And yet, where rainbow foliage crowns the swamp,

I hear in dreams an April robin sing,

And memory, amid this Autumn pomp,

Strays with the ghost of Spring.

BY-WAYS OF EUROPE.

A VISIT TO THE BALEARIC ISLANDS.

I.

As the steamer Mallorca slowly moved out of the harbor of Barcelona, I

made a rapid inspection of the passengers gathered on deck, and found

that I was the only foreigner among them. Almost without exception they

were native Majorcans, returning from trips of business or pleasure to

the Continent. They spoke no language except Spanish and Catalan, and

held fast to all the little habits and fashions of their insular life.

If anything more had been needed to show me that I was entering upon

untrodden territory, it was supplied by the joyous surprise of the

steward when I gave him a fee. This fact reconciled me to my isolation

on board, and its attendant awkwardness.

I knew not why I should have chosen to visit the Balearic Islands,

unless for the simple reason that they lie so much aside from the

highways of travel, and are not represented in the journals and

sketch-books of tourists. If any one had asked me what I expected to

see, I should have been obliged to confess my ignorance; for the few dry

geographical details which I possessed were like the chemical analysis

of a liquor wherefrom no one can reconstruct the taste. The _flavor_ of

a land is a thing quite apart from its statistics. There is no special

guide-book for the islands, and the slight notices in the works on Spain

only betray the haste of the authors to get over a field with which they

are unacquainted. But this very circumstance, for me, had grown into a

fascination. One gets tired of studying the bill of fare in advance of

the repast. When the sun and the Spanish coast had set together behind

the placid sea, I went to my berth with the delightful certainty that

the sun of the morrow, and of many days thereafter, would rise upon

scenes and adventures which could not be anticipated.

The distance from Barcelona to Palma is about a hundred and forty miles;

so the morning found us skirting the southwestern extremity of

Majorca,--a barren coast, thrusting low headlands, of gray rock into the

sea, and hills covered with parched and stunted chaparral in the rear.

The twelfth century, in the shape of a crumbling Moorish watch-tower,

alone greeted us. As we advanced eastward into the Bay of Palma,

however, the wild shrubbery melted into plantations of olive, solitary

houses of fishermen nestled in the coves, and finally a village, of

those soft ochre-tints which are a little brighter than the soil,

appeared on the slope of a hill. In front, through the pale morning mist

which still lay upon the sea, I saw the cathedral of Palma, looming

grand and large beside the towers of other churches, and presently,

gliding past a mile or two of country villas and gardens, we entered the

crowded harbor.

Inside the mole there was a multitude of the light craft of the

Mediterranean,--xebecs, feluccas, speronaras, or however they may be

termed,--with here and there a brigantine which had come from beyond the

Pillars of Hercules. Our steamer drew into her berth beside the quay,

and after a very deliberate review by the port physician we were allowed

to land. I found a porter, Arab in everything but costume, and followed

him through the water-gate into the half-awake city. My destination was

the Inn of the Four Nations, where I was cordially received, and

afterwards roundly swindled, by a French host. My first demand was for a

native attendant, not so much from any need of guide as simply to

become more familiar with the people through him; but I was told that

no such serviceable spirit was to be had in the place. Strangers are so

rare that a class of people who live upon them has not yet been created.

"But how shall I find the Palace of the Government, or the monastery of

San Domingo, or anything else?" I asked.

"O, we will give you directions, so that you cannot miss them," said the

host; but he laid before me such a confusion of right turnings and left

turnings, ups and downs, that I became speedily bewildered, and set

forth, determined to let the "spirit in my feet" guide me. A

labyrinthine place is Palma, and my first walks through the city were so

many games of chance. The streets are very narrow, changing their

direction, it seemed to me, at every tenth step; and whatever landmark

one may select at the start is soon shut from view by the high, dark

houses. At first, I was quite astray, but little by little I regained

the lost points of the compass.

After having had the Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans,

Vandals, and Saracens as masters, Majorca was first made Spanish by King

Jaime of Aragon, the Conquistador, in the year 1235. For a century after

the conquest it was an independent kingdom, and one of its kings was

slain by the English bowmen at the battle of Crecy. The Spanish element

has absorbed, but not yet entirely obliterated, the characteristics of

the earlier races who inhabited the island. Were ethnology a more

positively developed science, we might divide and classify this confused

inheritance of character; as it is, we vaguely feel the presence of

something quaint, antique, and unusual, in walking the streets of Palma,

and mingling with the inhabitants. The traces of Moorish occupation are

still noticeable everywhere. Although the Saracenic architecture no

longer exists in its original forms, its details may be detected in

portals, court-yards, and balconies, in almost every street. The

conquerors endeavored to remodel the city, but in doing so they

preserved the very spirit which they sought to destroy.

