The Complete Poetical Works of George Chapman

by George Chapman

  Aub. I’me sorry for your youth then; though the strictness

  Of Law shall not fall on you, that of life

  Must presently, go to a Cloyster, carry her,

  And there for ever lead your life in penitence.

  Edi. Best Father to my soul, I give you thanks, Sir,

  And now my fair revenges have their ends,

  My vows shall be my kin, my prayers my friends. [Exit.

  Enter Latorch, and Juglers.

  Lat. Stay there, I’le step in and prepare the Duke.

  Nor. We shall have brave rewards?

  Fis. That is without question.

  Lat. By this time where’s my huffing friend Lord Aubrey?

  Where’s that good Gentleman? oh, I could laugh now,

  And burst my self with meer imagination;

  A wise man, and a valiant man, a just man;

  To suffer himself be juggl’d out of the world,

  By a number of poor Gipseys? farewel Swash-buckler,

  For I know thy mouth is cold enough by this time;

  A hundred of ye I can shave as neatly,

  And ne’r draw bloud in shew: now shall my honour,

  My power and vertue walk alone: my pleasure

  Observ’d by all, all knees bend to my worship,

  All sutes to me as Saint of all their fortunes,

  Prefer’d and crowded to, what full place of credit,

  And what place now? your Lordship? no, ’tis common,

  But that I’le think to morrow on; now for my business.

  Aub. Who’s there?

  Lat. Dead, my Master dead? Aubrey alive too?

  Gua. Latorch, Sir.

  Aub. Seize his body.

  Lat. My Master dead?

  Aub. And you within this halfhour,

  Prepare your self good Devil, you must to it,

  Millions of gold shall not redeem thy mischief,

  Behold the Justice of thy practice, villain;

  The mass of murthers thou hast drawn upon us:

  Behold thy doctrine; you look now for reward, Sir,

  To be advanc’d, I’m sure, for all your labours?

  And you shall have it, make his gallows higher

  By ten foot at the least, and then advance him.

  Lat. Mercy, mercy.

  Aub. ’Tis too late fool,

  Such as you meant for me, away with him. [He is led out.

  What gaping knaves are these, bring ’em in fellows,

  Now, what are you?

  Nor. Mathematicians, if it please your Lordship.

  dub. And you drew a figure?

  Fis. We have drawn many.

  dub. For the Duke, I mean; Sir Latorchs knaves you are.

  Nor. We know the Gentleman.

  dub. What did he promise you?

  Nor. We are paid already.

  dub. But I will see you better paid, go whip them.

  Nor. We do beseech your Lordship, we were hir’d.

  dub. I know you were, and you shall have your hire;

  Whip ’em extremely, whip that Doctor there,

  Till he record himself a Rogue.

  Nor. I am one, Sir.

  dub. Whip him for being one, and when th’are whip’t,

  Lead ’em to the gallows to see their patron hang’d;

  Away with them. [They are led out.

  Nor. Ah, good my Lord.

  dub. Now to mine own right, Gentlemen.

  1 Lord. You have the next indeed, we all confess it,

  And here stand ready to invest you with it.

  2 Lord. Which to make stronger to you, and the surer

  Than bloud or mischiefs dare infringe again,

  Behold this Lady, Sir, this noble Lady,

  Full of the bloud as you are, of that nearness,

  How blessed would it be?

  dub. I apprehend you, and so the fair Matilda dare accept

  Me her ever constant servant.

  Mat. In all pureness,

  In all humility of heart and services,

  To the most noble Aubrey, I submit me.

  dub. Then this is our first tye, now to our business,

  1 Lord. We are ready all to put the honour on you, Sir.

  dub. These sad rites must be done first, take up the bodys,

  This, as he was a Prince, so Princely funeral

  Shall wait upon him: on this honest Captain,

  The decency of arms; a tear for him too.

  So, sadly on, and as we view his bloody

  May his Example in our Rule raise good.

