A History of English Literature, George Saintsbury [readnow .TXT] 📗
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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.
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."
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 abhorrèd 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.
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."
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 sæva 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
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