My wanderings, after all, were not wholly undirected. I found an

intelligent guide, who was at the same time an old acquaintance. The

whirligig of time brings about, not merely its revenges, but also its

compensations and coincidences. Twenty-two years ago, when I was

studying German as a boy in the old city of Frankfort, guests from the

South of France came to visit the amiable family with whom I was

residing. There were M. Laurens, a painter and a musical enthusiast, his

wife, and Mademoiselle Rosalba, a daughter as fair as her name. Never

shall I forget the curious letter which the artist wrote to the manager

of the theatre, requesting that Beethoven's _Fidelio_ might be given

(and it was!) for his own especial benefit, nor the triumphant air with

which he came to us one day, saying, "I have something of most

precious," and brought forth, out of a dozen protecting envelopes, a

single gray hair from Beethoven's head. Nor shall I forget how Madame

Laurens taught us French plays, and how the fair Rosalba declaimed Andre

Chenier to redeem her pawns; but I might have forgotten all these

things, had it not been for an old volume[A] which turned up at need,

and which gave me information, at once clear, precise, and attractive,

concerning the streets and edifices of Palma. The round, solid head,

earnest eyes, and abstracted air of the painter came forth distinct from

the limbo of things overlaid but never lost, and went with me through

the checkered blaze and gloom of the city.

The monastery of San Domingo, which was the head-quarters of the

Inquisition, was spared by the progressive government of Mendizabal, but

destroyed by the people. Its ruins must have been the most picturesque

sight of Palma; but since the visit of M. Laurens they have been

removed, and their broken vaults and revealed torture-chambers are no

longer to be seen. There are, however, two or three buildings of more

than ordinary interest. The _Casa Consistorial_, or City Hall, is a

massive Palladian pile of the sixteenth century, resembling the old

palaces of Pisa and Florence, except in the circumstance that its roof

projects at least ten feet beyond the front, resting on a massive

cornice of carved wood with curious horizontal caryatides in the place

of brackets. The rich burnt-sienna tint of the carvings contrasts finely

with the golden-brown of the massive marble walls,--a combination which

is shown in no other building of the Middle Ages. The sunken rosettes,

surrounded by raised arabesque borders, between the caryatides, are

sculptured with such a careful reference to the distance at which they

must be seen, that they appear as firm and delicate as if near the

spectator's eye.

The Cathedral, founded by the Conquistador, and built upon, at

intervals, for more than three centuries, is not yet finished. It stands

upon a natural platform of rock, overhanging the sea, where its grand

dimensions produce the greatest possible effect. In every view of Palma,

it towers solidly above the houses and bastioned walls, and insists upon

having the sky as a background for the light Gothic pinnacles of its

flying buttresses. The government has recently undertaken its

restoration, and a new front of very admirable and harmonious design is

about half completed. The soft amber-colored marble of Majorca is

enriched in tint by exposure to the air, and even when built in large,

unrelieved masses retains a bright and cheerful character. The new

portion of the cathedral, like the old, has but little sculpture, except

in the portals; but that little is so elegant that a greater profusion

of ornament would seem out of place.

Passing from the clear, dazzling day into the interior, one finds

himself, at first, in total darkness; and the dimensions of the

nave--nearly three hundred feet in length by one hundred and forty in

height--are amplified by the gloom. The wind, I was told, came through

the windows on the sea side with such force as to overturn the chalices,

and blow out the tapers on the altar, whereupon every opening was walled

up, except a rose at the end of the chancel, and a few slits in the

nave, above the side-aisles. A sombre twilight, like that of a stormy

day, fills the edifice. Here the rustling of stoles and the muttering of

prayers suggest incantation rather than worship; the organ has a hollow,

sepulchral sound of lamentation; and there is a spirit of mystery and

terror in the stale, clammy air. The place resembles an antechamber of

Purgatory much more than of Heaven. The mummy of Don Jaime II., son of

the Conquistador and first king of Majorca, is preserved in a

sarcophagus of black marble. This is the only historic monument in the

Cathedral, unless the stranger chooses to study the heraldry of the

island families from their shields suspended in the chapels.

