When the rule limiting speeches to an hour was adopted by Congress,
which was before most of you were born, an eminent but somewhat
discursive person spent more than that measure of time in convincing
me that whoever really had anything to say could say it in less. I
then and there acquired a conviction of this truth, which has only
strengthened with years. Yet whoever undertakes to lecture must adapt
his discourse to the law which requires such exercises to be precisely
sixty minutes long, just as a certain standard of inches must be
reached by one who would enter the army. If one has been studying all
his life how to be terse, how to suggest rather than to expound, how
to contract rather than to dilate, something like a strain is put upon
the conscience by this necessity of giving the full measure of words,
without reference to other considerations which a judicious ear may
esteem of more importance. Instead of saying things compactly and
pithily, so that they may be easily carried away, one is tempted into a
certain generosity and circumambience of phrase, which, if not adapted
to conquer Time, may at least compel him to turn his glass and admit a
drawn game. It is so much harder to fill an hour than to empty one!
These thoughts rose before me with painful vividness as I fancied
myself standing here again, after an interval of thirty-two years,
to address an audience at the Lowell Institute. Then I lectured, not
without some favorable acceptance, on Poetry in general and what
constituted it, on Imagination and Fancy, on Wit and Humor, on Metrical
Romances, on Ballads, and I know not what else--on whatever I thought
I had anything to say about, I suppose. Then I was at the period in
life when thoughts rose in coveys, and one filled one’s bag without
considering too nicely whether the game had been hatched within his
neighbor’s fence or within his own,--a period of life when it doesn’t
seem as if everything had been said; when a man overestimates the
value of what specially interests himself, and insists with Don
Quixote that all the world shall stop till the superior charms of
his Dulcinea of the moment have been acknowledged; when he conceives
himself a missionary, and is persuaded that he is saving his fellows
from the perdition of their souls if he convert them from belief in
some æsthetic heresy. That is the mood of mind in which one may read
lectures with some assurance of success. I remember how I read mine
over to the clock, that I might be sure I had enough, and how patiently
the clock listened, and gave no opinion except as to duration, on which
point it assured me that I always ran over. This is the pleasant peril
of enthusiasm, which has always something of the careless superfluity
of youth. Since then, and for a period making a sixth part of my mature
life, my mind has been shunted off upon the track of other duties and
other interests. If I have learned something, I have also forgotten
a good deal. One is apt to forget so much in the service of one’s
country,--even that he is an American, I have been told, though I can
hardly believe it.
When I selected my topic for this new venture, I was returning to a
first love. The second volume I ever printed, in 1843, I think it
was,--it is now a rare book, I am not sorry to know; I have not seen it
for many years,--was mainly about the Old English Dramatists, if I am
not mistaken. I dare say it was crude enough, but it was spontaneous
and honest. I have continued to read them ever since, with no less
pleasure, if with more discrimination. But when I was confronted with
the question what I could say of them that would interest any rational
person, after all that had been said by Lamb, the most sympathetic of
critics, by Hazlitt, one of the most penetrative, by Coleridge, the
most intuitive, and by so many others, I was inclined to believe that
instead of an easy subject I had chosen a subject very far from easy.
But I sustained myself with the words of the great poet who so often
has saved me from myself:--
“Vagliami il lungo studio e il grande amore,
Che m’ha fatto cercar lo tuo volume.”
If I bring no other qualification, I bring at least that of hearty
affection, which is the first condition of insight. I shall not scruple
to repeat what may seem already too familiar, confident that these old
poets will stand as much talking about as most people. At the risk of
being tedious, I shall put you back to your scales as a teacher of
music does his pupils. For it is the business of a lecturer to treat
his audience as M. Jourdain wished to be treated in respect of the
Latin language,--to take it for granted that they know, but to talk to
them as if they did n’t. I should have preferred to entitle my course
Readings from the Old English Dramatists with illustrative comments,
rather than a critical discussion of them, for there is more conviction
in what is beautiful in itself than in any amount of explanation why,
or exposition of how, it is beautiful. A rose has a very succinct way
of explaining itself. When I find nothing profitable to say, I shall
take sanctuary in my authors.
