Putting aside the abiding influence of a good long-continued course of misrepresentation, it is still not difficult to discover the source of this under-estimate, without admitting the worst view or even any very bad view of Ben Jonson's character, literary and personal. It may be granted that he was rough and arrogant, a scholar who pushed scholarship to the verge of pedantry, a critic who sometimes forgot that though a schoolmaster may be a critic, a critic should not be merely a schoolmaster. His work is saturated with that contempt of the profanum vulgus which the profanum vulgus (humanly enough) seldom fails to return. Moreover, it is extremely voluminous, and it is by no means equal. Of his eighteen plays, three only—Every Man in his Humour, The Alchemist, and the charming fragment of The Sad Shepherd—can be praised as wholes. His lovely Masques are probably unread by all but a few scores, if so many, in each generation. His noble sinewy prose is, for the most part, unattractive in subject. His minor poems, though not a few of them are known even to smatterers in literature, are as a whole (or at least it would seem so) unknown. Yet his merits are extraordinary. "Never" in his plays (save The Sad Shepherd) "tender," and still more rarely "sublime," he yet, in words much better applied to him than to his pupil Dryden, "wrestles with and conquers time." Even his enemies admit his learning, his vigour, his astonishing power of work. What is less generally admitted, despite in one case at least the celebrity of the facts that prove it, is his observation, his invention, and at times his anomalous and seemingly contradictory power of grace and sweetness. There is no more singular example of the proverb, "Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong sweetness," which has been happily applied to Victor Hugo, than the composition, by the rugged author of Sejanus and Catiline, of The Devil is an Ass and Bartholomew Fair, of such things as

"Here lies to each her parents ruth;"

or the magnificent song,

"Drink to me only with thine eyes;"

or the crown and flower of all epitaphs,

"Underneath this sable herse."[33]

[33] Ben is sometimes deprived of this, me judice, most irreligiously.

But these three universally-known poems only express in quintessence a quality of Jonson's which is spread all about his minor pieces, which appears again perfectly in The Sad Shepherd, and which he seems to have kept out of his plays proper rather from bravado than for any other reason. His prose will be noticed separately in the next chapter, but it may be observed here that it is saturated with the same literary flavour which pervades all his work. None of his dramatic fellows wrote anything that can compare to it, just as none of them wrote anything that surpasses the songs and snatches in his plays, and the best things in his miscellaneous works. The one title which no competent criticism has ever grudged him is that of best epitaph-writer in the English language, and only those who have failed to consider the difficulties and the charm of that class of composition will consider this faint praise. Nevertheless, it was no doubt upon drama that Jonson concentrated his powers, and the unfavourable judgments which have been delivered on him chiefly refer to this.

A good deal of controversy has arisen out of the attribution to him, which is at least as old as The Return from Parnassus, of being minded to classicise the English drama. It is certain that he set a value on the Unities which no other English dramatist has set, and that in The Alchemist at least he has given something like a perfect example of them, which is at the same time an admirable play. Whether this attention is at all responsible for the defects which are certainly found in his work is a very large question. It cannot be denied that in that work, with perhaps the single exception just mentioned, the reader (it is, except in the case of Every Man in his Humour, generations since the playgoer had any opportunity of judging) finds a certain absence of sympathetic attraction, as well as, for all the formal unity of the pieces, a lack of that fusing poetic force which makes detail into a whole. The amazing strength of Jonson's genius, the power with which he has compelled all manner of unlikely elements into his service, is evident enough, but the result usually wants charm. The drawbacks are (always excepting The Alchemist) least perceptible in Every Man in his Humour, the first sprightly runnings (unless The Case is Altered is older) of Jonson's fancy, the freshest example of his sharp observation of "humours." Later he sometimes overdid this observation, or rather he failed to bring its results sufficiently into poetic or dramatic form, and, therefore, is too much for an age and too little for all time. But Every Man in his Humour is really charming. Bobadil, Master Stephen, and Kitely attain to the first rank of dramatic characters, and others are not far behind them in this respect. The next play, Every Man out of his Humour, is a great contrast, being, as even the doughty Gifford admits, distinctly uninteresting as a whole, despite numerous fine passages. Perhaps a little of its want of attraction must be set down to a pestilent habit of Jonson's, which he had at one time thought of applying to Every Man in his Humour, the habit of giving foreign, chiefly Italian, appellations to his characters, describing, and as it were labelling them—Deliro, Macilente, and the like. This gives an air of unreality, a figurehead and type character. Cynthia's Revels has the same defects, but is to some extent saved by its sharp raillery of euphuism. With The Poetaster Jonson began to rise again. I think myself that the personages and machinery of the Augustan Court would be much better away, and that the implied satire on contemporaries would be tedious if it could not, as it fortunately can, be altogether neglected. But in spite of these drawbacks, the piece is good. Of Sejanus and Jonson's later Roman play Catiline I think, I confess, better than the majority of critics appear to think. That they have any very intense tragic interest will, indeed, hardly be pretended, and the unfortunate but inevitable comparison with Coriolanus and Julius Caesar has done them great and very unjust harm. Less human than Shakespere's "godlike Romans" (who are as human as they are godlike), Jonson's are undoubtedly more Roman, and this, if it is not entirely an attraction, is in its way a merit. But it was not till after Sejanus that the full power of Jonson appeared. His three next plays, Volpone, Epicene, and The Alchemist, could not have been written by any one but himself, and, had they not been written, would have left a gap in English which nothing from any other literature could supply. If his attitude had been a little less virtuous and a little more sarcastic, Jonson would in these three plays have anticipated Swift. Of the three, I prefer the first and the last—the last being the best of all. Epicene or the Silent Woman was specially liked by the next generation because of its regularity, and of the skill with which the various humours are all wrought into the main plot. Both these things are undeniable, and many of the humours are in themselves amusing enough. But still there is something wanting, which is supplied in Volpone and The Alchemist. It has been asked whether that disregard of probability, which is one of Jonson's greatest faults, does not appear in the recklessness with which "The Fox" exposes himself to utter ruin, not so much to gratify any sensual desire or obtain any material advantage, as simply to indulge his combined hypocrisy and cynicism to the very utmost. The answer to this question will very much depend on each reader's taste and experience. It is undeniable that there have been examples of perverse indulgence in wickedness for wickedness' sake, which, rare as they are, go far to justify the creation of Volpone. But the unredeemed villany of the hero, with whom it is impossible in any way to sympathise, and the sheer brutality of the fortune-hunting dupes who surround him, make it easier to admire than to like the play. I have little doubt that Jonson was to some extent sensible of this, for the comic episode or underplot of Sir Politick and Lady Would-be is very much more loosely connected with the centre interest (it is only by courtesy that it can be said to be connected at all), than is usual with him, and this is an argument in favour of its having been introduced as a makeweight.

From the drawbacks of both these pieces The Alchemist is wholly free. Jonson here escaped his usual pitfall of the unsympathetic, for the vices and follies he satirises are not loathsome, only contemptible at worst, and not always that. He found an opportunity of exercising his extraordinary faculty of concentration as he nowhere else did, and has given us in Sir Epicure Mammon a really magnificent picture of concupiscence, of sensual appetite generally, sublimed by heat of imagination into something really poetic. The triumvirate of adventurers, Subtle, Dol and Face (for Dol has virile qualities), are not respectable, but one does not hate them; and the gulls are perfection. If any character could be spared it is the "Angry Boy," a young person whose humours, as Jonson himself admits of another character elsewhere, are "more tedious than diverting." The Alchemist was followed by Catiline, and Catiline by Bartholomew Fair, a play in which singularly vivid and minute pictures of manners, very amusing sketches of character, and some capital satire on the Puritans, do not entirely redeem a profusion of the coarsest possible language and incident. The Devil is an Ass comes next in time, and though no single character is the equal of Zeal-of-the-land Busy in Bartholomew Fair, the play is even more amusing. The four last plays, The Staple of News, The Magnetic Lady, The New Inn, and The Tale of a Tub, which Jonson produced after long absence from the stage, were not successful, and were both unkindly and unjustly called by Dryden "Ben's dotages." As for the charming Sad Shepherd, it was never acted, and is now unfinished, though it is believed that the poet completed it. It stands midway as a pastoral Feerie between his regular plays and the great collection of ingenious and graceful masques and entertainments, which are at the top of all such things in England (unless Comus be called a masque), and which are worth comparing with the ballets and spectacle pieces of Moliere. Perhaps a complete survey of Jonson's work indicates, as his greatest defect, the want of passion. He could be vigorous, he could be dignified, he could be broadly humorous, and, as has been said, he could combine with these the apparently incompatible, or, at least, not closely-connected faculty of grace. Of passion, of rapture, there is no trace in him, except in the single instance—in fire mingled with earth—of Sir Epicure Mammon. But the two following passages—one from Sejanus, one from The Sad Shepherd—will show his dignity and his pathos. No extract in brief could show his humour:—

Arr. "I would begin to study 'em,[34] if I thought They would secure me. May I pray to Jove In secret and be safe? ay, or aloud, With open wishes, so I do not mention Tiberius or Sejanus? Yes I must, If I speak out. 'Tis hard that. May I think And not be racked? What danger is't to dream, Talk in one's sleep or cough? Who knows the laws? May I shake my head without a comment? Say It rains, or it holds up, and not be thrown Upon the Gemonies? These now are things, Whereon men's fortune, yea, their fate depends. Nothing hath privilege 'gainst the violent ear. No place, no day, no hour, we see, is free, Not our religious and most sacred times From some one kind of cruelty: all matter, Nay, all occasion pleaseth. Madmen's rage, The idleness of drunkards, women's nothing, Jester's simplicity, all, all is good That can be catcht at. Nor is now the event Of any person, or for any crime To be expected; for 'tis always one: Death, with some little difference of place Or time. What's this? Prince Nero, guarded!"

