Few poets, on the other hand, have been more unsparing in the use of illustration than Chapman; he flings about similes by the handful, many of them diffuse and elaborate in expression, most of them curiously thoughtful and ingenious, not a few of them eloquent and impressive; but in many cases they tend rather to distract the attention of the reader than to elucidate the matter of his study. To his first poem, short as it is, Chapman appends a glossary to explain the accumulated allusions of a mythological kind, with this note at the foot of it: For the rest of his own invention, figures and similes, touching their aptness and novelty, he hath not laboured to justify them, because he hopes they will be proved enough to justify themselves, and prove sufficiently authentical to such as understand them; for the rest, God help them (for the poet evidently will not), ‘I cannot do as others, make day seem a lighter woman than she is, by painting her.’ The poem is, however, rich in fine verses which struggle into sight through the vaporous atmosphere of bombast and confusion; it is thoughtful, earnest, eloquent, with interludes of mere violent and dissonant declamation, and rarer flashes of high and subtle beauty. The licentious grammar and the shapeless structure of sentences that break all bounds of sense or harmony are faults that cannot be overlooked and must be condoned if we care to get at the kernel underlying these outer and inner husks of hard language. The same comment may be applied to the poems which follow; but the second Hymn, being longer and more discursive than the first, is more extravagant and incoherent, and its allegory more confused and difficult (whenever it is possible) to follow.
Whether or not there be as usual any reference to Elizabeth and her court under the likeness of Cynthia and her nymphs, or any allusion to English matters of contemporary interest, to perils and triumphs of policy or war, in the ‘sweet chase’ of the transformed nymph Euthymia under the shape of a panther or a boar by the hounds of the goddess which pursue her into the impenetrable thicket where the souls of such as have revolted from the empire of Cynthia are held in bondage and torment, and whence the hunters who hew themselves a way into the covert are forced to recoil in horror, it is easier to conjecture than to determine: but the ‘fruitful island’ to which the panther flies and eludes the hounds who track her by scent should be recognisable as England, ‘full of all wealth, delight, and empery’; though the sequel in which the panther, turned into a huger boar than that of Calydon, lays waste its ‘noblest mansions, gardens, and groves’ through which the chase makes way, may seem now more impenetrable to human apprehension than the covert before described. Leaving, however, to others, without heed of the poet’s expressed contempt for our ‘flesh-confounded souls,’ the task of seeking a solution for riddles to us insoluble, we may note in this poem the first sign of that high patriotic quality which, though common to all the great of his generation, is more constantly perceptible in the nobler moods of Chapman’s mind than in the work of many among his compeers. Especially in the reference of one elaborate simile to a campaign in the Netherlands, and the leadership of the English forces by
War’s quick artisan,
Fame-thriving Vere, that in those countries wan
More fame than guerdon,
we trace the lifelong interest taken by this poet in the fortunes of English fighting men in foreign wars, and the generous impulse which moved him twenty-eight years later, at the age of sixty-three, to plead in earnest and fervent verses the cause of Sir Horatio Vere, then engaged ‘with his poor handful of English’ in the ‘first act’ of the Thirty Years War (‘besieged and distressed in Mainhem,’ Chapman tells us), in the ears of the courtiers of James I. A quainter example of this interest in the foreign campaigns of his countrymen may be found in the most untimely intrusion of such another simile into the third sestiad of Hero and Leander.