When I returned to the Four Nations for breakfast, I found at the table

a gentleman of Palma, who invited me to sit down and partake of his

meal. For the first time this Spanish custom, which really seems

picturesque and fraternal when coming from shepherds or muleteers in a

mountain inn, struck me as the hollowest of forms. The gentleman knew

that I would not accept his invitation, nor he mine; he knew, moreover,

that I knew he did not wish me to accept it. The phrase, under such

conditions, becomes a cheat which offends the sacred spirit of

hospitality. How far the mere form may go was experienced by George

Sand, who, having accepted the use of a carriage most earnestly offered

to her by a Majorcan count, found the equipage at her door, it is true,

but with it a letter expressing so much vexation, that she was forced to

withdraw her acceptance of the favor at once, and to apologize for it! I

have always found much hospitality among the common people of Spain,

and I doubt not that the spirit exists in all classes; but it requires

some practice to distinguish between empty phrase and the courtesy which

comes from the heart. A people who boast of some special virtue

generally do not possess it.

My own slight intercourse with the Majorcans was very pleasant. On the

day of my arrival, I endeavored to procure a map of the island, but none

of the bookstores possessed the article. It could be found in one house

in a remote street, and one of the shopmen finally sent a boy with me to

the very door. When I offered money for the service, my guide smiled,

shook his head, and ran away. The map was more than fifty years old, and

drawn in the style of two centuries ago, with groups of houses for the

villages, and long files of conical peaks for the mountains. The woman

brought it down, yellow and dusty, from a dark garret over the shop, and

seemed as delighted with the sale as if she had received money for

useless stock. In the streets, the people inspected me curiously, as a

stranger, but were always ready to go out of their way to guide me. The

ground-floor being always open, all the features of domestic life and of

mechanical labor are exposed to the public. The housewives, the masters,

and apprentices, busy as they seem, manage to keep one eye disengaged,

and no one passes before them without notice. Cooking, washing, sewing,

tailoring, shoemaking, coopering, rope and basket making, succeed each

other, as one passes through the narrow streets. In the afternoon, the

mechanics frequently come forth and set up their business in the open

air, where they can now and then greet a country acquaintance or a city

friend or sweetheart.

When I found that the ruins of San Domingo had been removed, and a

statue of Isabella II. erected on the Alameda, I began to suspect that

the reign of old things was over in Majorca. A little observation of the

people made this fact more evident. The island costume is no longer

worn by the young men, even in the country; they have passed into a very

comical transition state. Old men, mounted on lean asses or mules, still

enter the gates of Palma, with handkerchiefs tied over their shaven

crowns, and long gray locks falling on their shoulders,--with short,

loose jackets, shawls around the waist, and wide Turkish trousers

gathered at the knee. Their gaunt brown legs are bare, and their feet

protected by rude sandals. Tall, large-boned, and stern of face, they

hint both of Vandal and of Moslem blood. The younger men are of inferior

stature, and nearly all bow-legged. They have turned the flowing

trousers into modern pantaloons, the legs of which are cut like the

old-fashioned _gigot_ sleeve, very big and baggy at the top, and tied

with a drawing-string around the waist. My first impression was, that

the men had got up in a great hurry, and put on their trousers

hinder-end foremost. It would be difficult to invent a costume more

awkward and ungraceful than this.

In the city the young girls wear a large triangular piece of white or

black lace, which covers the hair, and tightly encloses the face, being

fastened under the chin and the ends brought down to a point on the

breast. Their almond-shaped eyes are large and fine, but there is very

little positive beauty among them. Most of the old country-women are

veritable hags, and their appearance is not improved by the

broad-brimmed stove-pipe hats which they wear. Seated astride on their

donkeys, between panniers of produce, they come in daily from the plains

and mountains, and you encounter them on all the roads leading out of

Palma. Few of the people speak any other language than the _Mallorquin_,

a variety of the Catalan, which, from the frequency of the terminations

in _ch_ and _tz_, constantly suggests the old Provencal literature. The

word _vitch_ (son) is both Celtic and Slavonic. Some Arabic terms are

also retained, though fewer, I think, than in Andalusia.

In the afternoon I walked out into the country. The wall, on the land

side, which is very high and massive, is pierced by five guarded gates.

