As we open our budget to-day, we are still under kingship of the great
Queen Bess, in whose presence we saw the portentous Lord Burleigh, whose
nod has passed into history; we saw, too, in our swift way, the wise, the
judicious, the simple-minded, the mismarried Richard Hooker. We called
Spenser before us, and had a taste of those ever-sweet poems of his--ever
sweet, though ever so long. Then his friend Philip Sidney flashed across
our view, the over-fine gentleman, yet full of nobility and courage, who
wrote a long book, _Arcadia_, so bright with yellow splendor as to tire
one; and still so full of high thinking as to warrant his fame and to
lend a halo to his brave and tragic death. You may remember, too, that
I made short mention of a certain John Lyly, who was about the same age
with Spenser, and who, with his pretty euphuisms came to cut a larger
figure in the days of Elizabeth than many stronger men did.
_John Lyly._
I recur to him now and tell you more of him, because he did in his time
set a sort of fashion in letters. He was an Oxford man,[95] born down in
Kent, and at twenty-five, or thereabout, made his fame by a book, which
grew out of suggestions (not only of name but largely of intent and
purpose) in the _Schoolmaster_ of Roger Ascham; and thus it happens over
and over in the fields of literature, that a plodding man will drop from
his store a nugget, over which some fellow of lively parts will stumble
into renown.
The book I refer to was called _Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit_, which
came into such extraordinary favor that he wrote shortly after another,
called _Euphues and his England_. And the fashion that he set, was a
fashion of affectations--of prettinesses of speech--of piling words on
words, daintier and daintier--antithesis upon antithesis, with flavors of
wide reading thrown in, and spangled with classic terms and far-fetched
similes--so that ladies ambitious of literary fame larded their talk with
these fine euphuisms of Mr. Lyly. Something of a coxcomb I think we must
reckon him; we might almost say an Oscar Wilde of letters--posing as
finely and as capable of drawing female shoals in his wake. His strain
for verbal felicities, always noticeable, comparing with good, simple,
downright English, as a dancing-master’s mincing step, compares with the
assured, steady tread of a go-ahead pedestrian, who thinks nothing of
attitudes. Scott, you will remember, sought to caricature the Euphuist,
in a somewhat exaggerated way, in Sir Piercie Shafton, who figures in his
story of the _Monastery_; he himself, however, in the later annotations
of his novel, confesses his failure, and admitted the justice of the
criticism which declared Sir Piercie a bore. Shakespeare, also, at a
time not far removed from Lyly’s conquest, perhaps intended a slap at
the euphuistic craze,[96] in the pedant Schoolmaster’s talk of “Love’s
Labor’s Lost.”
Yet there was a certain good in this massing of epithets, and in this
tesselated cumulation of nice bits of language, from which the more wary
and skilful of writers could choose--as from a great vocabulary--what
words were cleanest and clearest. Nor do I wish to give the impression
that there were no evidences of thoughtfulness or of good purpose,
under Lyly’s tintinnabulation of words. Hazlitt thought excellently
well of him; and Charles Kingsley, in these later times, has pronounced
extravagant eulogy of him. Indeed he had high moral likings, though his
inspirations are many of them from Plato or Boëthius; it is questionable
also if he did not pilfer from Plutarch; certainly he sugar-coats with
his language a great many heathen pills.
In observation he is very acute. That _Euphues_ who gives name to his
book, is an Athenian youth of rare parts--“well-constituted” as the Greek
implies--who has lived long in Italy, and who talks in this strain of the
ladies he saw on a visit to England:--
“The English Damoiselles have their bookes tied to their
girdles--not feathers--who are as cunning in the Scriptures as
you are in Ariosto or Petrark. It is the most gorgeous court
[of England] that ever I have seene or heard of; but yet do
they not use their apparel so nicely as you in Italy, who
thinke scorne to kneele at service, for fear of wrinckles in
your silk, who dare not lift up your head to heaven, for fear
of rumpling the ruffs in your neck; yet your handes, I confess,
are holden up, rather I thinke, to show your ringes, than to
manifest your righteousness.”
Elizabeth would have very probably relished this sort of talk, and
have commended the writer in person; nor can there be any doubt that,
in such event, Lyly would have mumbled his thanks in kissing the royal
hands: there are complaining letters of his on the score of insufficient
court patronage, which are not high-toned, and which make us a little
doubtful of a goodly manhood in him. Certainly his deservings were
great, by reason of the plays which he wrote for her Majesty’s Company
of Child-players, and which were acted at the Chapel Royal and in the
palaces. In some of these there are turns of expression and of dramatic
incident which Shakespeare did not hesitate to convert to his larger
purposes; indeed there is, up and down in them, abundance of dainty
word-craft--of ingenuity--of more than Elizabethan delicacy too, and
from time to time, some sweet little lyrical outburst that holds place
still in the anthologies.