* * * * *
It is generally assumed that the Modern Drama in France, Spain, Italy,
and England was an evolution out of the Mysteries and Moralities and
Interludes which had edified and amused preceding generations of
simpler taste and ruder intelligence. ’T is the old story of Thespis
and his cart. Taken with due limitations, and substituting the word
_stage_ for _drama_, this theory of origin is satisfactory enough. The
stage was there, and the desire to be amused, when the drama at last
appeared to occupy the one and to satisfy the other. It seems to have
been, so far as the English Drama is concerned, a case of _post hoc_,
without altogether adequate grounds for inferring a _propter hoc_.
The Interludes may have served as training-schools for actors. It is
certain that Richard Burbage, afterwards of Shakespeare’s company,
was so trained. He is the actor, you will remember, who first played
the part of Hamlet, and the untimely expansion of whose person is
supposed to account for the Queen’s speech in the fencing scene, “He’s
fat and scant of breath.” I may say, in passing, that the phrase
merely means “He’s out of training,” as we should say now. A fat
Hamlet is as inconceivable as a lean Falstaff. Shakespeare, with his
usual discretion, never makes the Queen hateful, and made use of this
expedient to show her solicitude for her son. Her last word, as she is
dying, is his name.
To return. The Interlude may have kept alive the traditions of a
stage, and may have made ready a certain number of persons to assume
higher and graver parts when the opportunity should come; but the
revival of learning, and the rise of cities capable of supplying a
more cultivated and exacting audience, must have had a stronger and
more direct influence on the growth of the Drama, as we understand the
word, than any or all other influences combined. Certainly this seems
to me true of the English Drama at least. The English Miracle Plays are
dull beyond what is permitted even by the most hardened charity, and
there is nothing dramatic in them except that they are in the form of
dialogue. The Interludes are perhaps further saddened in the reading by
reminding us how much easier it was to be amused three hundred years
ago than now, but their wit is the wit of the Eocene period, unhappily
as long as it is broad, and their humor is horse-play. We inherited
a vast accumulation of barbarism from our Teutonic ancestors. It was
only on those terms, perhaps, that we could have their vigor too. The
Interludes have some small value as illustrating manners and forms of
speech, but the man must be born expressly for the purpose--as for
some of the adventures of mediæval knight-errantry--who can read them.
“Gammer Gurton’s Needle” is perhaps as good as any. It was acted at
Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1566, and is remarkable, as Mr. Collier
pointed out, as the first existing play acted before either University.
Its author was John Still, afterwards Bishop of Bath and Wells, and
it is curious that when Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge he should have
protested against the acting before the University of an English play
so unbefitting its learning, dignity, and character. “Gammer Gurton’s
Needle” contains a very jolly and spirited song in praise of ale. Latin
plays were acted before the Universities on great occasions, but there
was nothing dramatic about them but their form. One of them by Burton,
author of the “Anatomy of Melancholy,” has been printed, and is not
without merit. In the “Pardoner and the Frere” there is a hint at the
drollery of those cross-readings with which Bonnell Thornton made our
grandfathers laugh:--
“_Pard._ Pope July the Sixth hath granted fair and well--
_Fr._ That when to them God hath abundance sent--
_Pard._ And doth twelve thousand years of pardon to them send--
_Fr._ They would distribute none to the indigent--
_Pard._ That aught to this holy chapel lend.”
Everything in these old farces is rudimentary. They are not merely
coarse; they are vulgar.
In France it was better, but France had something which may fairly be
called literature before any other country in Europe, not literature in
the highest sense, of course, but something, at any rate, that may be
still read with pleasure for its delicate beauty, like “Aucassin and
Nicolete,” or for its downright vigor, like the “Song of Roland,” or
for its genuine humor, like “Renard the Fox.” There is even one French
Miracle Play of the thirteenth century, by the trouvère Rutebeuf, based
on the legend of Theophilus of Antioch, which might be said to contain
the germ of Calderon’s “El Magico Prodigioso,” and thus, remotely,
of Goethe’s “Faust.” Of the next century is the farce of “Patelin,”
which has given a new word with its several derivatives to the French
language, and a proverbial phrase, _revenons à nos moutons_, that
long ago domiciled itself beyond the boundaries of France. “Patelin”
rises at times above the level of farce, though hardly to the region
of pure comedy. I saw it acted at the Théâtre Français many years ago,
with only so much modernization of language as was necessary to make
it easily comprehensible, and found it far more than archæologically
entertaining. Surely none of our old English Interludes could be put
upon the stage now without the gloomiest results. They were not, in my
judgment, the direct, and hardly even the collateral, ancestors of our
legitimate comedy. On the other hand, while the Miracle Plays left no
traces of themselves in our serious drama, the play of Punch and Judy
looks very like an impoverished descendant of theirs.