[34] To wit the "arts" of suffering and being silent, by which his interlocutor Lepidus has explained his own safety from delation.

* * * * *

AEg. "A spring, now she is dead! of what? of thorns, Briars and brambles? thistles, burs and docks? Cold hemlock, yews? the mandrake, or the box? These may grow still: but what can spring beside? Did not the whole earth sicken when she died As if there since did fall one drop of dew, But what was wept for her! or any stalk Did bear a flower, or any branch a bloom, After her wreath was made! In faith, in faith, You do not fair to put these things upon me, Which can in no sort be: Earine Who had her very being and her name With the first knots or buddings of the spring, Born with the primrose and the violet Or earliest roses blown: when Cupid smiled And Venus led the Graces out to dance, And all the flowers and sweets in nature's lap Leaped out and made their solemn conjuration To last but while she lived! Do not I know How the vale withered the same day? how Dove, Dean, Eye, and Erwash, Idel, Snite and Soare Each broke his urn, and twenty waters more That swelled proud Trent, shrunk themselves dry, that since No sun or moon, or other cheerful star, Looked out of heaven, but all the cope was dark As it were hung so for her exequies! And not a voice or sound to ring her knell But of that dismal pair, the screeching owl And buzzing hornet! Hark! hark! hark! the foul Bird! how she flutters with her wicker wings! Peace! you shall hear her screech.

Cla. Good Karolin, sing, Help to divert this phant'sy.

Kar. All I can:

Sings while AEg. reads the song.

'Though I am young and cannot tell Either what Death or Love is well, Yet I have heard they both bear darts And both do aim at human hearts: And then again, I have been told, Love wounds with heat, as Death with cold; So that I fear they do but bring Extremes to touch and mean one thing.

'As in a ruin we it call One thing to be blown up, or fall; Or to our end, like way may have, By a flash of lightning or a wave: So Love's inflamed shaft or brand May kill as soon as Death's cold hand, Except Love's fires the virtue have To fright the frost out of the grave.'"

Of no two contemporary men of letters in England can it be said that they were, intellectually speaking, so near akin as Ben Jonson and George Chapman. The translator of Homer was a good deal older than Jonson, and exceedingly little is known of his life. He was pretty certainly born near Hitchin in Hertfordshire, the striking situation of which points his reference to it even in these railroad days. The date is uncertain—it may have been 1557, and was certainly not later than 1559—so that he was the oldest of the later Elizabethan school who survived into the Caroline period. He perhaps entered the University of Oxford in 1574. His first known work, The Shadow of Night, dates from 1594; and a reference of Meres's shows that he was known for tragedy four years later. In 1613 he, Jonson (a constant friend of his whose mutual fidelity refutes of itself the silly calumnies as to Jonson's enviousness, for of Chapman only, among his colleagues, was he likely to be jealous), and Marston were partners in the venture of Eastward Ho! which, for some real or fancied slight on Scotland, exposed the authors to danger of the law. He was certainly a protege of Prince Henry, the English Marcellus, and he seems to have received patronage from a much less blameless patron, Carr, Earl of Somerset. His literary activity was continuous and equal, but it was in his later days that he attempted and won the crown of the greatest of English translators. "Georgius Chapmannus, Homeri metaphrastes" the posy of his portrait runs, and he himself seems to have quite sunk any expectation of fame from his original work in the expectation of remembrance as a translator of the Prince of Poets. Many other interesting traits suggest, rather than ascertain, themselves in reference to him, such as his possible connection with the early despatch of English troupes of players to Germany, and his adoption of contemporary French subjects for English tragedy. But of certain knowledge of him we have very little. What is certain is that, like Drayton (also a friend of his), he seems to have lived remote and afar from the miserable quarrels and jealousies of his time; that, as has been already shown by dates, he was a kind of English Fontenelle in his overlapping of both ends of the great school of English poets; and that absolutely no base personal gossip tarnishes his poetical fame. The splendid sonnet of Keats testifies to the influence which his work long had on those Englishmen who were unable to read Homer in the original. A fine essay of Mr. Swinburne's has done, for the first time, justice to his general literary powers, and a very ingenious and, among such hazardous things, unusually probable conjecture of Mr. Minto's identifies him with the "rival poet" of Shakespere's Sonnets. But these are adventitious claims to fame. What is not subject to such deduction is the assertion that Chapman was a great Englishman who, while exemplifying the traditional claim of great Englishmen to originality, independence, and versatility of work, escaped at once the English tendency to lack of scholarship, and to ignorance of contemporary continental achievements, was entirely free from the fatal Philistinism in taste and in politics, and in other matters, which has been the curse of our race, was a Royalist, a lover, a scholar, and has left us at once one of the most voluminous and peculiar collections of work that stand to the credit of any literary man of his country. It may be that his memory has gained by escaping the danger of such revelations or scandals as the Jonson confessions to Drummond, and that the lack of attraction to the ordinary reader in his work has saved him from that comparison which (it has perhaps been urged ad nauseam) is the bane of just literary judgment. To those who always strive to waive all such considerations, these things will make but little difference.

The only complete edition of Chapman's works dates from our own days, and its three volumes correspond to a real division of subject. Although, in common with all these writers, Chapman has had much uncertain and some improbable work fathered on him, his certain dramas supply one of the most interesting studies in our period. As usual with everyone except Shakespere and (it is a fair reason for the relatively disproportionate estimate of these so long held) Beaumont and Fletcher, they are extremely unequal. Not a certain work of Chapman is void of interest. The famous Eastward Ho! (one of the liveliest comedies of the period dealing with London life) was the work of three great writers, and it is not easy to distribute its collaboration. That it is not swamped with "humours" may prove that Jonson's learned sock was put on by others. That it is neither grossly indecent nor extravagantly sanguinary, shows that Marston had not the chief hand in it, and so we are left to Chapman. What he could do is not shown in the list of his own certain plays till All Fools. The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1596?) and An Humorous Day's Mirth show that singular promiscuousness—that heaping together of scenes without order or connection—which we have noticed in the first dramatic period, not to mention that the way in which the characters speak of themselves, not as "I" but by their names in the third person, is also unmistakable. But All Fools is a much more noteworthy piece, and though Mr. Swinburne may have praised it rather highly, it would certainly take place in a collection of the score best comedies of the time not written by Shakespere. The Gentleman Usher and Monsieur d'Olive belong to the same school of humorous, not too pedantic comedy, and then we come to the strange series of Chapman's French tragedies, Bussy d'Ambois, The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois, Byron's Conspiracy, The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, and The Tragedy of Philip Chabot, Admiral of France. These singular plays stand by themselves. Whether the strong influence which Marlowe exercised on Chapman led the later poet (who it must be remembered was not the younger) to continue The Massacre of Paris, or what other cause begat them, cannot now be asserted or even guessed without lost labour. A famous criticism of Dryden's attests his attention to them, but does not, perhaps, to those who have studied Dryden deeply, quite express the influence which Chapman had on the leader of post-Restoration tragedy. As plays, the whole five are models of what plays should not be; in parts, they are models of what plays should be. Then Chapman returned to the humour-comedy and produced two capital specimens of it in May-Day and The Widow's Tears. Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany, which contains long passages of German, and Revenge for Honour, two tragedies which were not published till long after Chapman's death, are to my mind very dubiously his. Mr. Swinburne, in dealing with them, availed himself of the hypothesis of a mellowing, but at the same time weakening of power by age. It may be so, and I have not the slightest intention of pronouncing decidedly on the subject. They bear to my mind much more mark of the decadent period of Charles I., when the secret of blank verse was for a time lost, and when even men who had lived in personal friendship with their great predecessors lapsed into the slipshod stuff that we find in Davenant, in his followers, and among them even in the earlier plays of Dryden. It is, of course, true that this loosening and slackening of the standard betrays itself even before the death of Chapman, which happened in 1634. But I cannot believe that the author of Bussy d'Ambois (where the verse is rude enough but never lax) and the contemporary or elder of Shakespere, Marlowe, and all the great race, could ever have been guilty of the slovenliness which, throughout, marks Revenge for Honour.