One of these, with which I daresay you may be over-familiar, is worth
quoting again. It is called Apelles’ Song, and it is from the play of
“Alexander and Campaspe:”
“Cupid and my Campaspe played
At cards for kisses--Cupid paid.
He stakes his quiver, bows and arrows,
His mother’s doves, and team of sparrows:
Loses them too: then down he throws
The coral of his lip--the Rose
Growing on’s cheek (but none knows how);
With these the crystal of his brow,
And then the dimple of his chin--
All these did my Campaspe win.
At last, he set her both his eyes--
She won; and Cupid blind did rise.
O Love, has she done this to thee?
What shall, alas! become of me?”
He puts, too, into imitative jingle of words the song of the
Nightingale--(as Bryant has done for the Bobolink); and of the strain of
the skylark nothing prettier was ever said than Mr. Lyly says:
“How, at Heaven’s gate she claps her wings,
The morn not waking--till _she_ sings.”
_Francis Bacon._
We go away from singing skylarks to find the next character that I
shall cull out from these Elizabethan times to set before you: this is
Lord Bacon--or, to give him his true title, Lord Verulam--there being,
in fact, the same impropriety in saying Lord Bacon (if custom had not
“brazed it so”) that there would be in saying Lord D’Israeli for Lord
Beaconsfield.
Here was a great mind--a wonderful intellect which everyone admired,
and in which everyone of English birth, from Royalty down, took--and
ever will take--a national pride; but, withal, few of those amiabilities
ever crop out in this great character which make men loved. He can see
a poor priest culprit come to the rack without qualms; and could look
stolidly on, as Essex, his special benefactor in his youth, walked to
the scaffold; yet the misstatement of a truth, with respect to physics,
or any matter about which truth or untruth was clearly demonstrable,
affected him like a galvanic shock. His biographers, Montagu and
Spedding, have padded his angularities into roundness; while Pope and
Macaulay have lashed him in the grave. I think we must find the real man
somewhere between them; if we credit him with a great straight-thinking,
truth-seeking brain, and little or no capacity for affection, the riddle
of his strange life will be more easily solved. Spedding,[97] who wrote
a voluminous life of Bacon--having devoted a quarter of a century to
necessary studies--does certainly make disastrous ripping-up of the seams
in Macaulay’s rhetoric; but there remain certain ugly facts relating to
the trial of Essex, and the bribe-takings, which will probably always
keep alive in the popular mind an under-current of distrust in respect to
the great Chancellor.
He was born in London, in 1561, three years before Shakespeare, and at
a time when, from his father’s house in the Strand he could look sheer
across the Thames to Southwark, where, before he was thirty, the Globe
Theatre was built, in which Shakespeare acted. He was in Paris when his
father died; there is no grief-stricken letter upon the event, but a
curious mention that he had dreamed two nights before how his father’s
house was covered with black mortar--so intent is he on mental processes.
He had a mother who was pious, swift-thoughted, jealous, imperious,
unreasonable, with streaks of tenderness.
“Be not speedy of speech,” she says in one of her letters--“nor
talk suddenly, but when discretion requireth, and that soberly
then. Remember you have no father; and you have little
enough--if not too little, regarded your kind, _no-simple_
mother’s wholesome advice.”
And again: “Look well to your health; sup not, nor sit not up
late; surely I think your drinking near to bedtime hindereth
your and your brother’s digestion very much: I never knew any
but sickly that used it; besides ill for head and eyes.” And
again, in postscript: “I trust you, with yr servants, use
prayers twice in a day, having been where reformation is. Omit
it not for any.”
And he responds with ceremony, waiving much of her excellent advice, and
sometimes suggesting some favor she can do him,--
“It may be I shall have occasion to visit the Court this
Vacation [he being then at Gray’s Inn], which I have not done
this months space. In which respect, because carriage of stuff
to and fro spoileth it, I would be glad of that light bed
of striped stuff which your Ladyship hath, if you have not
otherwise disposed it.”
Sharpish words, too, sometimes pass between them; but he is always
decorously and untouchingly polite.