  The Biography

  George Chapman by John Taylor Wedgwood, after John Thurston, published 1820

  GEORGE CHAPMAN by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  The fame which from his own day to ours has never wholly failed to attend the memory of George Chapman has yet been hitherto of a looser and vaguer kind than floats about the memory of most other poets. In the great revival of studious enthusiasm for the works of the many famous men who won themselves a name during the seventy-five memorable years of his laborious life, the mass of his original work has been left too long unnoticed and unhonoured. Our ‘Homer-Lucan,’ as he was happily termed by Daniel in that admirable Defence of Rhyme which remains to this day one of the most perfect examples of sound and temperate sense, of pure style and just judgment, to be found in the literature of criticism, has received, it may be, not much less than his due meed of praise for those Homeric labours by which his name is still chiefly known: but what the great translator could accomplish when fighting for his own hand few students of English poetry have been careful to inquire or competent to appreciate.

  And yet there are not many among his various and unequal writings which we can open without some sense of great qualities in the workman whose work lies before us. There are few poets from whose remains a more copious and noble anthology of detached beauties might be selected. He has a singular force and depth of moral thought, a constant energy and intensity of expression, an occasional delicacy and perfection of fanciful or reflective beauty, which should have ensured him a place in the front rank at least of gnomic poets. It is true that his ‘wisdom entangles itself in overniceness’; that his philosophy is apt to lose its way among brakes of digression and jungles of paradox; that his subtle and sleepless ingenuity can never resist the lure of any quaint or perverse illustration which may start across its path from some obscure corner at the unluckiest and unlikeliest time; that the rough and barren byways of incongruous allusion, of unseasonable reflection or preposterous and grotesque symbolism, are more tempting to his feet than the highway of art, and the brushwood or the morass of metaphysics seems often preferable in his eyes to the pastures or the gardens of poetry. But from first to last the grave and frequent blemishes of his genius bear manifestly more likeness to the deformities of a giant than to the malformations of a dwarf, to the overstrained muscles of an athlete than to the withered limbs of a weakling.

  He was born between Spenser and Shakespeare, before the first dawn of English tragedy with the morning star of Marlowe. Five years later that great poet began a life more brief, more glorious and more fruitful in proportion to its brevity than that of any among his followers except Beaumont and Shelley: each of these leaving at the close of some thirty years of life a fresh crown of immortality to the national drama founded by the first-born of the three. A few months more and Shakespeare was in the world; ten years further and Ben Jonson had followed. This latter poet, the loving and generous panegyrist of Chapman, was therefore fifteen years younger than his friend; who was thus twenty years older than Fletcher, and twenty-seven years older than Beaumont. All these immortals he outlived on earth, with the single exception of Jonson, who died but three years after the death of the elder poet. No man could ever look round upon a more godlike company of his fellows; yet we have no record of his relations with any of these but Jonson and Fletcher.

  The date of Chapman’s birth is significant, and should be borne in mind when we attemp
t to determine his rank among the poets of that golden age. From the splendid and triumphant example of the one great poet whose popularity his earlier years must have witnessed, he may have caught a contagious love of allegory and moral symbolism; he certainly caught nothing of the melodious ease and delicate grace which gave Spenser his supremacy in the soft empire of that moonlight-coloured world where only his genius was at home. Chapman’s allegories are harsh, crude, and shapeless; for the sweet airs and tender outlines and floating Elysian echoes of Spenser’s vision he has nothing to offer in exchange but the thick rank mist of a lowland inhabited by monstrous hybrids and haunted by jarring discords. Behind Spenser came Sidney and the Euphuists; and in their schools neither Chapman nor any other was likely to learn much good. The natural defects and dangers of his genius were precisely of the kind most likely to increase in the contagion of such company. He had received from nature at his birth a profuse and turbid imagination, a fiery energy and restless ardour of moral passion and spiritual ambition, with a plentiful lack of taste and judgment, and a notable excess of those precious qualities of pride and self-reliance which are at once needful to support and liable to misguide an artist on his way of work.

  The two main faults of the school of poets which blossomed and faded from the brief flower of court favour during the youth of Chapman were tedious excess of talk and grotesque encumbrance of imagery; and Chapman had unhappily a native tendency to the grotesque and tedious, which all his study of the highest and purest literature in the world was inadequate to suppress or to chasten. For all his labours in the field of Greek translation, no poet was ever less of a Greek in style or spirit. He enters the serene temples and handles the holy vessels of Hellenic art with the stride and the grasp of a high-handed and high-minded barbarian. Nevertheless it is among the schools of Greek poetry that we must look for a type of the class to which this poet belongs. In the great age of Greece he would have found a place of some credit among the ranks of the gnomic poets, and written much grave and lofty verse of a moral and political sort in praise of a powerful conservative oligarchy, and in illustration of the public virtues which are fostered and the public vices which are repressed under the strong sharp tutelage of such a government. At the many-headed beast of democracy he would have discharged the keenest arrows of his declamation, and sought shelter at need from its advance behind the shield of some tutelary Pittacus or Pisistratus.

