How small a fraction of Heywood’s actual work is comprised in these twenty-six plays we cannot even conjecturally compute; we only know that they amount to less than an eighth part of the plays written wholly or mainly by his indefatigable hand, and that they are altogether outweighed in volume, though decidedly not in value, by the existing mass of his undramatic work. We know also, if we have eyes to see, that the very hastiest and slightest of them does credit to the author, and that the best of them are to be counted among the genuine and imperishable treasures of English literature. Such amazing fecundity and such astonishing industry would be memorable even in a far inferior writer; but, though I certainly cannot pretend to anything like an exhaustive or even an adequate acquaintance with all or any of his folios, I can at least affirm that they contain enough delightfully readable matter to establish a more than creditable reputation. His prose, if never to be called masterly, may generally be called good and pure: its occasional pedantries and pretentions are rather signs of the century than faults of the author; and he can tell a story, especially a short story, as well as if not better than many a better-known writer. I fear, however, that it is not the poetical quality of his undramatic verse which can ever be said to make it worth reading: it is, as far as I know, of the very homeliest homespun ever turned out by the very humblest of workmen. His poetry, it would be pretty safe to wager, must be looked for exclusively in his plays: but there, if not remarkable for depth or height of imagination or of passion, it will be found memorable for unsurpassed excellence of unpretentious elevation in treatment of character. The unity (or, to borrow from Coleridge a barbaric word, the triunity) of noble and gentle and simple in the finest quality of the English character at its best — of the English character as revealed in our Sidneys and Nelsons and Collingwoods and Franklins — is almost as apparent in the best scenes of his best plays as in the lives of our chosen and best-beloved heroes: and this, I venture to believe, would have been rightly regarded by Thomas Heywood as a more desirable and valuable success than the achievement of a noisier triumph or the attainment of a more conspicuous place among the poets of his country.
GEORGE CHAPMAN
George Chapman, translator of Homer, dramatist, and gnomic poet, was born in 1559, and died in 1634. At fifteen, according to Anthony Wood, “he, being well grounded in school learning, was sent to the university” of Oxford; at thirty-five he published his first poem: “The Shadow of Night.” Between these dates, though no fact has been unearthed concerning his career, it is not improbable that he may have travelled in Germany. At thirty-nine he was reckoned “among the best of our tragic writers for the stage”; but his only play published at that age was a crude and formless attempt at romantic comedy, which had been acted three years before it passed from the stage to the press; and his first tragedy now extant in print, without name of author, did not solicit the suffrage of a reader till the poet was forty-eight. At thirty-nine he had also published the first instalment of his celebrated translation of the “Iliad,” in a form afterward much remodelled; at sixty-five he crowned the lofty structure of his labor by the issue of an English version of the “Hymns” and other minor Homeric poems. The former he dedicated to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, the hapless favorite of Elizabeth; the latter to Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, the infamous minion of James. Six years earlier he had inscribed to Bacon, then Lord Chancellor, a translation of Hesiod’s “Works and Days.” His only other versions of classic poems are from the fifth satire of Juvenal and the “Hero and Leander” which goes under the name of Musaeus, the latter dedicated to Inigo Jones. His revised and completed version of the “Iliad” had been inscribed in a noble and memorable poem of dedication to Henry Prince of Wales, after whose death he and his “Odyssey” fell under the patronage of Carr. Of the manner of his death at seventy-five we know nothing more than may be gathered from the note appended to a manuscript fragment, which intimates that the remainder of the poem, a lame and awkward piece of satire on his old friend Jonson, had been “lost in his sickness.” Chapman, his first biographer is careful to let us know, “was a person of most reverend aspect, religious and temperate, qualities rarely meeting in a poet”; he had also certain other merits at least as necessary to the exercise of that profession. He had a singular force and solidity of thought, an admirable ardor of ambitious devotion to the service of poetry, a deep and burning sense at once of the duty implied and of the dignity inherent in his office; a vigor, opulence, and loftiness of phrase, remarkable even in that age of spiritual strength, wealth, and exaltation of thought and style; a robust eloquence, touched not unfrequently with flashes of fancy, and kindled at times into heat of imagination. The main fault of his style is one more commonly found in the prose than in the verse of his time — a quaint and florid obscurity, rigid with elaborate rhetoric and tortuous with labyrinthine illustration; not dark only to the rapid reader through closeness and subtlety of thought, like Donne, whose miscalled obscurity is so often “all glorious within,” but thick and slab as a witch’s gruel with forced and barbarous eccentricities of articulation. As his language in the higher forms of comedy is always pure and clear, and sometimes exquisite in the simplicity of its sincere and natural grace, the stiffness and density of his more ambitious style may perhaps be attributed to some pernicious theory or conceit of the dignity proper to a moral and philosophic poet. Nevertheless, many of the gnomic passages in his tragedies and allegoric poems are of singular weight and beauty; the best of these, indeed, would not discredit the fame of the very greatest poets for sublimity of equal thought and expression: witness the lines chosen by Shelley as the motto for a poem, and fit to have been chosen as the motto for his life.