Indeed his protestations of undying friendship to all of high station,
whom he addresses unctuously, are French in their amplitude, and French,
too, in their vanities. He presses sharply always toward the great end
of self-advancement--whether by flatteries, or cajolement, or direct
entreaty. He believed in the survival of the fittest; and that the
fittest should struggle to make the survival good--no matter what weak
ones, or timid ones, or confiding ones, or emotional ones should go
to the wall, or the bottom, in the struggle. His flatteries, I think,
never touched the Queen, though he tried them often and gave a lurid
color to his flatteries. She admired his parts as a young man; she had
honored his father; she accepted his services with thanks--even the
dreadful services which he rendered in demonstrating the treason of
the gallant and generous, but headstrong Earl of Essex. He never came
into full possession of royal confidences, however, until James I. came
to the throne: by him he was knighted, by him made Lord Chancellor, by
him elevated to the peerage; and it was under him that he was brought
to trial for receiving bribes--was convicted, despoiled of his judicial
robes, went to prison--though it might be only for a day--and thereafter
into that retirement, at once shameful and honorable, where he put the
last touches to those broad teachings of “Philosophy,” which the world
will always cherish and revere: not the first nor the last instance in
which great and fatal weaknesses have been united to great power and
great accomplishment.
But lest you may think too hardly of this eminent man, a qualifying word
must be said of that stain upon him--of receiving bribes: it was no
uncommon thing for high judicial personages to take gifts; no uncommon
thing for all high officers of the Government--nay, for the Government
itself, as typified in its supreme head. And, strange as it may seem,
Bacon’s sense of justice does not appear to have been swayed by the
gifts he took. Spedding has demonstrated, I think, that no judgment he
rendered was ever reversed by subsequent and farther hearing.[98] He was
not in the ordinary sense a money-lover; but he did love the importance
and consideration which money gave, yet was always in straits; and
those unwise receivings of his went to supply the shortcomings in a
very extravagant and disorderly home-life. His servants plundered him;
his tradespeople fleeced him; nor do I think that the mistress of the
Chancellor’s household was either very wary or very winning. Almost the
only time there is mention of her in his letters occurs previous to his
marriage (which did not take place till he was well in middle age), and
then only as “the daughter of an alderman who will bring a good dot” with
her. His mother-in-law, too, appears to have been of the stage sort of
mother-in-law, whom he addresses (by letter) in this fashion:--
“Madam,” he says, “you shall with right good-will be made
acquainted with anything that concerneth your daughters, if you
bear a mind of love and concord: Otherwise you must be content
to be a stranger to us. For I may not be so unwise as to suffer
you to be an author or occasion of dissension between your
daughters and their husbands; having seen so much misery of
that kind in yourself.”
This looks a little as if the mother-in-law found the “grapes sour” in
the Bacon gardens. I do not think there was much domesticity about him,
even if home influences had encouraged it: he was without children,
and not one to read poetry to his wife in a boudoir; yet his essays
concerning marriage and concerning children and concerning friendship and
concerning extravagance, are full of piquant truths.
Indeed two distinct lines of life ran through the career of this
extraordinary man. In one he loved parade, ceremony, glitter; he stooped
ungraciously to those who ranked him in factitious distinctions; was
profuse and heartless in his adulation; taking great gifts with servile
acknowledgment; shunning friends who were falling; courting enemies who
were rising: and yet through all this, and looking out from the same
keen inscrutable eyes was the soul of a philosopher cognizant of all
humanities, searching sharply after the largest and broadest truths; too
indifferent to small ones; weighing his own shortcomings with bitter
remorse; alive to everything in science that should help the advancement
of the world, and absorbed in high ranges of thinking which the
animosities and cares and criminalities and accidents of every-day life
did not seem to reach or to disturb.
In such mood he wrote those essays, of some of which I have
spoken--wonderfully compact of thought, and as wonderfully compact of
language--which one should read and read again. No private library of a
hundred English books is complete without a copy of Bacon’s Essays. The
keen sagacity and perdurable sense of his observations always engage one.
Thus of Travel, he says,--
“Let him [the Traveller] sequester himself from the company of
his countrymen, and diet in such places where there is good
company of the nation where he travelleth. He that travelleth
into a country before he hath some entrance into the language,
goeth to school and not to travel.”
Of Friendship:--“This communicating of a man’s self to his
friend, works two contrary efforts; for it redoubleth joys
and cutteth griefs in halves.” Again, of the advantages of
talk with a friend:--“Certain it is, that whosoever hath his
mind fraught with many thoughts, his wits and understanding do
clarify and break up, in the communicating and discoursing with
another; he tosseth his thoughts more easily; he marshalleth
them more orderly; he seeth how they look when they are turned
into words; finally, he waxeth wiser than himself: and that
more by an hours discourse than by a days meditation.”