The second part of Chapman's work, his original verse, is much inferior in bulk and in interest of matter to the first and third. Yet, is it not perhaps inferior to either in giving evidence of the author's peculiarities; while the very best thing he ever wrote (a magnificent passage in The Tears of Peace) is contained in it. Its component parts are, however, sufficiently odd. It opens with a strange poem called The Shadow of Night, which Mr. Swinburne is not wrong in classing among the obscurest works in English. The mischievous fashion of enigmatic writing, already glanced at in the section on satire, was perhaps an offshoot of euphuism; and certainly Chapman, who never exhibits much taint of euphuism proper, here out-Herods Herod and out-Tourneurs Tourneur. It was followed by an equally singular attempt at the luscious school of which Venus and Adonis is the most famous. Ovid's Banquet of Sense has received high praise from critics whom I esteem. For my own part I should say that it is the most curious instance of a radically unpassionate nature, trying to lash itself into passion, that our language contains. Then Chapman tried an even bolder flight in the same dialect—the continuation of Marlowe's unfinished Hero and Leander. In this attempt, either by sheer force of his sinewy athletics, or by some inspiration derived from the "Dead Shepherd," his predecessor, he did not fail, curious as is the contrast of the two parts. The Tears of Peace, which contains his finest work, is in honour of Prince Henry—a worthy work on a worthy subject, which was followed up later by an epicedium on the prince's lamented death. Besides some epigrams and sonnets, the chief other piece of this division is the disastrous Andromeda Liberata, which unluckily celebrates the nuptials—stained with murder, adultery, and crime of all sorts—of Frances Howard and Robert Carr. It is in Chapman's most allusive and thorniest style, but is less interesting intrinsically than as having given occasion to an indignant prose vindication by the poet, which, considering his self-evident honesty, is the most valuable document in existence for explaining the apparently grovelling panegyric of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. It makes clear (what indeed an intelligent reader might gather for himself) that the traditional respect for rank and station, uniting with the tendency to look for patterns and precedents in the classics for almost everything, made of these panegyrics a kind of school exercise, in which the excellence of the subject was taken for granted, and the utmost hyperbole of praise was only a "common form" of composition, to which the poet imparted or added what grace of style or fancy he could, with hardly a notion of his ascriptions being taken literally.

But if Chapman's dramas have been greatly undervalued, and if his original poems are an invaluable help to the study of the time, there is no doubt that it is as a translator that he made and kept the strongest hold on the English mind. He himself spoke of his Homeric translations (which he began as early as 1598, doing also Hesiod, some Juvenal, and some minor fragments, Pseudo-Virgilian, Petrarchian and others) as "the work that he was born to do." His version, with all its faults, outlived the popularity even of Pope, was for more than two centuries the resort of all who, unable to read Greek, wished to know what the Greek was, and, despite the finical scholarship of the present day, is likely to survive all the attempts made with us. I speak with all humility, but as having learnt Homer from Homer himself, and not from any translation, prose or verse. I am perfectly aware of Chapman's outrageous liberties, of his occasional unfaithfulness (for a libertine need not necessarily be unfaithful in translation), and of the condescension to his own fancies and the fancies of his age, which obscures not more perhaps than some condescensions which nearness and contemporary influences prevent some of us from seeing the character of the original. But at the same time, either I have no skill in criticism, and have been reading Greek for fifty years to none effect, or Chapman is far nearer Homer than any modern translator in any modern language. He is nearer in the Iliad than in the Odyssey—an advantage resulting from his choice of vehicle. In the Odyssey he chose the heroic couplet, which never can give the rise and fall of the hexameter. In the Iliad, after some hesitation between the two (he began as early as 1598), he preferred the fourteener, which, at its best, is the hexameter's nearest substitute. With Chapman it is not always at its best—very far from it. If he never quite relapses into the sheer doggerel of the First Period, he sometimes comes perilously near to it. But he constantly lifts his wings and soars in a quite different measure which, when he keeps it up for a little, gives a narrative vehicle unsurpassed, and hardly equalled, in English poetry for variation of movement and steady forward flow combined. The one point in which the Homeric hexameter is unmatched among metres is its combination of steady advance with innumerable ripples and eddies in its course, and it is here that Chapman (though of course not fully) can partly match it. It is, however, one of the testimonies to the supreme merit of the Homeric poems that every age seems to try to imitate them in its own special mannerisms, and that, consequently, no age is satisfied with the attempts of another. It is a second, that those who know the original demur at all.

The characteristics of Chapman, then, are very much those of Jonson with a difference. Both had the same incapacity of unlaboured and forceless art, the same insensibility to passion, the same inability to rise above mere humours and contemporary oddities into the region of universal poetry. Both had the same extensive learning, the same immense energy, the same (if it must be said) arrogance and contempt of the vulgar. In casual strokes, though not in sustained grasp, Chapman was Jonson's superior; but unlike Jonson he had no lyric gift, and unlike Jonson he let his learning and his ambitious thought clog and obscure the flow of his English. Nor does he show in any of his original work the creative force of his younger friend. With the highest opinion reasonably possible of Chapman's dramas, we cannot imagine him for a moment composing a Volpone or an Alchemist—even a Bartholomew Fair; while he was equally, or still more, incapable of Jonson's triumphs in epigram and epitaph, in song and ode. A certain shapelessness is characteristic of everything that Chapman did—an inability, as Mr. Swinburne (to whom every one who now writes on Chapman must acknowledge indebtedness), has said, "to clear his mouth of pebbles, and his brow of fog." His long literary life, which must have exceeded half a century, and his great learning, forbid our setting this down as it may be set in the case of many of his contemporaries, and especially in the case of those two to whom we are now coming, as due to youth, to the imperfect state of surrounding culture, to want of time for perfecting his work, and so forth. He is the "Begue de Vilaines," the heroic Stammerer of English literature—a man who evidently had some congenital defect which all his fire and force, all his care and curiosity, could not overcome. Yet are his doings great, and it is at least probable that if he had felt less difficulty in original work, he would not have been prompted to set about and finish the noble work of translation which is among the best products of an unsatisfactory kind, and which will outlive the cavils of generations of etymologists and aorist-grinders. He has been so little read that four specimens of his different manners—the early "tenebrous" style of The Shadow of Night, the famous passage from Bussy d'Ambois which excited Lamb's enthusiasm, and a sample from both Iliad and Odyssey—may be given:

"In this vast thicket (whose description's task The pens of fairies and of fiends would ask: So more than human-thoughted horrible) The souls of such as lived implausible, In happy empire of this goddess' glories, And scorned to crown her fanes with sacrifice,[35] Did ceaseless walk; exspiring fearful groans, Curses and threats for their confusions. Her darts, and arrows, some of them had slain: Others her dogs eat, painting her disdain, After she had transformed them into beasts: Others her monsters carried to their nests, Rent them in pieces, and their spirits sent To this blind shade, to wail their banishment. The huntsmen hearing (since they could not hear) Their hounds at fault, in eager chase drew near, Mounted on lions, unicorns, and boars, And saw their hounds lie licking of their sores Some yearning at the shroud, as if they chid Her stinging tongues, that did their chase forbid: By which they knew the game was that way gone. Then each man forced the beast he rode upon, T' assault the thicket; whose repulsive thorns So gall'd the lions, boars, and unicorns, Dragons and wolves, that half their courages Were spent in roars, and sounds of heaviness: Yet being the princeliest, and hardiest beasts, That gave chief fame to those Ortygian forests, And all their riders furious of their sport, A fresh assault they gave, in desperate sort: And with their falchions made their way in wounds, The thicket open'd, and let in the hounds."

[35] The rhyme, bad as it is, is not unprecedented.

* * * * *

Bu. "What dismal change is here; the good old Friar Is murther'd, being made known to serve my love; And now his restless spirit would forewarn me Of some plot dangerous and imminent. Note what he wants? He wants his upper weed, He wants his life and body; which of these Should be the want he means, and may supply me With any fit forewarning? This strange vision (Together with the dark prediction Used by the Prince of Darkness that was raised By this embodied shadow) stir my thoughts With reminiscion of the spirit's promise, Who told me, that by any invocation I should have power to raise him, though it wanted The powerful words and decent rites of art; Never had my set brain such need of spirit T' instruct and cheer it; now, then, I will claim Performance of his free and gentle vow T' appear in greater light and make more plain His rugged oracle. I long to know How my dear mistress fares, and be inform'd What hand she now holds on the troubled blood Of her incensed lord. Methought the spirit (When he had utter'd his perplex'd presage) Threw his changed countenance headlong into clouds, His forehead bent, as it would hide his face, He knock'd his chin against his darken'd breast, And struck a churlish silence through his powers. Terror of darkness! O, thou king of flames! That with thy music-footed horse dost strike The clear light out of crystal on dark earth, And hurl'st instructive fire about the world, Wake, wake, the drowsy and enchanted night That sleeps with dead eyes in this heavy riddle; Or thou great prince of shades where never sun Sticks his far darted beams, whose eyes are made To shine in darkness, and see ever best Where sense is blindest: open now the heart Of thy abashed oracle, that for fear Of some ill it includes, would fain lie hid, And rise thou with it in thy greater light."

* * * * *

"For Hector's glory still he stood, and ever went about To make him cast the fleet such fire, as never should go out; Heard Thetis' foul petition, and wished in any wise The splendour of the burning ships might satiate his eyes.[36] From him yet the repulse was then to be on Troy conferred, The honour of it given the Greeks; which thinking on, he stirr'd With such addition of his spirit, the spirit Hector bore To burn the fleet, that of itself was hot enough before. But now he fared like Mars himself, so brandishing his lance As, through the deep shades of a wood, a raging fire should glance, Held up to all eyes by a hill; about his lips a foam Stood as when th' ocean is enraged; his eyes were overcome With fervour and resembled flames, set off by his dark brows, And from his temples his bright helm abhorred lightnings throws; For Jove, from forth the sphere of stars, to his state put his own And all the blaze of both the hosts confined in him alone. And all this was, since after this he had not long to live, This lightning flew before his death, which Pallas was to give (A small time thence, and now prepared) beneath the violence Of great Pelides. In meantime, his present eminence Thought all things under it; and he, still where he saw the stands Of greatest strength and bravest arm'd, there he would prove his hands, Or no where; offering to break through, but that passed all his power Although his will were past all theirs, they stood him like a tower Conjoined so firm, that as a rock, exceeding high and great, And standing near the hoary sea, bears many a boisterous threat Of high-voiced winds and billows huge, belched on it by the storms; So stood the Greeks great Hector's charge, nor stirred their battellous forms."