The dry moat, both wide and deep, is spanned by wooden bridges, after

crossing which one has the choice of a dozen highways, all scantily

shaded with rows of ragged mulberry-trees, glaring white in the sun and

deep in impalpable dry dust. But the sea-breeze blows freshening across

the parched land; shadows of light clouds cool the arid mountains in the

distance; the olives roll into silvery undulations; a palm in full,

rejoicing plumage rustles over your head; and the huge spatulate leaves

of a banana in the nearest garden twist and split into fringes. There is

no languor in the air, no sleep in the deluge of sunshine; the landscape

is active with signs of work and travel. Wheat, wine, olives, almonds,

and oranges are produced, not only side by side, but from the same

fields, and the painfully thorough system of cultivation leaves not a

rood of the soil unused.

I had chosen, at random, a road which led me west toward the nearest

mountains, and in the course of an hour I found myself at the entrance

of a valley. Solitary farm-houses, each as massive as the tower of a

fortress and of the color of sunburnt gold, studded the heights,

overlooking the long slopes of almond-orchards. I looked about for

water, in order to make a sketch of the scene; but the bed of the brook

was as dry as the highway. The nearest house toward the plain had a

splendid sentinel palm beside its door,--a dream of Egypt, which

beckoned and drew me towards it with a glamour I could not resist. Over

the wall of the garden the orange-trees lifted their mounds of

impenetrable foliage; and the blossoms of the pomegranates, sprinkled

against such a background, were like coals of fire. The fig-bearing

cactus grew about the house in clumps twenty feet high, covered with

pale-yellow flowers. The building was large and roomy, with a

court-yard, around which ran a shaded gallery. The farmer who was

issuing therefrom as I approached wore the shawl and Turkish trousers

of the old generation, while his two sons, reaping in the adjoining

wheat-fields, were hideous in the modern _gigots_. Although I was

manifestly an intruder, the old man greeted me respectfully, and passed

on to his work. Three boys tended a drove of black hogs in the stubble,

and some women were so industriously weeding and hoeing in the field

beyond, that they scarcely stopped to cast a glance upon the stranger.

There was a grateful air of peace, order, and contentment about the

place; no one seemed to be suspicious, or even surprised, when I seated

myself upon a low wall, and watched the laborers.

The knoll upon which the farm-house stood sloped down gently into the

broad, rich plain of Palma, extending many a league to the eastward. Its

endless orchards made a dim horizon-line, over which rose the solitary

double-headed mountain of Felaniche, and the tops of some peaks near

Arta. The city wall was visible on my right, and beyond it a bright arc

of the Mediterranean. The features of the landscape, in fact, were so

simple, that I fear I cannot make its charm evident to the reader.

Looking over the nearer fields, I observed two peculiarities of Majorca,

upon which depends much of the prosperity of the island. The wheat is

certainly, as it is claimed to be, the finest of any Mediterranean land.

Its large, perfect grains furnish a flour of such fine quality that the

whole produce of the island is sent to Spain for the pastry and

confectionery of the cities, while the Majorcans import a cheap,

inferior kind in its place. Their fortune depends on their abstinence

from the good things which Providence has given them. Their pork is

greatly superior to that of Spain, and it leaves them in like manner;

their best wines are now bought up by speculators and exported for the

fabrication of sherry; and their oil, which might be the finest in the

world, is so injured by imperfect methods of preservation that it might

pass for the worst. These things, however, give them no annoyance.

Southern races are sometimes indolent, but rarely Epicurean in their

habits; it is the Northern man who sighs for his flesh-pots.

I walked forward between the fields toward another road, and came upon a

tract which had just been ploughed and planted for a new crop. The soil

was ridged in a labyrinthine pattern, which appeared to have been drawn

with square and rule. But more remarkable than this was the difference

of level, so slight that the eye could not possibly detect it, by which

the slender irrigating streams were conducted to every square foot of

the field, without a drop being needlessly wasted. The system is an

inheritance from the Moors, who were the best natural engineers the

world has ever known. Water is scarce in Majorca, and thus every stream,

spring, rainfall,--even the dew of heaven,--is utilized. Channels of

masonry, often covered to prevent evaporation, descend from the

mountains, branch into narrower veins, and visit every farm on the

plain, whatever may be its level. Where these are not sufficient, the

rains are added to the reservoir, or a string of buckets, turned by a

mule, lifts the water from a well. But it is in the economy of

distributing water to the fields that the most marvellous skill is

exhibited. The grade of the surface must not only be preserved, but the

subtle, tricksy spirit of water so delicately understood and humored

that the streams shall traverse the greatest amount of soil with the

least waste or wear. In this respect, the most skilful application of

science could not surpass the achievements of the Majorcan farmers.

Working my way homeward through the tangled streets, I was struck with

the universal sound of wailing which filled the city. All the tailors,

shoemakers, and basket-makers, at work in the open air, were singing,

rarely in measured strains, but with wild, irregular, lamentable cries,

exactly in the manner of the Arabs. Sometimes the song was antiphonal,

flung back and forth from the farthest visible corners of a street; and

then it became a contest of lungs, kept up for an hour at a time. While

breakfasting, I had heard, as I supposed, a _miserere_ chanted by some

procession of monks, and wondered when the doleful strains would cease.

I now saw that they came from the mouths of some cheerful coopers, who

were heading barrels a little farther down the street. The Majorcans

still have their troubadours, who are hired by languishing lovers to

improvise strains of longing or reproach under the windows of the fair,

and perhaps the latter may listen with delight; but I know of no place

where the Enraged Musician would so soon become insane. The isle is full

of noises, and a Caliban might say that they hurt not; for me they

murdered sleep, both at midnight and at dawn.

I had decided to devote my second day to an excursion to the mountain

paradise of Valdemosa, and sallied forth early, to seek the means of

conveyance. Up to this time I had been worried--tortured, I may say,

without exaggeration--by desperate efforts to recover the Spanish

tongue, which I had not spoken for fourteen years. I still had the sense

of possessing it, but in some old drawer of memory, the lock of which

had rusted and would not obey the key. Like Mrs. Dombey, I felt as if

there were Spanish words somewhere in the room, but I could not

positively say that I had them,--a sensation which, as everybody knows,

is far worse than absolute ignorance. I had taken a carriage for

Valdemosa, after a long talk with the proprietor, a most agreeable

fellow, when I suddenly stopped, and exclaimed to myself, "You are

talking Spanish,--did you know it?" It was even so: as much of the

language as I ever knew was suddenly and unaccountably restored to me.

On my return to the Four Nations, I was still further surprised to find

myself repeating songs, without the failure of a line or word, which I

had learned from a Mexican as a school-boy, and had not thought of for

twenty years. The unused drawer had somehow been unlocked or broken

open while I slept.

Valdemosa is about twelve miles north of Palma, in the heart of the only

mountain-chain of the island, which forms its western, or rather

northwestern coast. The average altitude of these mountains will not

exceed three thousand feet; but the broken, abrupt character of their

outlines, and the naked glare of their immense precipitous walls, give

them that intrinsic grandeur which does not depend on measurement. In

their geological formation they resemble the Pyrenees; the rocks are of

that _palombino_, or dove-colored limestone, so common in Sicily and the

Grecian islands,--pale bluish-gray, taking a soft orange tint on the

faces most exposed to the weather. Rising directly from the sea on the

west, they cease almost as suddenly on the land side, leaving all the

central portion of the island a plain, slightly inclined toward the

southeast, where occasional peaks or irregular groups of hills interrupt

its monotony.

In due time my team made its appearance,--an omnibus of basket-work,

with a canvas cover, drawn by two horses. It had space enough for twelve

persons, yet was the smallest vehicle I could discover. There appears to

be nothing between it and the two-wheeled cart of the peasant, which, on

a pinch, carries six or eight. For an hour and a half we traversed the

teeming plain, between stacks of wheat worthy to be laid on the altar at

Eleusis, carob-trees with their dark, varnished foliage, almond-orchards

bending under the weight of their green nuts, and the country-houses

with their garden clumps of orange, cactus, and palm. As we drew near

the base of the mountains, olive-trees of great size and luxuriance

covered the earth with a fine sprinkle of shade. Their gnarled and

knotted trunks, a thousand years old, were frequently split into three

or four distinct and separate trees, which in the process assumed forms

so marvellously human in their distortion, that I could scarcely believe

them to be accidental. Dore never drew anything so weird and grotesque.

Here were two club-headed individuals righting, with interlocked knees,

convulsed shoulders, and fists full of each other's hair; yonder a bully

was threatening attack, and three cowards appeared to be running away

from him with such speed that they were tumbling over one another's

heels. In one place a horrible dragon was devouring a squirming,

shapeless animal; in another, a drunken man, with whirling arms and

tangled feet, was pitching forward upon his face. The living wood in

Dante was tame beside these astonishing trees.

We now entered a wild ravine, where, nevertheless, the mountain-sides,

sheer and savage as they were, had succumbed to the rule of man, and

nourished an olive or a carob tree on every corner of earth between the

rocks. The road was built along the edge of the deep, dry bed of a

winter stream, so narrow that a single arch carried it from side to

side, as the windings of the glen compelled. After climbing thus for a

mile in the shadows of threatening masses of rock, an amphitheatre of

gardens, enframed by the spurs of two grand, arid mountains, opened

before us. The bed of the valley was filled with vines and orchards,

beyond which rose long terraces, dark with orange and citron trees,

obelisks of cypress and magnificent groups of palm, with the long white

front and shaded balconies of a hacienda between. Far up, on a higher

plateau between the peaks, I saw the church-tower of Valdemosa. The

sides of the mountains were terraced with almost incredible labor, walls

massive as the rock itself being raised to a height of thirty feet, to

gain a shelf of soil two or three yards in breadth. Where the olive and

the carob ceased, box and ilex took possession of the inaccessible

points, carrying up the long waves of vegetation until their

foam-sprinkles of silver-gray faded out among the highest clefts. The

natural channels of the rock were straightened and made to converge at

the base, so that not a wandering cloud could bathe the wild growths of

the summit without being caught and hurried into some tank below. The

wilderness was forced, by pure toil, to become a Paradise; and each

stubborn feature, which toil could not subdue, now takes its place as a

contrast and an ornament in the picture. Verily, there is nothing in all

Italy so beautiful as Valdemosa!

Lest I should be thought extravagant in my delight, let me give you some

words of George Sand, which I have since read. "I have never seen," she

says, "anything so bright, and at the same time so melancholy, as these

perspectives where the ilex, the carob, pine, olive, poplar, and cypress

mingle their various hues in the hollows of the mountain,--abysses of

verdure, where the torrent precipitates its course under mounds of

sumptuous richness and an inimitable grace.... While you hear the sound

of the sea on the northern coast, you perceive it only as a faint

shining line beyond the sinking mountains and the great plain which is

unrolled to the southward;--a sublime picture, framed in the foreground

by dark rocks covered with pines; in the middle distance by mountains of

boldest outline, fringed with superb trees; and beyond these by rounded

hills which the setting sun gilds with burning colors, where the eye

distinguishes, a league away, the microscopic profile of trees, fine as

the antennae of butterflies, black and clear as pen-drawings of India-ink

on a ground of sparkling gold. It is one of those landscapes which

oppress you because they leave nothing to be desired, nothing to be

imagined. Nature has here created that which the poet and the painter

behold in their dreams. An immense _ensemble_, infinite details,

inexhaustible variety, blended forms, sharp contours, dim, vanishing

depths,--all are present, and art can suggest nothing further. Majorca

is one of the most beautiful countries of the world for the painter, and

one of the least known. It is a green Helvetia under the sky of

Calabria, with the solemnity and silence of the Orient."

The village of Valdemosa is a picturesque, rambling place, brown with

age, and buried in the foliage of fig and orange trees. The highest part

of the narrow plateau where it stands is crowned by the church and

monastery of the Trappists (_Cartusa_), now deserted. My coachman drove

under the open roof of a venta, and began to unharness his horses. The

family, who were dining at a table so low that they appeared to be

sitting on the floor, gave me the customary invitation to join them, and

when I asked for a glass of wine brought me one which held nearly a

quart. I could not long turn my back on the bright, wonderful landscape

without; so, taking books and colors, I entered the lonely cloisters of

the monastery. Followed first by one small boy, I had a retinue of at

least fifteen children before I had completed the tour of the church,

court-yard, and the long-drawn, shady corridors of the silent monks; and

when I took my seat on the stones at the foot of the towers, with the

very scene described by George Sand before my eyes, a number of older

persons added themselves to the group. A woman brought me a chair, and

the children then planted themselves in a dense row before me, while I

attempted to sketch under such difficulties as I had never known before.

Precisely because I am no artist, it makes me nervous to be watched

while drawing; and the remarks of the young men on this occasion were

not calculated to give me courage.

When I had roughly mapped out the sky with its few floating clouds, some

one exclaimed, "He has finished the mountains, there they are!" and they

all crowded around me, saying, "Yes, there are the mountains!" While I

was really engaged upon the mountains, there was a violent discussion as

to what they might be; and I don't know how long it would have lasted,

had I not turned to some cypresses nearer the foreground. Then a young

man cried out: "O, that's a cypress! I wonder if he will make them

all,--how many are there? One, two, three, four, five,--yes, he makes

five!" There was an immediate rush, shutting out earth and heaven from

my sight, and they all cried in chorus, "One, two, three, four,

five,--yes, he has made five!" "Cavaliers and ladies," I said, with

solemn politeness, "have the goodness not to stand before me." "To be

sure! Santa Maria! How do you think he can see?" yelled an old woman,

and the children were hustled away. But I thereby won the ill-will of

those garlic-breathing and scratching imps, for very soon a shower of

water-drops fell upon my paper. Next a stick, thrown from an upper

window, dropped on my head, and more than once my elbow was

intentionally jogged from behind. The older people scolded and

threatened, but young Majorca was evidently against me. I therefore made

haste to finish my impotent mimicry of air and light, and get away from

the curious crowd.

Behind the village there is a gleam of the sea, near, yet at an unknown

depth. As I threaded the walled lanes, seeking some point of view, a

number of lusty young fellows, mounted on unsaddled mules, passed me

with a courteous greeting. On one side rose a grand pile of rock,

covered with ilex-trees,--a bit of scenery so admirable, that I fell

into a new temptation. I climbed a little knoll and looked around me.

Far and near no children were to be seen; the portico of an unfinished

house offered both shade and seclusion. I concealed myself behind a

pillar, and went to work. For half an hour I was happy; then around

black head popped up over a garden-wall, a small brown form crept

towards me, beckoned, and presently a new multitude had assembled. The

noise they made provoked a sound of cursing from the interior of a

stable adjoining the house. They only made a louder tumult in answer;

the voice became more threatening, and at the end of five minutes the

door burst open. An old man, with wrath flashing from his eyes, came

forth. The children took to their heels; I greeted the new-comer

politely, but he hardly returned the salutation. He was a very fountain

of curses, and now hurled stones with them after the fugitives. When

they had all disappeared behind the walls, he went back to his den,

grumbling and muttering. It was not five minutes, however, before the

children were back again, as noisy as before; so, at the first thunder

from the stable, I shut up my book, and returned to the inn.

While the horses were being harnessed, I tried to talk with an old

native, who wore the island costume, and was as grim and grizzly as

Ossawatomie Brown. A party of country people from the plains, who seemed

to have come up to Valdemosa on a pleasure trip, clambered into a

two-wheeled cart drawn by one mule, and drove away. My old friend gave

me the distances of various places, the state of the roads, and the

quality of the wine; but he seemed to have no conception of the world

outside of the island. Indeed, to a native of the village, whose fortune

has simply placed him beyond the reach of want, what is the rest of the

world? Around and before him spread one of its loveliest pictures; he

breathes its purest air; and he may enjoy its best luxuries, if he heeds

or knows how to use them.

Up to this day the proper spice and flavor had been wanting. Palma had

only interested me, but in Valdemosa I found the inspiration, the heat

and play of vivid, keen sensation, which one (often somewhat

unreasonably) expects from a new land. As my carriage descended, winding

around the sides of the magnificent mountain amphitheatre, in the

alternate shadows of palm and ilex, pine and olive, I looked back,

clinging to every marvellous picture, and saying to myself, over and

over again, "I have not come hither in vain." When the last shattered

gate of rock closed behind me, and the wood of insane olive-trunks was

passed, with what other eyes I looked upon the rich orchard-plain! It

had now become a part of one superb whole; as the background of my

mountain view, it had caught a new glory, and still wore the bloom of

the invisible sea.

In the evening I reached the Four Nations, where I was needlessly

invited to dinner by certain strangers, and dined alone, on meats cooked

in rancid oil. When the cook had dished the last course, he came into a

room adjoining the dining apartment, sat down to a piano in his white

cap, and played loud, long, and badly. The landlord had papered this

room with illustrations from all the periodicals of Europe:

dancing-girls pointed their toes under cardinals' hats, and bulls were

baited before the shrines of saints. Mixed with the woodcuts were the

landlord's own artistic productions, wonderful to behold. All the house

was proud of this room, and with reason; for there is assuredly no other

room like it in the world. A notice in four languages, written with

extraordinary flourishes, announced in the English division that

travellers will find "confortation and modest prices." The former

advantage, I discovered, consisted in the art of the landlord, the music

and oil of the cook, and the attendance of a servant so distant that it

was easier to serve myself than seek him; the latter may have been

"modest" for Palma, but in any other place they would have been

considered brazenly impertinent. I should therefore advise travellers to

try the "Three Pigeons," in the same street, rather than the Four

Nations.