Thus I could go on for page after page of citations which you would
approve, and which are so put in words that no mending or shortening
or deepening of their force seems anyway possible. And yet this book
of Essays--with all its sagacities, its ringing terseness, its stanch
worldly wisdom--is one we do not warm toward. Even when he talks of
friendship or marriage, death or love, a cold line of self-seeking
pervades it. Of sacrifice for love’s sake, for friendship’s sake, or
for charity’s sake, there is nothing; and in that Essay on “Parents and
Children”--what iciness of reflection--of suggestion! A man might talk as
Bacon talks there, of the entries in a “Herd-book.”
As for the _Novum Organum_ and the _Augmentis Scientiarum_--you would
not read them if I were to suggest it: indeed, there is no need for
reading them, except as a literary _excursus_, seeing that they have
wrought their work in breaking up old, slow modes of massing knowledge,
and in pouring light upon new ways;--in serving, indeed, so far as their
reach went, as a great logical lever, by which subsequent inquirers have
prised up a thousand hidden knowledges and ways of knowledge to the
comprehension and cognizance of the world.
And the two lines of life in Francis Bacon were joined by a strange
hyphen at last: He got out of his coach (which was not paid for), and in
his silk stockings walked through the snow, to prosecute some scientific
post-mortem experiment upon the body of a chicken he had secured by
the roadside, near to London. He caught cold--as lesser men would
have done; and he died of it. This date of his death (1626) brings us
beyond Elizabeth’s time--beyond James’ time, too, and far down to the
early years of Charles I. He was born, as I said, three years before
Shakespeare, three years after Elizabeth came to the throne; and the
_Novum Organum_ was published in the same year in which the Pilgrims
landed at Plymouth Rock--a convenient peg on which to hang the date of
two great events.
He was buried in the old town of St. Alban’s, of whose antiquities I have
already spoken, and near to which Gorhambury, the country home of Bacon,
was situated. The town and region are well worth a visit: and it is one
of the few spots whither one can still go by a well-appointed English
stage-coach with sleek horses--four-in-hand, which starts every morning
in summer from the White Horse Cellar, in Piccadilly, and spins over the
twenty miles of intervening beautiful road (much of it identical with the
old Roman Watling Street) in less than two hours and a half. The drive
is through Middlesex, and into “pleasant Hertfordshire,” where the huge
Norman tower of the old abbey buildings, rising from the left bank of the
Ver, marks the town of St. Alban’s. The tomb and monument of Bacon are in
the Church of St. Michael’s: there is still an Earl of Verulam presiding
over a new Gorhambury House; and thereabout, one may find remnants of the
old home of the great Chancellor and some portion of the noble gardens
in which he took so much delight, and in which he wandered up and
down, in peaked hat and in ruff, and with staff--pondering affairs of
State--possibly meditating the while upon that most curious and stately
Essay of his upon “Gardens,” which opens thus:--
“God Almighty first planted a garden. And, indeed, it is the
purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to
the spirits of man, without which building and palaces are but
gross handyworks: and a man shall ever see, that when ages
grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately,
sooner than to garden finely; as if gardening were the greater
perfection.”
Surely, we who grow our own salads and “graff” our own pear-trees may
take exaltation from this: and yet I do not believe that the great
Chancellor ever put his hand, laboringly, to a rake-stave: but none
the less, he snuffed complacently the odor of his musk-roses and his
eglantine, and looked admiringly at his clipped walls of hedges.
_Thomas Hobbes._
There used to come sometimes to these gardens of Gorhambury, in Bacon’s
day, a young man--twenty years his junior--of a strangely subtle
mind, who caught so readily at the great Chancellor’s meaning, and was
otherwise so well instructed that he was employed by him in some clerical
duties. His name was Thomas Hobbes; and it is a name that should be
known and remembered, because it is identified with writings which had
as much influence upon the current of thought in the middle of the next
century (the seventeenth) as those of Herbert Spencer have now, and for
somewhat similar reasons. He was a very free thinker, as well as a deep
one; keeping, from motives of policy, nominally within Church lines, yet
abhorred and disavowed by Church-teachers; believing in the absolute
right of kings, and in self-interest as the nucleus of all good and
successful schemes for the conduct of life; weighing relations to the
future and a Supreme Good (if existing) with a trader’s prudence, and
counting Friendship “a sense of social utility.” His theory of government
was--a crystallization of forces, coming about regularly by the prudent
self-seeking of individuals. Of divine or spiritual influences he does
not take any sympathetic cognizance; hard, cold, calculating; not
inspiring, not hopeful; feeding higher appetites on metaphysic husks.