  What Pope said of Chapman’s Homer may be applied with a difference to his original poetry; it might not be inaccurate to say that he often writes, not indeed as Homer, but as Theognis might have written before he came to years of discretion. He shows, we must admit, only in a few couplets or brief paragraphs the pure and luminous charm of perfect speech proper to a Greek moralist of the elegiac school; but he has more of a certain fire and force of fancy than we should look for in a poet of that order, where with far less of thick acrid smoke there is also less real heat and flame perceptible than struggles here through the fume and fog of a Cimmerian style. The dialect of Chapman’s poems is undoubtedly portentous in its general barbarism; and that study of purer writers, which might in another case have been trusted to correct and chasten the turgid and fiery vigour of a barbarian imagination, seems too often to have encrusted the mind with such arrogance and the style with such pedantry as to make certain of these poems, full of earnest thought, of passionate energy, of tumid and fitful eloquence, the most indigestible food ever served up to the guests of a man of genius by the master of the feast.

  Under no circumstances, probably, would Chapman have been always a pure and harmonious writer, capable of casting into fit and radiant form the dark hard masses of his deep and ardent thought, of uttering the weighty and noble things he had to say in a fluent and lucid style; but as it was, he appears from first to last to have erected his natural defects into an artificial system, and cultivated his incapacities as other men cultivate their faculties. ‘That Poesy should be as pervial as oratory, and plainness her special ornament, were the plain way to barbarism’: so he tells us at the very outset of his career, in a letter of dedication prefixed to the second of his published poems, and containing several excellent reflections on the folly of those who expect grave and deep matter of poetry to be so handled that he who runs or lounges need not pause or rouse himself to read.

  ‘That energia, or clearness of representation, required in absolute poems is not the perspicuous delivery of a low invention; but high and hearty invention expressed in most significant and unaffected phrase.’ That is admirably said; but when we turn to the practical comment supplied by the poetry which illustrates this critical profession of faith, we find it hard to stomach the preacher’s application of his text. In this same dedication, which is well worth note and regard from all students of Chapman-and with all his shortcomings we may reasonably hope that the number of them will increase, with the first issue of his complete works, among all professed students of English poetry at its highest periods-he proceeds to a yet more distinct avowal of his main principle; and it is something to know that he had any, though the knowledge be but too likely to depress the interest and dishearten the sympathy of a reader who but for this assurance of design would probably have supposed that great part of these poems had been written in a chaotic jargon, where grammar, metre, sense, sound, coherence, and relevancy are hurled together on a heap of jarring and hurtling ruins, rather because the author wanted skill or care to write better than because he took pains to achieve so remarkable a result by the observance of fixed means for the attainment of a fixed purpose. It should seem to be with malice aforethought that he sets himself to bring to perfection the qualities of crabbed turgidity and barbarous bombast with which nature had but too richly endowed him, mingling these among many better gifts with so cunning a hand and so malignant a liberality as wellnigh to stifle the good seed of which yet she had not been sparing. ‘There is no confection made to last, but is admitted more cost and skill than presently-to-be-used simples and in my opinion that which being with a little endeavour searched adds a kind of majesty to poesy is better than that which every cobbler may sing to his patch. Obscurity in affection of words and indigested conceits is pedantical and childish; but where it shroudeth itself in the heart of his subject, uttered with fitness of figure and expressive epithets, with that darkness will I still labour to be shadowed.’

  This promise, we may add, was most religiously kept; but the labour was at least superfluous. To translate out of the crude and incoherent forms of expression in which they now lie weltering the scholastic subtleties and metaphysical symbols which beset the reader’s diverted and distracted attention at every step through the jungle of these poems, and thus to render what he had to say into some decent order and harmony, he would have found a harder if a more profitable labour than to fling forth his undigested thoughts and incongruous fancies in a mass of rich inextricable confusion for them to sift and sort who list. But this, we see, was far enough from his purpose. He takes his motto from Persius:

  Quis leget haec? Nemo, hercule, nemo;

  Vel duo vel nemo;

  and the label thus affixed to the forehead of one volume might have served for almost any other of his poems. His despair of a fit audience is less remarkable than the bitter and violent expression of his contempt for general opinion. ‘Such is the wilful poverty of judgments, wandering like passportless men in contempt of the divine discipline of poesy, that a man may well fear to frequent their walks. The profane multitude I hate, and only consecrate my strange poems to those searching spirits whom learning hath made noble, and nobility sacred.’ And this is throughout his manner of reference to the tastes and judgments of those common readers in whose eyes he took such less than little pains to make his work even passably attractive that we may presume this acrid tone of angry contempt, half haughty and half petulant in its endless repetition, to have had in it some salt of sincerity as well as some underlying sense of conscious failure in the pursuit of that success o
n the image or idea of which he turns and tramples with passionate scorn. It is not usually till he has failed to please that a man discovers how despicable and undesirable a thing it would have been to succeed.

  No student, however warm his goodwill and admiration for the high-toned spirit and genius of Chapman, will be disposed to wonder that he found cause to growl and rail at the neglect and distaste of the multitude for his writings. Demosthenes, according to report, taught himself to speak with pebbles in his mouth ; but it is presumable that he also learnt to dispense with their aid before he stood up against Aeschines or Hyperides on any great occasion of public oratory. Our philosophic poet, on the other hand, before addressing such audience as he may find, is careful always to fill his mouth till the jaws are stretched wellnigh to bursting with the largest, roughest, and most angular of polygonal flintstones that can be hewn or dug out of the mine of human language; and as fast as one voluminous sentence or unwieldy paragraph has emptied his mouth of the first patch of barbarisms, he is no less careful to refill it before proceeding to a fresh delivery. I sincerely think and hope that no poems with a tithe of their genuine power and merit were ever written on such a plan or after such a fashion as the Shadow of Night or Andromeda Liberata of Chapman. It is not merely the heavy and convulsive movement of the broken and jarring sentences, the hurried broken-winded rhetoric that seems to wheeze and pant at every painful step, the incessant byplay of incongruous digressions and impenetrable allusions, hat make the first reading of these poems as tough and tedious a task for the mind as oakum-picking or stone-breaking can be for the body. Worse than all this is the want of any perceptible centre towards which these tangled and ravelled lines of thought may seem at least to converge. We see that the author has thought hard and felt deeply; we apprehend that he is charged as it were to the muzzle with some ardent matter of spiritual interest, of which he would fain deliver himself in explosive eloquence; we perceive that he is angry, ambitious, vehement, and arrogant; no pretender, but a genuine seer or Pythian bemused and stifled by the oracular fumes which choke in its very utterance the message they inspire, and for ever preclude the seer from becoming properly the prophet of their mysteries:- We understand a fury in his words, But not the words; and the fury which alone we understand waxes tenfold hotter at our incompetence to comprehend what the orator is incompetent to express. He foams at the mouth with rage through all the flints and pebbles of hard language which he spits forth, so to say, in the face of ‘the prejudicate and peremptory reader’ whose ears he belabours with ‘very bitter words,’ and with words not less turgid than were hurled by Pistol at the head of the recalcitrant and contumelious Mistress Tearsheet: nor assuredly had the poet much right to expect that they would be received by the profane multitude with more reverence and humility than was the poetic fury of ‘such a fustian rascal’ by that ‘honest, virtuous, civil gentlewoman.’ The charge of obscurity is perhaps of all charges the likeliest to impair the fame or to imperil the success of a rising or an established poet. It is often misapplied by hasty or ignorant criticism as any other on the roll of accusations; and was never misapplied more persistently and perversely than to an eminent writer of our own time. The difficulty found by many in certain of Mr. Browning’s works arises from a quality the very reverse of that which produces obscurity properly so called. Obscurity is the natural product of turbid forces and confused ideas; of a feeble and clouded or of a vigorous but unfixed and chaotic intellect. Such a poet as Lord Brooke, for example-and I take George Chapman and Fulke Greville to be of all English poets the two most genuinely obscure in style upon whose works I have ever adventured to embark in search of treasure hidden beneath the dark gulfs and crossing currents of their rocky and weedy waters, at some risk of my understanding being swept away by the ground-swell-such a poet, overcharged with overflowing thoughts, is not sufficiently possessed by any one leading idea, or attracted towards any one central point, to see with decision the proper end and use with resolution the proper instruments of his design.