The romantic and sometimes barbaric grandeur of Chapman’s Homer remains attested by the praise of Keats, of Coleridge, and of Lamb; it is written at a pitch of strenuous and laborious exaltation, which never flags or breaks down, but never flies with the ease and smoothness of an eagle native to Homeric air. From his occasional poems an expert and careful hand might easily gather a noble anthology of excerpts, chiefly gnomic or meditative, allegoric or descriptive. The most notable examples of his tragic work are comprised in the series of plays taken, and adapted sometimes with singular license, from the records of such part of French history as lies between the reign of Francis I. and the reign of Henry IV., ranging in date of subject from the trial and death of Admiral Chabot to the treason and execution of Marshal Biron. The two plays bearing as epigraph the name of that famous soldier and conspirator are a storehouse of lofty thought and splendid verse, with scarcely a flash or sparkle of dramatic action. The one play of Chapman’s whose popularity on the stage survived the Restoration is “Bussy d’Ambois” (d’Amboise) — a tragedy not lacking in violence of action or emotion, and abounding even more in sublime or beautiful interludes than in crabbed and bombastic passages. His rarest jewels of thought and verse detachable from the context lie embedded in the tragedy of “Caesar and Pompey,” whence the finest of them were first extracted by the unerring and unequalled critical genius of Charles Lamb. In most of his tragedies the lofty and laboring spirit of Chapman may be said rather to shine fitfully through parts than steadily to pervade the whole; they show nobly altogether as they stand, but even better by help of excerpts and selections. But the excellence of his best comedies can only be appreciated by a student who reads them fairly and fearlessly through, and, having made some small deductions on the score of occasional pedantry and occasional crudity, finds in “All Fools,” “Monsieur d’Olive,” “The Gentleman Usher,” and “The Widow’s Tears” a wealth and vigor of humorous invention, a tender and earnest grace of romantic poetry, which may atone alike for these passing blemishes and for the lack of such clear-cut perfection of character and such dramatic progression of interest as we find only in the yet higher poets of our heroic age.
The severest critic of his shortcomings or his errors, if not incompetent to appreciate his achievements and his merits, must recogni
ze in Chapman an original poet, one who held of no man and acknowledged no master, but throughout the whole generation of our greatest men, from the birth of Marlowe wellnigh to the death of Jonson, held on his own hard and haughty way of austere and sublime ambition, not without an occasional pause for kindly and graceful salutation of such younger and still nobler compeers as Jonson and Fletcher. With Shakespeare we should never have guessed that he had come at all in contact, had not the intelligence of Mr. Minto divined or rather discerned him to be the rival poet referred to in Shakespeare’s sonnets with a grave note of passionate satire, hitherto as enigmatic as almost all questions connected with those divine and dangerous poems. This conjecture the critic has fortified by such apt collocation and confrontation of passages that we may now reasonably accept it as an ascertained and memorable fact.
The objections which a just and adequate judgment may bring against Chapman’s master-work, his translation of Homer, may be summed up in three epithets: it is romantic, laborious, Elizabethan. The qualities implied by these epithets are the reverse of those which should distinguish a translator of Homer; but setting this apart, and considering the poems as in the main original works, the superstructure of a romantic poet on the submerged foundations of Greek verse, no praise can be too warm or high for the power, the freshness, the indefatigable strength and inextinguishable fire which animate this exalted work, and secure for all time that shall take cognizance of English poetry an honored place in its highest annals for the memory of Chapman.