Before I take in hand the examination of Chapman’s works as a dramatist, I may sum up the best and the worst I have to say of his earlier poems in the remark that on a first plunge into their depths even the reader most willing to accept and most anxious to admire the first fruits of a poet’s mind which he knows to have elsewhere put forth such noble fruit as Chapman’s will be liable to do them less than justice until his own mind recovers from the shock given to his taste by the crabbed and bombastic verbiage, the tortuous and pedantic obscurity, the rigidity and the laxity of a style which moves as it were with a stiff shuffle, at once formal and shambling; which breaks bounds with a limping gait, and plays truant from all rule without any of the grace of freedom; wanders beyond law and straggles out of order at the halting pace of age and gravity, and in the garb of a schoolmaster plays the pranks of a schoolboy with a ponderous and lumbaginous license of movement, at once rheumatic and erratic. With the recovery will probably come a reaction from this first impression; and the student will perhaps be more than sufficiently inclined to condone these shortcomings in favour of the merits they obscure at first sight; the wealth of imagery, the ardour of thought and feeling, the grave and vigorous harmony of the better parts, and the general impression left on us of communion with a strong, earnest, highminded man of genius, set adrift without helm or rudder; of lofty instincts and large aspirations that run rather to leaf than to fruit for want of an eye to choose their proper aim and a hand to use the means to it aright. The editor of the first and by no means the worst English anthology has gathered from these poems, and especially from Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, large handfuls of fine verses, which when thus culled out and bound up into separate sheaves make a better show than in the text where they lay entangled among weeds and briers. There are beauties enough lost in this thick and thorny jungle of scholastic sensuality to furnish forth a dozen or so of pilfering poeticules with abundance of purple patches to be sewn on at intervals to the common texture of their style. It is with a singular sense of jarring admiration and irritation that we find couplets and quatrains of the most noble and delicate beauty embedded in the cumbrous ore of crude pedantic jargon: but those who will may find throughout the two earliest publications of Chapman a profusion of good verses thickly scattered among an overgrowth of bad. The first poem, however, which leaves us on the whole with a general and equable impression of content, is the small ‘epic song’ or copy of verses on the second expedition to Guiana. Here the poet has got clear of those erotic subtleties and sensual metaphysics which were served up at his ‘banquet’ in such clumsy vessels of the coarsest ware by the awkward and unwashed hands of an amorous pedant, soiling with the ink of the schools the lifted hem of the garment of love; he has found instead a fit argument for his genius in the ambition and adventure of his boldest countrymen, and applied himself to cheer and celebrate them ‘in no ignoble verse.’ The first brief paragraph alone is crabbed and inflated in style; from thence to the end, with but slight breaks or jars, the strong and weighty verse steps out with masculine dignity, and delivers in clear grave accents its cordial message of praise and good cheer.
At all times Chapman took occasion to approve himself a true son of the greatest age of Englishmen in his quick and fiery sympathy with the daring and the suffering of its warriors and adventurers; a sympathy which found vent at times where none but Chapman would have made room for it; witness the sudden and singular illustration, in his Epicede on the death of Prince Henry, of the popular anguish and dismay at that calamity by a ‘description of the tempest that cast Sir Th. Gates on the Bermudas, and the state of his ship and men, to this kingdom’s plight applied in the Prince’s death.’ It has been remarked by editors and biographers that between the years 1574, at or about which date, according to Anthony Wood, ‘he, being well-grounded in school learning, was sent to the university,’ and 1594, when he published his first poem, we have no trace or hint to guide us in conjecturing how his life was spent from fifteen to thirty-five. This latter age is the least he can have attained by any computation at the time when he put forth his Shadow of Night, full of loud and angry complaints of neglect and slight endured at the hands of an unthankful and besotted generation; it is somewhat late
in life for the first appearance of a poet, and the poem then issued is a more crude and chaotic performance than might be looked for from a writer who has no longer the plea of unripe age to put forward in excuse of the raw green fruits which he offers to the reader. Dr. Elze, in the learned and ingenious essay prefixed to his edition of Chapman’s Alphonsus, points out that from the internal evidence of that play ‘we are driven to the alternative either of supposing Chapman to have been in Germany or of allowing him a German partner’ (), and a little before observes that ‘there is ample room between his leaving the university without a degree in 1576 or 1578 and his first acknowledged publication in 1594 even for a lengthened stay in Germany.’ In default of evidence we might perhaps be permitted to throw out a guess that the future poet had in his youth seen some service and been possibly an eyewitness of some part of the campaigns in the Low Countries to which he refers in a manner showing his intimate acquaintance with the details of an action on the ‘most excellent river’ Waal before ‘stately-sighted sconce-torn Nimiguen,’ fought between the cavalry of ‘the Italian Duke’ and the English leader, Sir Francis or Sir Horatio Vere, who drew the enemy’s horse, by a feint made with his own, into an ambuscade of infantry by which they were put to rout. Both the text and the note appended show a willingness to display this knowledge of the strategy and geography of the skirmish with some ostentation of precision; his parting remark at the end of the note has a tone of satisfaction in the discovery of a new order of illustration. ‘And these like similes, in my opinion, drawn from the honourable deeds of our noble countrymen, clad in comely habit of poesy, would become a poem as well as further-fetched grounds, if such as be poets nowadays would use them.’ He was not himself, as we have seen, over-careful to use them at the right moment or turn them to the most natural account; but to the principle here advanced he remained staunch in his later writings.
