of the Odyssey, he being less in sympathy with the quieter beauties of that exquisite poem. Cervantes said long ago that no poet is translatable, and he said truly, for his thoughts will not _sing_ in any language but their own. Even where the languages are of common parentage, like English and German, the feat is impossible. Who ever saw a translation of one of Heine’s songs into English from which the genius had not utterly vanished? We cannot translate the music; above all, we cannot translate the indefinable associations which have gathered round the poem, giving it more meaning to us, perhaps, than it ever had for the poet himself. In turning it into our own tongue the translator has made it foreign to us for the first time. Why, we do not like to hear any one read aloud a poem that we love, because he translates it into something unfamiliar as he reads. But perhaps it is fair, and this is sometimes forgotten, to suppose that a translation is intended only for such as have no knowledge of the original, and to whom it will be a new poem. If that be so, there can be no question that a free reproduction, a transfusion into the moulds of another language, with an absolute deference to its associations, whether of the ear or of the memory, is the true method. There are no more masterly illustrations of this than the versions from the Greek, Persian, and Spanish of the late Mr. Fitzgerald. His translations, however else they may fail, make the same vivid impression on us that an original would. He has aimed at translating the genius, in short, letting all else take care of itself, and has succeeded. Chapman aimed at the same thing, and I think has also succeeded. You all remember Keats’s sonnet on first looking in his Homer.

“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken.”

Whether Homer or not, his translation is at least not Milton, as those in blank verse strive without much success to be. If the Greek original had been lost, and we had only Chapman, would it not enable us to divine some of the chief qualities of that original? I think it would; and I think this perhaps the fairest test. Commonly we open a translation as it were the door of a house of mourning. It is the burial-service of our poet that is going on there. But Chapman’s poem makes us feel as if Homer late in life had married an English wife, and we were invited to celebrate the coming of age of their only son. The boy, as our country people say, and as Chapman would have said, favors his mother; there is very little Greek in him; and yet a trick of the gait now and then, and certain tones of voice, recall the father. If not so tall as he, and without his dignity, he is a fine stalwart fellow, and looks quite able to make his own way in the world. Yes, in Chapman’s poem there is life, there is energy, and the consciousness of them. Did not Dryden say admirably well that it was such a poem as we might fancy Homer to have written before he arrived at years of discretion? Its defect is, I should say, that in it Homer is translated into Chapman rather than into English.

Chapman is a poet for intermittent rather than for consecutive reading. He talks too loud and is too emphatic for continuous society. But when you leave him, you feel that you have been in the company of an original, and hardly know why you should not say a great man. From his works, one may infer an individuality of character in him such as we can attribute to scarce any other of his contemporaries, though originality was far cheaper then than now. A lofty, impetuous man, ready to go off without warning into what he called a “holy fury,” but capable of inspiring an almost passionate liking. Had only the best parts of what he wrote come down to us, we should have reckoned him a far greater poet than we can fairly call him. His fragments are truly Cyclopean.

V

BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER