As I turn from one to another of the old dramatists, and see how little
is known about their personal history, I find a question continually
coming back, invincible as a fly with a strong sense of duty, which I
shall endeavor to fan away by a little discussion. This question is
whether we gain or lose by our ignorance of the personal details of
their history. Would it make any difference in our enjoyment of what
they wrote, if we had the means of knowing that one of them was a good
son, or the other a bad husband? that one was a punctual paymaster, and
that the other never paid his washer-woman for the lustration of the
legendary single shirt without which he could not face a neglectful
world, or hasten to the theatre with the manuscript of the new play
for which posterity was to be more thankful than the manager? Is it
a love of knowledge or of gossip that renders these private concerns
so interesting to us, and makes us willing to intrude on the awful
seclusion of the dead, or to flatten our noses against the windows
of the living? The law is more scrupulous than we in maintaining
the inviolability of private letters. Are we to profit by every
indiscretion, by every breach of confidence? Of course, in whatever
the man himself has made a part of the record we are entitled to find
what intimations we can of his genuine self, of the real man, veiled
under the draperies of convention and circumstance, who was visible
for so many years, yet perhaps never truly seen, obscurely known to
himself, conjectured even by his intimates, and a mere name to all
beside. And yet how much do we really know even of men who profess to
admit us to every corner of their nature--of Montaigne? of Rousseau?
As in the box under the table at which the automaton chess-player
sat, there is always a closet within that which is so frankly opened
to us, and into this the enigma himself absconds while we are staring
at nothing in the other. Even in autobiographies, it is only by
inadvertencies, by unconscious betrayals when the author is off his
guard, that we make our discoveries. In a man’s works we read between
the lines, not always wisely. No doubt there is an intense interest in
watching the process by which a detective critic like Sainte-Beuve dogs
his hero or his victim, as the case may be, with tireless sympathy or
vindictive sagacity, tracking out clew after clew, and constructing out
of the life a comment on the works, or, again, from the works divining
the character. But our satisfaction depends upon the bias with which
the inquisition is conducted, and, after assisting at this process in
the case of Châteaubriand, for example, are we sure that we know the
man better, or only what was morbid in the man, which, perhaps, it was
not profitable for us to know?
But is it not after the discreditable particulars which excite a
correspondingly discreditable curiosity that we are eager, and these
that we read with greatest zest? So it should seem if we judged by
the fact that biography, and especially that of men of letters,
tends more and more towards these indecent exposures. The concern
of the biographer should be with the mind, and not with the body
of his victim. We are willing to be taken into the parlor and the
library, but may fairly refuse to be dragged down to the kitchen or
to look into the pantry. Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” does not come
under this condemnation, being mainly a record of the great doctor’s
opinions, and, since done with his own consent, is almost to be called
autobiographical. There are certain memoirs after reading which one
blushes as if he had not only been peeping through a key-hole, but
had been caught in the act. No doubt there is a fearful truth in
Shakespeare’s saying,--
“The evil that men do lives after them,”
but I should limit it to the evil done by otherwise good men, for it is
only in this kind of evil that others will seek excuse for what they
are tempted to do, or palliation for what they have already done. I
like to believe, and to think I see reason for believing, that it is
the good that is in men which is immortal, and beneficently immortal,
and that the sooner the perishable husk in which it was enveloped is
suffered to perish and crumble away, the sooner we shall know them
as they really were. I remember how Longfellow used to laugh in his
kindly way when he told the story of the French visitor who asked him
for some _révélations intimes_ of his domestic life, to be published
in a Paris newspaper. No man would have lost less by the most staring
light that could have been admitted to those sacred retreats, but he
shrank instinctively from being an accomplice to its admission. I am
not sure that I ought to be grateful for the probable identification
of the Dark Lady to whom twenty-five of Shakespeare’s sonnets are
addressed, much as I should commend the research and acuteness that
rendered it possible. We had, indeed, more than suspected that these
sonnets had an address within the bills of mortality, for no such
red-blooded flame as this sometimes is ever burned on the altar of
the Ideal. But whoever she was, she was unembodied so long as she
was nameless, she moved about in a world not realized, sacred in her
inaccessibility, a fainter image of that image of her which had been
mirrored in the poet’s eyes; and this vulgarization of her into flesh
and blood seems to pull down the sonnets from heaven’s sweetest air
to the turbid level of our earthier apprehension. Here is no longer
an object for the upward, but for the furtive and sidelong glance.
A gentleman once told me that being compelled to part with some
family portraits, he requested a dealer to price that of a collateral
ancestress by Gainsborough. He thought the sum offered surprisingly
small, and said so.
“I beg your pardon for asking the question,” said the dealer, “but
business is business. You are not, I understand, a direct descendant
of this lady. Was her name ever connected with any scandal? If so, I
could double my offer.”
Somewhere in our in-human nature there must be an appetite for
these unsavory personalities, but they are degrading in a double
sense--degrading to him whose secret is betrayed, and to him who
consents to share in the illicit knowledge of it. These things are none
of our business, and yet it is remarkable how scrupulously exact even
those most neglectful in their own affairs are in attending to the
business of other people. I think, on the whole, that it is fortunate
for us that our judgment of what the old dramatists did should be so
little disturbed by any misinformation as to what they were, for to be
imperfectly informed is to be misinformed, and even to look through
contemporary eyes is to look through very crooked glass. Sometimes
we may draw a pretty infallible inference as to a man’s temperament,
though not as to his character, from his writings. And this, I think,
is the case with Chapman.
George Chapman was born at Hitchin, in Hertfordshire, in 1559 probably,
though Anthony Wood makes him two years older, and died in London on
the 12th of May, 1634. He was buried in the church-yard of St. Giles in
the Fields, where the monument put up over him by Inigo Jones is still
standing. He was five years older than Shakespeare, whom he survived
for nearly twenty years, and fifteen years older than Ben Jonson, who
out-lived him three years. There is good ground for believing that
he studied at both Universities, though he took a degree at neither.
While there he is said to have devoted himself to the classics, and to
have despised philosophy. This contempt, however, seems to me somewhat
doubtful, for he is certainly the most obtrusively metaphysical of all
our dramatists. After leaving the University, he is supposed to have
travelled, which is as convenient a way as any other to fill up the gap
of sixteen years between 1578, when he ended his academic studies, and
1594, when we first have notice of him in London, during which period
he vanishes altogether. Whether he travelled in France and Italy or
not, he seems to have become in some way familiar with the languages
of those countries, and there is some reason for thinking that he
understood German also. We have two glimpses of him during his life in
London. In 1605 he, with Jonson and Marston, produced a play called
“Eastward Ho!” Some “injurious reflections” on the Scottish nation in
it angered King James, and the authors were imprisoned for a few days
in the Fleet. Again, in 1606, the French ambassador, Beaumont, writes
to his master: “I caused certain players to be forbid from acting ‘The
History of the Duke of Biron;’ when, however, they saw that the whole
court had left town, they persisted in acting it; nay, they brought
upon the stage the Queen of France and Mlle, de Verneuil. The former
having first accosted the latter with very hard words, gave her a box
on the ear. At my suit three of them were arrested; but the principal
person, the author, escaped.” This was Chapman’s tragedy, and in
neither of the editions printed two years later does the objectionable
passage appear. It is curious that this interesting illustration of the
history of the English stage should have been unearthed from the French
archives by Von Raumer in his “History of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries.”
Chapman was a man of grave character and regular life. We may,
perhaps, infer from some passages in his plays that he heartily hated
Puritans. There are other passages that might lead one to suspect
him of a leaning towards Catholicism, or at least of regretting the
schism of the Reformation. The scene of “Byron’s Conspiracy” and
“Byron’s Tragedy” is laid in France, to be sure, in the time of Henry
IV., but not to mention that Chapman’s characters are almost always
the mere mouth-pieces of his own thought, there is a fervor in the
speeches to which I have alluded which gives to them an air of personal
conviction. In “Byron’s Tragedy” there is a eulogy of Philip II. and
his policy very well worth reading by those who like to keep their
minds judicially steady, for it displays no little historical insight.
It certainly shows courage and independence to have written such a
vindication only eighteen years after the Armada, and when national
prejudice against Spain was so strong.
Chapman’s friendships are the strongest testimonials we have of his
character. Prince Henry, whose untimely death may have changed the
course of English history, and with it that of our own, was his
patron. So was Carr, Earl of Somerset, whom he did not desert in ill
fortune. Inigo Jones was certainly his intimate friend; and he is
said to have been, though it seems doubtful, on terms of friendly
intercourse with Bacon. In dedicating his “Byron’s Conspiracy” to Sir
Thomas Walsingham, he speaks as to an old friend. With his fellow-poets
he appears to have been generally on good terms. His long life covered
the whole of the Elizabethan age of literature, and before he died he
might have read the earlier poems of Milton.
He wrote seven comedies and eight tragedies that have come down to us,
and probably others that have perished. Nearly all his comedies are
formless and coarse, but with what seems to me a kind of stiff and
wilful coarseness, as if he were trying to make his personages speak
in what he supposed to be their proper dialect, in which he himself
was unpractised, having never learned it in those haunts, familiar
to most of his fellow-poets, where it was vernacular. His characters
seem, indeed, types, and he frankly proclaims himself an idealist
in the dedication of “The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois” to Sir Thomas
Howard, where he says, “And for the authentical truth of either person
or action, who (worth the respecting) will expect it in a Poem whose
subject is not truth, but things like truth?” Of his comedies, “All
Fools” is by general consent the best. It is less lumpish than the
others, and is, on the whole, lively and amusing. In his comedies he
indulges himself freely in all that depreciation of woman which had
been so long traditional with the sex which has the greatest share in
making them what they are. But he thought he was being comic, and there
is, on the whole, no more depressing sight than a naturally grave man
under that delusion. His notion of love, too, is coarse and animal, or
rather the notion he thinks proper to express through his characters.
And yet in his comedies there are two passages, one in praise of love,
and the other of woman, certainly among the best of their kind. The
first is a speech of Valerio in “All Fools:”--
“I tell thee love is Nature’s second sun
Causing a spring of virtues where he shines;
And as without the sun, the world’s great eye,
All colors, beauties, both of art and nature,
Are given in vain to men, so without love
All beauties bred in women are in vain,
All virtues born in men lie buried;
For love informs them as the sun doth colors;
And as the sun, reflecting his warm beams
Against the earth, begets all fruits and flowers,
So love, fair shining in the inward man,
Brings forth in him the honorable fruits
Of valor, wit, virtue, and haughty thoughts,
Brave resolution and divine discourse:
O, ’t is the paradise, the heaven of earth!
And didst thou know the comfort of two hearts
In one delicious harmony united;
As to enjoy one joy, think both one thought,
Live both one life and therein double life,
* * * * *
Thou wouldst abhor thy tongue for blasphemy.”
And now let me read to you a passage in praise of women from “The
Gentleman Usher.” It is not great poetry, but it has fine touches of
discrimination both in feeling and expression:--
“Let no man value at a little price
A virtuous woman’s counsel; her winged spirit
Is feathered oftentimes with heavenly words,
And, like her beauty, ravishing and pure;
The weaker body still the stronger soul.
* * * * *
O what a treasure is a virtuous wife,
Discreet and loving! not one gift on earth
Makes a man’s life so highly bound to heaven;
She gives him double forces, to endure
And to enjoy, by being one with him.”
Then, after comparing her with power, wealth, music, and delicate diet,
which delight but imperfectly,--
“But a true wife both sense and soul delights,
And mixeth not her good with any ill.
All store without her leaves a man but poor,
And with her poverty is exceeding store.”
Chapman himself, in a passage of his “Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois,”
condemns the very kind of comedy he wrote as a concession to public
taste:--
“Nay, we must now have nothing brought on stages
But puppetry, and pied ridiculous antics;
Men thither come to laugh and feed fool-fat,
Check at all goodness there as being profaned;
When wheresoever goodness comes, she makes
The place still sacred, though with other feet
Never so much ’t is scandaled and polluted.
Let me learn anything that fits a man,
In any stables shown, as well as stages.”
Of his tragedies, the general judgment has pronounced “Byron’s
Conspiracy” and “Byron’s Tragedy” to be the finest, though they have
less genuine poetical ecstasy than his “d’Ambois.” The “Tragedy of
Chabot, Admiral of France,” is almost wholly from his hand, as all its
editors agree, and as is plain from internal evidence, for Chapman has
some marked peculiarities of thought and style which are unmistakable.
Because Shirley had some obscure share in it, it is printed with his
works, and omitted by the latest editor of Chapman. Yet it is far more
characteristic of him than “Alphonsus,” or “Cæsar and Pompey.” The
character of Chabot has a nobility less prompt to vaunt itself, less
conscious of itself, less obstreperous, I am tempted to say, than is
common with Chapman. There is one passage in the play which I will
quote, because of the plain allusion in it to the then comparatively
recent fate of Lord Bacon. I am not sure whether it has been before
remarked or not. The Lord Chancellor of France is impeached of the same
crimes with Bacon. He is accused also of treacherous cruelty to Chabot,
as Bacon was reproached for ingratitude to Essex. He is sentenced like
him to degradation of rank, to a heavy fine, and to imprisonment at the
King’s pleasure. Like Bacon, again, he twice confesses his guilt before
sentence is passed on him, and throws himself on the King’s mercy:--
“Hear me, great Judges; if you have not lost
For my sake all your charities, I beseech you
Let the King know my heart is full of penitence;
Calm his high-going sea, or in that tempest
I ruin to eternity. O, my lords,
Consider your own places and the helms
You sit at; while with all your providence
You steer, look forth and see devouring quicksands!
My ambition now is punished, and my pride
Of state and greatness falling into nothing;
I, that had never time, through vast employments,
To think of Heaven, feel His revengeful wrath
Boiling my blood and scorching up my entrails.
There’s doomsday in my conscience, black and horrid,
For my abuse of justice; but no stings
Prick with that terror as the wounds I made
Upon the pious Admiral. Some good man
Bear my repentance thither; he is merciful,
And may incline the King to stay his lightning,
Which threatens my confusion, that my free
Resign of title, office, and what else
My pride look’d at, would buy my poor life’s safety;
Forever banish me the Court, and let
Me waste my life far-off in some mean village.”