In Spain it was otherwise. There the old Moralities and Mysteries
of the Church Festivals are renewed and perpetuated in the Autos
Sacramentales of Calderon, but ensouled with the creative breath of
his genius, and having a strange phantasmal reality in the ideal world
of his wonder-working imagination. One of his plays, “La Devocion de
la Cruz,” an Auto in spirit if not in form, dramatizes, as only he
could do it, the doctrine of justification by faith. In Spain, too,
the comedy of the booth and the plaza is plainly the rude sketch of
the higher creations of Tirso and Lope and Calderon and Rojas and
Alarcon, and scores of others only less than they. The tragicomedy
of “Celestina,” written at the close of the fifteenth century, is
the first modern piece of realism or naturalism, as it is called,
with which I am acquainted. It is coarse, and most of the characters
are low, but there are touches of nature in it, and the character of
Celestina is brought out with singular vivacity. The word tragicomedy
is many years older than this play, if play that may be called which is
but a succession of dialogues, but I can think of no earlier example of
its application to a production in dramatic form than by the Bachelor
Fernando de Rojas in this instance. It was made over into English,
rather than translated, in 1520,--our first literary debt to Spain, I
should guess. The Spanish theatre, though the influence of Seneca is
apparent in the form it put on, is more sincerely a growth of the soil
than any other of modern times, and it has one interesting analogy with
our own in the introduction of the clown into tragedy, whether by way
of foil or parody. The Spanish dramatists have been called marvels of
fecundity, but the facility of their trochaic measure, in which the
verses seem to go of themselves, makes their feats less wonderful. The
marvel would seem to be rather that, writing so easily, they also wrote
so well. Their invention is as remarkable as their abundance. Their
drama and our own have affected the spirit and sometimes the substance
of later literature more than any other. They have to a certain extent
impregnated it. I have called the Spanish theatre a product of the
soil, yet it must not be overlooked that Sophocles, Euripides, Plautus,
and Terence had been translated into Spanish early in the sixteenth
century, and that Lope de Rueda, its real founder, would willingly have
followed classical models more closely had the public taste justified
him in doing so. But fortunately the national genius triumphed over
traditional criterions of art, and the Spanish theatre, asserting
its own happier instincts, became and continued Spanish, with an
unspeakable charm and flavor of its own.
One peculiarity of the Spanish plays makes it safe to recommend them
even _virginibus puerisque_,--they are never unclean. Even Milton would
have approved a censorship of the press that accomplished this. It is
a remarkable example of how sharp the contradiction is between the
private morals of a people and their public code of morality. Certain
things may be done, but they must not seem to be done.
I have said nothing of the earlier Italian Drama because it has failed
to interest me. But Italy had indirectly a potent influence, through
Spenser, in supplying English verse till it could answer the higher
uses of the stage. The lines--for they can hardly be called verses--of
the first attempts at regular plays are as uniform, flat, and void
of variety as laths cut by machinery, and show only the arithmetical
ability of their fashioners to count as high as ten. A speech is a
series of such laths laid parallel to each other with scrupulous
exactness. But I shall have occasion to return to this topic in
speaking of Marlowe.
Who, then, were the Old English Dramatists? They were a score or so
of literary bohemians, for the most part, living from hand to mouth
in London during the last twenty years of the sixteenth century and
the first thirty years of the seventeenth, of the personal history
of most of whom we fortunately know little, and who, by their good
luck in being born into an unsophisticated age, have written a few
things so well that they seem to have written themselves. Poor, nearly
all of them, they have left us a fine estate in the realm of Faery.
Among them were three or four men of genius. A comrade of theirs by
his calling, but set apart from them alike by the splendor of his
endowments and the more equable balance of his temperament, was that
divine apparition known to mortals as Shakespeare. The civil war put an
end to their activity. The last of them, in the direct line, was James
Shirley, remembered chiefly for two lines from the last stanza of a
song of his in “The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses,” which have become
a proverb:--
“Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.”
It is a nobly simple piece of verse, with the slow and solemn cadence
of a funeral march. The hint of it seems to have been taken from a
passage in that droningly dreary book the “Mirror for Magistrates.”
This little poem is one of the best instances of the good fortune of
the men of that age in the unconscious simplicity and gladness (I know
not what else to call it) of their vocabulary. The language, so to
speak, had just learned to go alone, and found a joy in its own mere
motion, which it lost as it grew older, and to walk was no longer a
marvel.
Nothing in the history of literature seems more startling than the
sudden spring with which English poetry blossomed in the later years
of Elizabeth’s reign. We may account for the seemingly unheralded
apparition of a single genius like Dante or Chaucer by the genius
itself; for, given that, everything else is possible. But even in
such cases as these much must have gone before to make the genius
available when it came. For the production of great literature there
must be already a language ductile to all the varying moods of
expression. There must be a certain amount of culture, or the stimulus
of sympathy would be wanting. If, as Horace tells us, the heroes who
lived before Agamemnon have perished for want of a poet to celebrate
them, so doubtless many poets have gone dumb to their graves, or, at
any rate, have uttered themselves imperfectly, for lack of a fitting
vehicle or of an amiable atmosphere. Genius, to be sure, makes its own
opportunity, but the circumstances must be there out of which it can be
made. For instance, I cannot help feeling that Turold, or whoever was
the author of the “Chanson de Roland,” was endowed with a rare epical
faculty, and that he would have given more emphatic proof of it had it
been possible for him to clothe his thought in a form equivalent to
the vigor of his conception. Perhaps with more art, he might have had
less of that happy audacity of the first leap which Montaigne valued
so highly, but would he not have gained could he have spoken to us in
a verse as sonorous as the Greek hexameter, nay, even as sweet in its
cadences, as variously voluble by its slurs and elisions, and withal as
sharply edged and clean cut as the Italian pentameter? It is at least a
question open to debate. Mr. Matthew Arnold taxes the “Song of Roland”
with an entire want of the grand style; and this is true enough; but
it has immense stores of courage and victory in it, as Taillefer
proved at the battle of Hastings,--yes, and touches of heroic pathos,
too.
Many things had slowly and silently concurred to make that singular
pre-eminence of the Elizabethan literature possible. First of all was
the growth of a national consciousness, made aware of itself and more
cumulatively operative by the existence and safer accessibility of a
national capital, to serve it both as head and heart. The want of such
a focus of intellectual, political, and material activity has had more
to do with the backwardness and provincialism of our own literature
than is generally taken into account. My friend Mr. Hosea Biglow
ventured to affirm twenty odd years ago that we had at last arrived
at this national consciousness through the convulsion of our civil
war,--a convulsion so violent as might well convince the members that
they formed part of a common body. But I make bold to doubt whether
that consciousness will ever be more than fitful and imperfect, whether
it will ever, except in some moment of supreme crisis, pour itself
into and reënforce the individual consciousness in a way to make our
literature feel itself of age and its own master, till we shall have
got a common head as well as a common body. It is not the size of a
city that gives it this stimulating and expanding quality, but the fact
that it sums up in itself and gathers all the moral and intellectual
forces of the country in a single focus. London is still the metropolis
of the British as Paris of the French race. We admit this readily
enough as regards Australia or Canada, but we willingly overlook it
as regards ourselves. Washington is growing more national and more
habitable every year, but it will never be a capital till every kind of
culture is attainable there on as good terms as elsewhere. Why not on
better than elsewhere? We are rich enough. Bismarck’s first care has
been the Museums of Berlin. For a fiftieth part of the money Congress
seems willing to waste in demoralizing the country, we might have had
the Hamilton books and the far more precious Ashburnham manuscripts.