It may be thought somewhat out of keeping with the general reputation of Chapman as a retired student of a grave and sober habit of life that he should be supposed to have ever taken any active part in a military campaign; but those were days when scholars and men of letters were not uncommonly found apt for employment in matters of war and policy, and gave good proof of a right to claim their place among other servants of the state for the performance of high patriotic duty; nor, unless we please, need we imagine Chapman to have served personally as a volunteer in the English ranks; but it is reasonable to conceive that either in person or by proxy he may have had special opportunities of studying the incidents of war in the Netherlands, which he would evidently have been mindful to make the most of and quick to put to use. It is also possible that his relations with the stage may have begun at an earlier date than has yet been traced; and as we know that in 1585, when Chapman was twenty-six years old, Leicester brought over to Holland a company of actors in his train when he set sail as commander of the forces dispatched from England to the support of the States-General, and that others followed suit on their own score in succeeding years, those who are unwilling to allow him a chance of service as a soldier may prefer to conjecture that he was drawn to the seat of war by the more probable force of some poetic or theatrical connection with either the general’s first troupe of players or that which followed in its track five years later. That these earlier adventurers were succeeded by fresh companies in 1604 and 1605, and again forty years later, at an unpropitious date for actors in England, eleven years after the death of Chapman, I further learn from an article in the Athenaeum (Sept. 5, 1874) on Herr von Hellwald’s History of the Stage in Holland; and eight years later than the venture of the second company of players in 1590 we find Chapman classed by Meres among the best of our tragic writers for the stage, and repeatedly entered on Henslowe’s books as debtor to the manager for some small advance of money on future dramatic work to be supplied to his company.
In any case it is remarkable that his first play should not have been brought on the stage till the poet was thirty-six, or published till he was rising forty; an age at which most men, who might have written such a play at sixteen, would have been unwilling to expose it to the light. It is even a more crude and graceless piece of work, if we consider it as designed for the stage, than his first venture of the preceding year if we regard it as intended for the study. The plot is more childish, though the language may be purer, than we find in the rudest sketches of Greene or Peele, whose day was now well over; and even for the first-fruits of ‘a person of most reverend aspect, religious and temperate, qualities rarely meeting in a poet,’ it will be admitted that the moral tone of Chapman’s two earliest comedies is not remarkably high. The first deals solely with the impossible frauds, preposterous adulteries, and farcical murders committed by a disguised hero who assumes the mask of as many pseudonyms to perpetrate his crimes as ever were assumed in Old or New Grub Street by a prudent member of the libellous order of rascally rhymesters to vent his villainies in shameful safety. The story is beneath the credulity of a nursery, and but for some detached passages of clear and vigorous writing the whole work might plausibly have been signed by any of the names under which a dunce of the order above mentioned might think it wisest to put forth his lyrics or his lies. In the better passages, and noticeably in a description of jewels engraved with figures of the gods, we catch a faint echo of the ‘mighty line’ in which Marlowe would lavish on such descriptions the wealth and strength, the majesty and the fancy, of his full imperial style.
