I shall preface what I have to say of Marlowe with a few words as to
the refinement which had been going on in the language, and the greater
ductility which it had been rapidly gaining, and which fitted it for
the use of the remarkable group of men who made an epoch of the reign
of Elizabeth. Spenser was undoubtedly the poet to whom we owe most
in this respect, and the very great contrast between his “Shepherd’s
Calendar,” published in 1579, and his later poems awakens curiosity.
In his earliest work there are glimpses, indeed, of those special
qualities which have won for him the name of the poet’s poet, but they
are rare and fugitive, and certainly never would have warranted the
prediction of such poetry as was to follow. There is nothing here to
indicate that a great artist in language had been born. Two causes,
I suspect, were mainly effective in this transformation, I am almost
tempted to say transubstantiation, of the man. The first was his
practice in translation (true also of Marlowe), than which nothing
gives a greater choice and mastery of one’s mother-tongue, for one must
pause and weigh and judge every word with the greatest nicety, and
cunningly transfuse idiom into idiom. The other, and by far the more
important, was his study of the Italian poets. The “Faerie Queene” is
full of loving reminiscence of them, but their happiest influence is
felt in his lyrical poems. For these, I think, make it plain that Italy
first taught him how much of the meaning of verse is in its music, and
trained his ear to a sense of the harmony as well as the melody of
which English verse was capable or might be made capable. Compare the
sweetest passage in any lyric of the “Shepherd’s Calendar” with the
eloquent ardor of the poorest, if any be poor, in the “Epithalamion,”
and we find ourselves in a new world where music had just been
invented. This we owe, beyond any doubt, to Spenser’s study of the
Italian canzone. Nay, the whole metrical movement of the “Epithalamion”
recalls that of Petrarca’s noble “_Spirto gentil_.” I repeat that
melody and harmony were first naturalized in our language by Spenser. I
love to recall these debts, for it is pleasant to be grateful even to
the dead.
Other men had done their share towards what may be called the
modernization of our English, and among these Sir Philip Sidney
was conspicuous. He probably gave it greater ease of movement, and
seems to have done for it very much what Dryden did a century later
in establishing terms of easier intercourse between the language of
literature and the language of cultivated society.
There had been good versifiers long before. Chaucer, for example, and
even Gower, wearisome as he mainly is, made verses sometimes not only
easy in movement, but in which the language seems strangely modern.
That most dolefully dreary of books, “The Mirror for Magistrates,”
and Sackville, more than any of its authors, did something towards
restoring the dignity of verse, and helping it to recover its
self-respect, while Spenser was still a youth. Tame as it is, the
sunshine of that age here and there touches some verse that ripples
in the sluggish current with a flicker of momentary illumination. But
before Spenser, no English verse had ever soared and sung, or been
filled with what Sidney calls “divine delightfulness.” Sidney, it may
be conjectured, did more by private criticism and argument than by
example. Drayton says of him:--
“The noble Sidney with this last arose,
That heroë for numbers and for prose,
That throughly paced our language as to show
The plenteous English hand in hand might go
With Greek and Latin, and did first reduce
Our tongue from Lilly’s writing then in use.”
But even the affectations of Lilly were not without their use as helps
to refinement. If, like Chaucer’s frere,--
“Somewhat he lisped, for his wantonness,”
it was through the desire
“To make his English sweet upon his tongue.”
It was the general clownishness against which he revolted, and we owe
him our thanks for it. To show of what brutalities even recent writers
could be capable, it will suffice to mention that Golding, in his
translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, makes a witch mutter the devil’s
pater-noster, and Ulysses express his fears of going “to pot.” I should
like to read you a familiar sonnet of Sidney’s for its sweetness:--
“Come, Sleep: O Sleep! the certain knot of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,
The indifferent judge between the high and low;
With shield of proof, shield me from out the press
Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw;
O make in me those civil wars to cease:
I will good tribute pay if thou do so.
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
A chamber deaf to noise and blind to light,
A rosy garland, and a weary head:
And if these things, as being thine of right,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella’s image see.”
Here is ease and simplicity; but in such a phrase as “baiting-place of
wit” there is also a want of that perfect discretion which we demand
of the language of poetry, however we may be glad to miss it in the
thought or emotion which that language conveys. _Baiting-place_ is no
more a homespun word than the word _inn_, which adds a charm to one of
the sweetest verses that Spenser ever wrote; but _baiting-place_ is
common, it smacks of the hostler and postilion, and commonness is a
very poor relation indeed of simplicity. But doubtless one main cause
of the vivacity of phrase which so charms us in our earlier writers is
to be found in the fact that there were not yet two languages--that of
life and that of literature. The divorce between the two took place a
century and a half later, and that process of breeding in and in began
which at last reduced the language of verse to a kind of idiocy.
Do not consider such discussions as these otiose or nugatory. The
language we are fortunate enough to share, and which, I think, Jacob
Grimm was right in pronouncing, in its admirable mixture of Saxon and
Latin, its strength and sonorousness, a better literary medium than
any other modern tongue--this language has not been fashioned to what
it is without much experiment, much failure, and infinite expenditure
of pains and thought. Genius and pedantry have each done its part
towards the result which seems so easy to us, and yet was so hard
to win--the one by way of example, the other by way of warning. The
purity, the elegance, the decorum, the chastity of our mother-tongue
are a sacred trust in our hands. I am tired of hearing the foolish
talk of an American variety of it, about our privilege to make it what
we will because we are in a majority. A language belongs to those
who know best how to use it, how to bring out all its resources, how
to make it search its coffers round for the pithy or canorous phrase
that suits the need, and they who can do this have been always in a
pitiful minority. Let us be thankful that we too have a right to it,
and have proved our right, but let us set up no claim to vulgarize it.