Perhaps what formerly gave Boston its admitted literary supremacy was
the fact that fifty years ago it was more truly a capital than any
other American city. Edinburgh once held a similar position, with
similar results. And yet how narrow Boston was! How scant a pasture
it offered to the imagination! I have often mused on the dreary fate
of the great painter who perished slowly of inanition over yonder in
Cambridgeport, he who had known Coleridge and Lamb and Wordsworth, and
who, if ever any,
“With immortal wine
Should have been bathed and swum in more heart’s ease
Than there are waters in the Sestian seas.”
The pity of it! That unfinished Belshazzar of his was a bitter sarcasm
on our self-conceit. Among _us_, it was unfinishable. Whatever place
can draw together the greatest amount and greatest variety of intellect
and character, the most abundant elements of civilization, performs the
best function of a university. London was such a centre in the days
of Queen Elizabeth. And think what a school the Mermaid Tavern must
have been! The verses which Beaumont addressed to Ben Jonson from the
country point to this:--
“What things have we seen
Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been
So nimble and so full of subtle flame
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life; then when there hath been thrown
Wit able enough to justify the town
For three days past, wit that might warrant be
For the whole city to talk foolishly
Till that were cancelled; and, when that was gone,
We left an air behind us which alone
Was able to make the two next companies
Right witty; though but downright fools, more wise.”
This air, which Beaumont says they left behind them, they carried with
them, too. It was the atmosphere of culture, the open air of it, which
loses much of its bracing and stimulating virtue in solitude and the
silent society of books. And what discussions can we not fancy there,
of language, of diction, of style, of ancients and moderns, of grammar
even, for our speech was still at school, and with license of vagrant
truancy for the gathering of wild flowers and the finding of whole
nests full of singing birds! Here was indeed a new World of Words, as
Florio called his dictionary. And the face-to-face criticism, frank,
friendly, and with chance of reply, how fruitful it must have been!
It was here, doubtless, that Jonson found fault with that verse of
Shakespeare’s,--
“Cæsar did never wrong but with just cause,”
which is no longer to be found in the play of “Julius Cæsar.” Perhaps
Heminge and Condell left it out, for Shakespeare could have justified
himself with the hook-nosed fellow of Rome’s favorite Greek quotation,
that nothing justified crime but the winning or keeping of supreme
power. Never could London, before or since, gather such an academy of
genius. It must have been a marvellous whetstone of the wits, and spur
to generous emulation.
Another great advantage which the authors of that day had was the
freshness of the language, which had not then become literary, and
therefore more or less commonplace. All the words they used were bright
from the die, not yet worn smooth in the daily drudgery of prosaic
service. I am not sure whether they were so fully conscious of this as
we are, who find a surprising charm in it, and perhaps endow the poet
with the witchery that really belongs to the vocables he employs. The
parts of speech of these old poets are just archaic enough to please us
with that familiar strangeness which makes our own tongue agreeable if
spoken with a hardly perceptible foreign accent. The power of giving
novelty to things outworn is, indeed, one of the prime qualities of
genius, and this novelty the habitual phrase of the Elizabethans has
for us without any merit of theirs. But I think, making all due
abatements, that they had the hermetic gift of buckling wings to the
feet of their verse in a measure which has fallen to the share of few
or no modern poets. I think some of them certainly were fully aware of
the fine qualities of their mother-tongue. Chapman, in the poem “To the
Reader,” prefixed to his translation of the Iliad, protests against
those who preferred to it the softer Romance languages:--
“And for our tongue that still is so impaired
By travailing linguists, I can prove it clear,
That no tongue hath the Muses’ utterance heired
For verse and that sweet Music to the ear
Strook out of rime, so naturally as this;
Our monosyllables so kindly fall,
And meet, opposed in rhyme, as they did kiss.”
I think Chapman has very prettily maintained and illustrated his
thesis. But, though fortunate in being able to gather their language
with the dew still on it, as herbs must be gathered for use in
certain incantations, we are not to suppose that our elders used it
indiscriminately, or tumbled out their words as they would dice,
trusting that luck or chance would send them a happy throw; that they
did not select, arrange, combine, and make use of the most cunning
artifices of modulation and rhythm. They debated all these questions,
we may be sure, not only with a laudable desire of excellence, and with
a hope to make their native tongue as fitting a vehicle for poetry and
eloquence as those of their neighbors, or as those of Greece and Rome,
but also with something of the eager joy of adventure and discovery.