[36] This line alone would suffice to exhibit Chapman's own splendour at his best.

* * * * *

"This the Goddess told, And then the morning in her throne of gold Surveyed the vast world; by whose orient light The nymph adorn'd me with attires as bright, Her own hands putting on both shirt and weed Robes fine, and curious, and upon my head An ornament that glittered like a flame; Girt me in gold; and forth betimes I came Amongst my soldiers, roused them all from sleep, And bade them now no more observance keep Of ease, and feast, but straight a shipboard fall, For now the Goddess had inform'd me all. Their noble spirits agreed; nor yet so clear Could I bring all off, but Elpenor there His heedless life left. He was youngest man Of all my company, and one that wan Least fame for arms, as little for his brain; Who (too much steep'd in wine and so made fain To get refreshing by the cool of sleep, Apart his fellows plung'd in vapours deep, And they as high in tumult of their way) Suddenly waked and (quite out of the stay A sober mind had given him) would descend A huge long ladder, forward, and an end Fell from the very roof, full pitching on The dearest joint his head was placed upon, Which quite dissolved, let loose his soul to hell."

With regard to Marston (of whose little-known personality something has been said in connection with his satires) I find myself somewhat unable to agree with the generality of critics, who seem to me to have been rather taken in by his blood-and-thunder work, his transpontine declamation against tyrants, and his affectation of a gloomy or furious scorn against mankind. The uncouthness, as well as the suspicion of insincerity, which we noted in his satirical work, extend, as it seems to me, also to his dramas; and if we class him as a worker in horrors with Marlowe earlier, and with Webster and Ford later, the chief result will be to show his extreme inferiority to them. He is even below Tourneur in this respect, while, like Tourneur, he is exposed to the charge of utterly neglecting congruity and proportion. With him we relapse not merely from the luminous perfection of Shakespere, from the sane order of work which was continued through Fletcher, and the best of Fletcher's followers, but from the more artificial unity of Jonson, back into the chaotic extravagances of the First Period. Marston, like the rest, is fond of laughing at Jeronimo, but his own tragic construction and some of his own tragic scenes are hardly less bombastic, and scarcely at all less promiscuous than the tangled horrors of that famous melodrama. Marston, it is true, has lucid intervals—even many of them. Hazlitt has succeeded in quoting many beautiful passages, one of which was curiously echoed in the next age by Nat. Lee, in whom, indeed, there was a strong vein of Elizabethan melodrama. The sarcasm on philosophical study in What You Will is one of the very best things of its own kind in the range of English drama,—light, sustained, not too long nor too short, in fact, thoroughly "hit off."

"Delight my spaniel slept, whilst I baused[37] leaves, Tossed o'er the dunces, pored on the old print Of titled words, and still my spaniel slept. Whilst I wasted lamp oil, bated my flesh, Shrunk up my veins, and still my spaniel slept, And still I held converse with Zabarell, Aquinas, Scotus, and the musty saws Of antique Donate: still my spaniel slept. Still on went I: first an sit anima, Then, an' 'twere mortal. O hold, hold! At that they are at brain buffets, fell by the ears, Amain [pell-mell] together—still my spaniel slept. Then whether 'twere corporeal, local, fixed, Ex traduce; but whether 't had free will Or no, hot philosophers Stood banding factions all so strongly propped, I staggered, knew not which was firmer part; But thought, quoted, read, observed and pried, Stuffed noting-books, and still my spaniel slept. At length he waked and yawned, and by yon sky For aught I know, he knew as much as I."

[37] Kissed.

There is real pathos in Antonio and Mellida, and real satire in Parasitaster and The Malcontent. Hazlitt (who had a very high opinion of Marston) admits that the remarkable inequalities of this last piece "seem to show want of interest in the subject." This is an odd explanation, but I suspect it is really only an anticipation in more favourable words of my own theory, that Marston's tragic and satiric moods were not really sincere; that he was a clever man who found a fashion of satire and a fashion of blood-and-thunder tragedy prevailing, and threw himself into both without much or any heart in the matter. This is supported by the curious fact that almost all his plays (at least those extant) were produced within a very few years, 1602-1607, though he lived some thirty years after the latter date, and quite twenty after his last dated appearances in literature, The Insatiate Countess, and Eastward Ho! That he was an ill-tempered person with considerable talents, who succeeded, at any rate for a time, in mistaking his ill-temper for saeva indignatio, and his talents for genius, is not, I think, too harsh a description of Marston. In the hotbed of the literary influences of the time these conditions of his produced some remarkable fruit. But when the late Professor Minto attributes to him "amazing and almost Titanic energy," mentions "life" several times over as one of the chief characteristics of his personages (I should say that they had as much life as violently-moved marionettes), and discovers "amiable and admirable characters" among them, I am compelled not, of course, to be positive that my own very different estimate is right, but to wonder at the singularly different way in which the same things strike different persons, who are not as a rule likely to look at them from very different points of view.

Marston's plays, however, are both powerful enough and famous enough to call for a somewhat more detailed notice. Antonio and Mellida, the earliest and if not the best as a whole, that which contains the finest scenes and fragments, is in two parts—the second being more properly called The Revenge of Antonio. The revenge itself is of the exaggerated character which was so popular with the Elizabethan dramatists, but in which (except in the famous Cornwall and Gloucester scene in Lear) Shakespere never indulged after his earliest days. The wicked tyrant's tongue is torn out, his murdered son's body is thrown down before him, and then the conspirators, standing round, gibe, curse, and rant at him for a couple of pages before they plunge their swords into his body. This goodly conclusion is led up to by a sufficient quantity of antecedent and casual crimes, together with much not very excellent fooling by a court gull, Balurdo, who might be compared with Shakespere's fools of the same kind, to the very great advantage of those who do not appreciate the latter. The beautiful descriptive and reflective passages which, in Lamb's Extracts, gave the play its reputation, chiefly occur towards the beginning, and this is the best of them:—

And. "Why man, I never was a Prince till now. 'Tis not the bared pate, the bended knees, Gilt tipstaves, Tyrian purple, chairs of state, Troops of pied butterflies, that flutter still In greatness summer, that confirm a prince: 'Tis not the unsavoury breath of multitudes, Shouting and clapping, with confused din; That makes a prince. No, Lucio, he's a king, A true right king, that dares do aught save wrong, Fears nothing mortal, but to be unjust, Who is not blown up with the flattering puffs Of spungy sycophants: who stands unmov'd Despite the jostling of opinion: Who can enjoy himself, maugre the throng That strive to press his quiet out of him: Who sits upon Jove's footstool as I do Adoring, not affecting majesty: Whose brow is wreathed with the silver crown Of clear content: this, Lucio, is a king, And of this empire, every man's possessed That's worth his soul."

Sophonisba, which followed, is much less rambling, but as bloody and extravagant. The scene where the witch Erichtho plays Succubus to Syphax, instead of the heroine, and in her form, has touches which partly, but not wholly, redeem its extravagance, and the end is dignified and good. What You Will, a comedy of intrigue, is necessarily free from Marston's worst faults, and here the admirable passage quoted above occurs. But the main plot—which turns not only on the courtship, by a mere fribble, of a lady whose husband is supposed to be dead, and who has very complacently forgotten all about him, but on a ridiculous plot to foist a pretender off as the dead husband itself—is simply absurd. The lack of probability, which is the curse of the minor Elizabethan drama, hardly anywhere appears more glaringly. Parasitaster, or The Fawn, a satirical comedy, is much better, but the jealous hatred of The Dutch Courtesan is again not made probable. Then came Marston's completest work in drama, The Malcontent, an anticipation, after Elizabethan fashion, of Le Misanthrope and The Plain Dealer. Though not free from Marston's two chief vices of coarseness and exaggerated cynicism, it is a play of great merit, and much the best thing he has done, though the reconciliation, at the end, of such a husband and such a wife as Piero and Aurelia, between whom there is a chasm of adultery and murder, again lacks verisimilitude. It is to be observed that both in The Fawn and The Malcontent there are disguised dukes—a fact not testifying any very great originality, even in borrowing. Of Eastward Ho! we have already spoken, and it is by no means certain that The Insatiate Countess is Marston's. His reputation would not lose much were it not. A fabliau-like underplot of the machinations of two light-o'-love citizens' wives against their husbands is not unamusing, but the main story of the Countess Isabella, a modern Messalina (except that she adds cruelty to the vices of Messalina) who alternately courts lovers and induces their successors to assassinate them, is in the worst style of the whole time—the tragedy of lust that is not dignified by the slightest passion, and of murder that is not excused by the slightest poetry of motive or treatment. Though the writing is not of the lowest order, it might have been composed by any one of some thirty or forty writers. It was actually attributed at the time to William Barksted, a minor poet of some power, and I am inclined to think it not Marston's, though my own estimate of him is, as will have been seen, not so high as some other estimates. It is because those estimates appear to me unduly high that I have rather accentuated the expression of my own lower one. For the last century, and perhaps longer, the language of hyperbole has been but too common about our dramatists, and I have known more than one case in which the extravagant praise bestowed upon them has, when students have come to the works themselves, had a very disastrous effect of disappointment. It is, therefore, all the more necessary to be candid in criticism where criticism seems to be required.

As to the last of our good company, there is fortunately very little risk of difference of opinion. A hundred years ago Thomas Dekker was probably little more than a name to all but professed students of Elizabethan literature, and he waited longer than any of his fellows for due recognition by presentation of his work in a complete form. It was not until the year 1873 that his plays were collected; it was not till eleven years later that his prose works had the same honour. Yet, since attention was directed to Dekker in any way, the best authorities have been unanimous in his praise. Lamb's famous outburst of enthusiasm, that he had "poetry enough for anything," has been soberly endorsed by two full generations of the best judges, and whatever differences of detail there may be as to his work, it is becoming more and more the received, and correctly-received opinion, that, as his collaborator Webster came nearest to Shakespere in universalising certain types in the severer tragedy, so Dekker has the same honour on the gently pathetic side. Yet this great honour is done to one of the most shadowy personalities in literature. We have four goodly volumes of his plays and five of his other works; yet of Thomas Dekker, the man, we know absolutely less than of any one of his shadowy fellows. We do not know when he was born, when he died, what he did other than writing in the certainly long space between the two unknown dates. In 1637 he was by his own words a man of threescore, which, as it has been justly remarked, may mean anything between fifty-five and seventy. He was in circumstances a complete contrast to his fellow-victim in Jonson's satire, Marston. Marston was apparently a gentleman born and bred, well connected, well educated, possessed of some property, able to make testamentary dispositions, and probably in the latter part of his life, when Dekker was still toiling at journalism of various kinds, a beneficed clergyman in country retirement. Dekker was, it is to be feared, what the arrogance of certain members of the literary profession has called, and calls, a gutter-journalist—a man who had no regular preparation for the literary career, and who never produced anything but hand-to-mouth work. Jonson went so far as to say that he was a "rogue;" but Ben, though certainly not a rogue, was himself not to be trusted when he spoke of people that he did not like; and if there was any but innocent roguery in Dekker he has contrived to leave exactly the opposite impression stamped on every piece of his work. And it is particularly interesting to note, that constantly as he wrote in collaboration, one invariable tone, and that the same as is to be found in his undoubtedly independent work, appears alike in plays signed with him by persons so different as Middleton and Webster, as Chettle and Ford. When this is the case, the inference is certain, according to the strictest rules of logic. We can define Dekker's idiosyncrasy almost more certainly than if he had never written a line except under his own name. That idiosyncrasy consists, first, of an exquisite lyrical faculty, which, in the songs given in all collections of extracts, equals, or almost equals, that of Shakespere; secondly, of a faculty for poetical comedy, for the comedy which transcends and plays with, rather than grasps and exposes, the vices and follies of men; thirdly, for a touch of pathos again to be evened only to Shakespere's; and lastly, for a knack of representing women's nature, for which, except in the master of all, we may look in vain throughout the plentiful dramatic literature of the period, though touches of it appear in Greene's Margaret of Fressingfield, in Heywood, in Middleton, and in some of the anonymous plays which have been fathered indifferently, and with indifferent hopelessness of identification, on some of the greatest of names of the period, on some of the meanest, and on an equal number of those that are neither great nor mean.

Dekker's very interesting prose works we shall treat in the next chapter, together with the other tracts into whose class they fall, and some of his plays may either go unnoticed, or, with those of the dramatists who collaborated with him, and whose (notably in the case of The Roaring Girl) they pretty evidently were more than his. His own characteristic pieces, or those in which his touch shows most clearly, though they may not be his entirely, are The Shoemaker's Holiday, Old Fortunatus, Satiromastix, Patient Grissil, The Honest Whore, The Whore of Babylon, If it be not Good the Devil is in it, The Virgin Martyr, Match me in London, The Son's Darling, and The Witch of Edmonton. In everyone of these the same characteristics appear, but the strangely composite fashion of writing of the time makes them appear in differing measures. The Shoemaker's Holiday is one of those innumerable and yet singular pieces in which the taste of the time seems to have so much delighted, and which seem so odd to modern taste,—pieces in which a plot or underplot, as the case may be, of the purest comedy of manners, a mere picture of the life, generally the lower middle-class life of the time, is united with hardly a thought of real dramatic conjunction to another plot of a romantic kind, in which noble and royal personages, with, it may be, a dash of history, play their parts. The crowning instance of this is Middleton's Mayor of Queenborough; but there are scores and hundreds of others, and Dekker specially affects it. The Shoemaker's Holiday is principally distinguished by the directness and raciness of its citizen sketches. Satiromastix (the second title of which is "The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet") is Dekker's reply to The Poetaster, in which he endeavours to retort Jonson's own machinery upon him. With his customary disregard of congruity, however, he has mixed up the personages of Horace, Crispinus, Demetrius, and Tucca, not with a Roman setting, but with a purely romantic story of William Rufus and Sir Walter Tyrrel, and the king's attempt upon the fidelity of Tyrrel's bride. This incongruous mixture gives one of the most charming scenes of his pen, the apparent poisoning of Celestina by her father to save her honour. But as Lamb himself candidly confessed, the effect of this in the original is marred, if not ruined, by the farcical surroundings, and the more farcical upshot of the scene itself,—the poisoning being, like Juliet's, a mere trick, though very differently fortuned. In Patient Grissil the two exquisite songs, "Art thou poor" and "Golden slumbers kiss thine eyes," and the sympathetic handling of Griselda's character (the one of all others to appeal to Dekker) mark his work. In all the other plays the same notes appear, and there is no doubt that Mr. Swinburne is wholly right in singling out from The Witch of Edmonton the feminine characters of Susan, Winifred, and the witch herself, as showing Dekker's unmatched command of the colours in which to paint womanhood. In the great debate as to the authorship of The Virgin Martyr, everything is so much conjecture that it is hard to pronounce authoritatively. Gifford's cool assumption that everything bad in the play is Dekker's, and everything good Massinger's, will not hold for a moment; but, on the other side, it must be remembered that since Lamb there has been a distinct tendency to depreciate Massinger. All that can be said is, that the grace and tenderness of the Virgin's part are much more in accordance with what is certainly Dekker's than with what is certainly Massinger's, and that either was quite capable of the Hircius and Spungius passages which have excited so much disgust and indignation—disgust and indignation which perhaps overlook the fact that they were no doubt inserted with the express purpose of heightening, by however clumsily designed a contrast, the virgin purity of Dorothea the saint.

It will be seen that I have reserved Old Fortunatus and The Honest Whore for separate notice. They illustrate, respectively, the power which Dekker has in romantic poetry, and his command of vivid, tender, and subtle portraiture in the characters, especially, of women. Both, and especially the earlier play, exhibit also his rapid careless writing, and his ignorance of, or indifference to, the construction of a clear and distinctly outlined plot. Old Fortunatus tells the well-known story of the wishing cap and purse, with a kind of addition showing how these fare in the hands of Fortunatus's sons, and with a wild intermixture (according to the luckless habit above noted) of kings and lords, and pseudo-historical incidents. No example of the kind is more chaotic in movement and action. But the interlude of Fortune with which it is ushered in is conceived in the highest romantic spirit, and told in verse of wonderful effectiveness, not to mention two beautiful songs; and throughout the play the allegorical or supernatural passages show the same character. Nor are the more prosaic parts inferior, as, for instance, the pretty dialogue of Orleans and Galloway, cited by Lamb, and the fine passage where Andelocia says what he will do "to-morrow."

Fort. "No more: curse on: your cries to me are music, And fill the sacred roundure of mine ears With tunes more sweet than moving of the spheres. Curse on: on our celestial brows do sit Unnumbered smiles, which then leap from their throne When they see peasants dance and monarchs groan. Behold you not this Globe, this golden bowl, This toy call'd world at our Imperial feet? This world is Fortune's ball wherewith she sports. Sometimes I strike it up into the air, And then create I Emperors and Kings. Sometimes I spurn it: at which spurn crawls out That wild beast multitude: curse on, you fools. 'Tis I that tumble Princes from their thrones, And gild false brows with glittering diadems. 'Tis I that tread on necks of conquerors, And when like semi-gods they have been drawn, In ivory chariots to the capitol, Circled about with wonder of all eyes The shouts of every tongue, love of all hearts Being swoll'n with their own greatness, I have prick'd The bladder of their pride, and made them die, As water bubbles, without memory. I thrust base cowards into honour's chair, Whilst the true spirited soldier stands by Bare headed, and all bare, whilst at his scars They scoff, that ne'er durst view the face of wars. I set an Idiot's cap on virtue's head, Turn learning out of doors, clothe wit in rags And paint ten thousand images of loam In gaudy silken colours: on the backs Of mules and asses I make asses ride Only for sport, to see the apish world Worship such beasts with sound idolatry. This Fortune does, and when this is done, She sits and smiles to hear some curse her name, And some with adoration crown her fame.

* * * * *

And. "To-morrow? ay to-morrow thou shalt buy them. To-morrow tell the Princess I will love her, To-morrow tell the King I'll banquet him, To-morrow, Shadow, will I give thee gold, To-morrow pride goes bare, and lust a-cold. To-morrow will the rich man feed the poor, And vice to-morrow virtue will adore. To-morrow beggars shall be crowned kings. This no-time, morrow's time, no sweetness sings. I pray thee hence: bear that to Agripyne."

The whole is, as a whole, to the last degree crude and undigested, but the ill-matured power of the writer is almost the more apparent.

The Honest Whore, in two parts, is, as far as general character goes, a mixed comedy of intrigue and manners combining, or rather uniting (for there is little combination of them), four themes—first, the love of Hippolito for the Princess Infelice, and his virtuous motions followed by relapse; secondly, the conversion by him of the courtesan Bellafront, a damsel of good family, from her evil ways, and her marriage to her first gallant, a hairbrained courtier named Matheo; thirdly, Matheo's ill-treatment of Bellafront, her constancy and her rejection of the temptations of Hippolito, who from apostle has turned seducer, with the humours of Orlando Friscobaldo, Bellafront's father, who, feigning never to forgive her, watches over her in disguise, and acts as guardian angel to her reckless and sometimes brutal husband; and lastly, the other humours of a certain marvellously patient citizen who allows his wife to hector him, his customers to bully and cheat him, and who pushes his eccentric and unmanly patience to the point of enduring both madhouse and jail. Lamb, while ranking a single speech of Bellafront's very high, speaks with rather oblique approval of the play, and Hazlitt, though enthusiastic for it, admires chiefly old Friscobaldo and the ne'er-do-well Matheo. My own reason for preferring it to almost all the non-tragical work of the time out of Shakespere, is the wonderful character of Bellafront, both in her unreclaimed and her reclaimed condition. In both she is a very woman—not as conventional satirists and conventional encomiasts praise or rail at women, but as women are. If her language in her unregenerate days is sometimes coarser than is altogether pleasant, it does not disguise her nature,—the very nature of such a woman misled by giddiness, by curiosity, by love of pleasure, by love of admiration, but in no thorough sense depraved. Her selection of Matheo not as the instrument of her being "made an honest woman," not apparently because she had any love for him left, or had ever had much, but because he was her first seducer, is exactly what, after a sudden convincing of sin, such a woman would have done; and if her patience under the long trial of her husband's thoughtlessness and occasional brutality seem excessive, it will only seem so to one who has been unlucky in his experience. Matheo indeed is a thorough good-for-nothing, and the natural man longs that Bellafront might have been better parted; but Dekker was a very moral person in his own way, and apparently he would not entirely let her—Imogen gone astray as she is—off her penance.



CHAPTER VI

LATER ELIZABETHAN AND JACOBEAN PROSE

One name so far dominates the prose literature of the last years of Elizabeth, and that of the whole reign of James, that it has probably alone secured attention in the general memory, except such as may be given to the purple patches (of the true Tyrian dye, but not extremely numerous) which decorate here and there the somewhat featureless expanse of Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World. That name, it is scarcely necessary to say, is the name of Francis Bacon. Bacon's eventful life, his much debated character, his philosophical and scientific position, are all matters beyond our subject. But as it is of the first importance in studying that subject to keep dates and circumstances generally, if not minutely, in view, it may be well to give a brief summary of his career. He was born in 1561, the son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper; he went very young to Cambridge, and though early put to the study of the law, discovered an equally early bent in another direction. He was unfortunate in not obtaining the patronage then necessary to all men not of independent fortune. Though Elizabeth was personally familiar with him, she gave him nothing of importance—whether owing to the jealousy of his uncle and cousin, Burleigh and Robert Cecil, is a point not quite certain. The patronage of Essex did him very little good, and drew him into the worst action of his life. But after Elizabeth's death, and when a man of middle age, he at last began to mount the ladder, and came with some rapidity to the summit of his profession, being made Lord Chancellor, and created Baron Verulam and Viscount St. Alban. The title Lord Bacon he never bore in strictness, but it has been consecrated by the use of many generations, and it is perhaps pedantry to object to it. Entangled as a courtier in the rising hatred of the Court felt by the popular party, exposed by his own carelessness, if not by actual venality in office, to the attacks of his enemies, and weakly supported, if supported at all, by the favourite Buckingham (who seems to have thought that Bacon took too much upon himself in state affairs), he lost, in 1621, all his places and emoluments, and was heavily fined. The retirement of his last few years produced much literary fruit, and he died (his death being caused or hastened by an injudicious experiment) in 1626.

Great as is the place that Bacon occupies in English literature, he occupies it, as it were, malgre lui. Unlike almost all the greatest men of his own and even of the preceding generation, he seems to have thought little of the capacities, and less of the chances of the English language. He held (and, unluckily for him, expressed his opinion in writing) that "these modern languages will at one time or the other play the bankrupt with books," and even when he wrote in the despised vernacular he took care to translate his work, or have it translated, into Latin in order to forestall the oblivion he dreaded. Nor is this his only phrase of contempt towards his mother-tongue—the tongue which in his own lifetime served as a vehicle to a literature compared with which the whole literary achievement of Latin antiquity is but a neat school exercise, and which in every point but accomplished precision of form may challenge comparison with Greek itself. This insensibility of Bacon's is characteristic enough, and might, if this were the place for any such subtlety, be connected with the other defects of his strangely blended character—his pusillanimity, his lack of passion (let any one read the Essay on Love, and remember that some persons, not always inmates of lunatic asylums, have held that Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespere), his love of empty pomp and display, and so forth.

But the English language which he thus despised had a noble and worthy revenge on Bacon. Of his Latin works hardly anything but the Novum Organum is now read even for scholastic purposes, and it is not certain that, but for the saving influences of academical study and prescription, even that might not slip out of the knowledge of all but specialists. But with the wider and wider spread and study of English the Essays and The Advancement of Learning are read ever more and more, and the only reason that The History of Henry VII., The New Atlantis, and the Sylva Sylvarum do not receive equal attention, lies in the comparative obsoleteness of their matter, combined with the fact that the matter is the chief thing on which attention is bestowed in them. Even in the two works noted, the Essays and The Advancement, which can go both together in a small volume, Bacon shows himself at his very greatest in all respects, and (ignorant or careless as he was of the fact) as one of the greatest writers of English prose before the accession of Charles I.

The characteristics of style in these two works are by no means the same; but between them they represent fairly enough the characteristics of all Bacon's English prose. It might indeed be desirable in studying it to add to them the Henry the Seventh, which is a model of clear historical narration, not exactly picturesque, but never dull; and though not exactly erudite, yet by no means wanting in erudition, and exhibiting conclusions which, after two centuries and a half of record-grubbing, have not been seriously impugned or greatly altered by any modern historian. In this book, which was written late, Bacon had, of course, the advantage of his long previous training in the actual politics of a school not very greatly altered since the time he was describing, but this does not diminish the credit due to him for formal excellence.

The Essays—which Bacon issued for the first time, to the number of ten, in 1597, when he was, comparatively speaking, a young man, which he reissued largely augmented in 1612, and yet again just before his death, in their final and fullest condition—are not so much in the modern sense essays as collections of thoughts more or less connected. We have, indeed, the genesis of them in the very interesting commonplace book called the Promus [butler or storekeeper] of Elegancies, the publication of which, as a whole, was for some reason or other not undertaken by Mr. Spedding, and is due to Mrs. Henry Pott. Here we have the quaint, but never merely quaint, analogies, the apt quotations, the singular flashes of reflection and illustration, which characterise Bacon, in their most unformed and new-born condition. In the Essays they are worked together, but still sententiously, and evidently with no attempt at sustained and fluent connection of style. That Montaigne must have had some influence on Bacon is, of course, certain; though few things can be more unlike than the curt severity of the scheme of the English essays and the interminable diffuseness of the French. Yet here and there are passages in Montaigne which might almost be the work of a French Bacon, and in Bacon passages which might easily be the work of an English Montaigne. In both there is the same odd mixture of dignity and familiarity—the familiarity predominating in Montaigne, the dignity in Bacon—and in both there is the union of a rich fancy and a profound interest in ethical questions, with a curious absence of passion and enthusiasm—a touch, as it may almost be called, of Philistinism, which in Bacon's case contrasts most strangely with his frequently gorgeous language, and the evident richness of his imagination, or at least his fancy.

The scheme and manner of these essays naturally induced a sententious and almost undeveloped manner of writing. An extraordinary number of separate phrases and sentences, which have become the common property of all who use the language, and are probably most often used without any clear idea of their author, may be disinterred from them, as well as many striking images and pregnant thoughts, which have had less general currency. But the compression of them (which is often so great that they might be printed sentence by sentence like verses of the Bible) prevents the author from displaying his command of a consecutive, elaborated, and harmonised style. What command he had of that style may be found, without looking far, in the Henry the Seventh, in the Atlantis, and in various minor works, some originally written in Latin and translated, such as the magnificent passage which Dean Church has selected as describing the purpose and crown of the Baconian system. In such passages the purely oratorical faculty which he undoubtedly had (though like all the earlier oratory of England, with rare exceptions, its examples remain a mere tradition, and hardly even that) displays itself; and one cannot help regretting that, instead of going into the law, where he never attained to much technical excellence, and where his mere promotion was at first slow, and was no sooner quickened than it brought him into difficulties and dangers, he had not sought the safer and calmer haven of the Church, where he would have been more at leisure to "take all knowledge to be his province;" would have been less tempted to engage in the treacherous, and to him always but half-congenial, business of politics, and would have forestalled, and perhaps excelled, Jeremy Taylor as a sacred orator. If Bacon be Jeremy's inferior in exuberant gorgeousness, he is very much his superior in order and proportion, and quite his equal in sudden flashes of a quaint but illuminative rhetoric. For after all that has been said of Bacon and his philosophy, he was a rhetorician rather than a philosopher. Half the puzzlement which has arisen in the efforts to get something exact out of the stately periods and splendid promises of the Novum Organum and its companions has arisen from oversight of this eminently rhetorical character; and this character is the chief property of his style. It may seem presumptuous to extend the charges of want of depth which were formulated by good authorities in law and physics against Bacon in his own day, yet he is everywhere "not deep." He is stimulating beyond the recorded power of any other man except Socrates; he is inexhaustible in analogy and illustration, full of wise saws, and of instances as well ancient as modern. But he is by no means an accurate expositor, still less a powerful reasoner, and his style is exactly suited to his mental gifts; now luminously fluent, now pregnantly brief; here just obscure enough to kindle the reader's desire of penetrating the obscurity, there flashing with ornament which perhaps serves to conceal a flaw in the reasoning, but which certainly serves to allure and retain the attention of the student. All these characteristics are the characteristics rather of the great orator than of the great philosopher. His constant practice in every kind of literary composition, and in the meditative thought which constant literary composition perhaps sometimes tempts its practitioners to dispense with, enabled him to write on a vast variety of subjects, and in many different styles. But of these it will always be found that two were most familiar to him, the short sententious apothegm, parallel, or image, which suggests and stimulates even when it does not instruct, and the half-hortatory half-descriptive discours d'ouverture, where the writer is the unwearied panegyrist of promised lands not perhaps to be identified with great ease on any chart.[38]