CYRIL TOURNEUR
“They, shut up under their roofs, the prisoners of darkness, and fettered with the bonds of a long night, lay exiled, fugitives from the eternal providence. For while they supposed to lie hid in their secret sins, they were scattered under a dark veil of forgetfulness, being horribly astonished, and troubled with sights.... Sad visions appeared unto them with heavy countenances. No power of the fire might give them light: neither could the bright flames of the stars endure to lighten that horrible night. Only there appeared unto them a fire kindled of itself, very dreadful: for being much terrified, they thought the things which they saw to be worse than the sight they saw not.... The whole world shined with clear light, and none were hindered in their labor: over them only was spread an heavy night, an image of that darkness which should afterward receive them: but yet were they unto themselves more grievous than the darkness.” In this wild world of fantastic retribution and prophetic terror the genius of a great English poet — if greatness may be attributed to a genius which holds absolute command in a strictly limited province of reflection and emotion — was born and lived and moved and had its being. The double mainspring of its energy is not difficult to define: its component parts are simply adoration of good and abhorrence of evil: all other sources of emotion were subordinate to these: love, hate, resentment, resignation, self-devotion, are but transitory agents on this lurid and stormy stage, which pass away and leave only the sombre fire of meditative indignation still burning among the ruins of shattered hopes and lives. More splendid success in pure dramatic dialogue has not been achieved by Shakespeare or by Webster than by Cyril Tourneur in his moments of happiest invention or purest inspiration: but the intensity of his moral passion has broken the outline and marred the symmetry of his general design. And yet he was at all points a poet: there is an accent of indomitable self-reliance, a note of persistence and resistance more deep than any note of triumph, in the very cry of his passionate and implacable dejection, which marks him as different in kind from the race of the great prosaic pessimists whose scorn and hatred of mankind found expression in the contemptuous and rancorous despondency of Swift or of Carlyle. The obsession of evil, the sensible prevalence of wickedness and falsehood, self-interest and stupidity, pressed heavily on his fierce and indignant imagination; yet not so heavily that mankind came to seem to him the “damned race,” the hopeless horde of millions “mostly fools” too foolish or too foul to be worth redemption, which excited the laughing contempt of Frederic the Great and the raging contempt of his biographer. On this point the editor to whom all lovers of high poetry were in some measure indebted for the first collection and reissue of his works has done much less than justice to the poet on whose text he can scarcely be said to have expended an adequate or even a tolerable amount of pains. A reader of his introduction who had never studied the text of his author might be forgiven if he should carry away the impression that Tourneur, as a serious or tragic poet, was little more than a better sort of Byron; a quack less impudent but not less transparent than the less inspired and more inflated ventriloquist of “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”: whereas it is hardly too much to say that the earnest and fiery intensity of Tourneur’s moral rhetoric is no less unmistakable than the blatant and flatulent ineptitude of Byron’s.
It seems to me that Tourneur might say with the greatest of the popes, “I have loved justice, and hated iniquity: therefore I die in exile”; therefore, in other words, I am cast aside and left behind by readers who are too lazy, too soft and slow of spirit, too sleepily sensual and self-sufficient, to endure the fiery and purgatorial atmosphere of my work. But there are breaths from heaven as surely as there are blasts from hell in the tumultuous and electric air of it. The cynicism and egotism which the editor already mentioned has the confidence to attribute to him are rather the outer garments than the inner qualities of his genius: the few and simple lines in which his purer and nobler characters are rapidly but not roughly drawn suffice to give them all due relief and all requisite attraction. The virtuous victims of the murderous conspirator whose crimes and punishment are the groundwork of “The Atheist’s Tragedy” have life and spirit enough to make them heartily interesting: and the mixed character of Sebastian, the high-hearted and gallant young libertine whose fearless frankness of generosity brushes aside and breaks away the best-laid schemes of his father, is as vividly and gracefully drawn as any of the same kind on the comic or the tragic stage.
In this earlier of the two plays extant which preserve the name of Cyril Tourneur the magnificent if grotesque extravagance of the design may perhaps be partly accounted for by the didactic or devotional aim of the designer. A more appalling scarecrow or scarebabe, as the contemporaries of his creator would have phrased it, was certainly never begotten by orthodoxy on horror than the figure of the portentous and prodigious criminal who here represents the practical results of indulgence in free thought. It is a fine proof of the author’s naturally dramatic genius that this terrific successor of Vanini and precursor of Diderot should be other than a mere man of straw. Huge as is the wilful and deliberate exaggeration of his atrocity, there are scenes and passages in which his daring and indomitable craft is drawn with native skill as well as force of hand; in which it is no mere stage monster, but a genuine man, plausible and relentless, versatile and fearless, who comes before us now clothed in all the cajoleries of cunning, now exultant in all the nakedness of defiance. But indeed, although the construction of the verse and the composition of the play may both equally seem to bear witness of crude and impatient inexperience, there is no lack of life in any of the tragic or comic figures which play their part through these tempestuous five acts. Even so small a figure as the profligate Puritan parasite of the atheist who hires his hypocrisy to plead against itself is bright with touches of real rough humor. There is not much of this quality in Tourneur’s work, and what there is of it is as bitter and as grim in feature and in flavor as might be expected of so fierce and passionate a moralist: but he knows well how to salt his invective with a due sprinkling of such sharply seasoned pleasantry as relieves the historic narrative of John Knox; whose “merry” account, for instance, of Cardinal Beaton’s last night in this world has the very savor of Tourneur’s tragic irony and implacable disgust in every vivid and relentless line of it.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 348