They must have felt with Lucretius the delight of wandering over the
pathless places of the Muse, and hence, perhaps, it is that their step
is so elastic, and that we are never dispirited by a consciousness of
any lassitude when they put forth their best pace. If they are natural,
it is in great part the benefit of the age they lived in; but the
winning graces, the picturesque felicities, the electric flashes, I had
almost said the explosions, of their style are their own. And their
diction mingles its elements so kindly and with such gracious reliefs
of changing key, now dallying with the very childishness of speech like
the spinsters and the knitters in the sun, and anon snatched up without
effort to the rapt phrase of passion or of tragedy that flashes and
reverberates!
The dullest of them, for I admit that many of them were dull as
a comedy of Goethe, and dulness loses none of its disheartening
properties by age, no, nor even by being embalmed in the precious gems
and spices of Lamb’s affectionate eulogy,--for I am persuaded that
I should know a stupid mummy from a clever one before I had been in
his company five minutes,--the dullest of them, I say, has his lucid
intervals. There are, I grant, dreary wastes and vast solitudes in such
collections as Dodsley’s “Old Plays,” where we slump along through the
loose sand without even so much as a mirage to comfort us under the
intolerable drought of our companion’s discourse. Nay, even some of the
dramatists who have been thought worthy of editions all to themselves,
may enjoy that seclusion without fear of its being disturbed by me.
Let me mention a name or two of such as I shall not speak of in this
course. Robert Greene is one of them. He has all the inadequacy of
imperfectly drawn tea. I thank him, indeed, for the word “brightsome,”
and for two lines of Sephestia’s song to her child,--
“Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,
When thou art old, there’s grief enough for thee,”--
which have all the innocence of the Old Age in them. Otherwise he is
naught. I say this for the benefit of the young, for in my own callow
days I took him seriously because the Rev. Alexander Dyce had edited
him, and I endured much in trying to reconcile my instincts with my
superstition. He it was that called Shakespeare “an upstart crow
beautified with our feathers,” as if any one could have any use for
feathers from such birds as he, except to make pens of them. He was the
cause of the dulness that was in other men, too, and human nature feels
itself partially avenged by this stanza of an elegy upon him by one
“R. B.,” quoted by Mr. Dyce:--
“Greene is the pleasing object of an eye;
Greene pleased the eyes of all that looked upon him;
Greene is the ground of every painter’s dye;
Greene gave the ground to all that wrote upon him;
Nay, more, the men that so eclipsed his fame
Purloyned his plumes; can they deny the same?”
Even the libeller of Shakespeare deserved nothing worse than this! If
this is “R. B.” when he was playing upon words, what must he have been
when serious?
Another dramatist whom we can get on very well without is George
Peele, the friend and fellow-roisterer of Greene. He, too, defied the
inspiring influence of the air he breathed almost as successfully as
his friend. But he had not that genius for being dull all the time that
Greene had, and illustrates what I was just saying of the manner in
which the most tiresome of these men waylay us when we least expect it
with some phrase or verse that shines and trembles in the memory like a
star. Such are:--
“For her I’ll build a kingly bower
Seated in hearing of a hundred streams”;
and this, of God’s avenging lightning,--
“At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt,
And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings,
Sit ever burning in his hateful bones.”
He also wrote some musically simple stanzas, of which I quote the first
two, the rather that Thackeray was fond of them:--
“My golden locks Time hath to silver turned
(O Time too swift, and swiftness never ceasing),
My youth ’gainst age, and age at youth hath spurned,
But spurned in vain; youth waneth by increasing.
Beauty, strength, and youth, flowers fading been;
Duty, faith, and love, are roots, and ever green.
“My helmet now shall make an hive for bees,
And lover’s songs shall turn to holy psalms;
A man-at-arms must now serve on his knees,
And feed on prayers, that are old age’s alms.
But though from court to cottage I depart,
My saint is sure of mine unspotted heart.”
There is a pensiveness in this, half pleasurable, half melancholy, that
has a charm of its own.