Of his Deism I give this exhibit:--
“Forasmuch as God Almighty is incomprehensible, it followeth
that we can have no conception or image of the Deity; and
consequently, all his attributes signify our inability and
defect of power to conceive anything concerning his nature,
and not any conception of the same, except only this--that
there is a God. For the effects, we acknowledge naturally, do
include a power of their producing, before they were produced;
and that power presupposeth something existent that hath such
power: and the thing so existing with power to produce, if it
were not eternal, must needs have been produced by somewhat
before it; and that, again, by something else before that,
till we come to an eternal (that is to say, the first) Power
of all Powers, and first Cause of all Causes; and this is it
which all men conceive by the name GOD, implying eternity,
incomprehensibility, and omnipotency. And thus all that will
consider may know that God is, though not _what_ he is.”
Cribbing his emotional nature (if he ever had any), he yet writes with
wonderful directness, perspicacity, and _verve_--making “Hobbism” talked
of, as Spencerism is talked of. Indeed, one does not see clearly how
any man, flinging only his bare hook of logic and his sinker of reason
into the infinite depths around us, can fish up anything of a helpfully
spiritual sort much better than Hobbism now.
He was specially befriended by the Cavendishes, having once been tutor to
a younger scion of that distinguished family; and so he came to pass his
latest years in their princely home of Chatsworth, humored by the Duke,
and treated by the Duchess as a pet bear--to be regularly fed and not
provoked; climbing the Derbyshire hills of a morning, dining at mid-day,
and at candle-lighting retiring to his private room to smoke his twelve
pipes of tobacco (his usual allowance) and to follow through the smoke
his winding trails of thought.[99]
He lived to the extreme age of ninety-two, thus coming well down into the
times of Charles II., who used to say of him that “he was a bear against
whom the Church played her young dogs to exercise them.” He lived and
died a bachelor, not relishing society in general, and liking only such
shrewd acute friends as could track him in his subtleties, who had the
grace to applaud him, and the wise policy of concealing their antagonisms.
He is not much cited now in books, nor has his name association with any
of those felicities of literature which exude perennial perfumes. He was
careless of graces; he stirred multitudes into new trains of thought; he
fed none of them with any of the minor and gracious delights of learning.
Perhaps he is best known in literary ways proper by a close and lucid
translation of the _History_ of Thucydides, which I believe is still
reckoned by scholars a good rendering of the Greek.[100]
He ventured, too, upon verse in praise of Derbyshire and of the valley
of the Derwent, but it is not rich or beautiful. A man who keeps
his emotional nature in a strait-jacket--for security or for other
purpose--may make catalogues of trees, or of summer days; but he cannot
paint the lilies or a sunrise. A translation of Homer which he undertook
and accomplished, when over eighty, was just as far from a success, and
for kindred reasons.
_George Chapman._
There was, however, another translation of Homer about those times, or a
little earlier, which was of much rarer quality, and which has not lost
its rare flavors even now. I speak of George Chapman’s. It is not so
true to the Greek as Hobbes’ Thucydides; indeed not true at all to the
words, but true to the spirit; and in passages where the translator’s
zeal was aflame catching more of the dash, and abounding flow, and brazen
resonance of the old Greek poet than Pope, or Cowper, Derby, or Bryant.
The literalists will never like him, of course; he drops words that worry
him--whole lines indeed with which he does not choose to grapple; he adds
words, too--whole lines, scenes almost; there is vulgarity sometimes, and
coarseness; he calls things by their old homely names; there is no fine
talk about the chest or the abdomen, but the Greek lances drive straight
through the ribs or to the navel, and if a cut be clean and large--we
are not told of crimson tides--but the blood gurgles out in great gouts
as in a slaughter-house; there may be over-plainness, and over-heat,
and over-stress; but nowhere weakness; and his unwieldly, staggering
lines--fourteen syllables long--forge on through the ruts which the
Homeric chariots have worn, bouncing and heaving and plunging and
jolting, but always lunging forward with their great burden of battle, of
brazen shields, and ponderous war-gods. I hardly know where to cut into
the welter of his long lines for sample, but in all parts his brawny pen
declares itself. Take a bit from that skrimmage of the Sixteenth Book
where--
“The swift Meriones
Pursuing flying Acamas, just as he got access
To horse and chariot--overtook, and dealt him such a blow
On his right shoulder that he left his chariot, and did strow
The dusty earth: life left limbs, and night his eyes possessed.
Idomeneus his stern dart at Erymas addressed,
As--like to Acamas--he fled; it cut the sundry bones
Beneath his brain, betwixt his neck and foreparts, and so runs,
Shaking his teeth out, through his mouth, his eyes all drowned in blood;
So through his nostrils and his mouth, that now dart-open stood,
He breathed his spirit.”