The frank folly and reckless extravagance of incident which appear to have won for Chapman’s first play the favour of an audience not remarkable, it should seem, for captious nicety of critical taste and judgment, are less perceptible in his second venture; but this also is a crude and coarse example of workmanship. The characters are a confused crowd of rough sketches, whose thin outlines and faint colours are huddled together on a ragged canvas without order or proportion. There is some promise of humour in the part of a Puritan adulteress, but it comes to little or nothing; and the comedy rather collapses than concludes in a tangle of incongruous imbecilities and incoherent indecencies. The text is seemingly more corrupt than we find in Chapman’s other plays, which are generally exempt from such gross and multitudinous misprints as deform the early editions of many Elizabethan dramatists; their chief defect is the confusion and the paucity of stage directions. In the opening speech of An Humorous Day’s Mirth, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth verse, we must supply with some such reading as this the evident hiatus of sense and metre in the fifteenth:-
But pure religion being but mental stuff,
And sense, indeed, [being] all [but] for itself,
’Tis to be doubted, etc.
The text and arrangement of the scenes throughout this comedy require a more careful revision than has yet been given; since if the crudest work of a man of genius is not to be rejected from the list of his writings in which it has once found place, it claims at least so much of editorial care as may leave it in a reasonably legible form.
It appears that in the same year which gave to the press this loose and slipshod effort at a comedy, the most perfect of Chapman’s plays, though not published till six years later, was completed for the stage. The admirable comedy of All Fools is the first work which bears full evidence of the vigorous and masculine versatility, the force and freshness of his free and natural genius. The dedication, which seems to have been cancelled almost as soon as issued, gives one of the most singular proofs on record of a poet’s proverbial inability to discern between his worse and better work. The writer who ten years before was so loud in his complaint of men’s neglect and so haughty in his claim on their attention for his crudest and faultiest work now assures the friend to whom he inscribes a poem of real excellence,
I am most loth to pass your sight
With any such-like mark of vanity,
Being marked with age for aims of greater weight
And drowned in dark death-ushering melancholy:
but for fear of pirati
cal publishers who might print ‘by stealth’ an unauthorised and interpolated edition ‘without my passport, patched with others wit,’ he consents to ‘expose to every common eye’ what he calls
The least allowed birth of my shaken brain,
alleging as his excuse that ‘of two enforced ills I elect the least’; and with this most superfluous apology he ushers in one of the most faultless examples of high comedy to be found in the whole rich field of our Elizabethan drama. The style is limpid and luminous as running water, the verse pure, simple, smooth, and strong, the dialogue always bright, fluent, lively, and at times relieved with delicate touches of high moral and intellectual beauty; the plot and the characters excellently fitted to each other, with just enough intricacy and fullness of incident to sustain without relaxation or confusion the ready interest of readers or spectators.
The play and counterplay of action by which all the chief persons of the comedy trick and are tricked by each other in turn might easily have become perplexed or excessive in less careful and skilful hands; but the lightness and dexterity of handling which the poet has here for once manifested throughout the whole development of his dramatic scheme suffice to keep the course of the story clear and the attention of the reader alert without involution or fatigue: and over all the dialogue and action there plays a fresh and radiant air of mirth and light swift buoyancy of life which breathes rather of joyous strength and high-spirited health than of the fumes of ‘dark death-ushering melancholy’; and as in matter of fact death was not ushered by melancholy or any other evil spirit into the stout presence of the old poet till full thirty-five years after the appearance and twenty-nine years after the dedication of this play, we may hopefully set down this malcontent phrase to some untimely fit of spleen from which, having thus given it vent, he soon shook himself clear and struck his pen through the record of it. I find but one slight and characteristic blemish worth noting in a comedy in which the proudest among his great compeers might have permissibly taken fresh pride; it is that the final scene of discovery which winds up the main thread and reconciles the chief agents of the intrigue is some- what hurriedly dispatched, with too rapid a change of character and readjustment of relations, to make room for a thin-spun and wire-drawn sample of that tedious burlesque declamation with which the author was too prone to indulge a taste not likely to be shared or relished by his readers for the minute dissection of a dead jest, so dry that it crumbles into dust under the scalpel of the anatomist. All the rest of the comedy is so light, bright, and easy in all its paces that we are the less disposed to tolerate the stiffness and elaboration of this oratorical interlude. But this is really the only spot or patch I can discover on the jocund face of a delightful comic poem.
The Complete Poetical Works of George Chapman Page 230