Thomas Dekker is a far more important person. Most of his works seem
to have been what artists call pot-boilers, written at ruinous speed,
and with the bailiff rather than the Muse at his elbow. There was a
liberal background of prose in him, as in Ben Jonson, but he was a poet
and no mean one, as he shows by the careless good luck of his epithets
and similes. He could rise also to a grave dignity of style that is
grateful to the ear, nor was he incapable of that heightened emotion
which might almost pass for passion. His fancy kindles wellnigh to
imagination at times, and ventures on those extravagances which entice
the fancy of the reader as with the music of an invitation to the
waltz. I had him in my mind when I was speaking of the _obiter dicta_,
of the fine verses dropt casually by these men when you are beginning
to think they have no poetry in them. Fortune tells Fortunatus, in the
play of that name, that he shall have gold as countless as
“Those gilded wantons that in swarms do run
To warm their _slender bodies_ in the sun,”
thus giving him a hint also of its ephemeral nature. Here is a verse,
too, that shows a kind of bleakish sympathy of sound and sense. Long
life, he tells us,--
“Is a long journey in December gone.”
It may be merely my fancy, but I seem to hear a melancholy echo in it,
as of footfalls on frozen earth. Or take this for a pretty fancy:--
“The moon hath through her bow scarce drawn to the head,
Like to twelve silver arrows, all the months
Since--”
when do you suppose? I give you three guesses, as the children say.
Since 1600! Poor Fancy shudders at this opening of Haydn’s “Dictionary
of Dates” and thinks her silver arrows a little out of place, like a
belated masquerader going home under the broad grin of day. But the
verses themselves seem plucked from “Midsummer-Night’s Dream.”
This is as good an instance as may be of the want of taste, of sense
of congruity, and of the delicate discrimination that makes style,
which strikes and sometimes even shocks us in the Old Dramatists.
This was a disadvantage of the age into which they were born, and is
perhaps implied in the very advantages it gave them, and of which I
have spoken. Even Shakespeare offends sometimes in this way. Good
taste, if mainly a gift of nature, is also an acquisition. It was not
impossible even then. Samuel Daniel had it, but the cautious propriety
with which it embarrassed him has made his drama of “Cleopatra”
unapproachable, in more senses than one, in its frigid regularity. His
contemplative poetry, thanks to its grave sweetness of style, is among
the best in our language. And Daniel wrote the following sentences,
which explain better than anything I could say why his contemporaries,
in spite of their manifest imperfections, pleased then and continue
to please: “Suffer the world to enjoy that which it knows and what it
likes, seeing whatsoever form of words doth move delight, and sway the
affections of men, in what Scythian sort soever it be disposed and
uttered, that is true number, measure, eloquence, and the perfection
of speech.” Those men did “move delight, and sway the affections of
men,” in a very singular manner, gaining, on the whole, perhaps, more
by their liberty than they lost by their license. But it is only
genius that can safely profit by this immunity. Form, of which we
hear so much, is of great value, but it is not of the highest value,
except in combination with other qualities better than itself; and it
is worth noting that the modern English poet who seems least to have
regarded it, is also the one who has most powerfully moved, swayed, and
delighted those who are wise enough to read him.
One more passage and I have done. It is from the same play of “Old
Fortunatus,” a favorite of mine. The Soldan of Babylon shows Fortunatus
his treasury, or cabinet of bric-à-brac:--
“Behold yon tower: there stands mine armoury,
In which are corselets forged of beaten gold
To arm ten hundred thousand fighting men,
Whose glittering squadrons when the sun beholds,
They seem like to ten hundred thousand Joves,
When Jove on the proud back of thunder rides,
Trapped all in lightning-flames. There can I show thee
The ball of gold that set all Troy on fire;
There shalt thou see the scarf of Cupid’s mother,
Snatcht from the soft moist ivory of her arm
To wrap about Adonis’ wounded thigh;
There shalt thou see a wheel of Titan’s car
Which dropt from Heaven when Phaethon fired the world.
I’ll give thee (if thou wilt) two silver doves
Composed by magic to divide the air,
Who, as they flie, shall clap their silver wings
And give strange music to the elements.
I’ll give thee else the fan of Proserpine,
Which, in reward for a sweet Thracian song,
The blackbrow’d Empress threw to Orpheus,
Being come to fetch Eurydice from hell.”