[38] Of Bacon in prose, as of Spenser, Shakespere, and Milton in verse, it does not seem necessary to give extracts, and for the same reason.

A parallel in the Plutarchian manner between Bacon and Raleigh would in many ways be pleasant, but only one point of it concerns us here,—that both had been happier and perhaps had done greater things had they been simple men of letters. Unlike Bacon, who, though he wrote fair verse, shows no poetical bent, Raleigh was homo utriusque linguae, and his works in verse, unequal as they are, occasionally touch the loftiest summits of poetry. It is very much the same in his prose. His minor books, mostly written hurriedly, and for a purpose, have hardly any share of the graces of style; and his masterpiece, the famous History of the World, is made up of short passages of the most extraordinary beauty, and long stretches of monotonous narration and digression, showing not much grace of style, and absolutely no sense of proportion or skill in arrangement. The contrast is so strange that some have sought to see in the undoubted facts that Raleigh, in his tedious prison labours, had assistants and helpers (Ben Jonson among others), a reason for the superior excellence of such set pieces as the Preface, the Epilogue, and others, which are scattered about the course of the work. But independently of the other fact that excellence of the most diverse kind meets us at every turn, though it also deserts us at every turn, in Raleigh's varied literary work, and that it would be absurd to attribute all these passages to some "affable familiar ghost," there is the additional difficulty that in none of his reported helpers' own work do the peculiar graces of the purple passages of the History occur. The immortal descant on mortality with which the book closes, and which is one of the highest achievements of English prose, is not in the least like Jonson, not in the least like Selden, not in the least like any one of whose connection with Raleigh there is record. Donne might have written it; but there is not the smallest reason for supposing that he did, and many for being certain that he did not. Therefore, it is only fair to give Raleigh himself the credit for this and all other passages of the kind. Their character and, at the same time, their comparative rarity are both easily explicable. They are all obviously struck off in moments of excitement—moments when the writer's variable and fanciful temperament was heated to flashing-point and gave off almost spontaneously these lightnings of prose as it gave, on other occasions, such lightnings of poetry as The Faerie Queene sonnet, as "the Lie," and as the other strange jewels (cats' eyes and opals, rather than pearls or diamonds), which are strung along with very many common pebbles on Raleigh's poetical necklace. In style they anticipate Browne (who probably learnt not a little from them) more than any other writer; and they cannot fairly be said to have been anticipated by any Englishman. The low and stately music of their cadences is a thing, except in Browne, almost unique, and it is not easy to trace it to any peculiar mannerism of vocabulary or of the arrangement of words. But Raleigh's usual style differs very little from that of other men of his day, who kept clear at once of euphuism and burlesque. Being chiefly narrative, it is rather plainer than Hooker, who has some few points of resemblance with Raleigh, but considerably freer from the vices of desultoriness and awkward syntax, than most writers of the day except Hooker. But its most interesting characteristic to the student of literature must always be the way in which it leads up to, without in the least foretelling, the bursts of eloquence already referred to. Even Milton's alternations of splendid imagery with dull and scurrilous invective, are hardly so strange as Raleigh's changes from jog-trot commonplace to almost inspired declamation, if only for the reason that they are much more intelligible. It must also be mentioned that Raleigh, like Milton, seems to have had little or no humour.

The opening and closing passages of the History are almost universally known; a quainter, less splendid, but equally characteristic one may be given here though Mr. Arber has already extracted it:—

"The four complexions resemble the four elements; and the seven ages of man, the seven planets. Whereof our infancy is compared to the moon; in which we seem only to live and grow, as plants.

"The second age, to Mercury; wherein we are taught and instructed.

"Our third age, to Venus; the days of Love, Desire and Vanity.

"The fourth, to the Sun; the strong, flourishing and beautiful age of man's life.

"The fifth, to Mars; in which we seek honour and victory; and in which our thoughts travel to ambitious ends.

"The sixth age is ascribed to Jupiter; in which we begin to take account of our times, judge of ourselves, and grow to the perfection of our understanding.

"The last and seventh, to Saturn; wherein our days are sad and overcast; and in which we find by dear and lamentable experience, and by the loss which can never be repaired, that, of all our vain passions and affections past, the sorrow only abideth. Our attendants are sicknesses and variable infirmities: and by how much the more we are accompanied with plenty, by so much the more greedily is our end desired. Whom, when Time hath made unsociable to others, we become a burden to ourselves: being of no other use than to hold the riches we have from our successors. In this time it is, when we, for the most part (and never before) prepare for our Eternal Habitation, which we pass on unto with many sighs, groans and sad thoughts: and in the end (by the workmanship of Death) finish the sorrowful business of a wretched life. Towards which we always travel, both sleeping and waking. Neither have those beloved companions of honour and riches any power at all to hold us any one day by the glorious promise of entertainments: but by what crooked path soever we walk, the same leadeth on directly to the House of Death, whose doors lie open at all hours, and to all persons."

But great as are Bacon and Raleigh, they cannot approach, as writers of prose, the company of scholarly divines who produced—what is probably the greatest prose work in any language—the Authorised Version of the Bible in English. Now that there is at any rate some fear of this masterpiece ceasing to be what it has been for three centuries—the school and training ground of every man and woman of English speech in the noblest uses of English tongue—every one who values that mother tongue is more especially bound to put on record his own allegiance to it. The work of the Company appears to have been loyally performed in common; and it is curious that such an unmatched result should have been the result of labours thus combined, and not, as far as is known, controlled by any one guiding spirit. Among the translators were many excellent writers,—an advantage which they possessed in a much higher degree than their revisers in the nineteenth century, of whom few would be mentioned among the best living writers of English by any competent authority. But, at the same time, no known translator under James has left anything which at all equals in strictly literary merit the Authorised Version, as it still is and as long may it be. The fact is, however, less mysterious after a little examination than it may seem at first sight. Putting aside all questions as to the intrinsic value of the subject-matter as out of our province, it will be generally admitted that the translators had in the greater part of the Old Testament, in a large part of the Apocrypha, and in no small part of the New Testament, matter as distinguished from form, of very high literary value to begin with in their originals. In the second place, they had, in the Septuagint and in the Vulgate, versions also of no small literary merit to help them. In the third place, they had in the earlier English versions excellent quarries of suitable English terms, if not very accomplished models of style. These, however, were not in any way advantages peculiar to themselves. The advantages which, in a manner at least, were peculiar to themselves may be divided into two classes. They were in the very centre of the great literary ferment of which in this volume I am striving to give a history as little inadequate as possible. They had in the air around them an English purged of archaisms and uncouthnesses, fully adapted to every literary purpose, and yet still racy of the soil, and free from that burden of hackneyed and outworn literary platitudes and commonplaces with which centuries of voluminous literary production have vitiated and loaded the English of our own day. They were not afraid of Latinising, but they had an ample stock of the pure vernacular to draw on. These things may be classed together. On the other side, but equally healthful, may be put the fact that the style and structure of the originals and earlier versions, and especially that verse division which has been now so unwisely abandoned, served as safeguards against the besetting sin of all prose writers of their time, the habit of indulging in long wandering sentences, in paragraphs destitute of proportion and of grace, destitute even of ordinary manageableness and shape. The verses saved them from that once for all; while on the other hand their own taste, and the help given by the structure of the original in some cases, prevented them from losing sight of the wood for the trees, and omitting to consider the relation of verse to verse, as well as the antiphony of the clauses within the verse. Men without literary faculty might no doubt have gone wrong; but these were men of great literary faculty, whose chief liabilities to error were guarded against precisely by the very conditions in which they found their work. The hour had come exactly, and so for once had the men.