The English of Abraham Lincoln was so good not because he learned it
in Illinois, but because he learned it of Shakespeare and Milton and
the Bible, the constant companions of his leisure. And how perfect it
was in its homely dignity, its quiet strength, the unerring aim with
which it struck once nor needed to strike more! The language is alive
here, and will grow. Let us do all we can with it but debase it. Good
taste may not be necessary to salvation or to success in life, but it
is one of the most powerful factors of civilization. As a people we
have a larger share of it and more widely distributed than I, at least,
have found elsewhere, but as a nation we seem to lack it altogether.
Our coinage is ruder than that of any country of equal pretensions,
our paper money is filthily infectious, and the engraving on it,
mechanically perfect as it is, makes of every bank-note a missionary
of barbarism. This should make us cautious of trying our hand in the
same fashion on the circulating medium of thought. But it is high time
that I should remember Maître Guillaume of Patelin, and come back to my
sheep.
In coming to speak of Marlowe, I cannot help fearing that I may fail a
little in that equanimity which is the first condition of all helpful
criticism. Generosity there should be, and enthusiasm there should be,
but they should stop short of extravagance. Praise should not weaken
into eulogy, nor blame fritter itself away into fault-finding. Goethe
tells us that the first thing needful to the critic, as indeed it is
to the wise man generally, is to see the thing as it really is; this
is the most precious result of all culture, the surest warrant of
happiness, or at least of composure. But he also bids us, in judging
any work, seek first to discover its beauties, and then its blemishes
or defects. Now there are two poets whom I feel that I can never judge
without a favorable bias. One is Spenser, who was the first poet I
ever read as a boy, not drawn to him by any enchantment of his matter
or style, but simply because the first verse of his great poem was,--
“A gentle knight was pricking on the plain,”
and I followed gladly, wishful of adventure. Of course I understood
nothing of the allegory, never suspected it, fortunately for me, and
am surprised to think how much of the language I understood. At any
rate, I grew fond of him, and whenever I see the little brown folio in
which I read, my heart warms to it as to a friend of my childhood. With
Marlowe it was otherwise. With him I grew acquainted during the most
impressible and receptive period of my youth. He was the first man of
genius I had ever really known, and he naturally bewitched me. What
cared I that they said he was a deboshed fellow? nay, an atheist? To me
he was the voice of one singing in the desert, of one who had found the
water of life for which I was panting, and was at rest under the palms.
How can he ever become to me as other poets are? But I shall try to be
lenient in my admiration.
Christopher Marlowe, the son of a shoemaker, was born at Canterbury, in
February, 1563, was matriculated at Benet College, Cambridge, in 1580,
received his degree of bachelor there in 1583 and of master in 1587.
He came early to London, and was already known as a dramatist before
the end of his twenty-fourth year. There is some reason for thinking
that he was at one time an actor. He was killed in a tavern brawl, by
a man named Archer, in 1593, at the age of thirty. He was taxed with
atheism, but on inadequate grounds, as it appears to me. That he was
said to have written a tract against the Trinity, for which a license
to print was refused on the ground of blasphemy, might easily have led
to the greater charge. That he had some opinions of a kind unusual then
may be inferred, perhaps, from a passage in his “Faust.” Faust asks
Mephistopheles how, being damned, he is out of hell. And Mephistopheles
answers, “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.” And a little farther
on he explains himself thus:--
“Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is there must we ever be;
And, to conclude, when all the earth dissolves,
And every creature shall be purified,
All places shall be hell that are not heaven.”
Milton remembered the first passage I have quoted, and puts nearly the
same words into the mouth of his Lucifer. If Marlowe was a liberal
thinker, it is not strange that in that intolerant age he should
have incurred the stigma of general unbelief. Men are apt to blacken
opinions which are distasteful to them, and along with them the
character of him who holds them.
This at least may be said of him without risk of violating the rule of
_ne quid nímis_, that he is one of the most masculine and fecundating
natures in the long line of British poets. Perhaps his energy was even
in excess. There is in him an Oriental lavishness. He will impoverish
a province for a simile, and pour the revenues of a kingdom into the
lap of a description. In that delightful story in the book of Esdras,
King Darius, who has just dismissed all his captains and governors
of cities and satraps, after a royal feast, sends couriers galloping
after them to order them all back again, because he has found a riddle
under his pillow, and wishes their aid in solving it. Marlowe in like
manner calls in help from every the remotest corner of earth and heaven
for what seems to us as trivial an occasion. I will not say that he
is bombastic, but he constantly pushes grandiosity to the verge of
bombast. His contemporaries thought he passed it in his “Tamburlaine.”
His imagination flames and flares, consuming what it should caress,
as Jupiter did Semele. That exquisite phrase of Hamlet, “the modesty
of nature,” would never have occurred to him. Yet in the midst of the
hurly-burly there will fall a sudden hush, and we come upon passages
calm and pellucid as mountain tarns filled to the brim with the purest
distillations of heaven. And, again, there are single verses that open
silently as roses, and surprise us with that seemingly accidental
perfection, which there is no use in talking about because itself says
all that is to be said and more.
There is a passage in “Tamburlaine” which I remember reading in the
first course of lectures I ever delivered, thirty-four years ago, as a
poet’s feeling of the inadequacy of the word to the idea:--
“If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of their masters’ thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admired themes;
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit;--
If these had made one poem’s period,
And all combined in beauty’s worthiness,
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest.”
Marlowe made snatches at this forbidden fruit with vigorous leaps,
and not without bringing away a prize now and then such as only the
fewest have been able to reach. Of fine single verses I give a few as
instances of this:--
“Sometimes a lovely boy in Dian’s shape,
_With hair that gilds the water as it glides_,
Shall bathe him in a spring.”