This is, here and there, tremblingly near bombast, but its exuberance
is cheery, and the quaintness of Proserpine’s fan shows how real she
was to the poet. Hers was a generous gift, considering the climate in
which Dekker evidently supposed her to dwell, and speaks well for the
song that could make her forget it. There is crudeness, as if the wine
had been drawn before the ferment was over, but the arm of Venus is
from the life, and that one verse gleams and glows among the rest like
the thing it describes. The whole passage is a good example of fancy,
whimsical, irresponsible. But there is more imagination and power
to move the imagination in Shakespeare’s “sunken wreck and sunless
treasures” than all his contemporaries together, not even excepting
Marlowe, could have mustered.
We lump all these poets together as dramatists because they wrote for
the theatre, and yet how little they were truly dramatic seems proved
by the fact that none, or next to none, of their plays have held the
stage. Not one of their characters, that I can remember, has become
one of the familiar figures that make up the habitual society of any
cultivated memory even of the same race and tongue. Marlowe, great as
he was, makes no exception. To some of them we cannot deny genius, but
creative genius we must deny to all of them, and dramatic genius as
well.
This last, indeed, is one of the rarest gifts bestowed on man. What is
that which we call dramatic? In the abstract, it is thought or emotion
in action, or on its way to become action. In the concrete, it is that
which is more vivid if represented than described, and which would lose
if merely narrated. Goethe, for example, had little dramatic power;
though, if taking thought could have earned it, he would have had
enough, for he studied the actual stage all his life. The characters in
his plays seem rather to express his thoughts than their own. Yet there
is one admirably dramatic scene in “Faust” which illustrates what I
have been saying. I mean Margaret in the cathedral, suggested to Goethe
by the temptation of Justina in Calderon’s “Magico Prodigioso,” but
full of horror as that of seductiveness. We see and hear as we read.
Her own bad conscience projected in the fiend who mutters despair into
her ear, and the awful peals of the “Dies Iræ,” that most terribly
resonant of Latin hymns, as if blown from the very trump of doom
itself, coming in at intervals to remind her that the
“Tuba mirum spargens sonum
Per sepulchra regionum
Coget omnes ante thronum,”
herself among the rest,--all of this would be weaker in narration.
This is real, and needs realization by the senses to be fully felt.
Compare it with Dimmesdale mounting the pillory at night, in “The
Scarlet Letter,” to my thinking the deepest thrust of what may be
called the metaphysical imagination since Shakespeare. There we
need only a statement of the facts--pictorial statement, of course,
as Hawthorne’s could not fail to be--and the effect is complete.
Thoroughly to understand a good play and enjoy it, even in the reading,
the imagination must body forth its personages, and see them doing or
suffering in the visionary theatre of the brain. There, indeed, they
are best seen, and Hamlet or Lear loses that ideal quality which makes
him typical and universal if he be once compressed within the limits,
or associated with the lineaments, of any, even the best, actor.
It is for their poetical qualities, for their gleams of imagination,
for their quaint and subtle fancies, for their tender sentiment,
and for their charm of diction that these old playwrights are worth
reading. They are the best comment also to convince us of the
immeasurable superiority of Shakespeare. Several of them, moreover,
have been very inadequately edited, or not at all, which is perhaps
better; and it is no useless discipline of the wits, no unworthy
exercise of the mind, to do our own editing as we go along, winning
back to its cradle the right word for the changeling the printers have
left in his stead, making the lame verses find their feet again, and
rescuing those that have been tumbled higgledy-piggledy into a mire
of prose. A strenuous study of this kind will enable us better to
understand many a faulty passage in our Shakespeare, and to judge of
the proposed emendations of them, or to make one to our own liking.
There is no better school for learning English, and for learning it
when, in many important respects, it was at its best.
I am not sure that I shall not seem to talk to you of many things that
seem trivialities if weighed in the huge business scales of life, but
I am always glad to say a word in behalf of what most men consider
useless, and to say it the rather because it has so few friends. I have
observed, and am sorry to have observed, that English poetry, at least
in its older examples, is less read now than when I was young. I do not
believe this to be a healthy symptom, for poetry frequents and keeps
habitable those upper chambers of the mind that open toward the sun’s
rising.