And again that wonderful duel between Patroclus and the divine Sarpedon:
“Down jumped he from his chariot, down leaped his foe as light,
And as, on some far-looking rock, a cast of vultures fight,
--Fly on each other, strike and truss--part, meet, and then stick by,
Tug, both with crooked beaks and seres, cry, fight, and fight and cry;
So fiercely fought these angry kings, and showed as bitter galls.”
What a description this old Chapman would have made of a tug at foot-ball!
Another fragment I take from the Twenty-first Book, where the River God
roars and rages in the waters of Scamander against Achilles:
----“Then swell’d his waves, then rag’d, then boil’d again
Against Achilles, up flew all, and all the bodies slain
In all his deeps, of which the heaps made bridges to his waves
He belch’d out, roaring like a bull. The unslain yet he saves
In his black whirl-pits, vast and deep. A horrid billow stood
About Achilles. On his shield the violence of the Flood
Beat so, it drove him back, and took his feet up, his fair palm
Enforc’d to catch into his stay a broad and lofty elm,
Whose roots he tossed up with his hold, and tore up all the shore.”
When any of us can make as spirited a translation as that, I think we can
stand a scolding from the teachers for not being literal. George Chapman
lived a very long life, and did other things worthily; wrote a mass of
dramas[101]--but not of the very best; they belong to the class of plays
those people talk of who want to talk of things nobody has read. I think
better and richer things are before us.
_Marlowe._
Did it ever happen to you to read upon a summer’s day that delightful
old book--of a half century later--called _The Complete Angler_; and
do you remember how, on a certain evening when the quiet Angler had
beguiled himself with loitering under beech-trees and watching the
lambs and listening to the birds, he did encounter, in an adjoining
field, a handsome milkmaid, who lifted up her voice--which was like a
nightingale’s--to an old-fashioned song, beginning?--
“Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, or hills, or field
Or woods, or steepy mountains yield--
And I will make thee beds of roses
And then a thousand fragrant posies
A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.”
Well, that song of the milkmaid, with its setting of verdant meads and
silver streams and honeysuckle hedges keeps singing itself in a great
many ears to-day: And it was written by Christopher Marlowe,[102] one
of the most harum-scarum young dare-devils of Elizabethan times. He was
born in the same year with Shakespeare--down in Canterbury, or near by
(whither we saw St. Augustine carrying Christian crosses)--was son of
a shoemaker who lived thereabout, yet came somehow to be a Cambridge
man, drifted thereafter to London--full of wit and words of wantonness;
developing early; known for a tragedy that caught the ear of the town
six years before Shakespeare had published the “Venus and Adonis.” He was
an actor, too, as so many of the dramatic wits of that day were--maybe
upon the same boards where Shakespeare was then certainly a mender, if
not a maker of parts. Did they hobnob together? Did they compare plots?
If we only knew: but we do not.
The critics of the days closely succeeding said he would have rivalled
Shakespeare if he had lived: Doubtless he would have brought more
learning to the rivalry; perhaps an equal wit--maybe an even greater
rhythmic faculty and as dauntless and daring imaginative power; but
dignity and poise of character were not in him. He died--stabbed--in a
drunken brawl before he was thirty.[103] In his tragedies--if you read
them--you will find the beat and flow and rhythm--to which a great
many of the best succeeding English tragedies were attuned. He scored
first upon British theatre-walls, with fingers made tremulous by tavern
orgies, a great sampler of dramatic story, by which scores of succeeding
play-writers set their copy; but into these copies many and many a one
of lesser power put a grace, a tenderness, and a dignity which never
belonged to the half-crazed and short-lived Marlowe. You will remember
him best perhaps as the author of the pleasant little madrigal of which
I cited a verselet; and if you value the delicatest of description, you
will relish still more his unfinished version of the Greek story of “Hero
and Leander”--a pregnant line of which--
“who ever loved that loved not at first sight”
--has the abiding honor of having been quoted by Shakespeare in his play
of “As You Like It.”
I leave Marlowe--citing first a beautiful bit of descriptive verse from
his “Hero and Leander:”--
“At Sestos Hero dwelt: Hero the fair,
Whom young Apollo courted for her hair,
And offered as a dower his burning throne,
Where she should sit for men to gaze upon.
The outside of her garments were of lawn,
--The lining purple silk, with gilt stars drawn.
Upon her head she wore a myrtle wreath
From thence her veil reached to the ground beneath;
Her veil was artificial flowers and leaves,
Whose workmanship both man and beast deceives;
Many would praise the sweet smell, as she past,
When ’twas the odor that her breath forth cast;
And there_for_ honey-bees have sought in vain
And beat from thence, have lighted there again.
About her neck hung chains of pebble stone,
Which, lighted by her neck, like diamonds shone.
She wore no gloves; for neither sun nor wind
Would burn or parch her hands, but, to her mind;
Or warm, or cool them; for they took delight
To play upon those hands, they were so white.
Some say, for her the fairest Cupid pin’d
And, looking in her face, was strooken blind.
But this is true; so like was one the other,
As he imagined Hero was his mother:
And often-times into her bosom flew,
About her naked neck his bare arms threw,
And laid his childish head upon her breast
And, with still panting rock’t, there took his rest.”
I think all will agree that this is very delicately done.
_A Tavern Coterie._
But let us not forget where we are, and where we are finding such men and
such poems: we are in London and are close upon the end of the sixteenth
century; there are no morning newspapers; these came long afterward; but
the story of such a death as that of Marlowe, stabbed in the eye--maybe
by his own dagger--would spread from tongue to tongue; (possibly one
of his horrific dramas had been played that very day): certainly the
knowledge of it would come quick to all his boon friends--actors,
writers, wits--who were used to meet, maybe at the Falcon on Bankside, or
possibly at the Mermaid Tavern.
This Mermaid Tavern was a famous place in those and in succeeding days.
It stood on Cheapside (between Friday and Bread Streets) gorgeous with
three ranges of Elizabethan windows, that gave look-out upon an array
of goldsmiths’ shops which shone across the way. It was almost in the
shadow of the Church of St. Mary le Bow, burned in the great fire, but
having its representative tower and spire--a good work of Christopher
Wren--standing thereabout in our time, and still holding out its clock
over the sidewalk.
And the literary friends who would have gathered in such a place to talk
over the sad happening to Kit Marlowe are those whom it behoves us to
know, at least by name. There, surely would be Thomas Lodge,[104] who
was concerned in the writing of plays; wrote, too, much to his honor,
a certain novel (if we may call it so) entitled _Rosalynde_, from
which Shakespeare took the hint and much of the pleasant machinery for
his delightful drama of “As You Like It.” This Lodge was in his youth
hail fellow with actors who gathered at taverns; and--if not actor
himself--was certainly a lover of their wild ways and their feastings.
He admired _Euphues_ overmuch, was disposed to literary affectations
and alliteration--writing, amongst other things, _A Nettle for Nice
Noses_. He was, too, a man of the world and wide traveller; voyaged
with Cavendish, and was said to be engaged in a British raid upon the
Canaries. In later years he became a physician of soberly habits and much
credit, dying of the plague in 1625.
Nashe[105] also would have been good mate-fellow with Marlowe; a
Cambridge man this--though possibly “weaned before his time;” certainly
most outspoken, hard to govern, quick-witted, fearless, flinging his
fiery word-darts where he would. Gabriel Harvey, that priggish patron
of Spenser, to whom I have alluded, found this to his cost. Indeed this
satirist came to have the name of the English Aretino--as sharp as he,
and as wild-living, and wild-loving as he.
Nashe was a native of Lowestoft, on the easternmost point of English
shore, in Suffolk, not far from those potteries (of Gurton) whose old
quaint products collectors still seek for and value. Dr. Grosart, in the
Huth Library, has built a wordy monument to his memory; we do not say it
is undeserved; certainly he had a full brain, great readiness, graphic
power, and deep love for his friends. Like Lodge, he travelled: like him
took to his wits to pay tavern bills; a sharp fellow every way. He lent
a hand, and a strong one, to that tedious, noisy, brawling ecclesiastic
controversy of his day--called the _Mar-Prelate_ one; a controversy full
of a great swash of those prickly, sharp-tasted, biting words--too often
belonging to church quarrels--and which men hardly approach for comment,
even in our time, without getting themselves pricked by contact into
wrathful splutter of ungracious language.
One may get a true taste (and I think a surfeit) of his exuberance
in epithet, and of his coarse but rasping raillery in his _Pierce
Penilesse_. Here is one of his pleasant lunges at some “Latinless”
critic:--“Let a scholar write and he says--‘Tush, I like not these common
fellows’; let him write well, and he says--‘Tush, it’s stolen out of some
book.’”
Then there was Robert Greene[106]--a Reverend, but used to tavern
gatherings, and whose story is a melancholy one, and worth a little more
than mere mention. He was a man of excellent family, well nurtured, as
times went; native of the old city of Norwich, in Norfolk; probably
something older than either Marlowe or Shakespeare; studied at St.
John’s, Cambridge--“amongst wags”--he says in his _Repentance_--“as lewd
as myself;” was a clergyman (after a sort); pretty certainly had a church
at one time; married a charming wife in the country, but going up to
that maelstrom of London fell into all evil ways: wrote little poems a
saint might have written, and cracked jokes with his tongue that would
make a saint shudder; deserted his wife and child; became a red-bearded
bully, raging in the taverns, with unkempt hair: Yet even thus and
there (as if all England in those Elizabethan times bloomed with lilies
and lush roses, which lent their perfume to all verse the vilest might
write) inditing poems having a tender pathos, which will live. Take
these verselets for instance; and as you read them, remember that he
had deserted his pure, fond, loving wife and his prattling boy, and was
more deeply sunk in ways of debauchery than any of his fellows; ’tis a
mother’s song to her child:--
“Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,
When thou art old, there’s grief enough for thee.
Streaming tears that never stint,
Like pearl-drops from a flint,
Fell by course from his eyes,
That one another’s place supplies.
Thus he grieved in every part,
Tears of blood fell from his heart
When he left his pretty boy,
Father’s sorrow--father’s joy.
The wanton smiled, father wept,
Mother cried, baby leapt;
More he crowed more we cried,
Nature could not sorrow hide;
He must go, he must kiss
Child and mother--baby bless--
For he left his pretty boy,
Father’s sorrow, father’s joy.
Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee,
When thou art old, there’s grief enough for thee.”
And the poet who wrote this--putting tenderness into poems of the
affections, and a glowing color into pastoral verse, and point and
delicacy into his prose--wrote also _A Groates worth of Wit, bought with
a Million of Repentance_, and he died of a surfeit of pickled herring and
Rhenish wine.
In that ‘Groat’s worth of Wit’ (published after his death) there is a
memorable line or two--being probably the first contemporary notice of
Shakespeare that still has currency; and it is in the form of a gibe:--
“There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that
with his Tygres heart wrapt in a players hide, supposes hee
is as well able to bombast out a blanke-verse as the best of
you; and, being an absolute Johannes-fac-totum, is in his owne
conceyt the onely Shake-Scene in a countrey.”
How drolly it sounds--to hear this fine fellow, broken up with drink and
all bedevilments, making his envious lunge at the great master who has
perhaps worried him by theft of some of his dramatic methods or schemes,
and who gives to poor Greene one of his largest titles to fame in having
been the subject of his lampoon!
It gives added importance, too, to this gibe, to know that it was
penned when the writer, impoverished, diseased, deserted by patrons,
saw death fronting him; and it gives one’s heart a wrench to read how
this debauched poet--whose work has given some of the best color to the
“Winter’s Tale” of Shakespeare--writes with faltering hand, begging his
“gentle” wife’s forgiveness, and that she would see that the charitable
host, who has taken him in, for his last illness, shall suffer no
loss--then, toying with the sheets, and “babbling o’ green fields,” he
dies.
Keen critics of somewhat later days said Shakespeare had Greene’s death
in mind when he told the story of Falstaff’s.
It is quite possible that all these men I have named will have
encountered, off and on, at their tavern gatherings, the lithe, youngish
fellow, large browed and with flashing eyes, who loves Rhenish too in a
way, but who loves the altitudes of poetic thought better; who is just
beginning to be known poet-wise by his “Venus and Adonis”--whose name is
William Shakespeare--and who has great aptitude at fixing a play, whether
his own or another man’s; and with Burbage for the leading parts, can
make them take wonderfully well.
Possibly, too, in these tavern gatherings would be the young, boyish
Earl of Southampton, who is associated with some of the many enigmas
respecting Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and whom we Americans ought to know
of, because he became interested thereafter in schemes for colonizing
Virginia, and has left his name of Southampton to one of the Virginia
counties; and, still better, is associated with that beautiful reach of
the Chesapeake waters which we now call “Hampton Roads.”
In that company too--familiar with London taverns in later Elizabethan
years--the beefy Ben Jonson was sure to appear, with his great shag of
hair, and his fine eye, and his coarse lip, bubbling over with wit and
with Latin: he, quite young as yet; perhaps just now up from Cambridge;
ten years the junior of Shakespeare; and yet by his bulky figure and
doughty air dominating his elders, and sure to call the attention of
all idlers who hung about the doors of the Mermaid. He may be even now
plotting his first play of “Every Man in his Humour,” or that new club of
his and Raleigh’s devising, which is to have its meeting of jolly fellows
in the same old Cheapside tavern, and to make its rafters shake with
their uproarious mirth. For the present we leave them all there--with
a May sun struggling through London fogs, and gleaming by fits and
starts upon the long range of jewellers’ shops, for which Cheapside
was famous--upon the White Cross and Conduit, whereat the shop-girls
are filling their pails--upon the great country wains coming in by
Whitechapel Road--upon the tall spire of St. Mary le Bow, and upon the
diamond panes of the Mermaid tavern, to whose recesses we have just seen
the burly figure of Ben Jonson swagger in.