The result of their labours is so universally known that it is not necessary to say very much about it; but the mere fact of the universal knowledge carries with it a possibility of under-valuation. In another place, dealing with the general subject of English prose style, I have selected the sixth and seventh verses of the eighth chapter of Solomon's Song as the best example known to me of absolutely perfect English prose—harmonious, modulated, yet in no sense trespassing the limits of prose and becoming poetry. I have in the same place selected, as a companion passage from a very different original, the Charity passage of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, which has been so miserably and wantonly mangled and spoilt by the bad taste and ignorance of the late revisers. I am tempted to dwell on this because it is very germane to our subject. One of the blunders which spoils this passage in the Revised Version is the pedantic substitution of "mirror" for "glass," it having apparently occurred to some wiseacre that glass was not known to the ancients, or at least used for mirrors. Had this wiseacre had the slightest knowledge of English literature, a single title of Gascoigne's, "The Steel Glass," would have dispensed him at once from any attempt at emendation; but this is ever and always the way of the sciolist. Fortunately such a national possession as the original Authorised Version, when once multiplied and dispersed by the press, is out of reach of vandalism. The improved version, constructed on very much the same principle as Davenant's or Ravenscroft's improvements on Shakespere, may be ordered to be read in churches, and substituted for purposes of taking oaths. But the original (as it may be called in no burlesque sense such as that of a famous story) will always be the text resorted to by scholars and men of letters for purposes of reading, and will remain the authentic lexicon, the recognised source of English words and constructions of the best period. The days of creation; the narratives of Joseph and his brethren, of Ruth, of the final defeat of Ahab, of the discomfiture of the Assyrian host of Sennacherib; the moral discourses of Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus and the Book of Wisdom; the poems of the Psalms and the prophets; the visions of the Revelation,—a hundred other passages which it is unnecessary to catalogue,—will always be the ne plus ultra of English composition in their several kinds, and the storehouse from which generation after generation of writers, sometimes actually hostile to religion and often indifferent to it, will draw the materials, and not unfrequently the actual form of their most impassioned and elaborate passages. Revision after revision, constructed in corrupt following of the transient and embarrassed phantoms of ephemeral fashion in scholarship, may sink into the Great Mother of Dead Dogs after setting right a tense here, and there transferring a rendering from text to margin or from margin to text. But the work of the unrevised version will remain unaffected by each of these futile exercitations. All the elements, all the circumstances of a translation as perfect as can be accomplished in any circumstances and with any elements, were then present, and the workers were worthy of the work. The plays of Shakespere and the English Bible are, and will ever be, the twin monuments not merely of their own period, but of the perfection of English, the complete expressions of the literary capacities of the language, at the time when it had lost none of its pristine vigour, and had put on enough but not too much of the adornments and the limitations of what may be called literary civilisation.

The boundary between the prose of this period and that which we shall treat later as "Caroline" is not very clearly fixed. Some men, such as Hall and Donne, whose poetical work runs parallel to that in prose which we are now noticing, come as prose writers rather under the later date; others who continued to write till long after Elizabeth's death, and even after that of James, seem, by their general complexion, to belong chiefly to the earlier day. The first of these is Ben Jonson, whose high reputation in other ways has somewhat unduly damaged, or at least obscured, his merits as a prose writer. His two chief works in this kind are his English Grammar, in which a sound knowledge of the rules of English writing is discovered, and the quaintly named Explorata or Discoveries and Timber—a collection of notes varying from a mere aphorism to a respectable essay. In these latter a singular power of writing prose appears. The book was not published till after Ben's death, and is thought to have been in part at least written during the last years of his life. But there can be no greater contrast than exists between the prose style usual at that time—a style tourmente, choked with quotation, twisted in every direction by allusion and conceit, and marred by perpetual confusions of English with classical grammar—and the straightforward, vigorous English of these Discoveries. They come, in character as in time, midway between Hooker and Dryden, and they incline rather to the more than to the less modern form. Here is found the prose character of Shakespere which, if less magniloquent than that in verse, has a greater touch of sheer sincerity. Here, too, is an admirable short tractate on Style which exemplifies what it preaches; and a large number of other excellent things. Some, it is true, are set down in a shorthand fashion as if (which doubtless they were) they were commonplace-book notes for working up in due season. But others and perhaps the majority (they all Baconian-wise have Latin titles, though only one or two have the text in Latin) are written with complete attention to literary presentment; seldom though sometimes relapsing into loose construction of sentences and paragraphs, the besetting sin of the day, and often presenting, as in the following, a model of sententious but not dry form:—

"We should not protect our sloth with the patronage of difficulty. It is a false quarrel against nature that she helps understanding but in a few, when the most part of mankind are inclined by her thither, if they would take the pains; no less than birds to fly, horses to run, etc., which if they lose it is through their own sluggishness, and by that means become her prodigies, not her children. I confess nature in children is more patient of labour in study than in age; for the sense of the pain, the judgment of the labour is absent, they do not measure what they have done. And it is the thought and consideration that affects us more than the weariness itself. Plato was not content with the learning that Athens could give him, but sailed into Italy, for Pythagoras' knowledge: and yet not thinking himself sufficiently informed, went into Egypt, to the priests, and learned their mysteries. He laboured, so must we. Many things may be learned together and performed in one point of time; as musicians exercise their memory, their voice, their fingers, and sometimes their head and feet at once. And so a preacher, in the invention of matter, election of words, composition of gesture, look, pronunciation, motion, useth all these faculties at once: and if we can express this variety together, why should not divers studies, at divers hours, delight, when the variety is able alone to refresh and repair us? As when a man is weary of writing, to read; and then again of reading, to write. Wherein, howsoever we do many things, yet are we (in a sort) still fresh to what we begin; we are recreated with change as the stomach is with meats. But some will say, this variety breeds confusion, and makes that either we lose all or hold no more than the last. Why do we not then persuade husbandmen that they should not till land, help it with marle, lime, and compost? plant hop gardens, prune trees, look to beehives, rear sheep, and all other cattle at once? It is easier to do many things and continue, than to do one thing long."

No other single writer until we come to the pamphleteers deserves separate or substantive mention; but in many divisions of literature there were practitioners who, if they have not kept much notoriety as masters of style, were well thought of even in that respect in their day, and were long authorities in point of matter. The regular theological treatises of the time present nothing equal to Hooker, who in part overlapped it, though the Jesuit Parsons has some name for vigorous writing. In history, Knolles, the historian of the Turks, and Sandys, the Eastern traveller and sacred poet, bear the bell for style among their fellows, such as Hayward, Camden, Spelman, Speed, and Stow. Daniel the poet, a very good prose writer in his way, was also a historian of England, but his chief prose work was his Defence of Rhyme. He had companions in the critical task; but it is curious and by no means uninstructive to notice, that the immense creative production of the time seems to have to a great extent smothered the theoretic and critical tendency which, as yet not resulting in actual performance, betrayed itself at the beginning of the period in Webbe and Puttenham, in Harvey and Sidney. The example of Eden in collecting and Englishing travels and voyages was followed by several writers, of whom two, successively working and residing, the elder at Oxford, and the younger at Cambridge, made the two greatest collections of the kind in the language for interest of matter, if not for perfection of style. These were Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, a venerable pair. The perhaps overpraised, but still excellent Characters of the unfortunate Sir Thomas Overbury and the prose works, such as the Counterblast and Demonology, of James I., are books whose authors have made them more famous than their intrinsic merits warrant, and in the various collections of "works" of the day, older and newer, we shall find examples nearly as miscellaneous as those of the class of writers now to be noticed. Of all this miscellaneous work it is impossible to give examples, but one critical passage from Daniel, and one descriptive from Hakluyt may serve:—

"Methinks we should not so soon yield up our consents captive to the authority of antiquity, unless we saw more reason; all our understandings are not to be built by the square of Greece and Italy. We are the children of nature as well as they, we are not so placed out of the way of judgment but that the same sun of discretion shineth upon us; we have our portion of the same virtues, as well as of the same vices, et Catilinam quocunque in populo videas, quocunque sub axe. Time and the turn of things bring about these faculties according to the present estimation; and, res temporibus, non tempore rebus servire opportet. So that we must never rebel against use; quem penes arbitrium est, et vis et norma loquendi. It is not the observing of trochaics nor their iambics, that will make our writings aught the wiser: all their poesy and all their philosophy is nothing, unless we bring the discerning light of conceit with us to apply it to use. It is not books, but only that great book of the world, and the all-overspreading grace of Heaven that makes men truly judicial. Nor can it but touch of arrogant ignorance to hold this or that nation barbarous, these or those times gross, considering how this manifold creature man, wheresoever he stand in the world, hath always some disposition of worth, entertains the order of society, affects that which is most in use, and is eminent in some one thing or other that fits his humour or the times. The Grecians held all other nations barbarous but themselves; yet Pyrrhus, when he saw the well ordered marching of the Romans, which made them see their presumptuous error, could say it was no barbarous manner of proceeding. The Goths, Vandals, and Longobards, whose coming down like an inundation overwhelmed, as they say, all the glory of learning in Europe, have yet left us still their laws and customs, as the originals of most of the provincial constitutions of Christendom; which, well considered with their other courses of government, may serve to clear them from this imputation of ignorance. And though the vanquished never speak well of the conqueror, yet even through the unsound coverings of malediction appear these monuments of truth, as argue well their worth, and proves them not without judgment, though without Greek and Latin."

* * * * *

"To speak somewhat of these islands, being called, in old time, Insulae fortunae, by the means of the flourishing thereof. The fruitfulness of them doth surely exceed far all other that I have heard of. For they make wine better then any in Spain: and they have grapes of such bigness that they may be compared to damsons, and in taste inferior to none. For sugar, suckets, raisons of the sun, and many other fruits, abundance: for rosin, and raw silk, there is great store. They want neither corn, pullets, cattle, nor yet wild fowl.