The next day, under the guidance of my old friend, M. Laurens, I

wandered for several hours through the streets, peeping into

court-yards, looking over garden-walls, or idling under the trees of the

Alameda. There are no pleasant suburban places of resort, such as are to

be found in all other Spanish cities; the country commences on the other

side of the moat. Three small cafes exist, but cannot be said to

flourish, for I never saw more than one table occupied. A theatre has

been built, but is only open during the winter, of course. Some placards

on the walls, however, announced that the national (that is, Majorcan)

diversion of baiting bulls with dogs would be given in a few days.

The noblesse appear to be even haughtier than in Spain, perhaps on

account of their greater poverty; and much more of the feudal spirit

lingers among them, and gives character to society, than on the

main-land. Each family has still a crowd of retainers, who perform a

certain amount of service on the estates, and are thenceforth entitled

to support. This custom is the reverse of profitable; but it keeps up an

air of lordship, and is therefore retained. Late in the afternoon, when

the new portion of the Alameda is in shadow, and swept by a delicious

breeze from the sea, it begins to be frequented by the people; but I

noticed that very few of the upper class made their appearance. So grave

and sombre are these latter, that one would fancy them descended from

the conquered Moors, rather than the Spanish conquerors.

M. Laurens is of the opinion that the architecture of Palma cannot be

ascribed to an earlier period than the beginning of the sixteenth

century. I am satisfied, however, either that many fragments of Moorish

sculpture must have been used in the erection of the older buildings, or

that certain peculiarities of Moorish art have been closely imitated.

For instance, that Moorish combination of vast, heavy masses of masonry

with the lightest and airiest style of ornament, which the Gothic

sometimes attempts, but never with the same success, is here found at

every step. I will borrow M. Laurens's words, descriptive of the

superior class of edifices, both because I can find no better of my own,

and because this very characteristic has been noticed by him. "Above the

ground-floor," he says, "there is only one story and a low garret. The

entrance is a semi-circular portal without ornament; but the number and

dimensions of the stones, disposed in long radii, give it a stately

aspect. The grand halls of the main story are lighted by windows

divided by excessively slender columns, which are entirely Arabic in

appearance. This character is so pronounced, that I was obliged to

examine more than twenty houses constructed in the same manner, and to

study all the details of their construction, in order to assure myself

that the windows had not really been taken from those fairy Moresque

palaces, of which the Alhambra is the only remaining specimen. Except in

Majorca, I have nowhere seen columns which, with a height of six feet,

have a diameter of only three inches. The fine grain of the marble of

which they are made, as well as the delicacy of the capitals, led me to

suppose them to be of Saracenic origin."

I was more impressed by the _Lonja_, or Exchange, than any other

building in Palma. It dates from the first half of the fifteenth

century, when the kings of the island had built up a flourishing

commerce, and expected to rival Genoa and Venice. Its walls, once

crowded with merchants and seamen, are now only opened for the Carnival

balls and other festivals sanctioned by religion. It is a square

edifice, with light Gothic towers at the corners, displaying little

ornamental sculpture, but nevertheless a taste and symmetry, in all its

details, which are very rare in Spanish architecture. The interior is a

single vast hall, with a groined roof, resting on six pillars of

exquisite beauty. They are sixty feet high, and fluted spirally from top

to bottom, like a twisted cord, with a diameter of not more than two

feet and a half. It is astonishing how the airy lightness and grace of

these pillars relieve the immense mass of masonry, spare the bare walls

the necessity of ornament, and make the ponderous roof light as a tent.

There is here the trace of a law of which our modern architects seem to

be ignorant. Large masses of masonry are always oppressive in their

effect; they suggest pain and labor, and the Saracens, even more than

the Greeks, seem to have discovered the necessity of introducing a

sportive, fanciful element, which shall express the delight of the

workman in his work.

In the afternoon, I sallied forth from the western coast-gate, and found

there, sloping to the shore, a village inhabited apparently by sailors

and fishermen. The houses were of one story, flat-roofed, and

brilliantly whitewashed. Against the blue background of the sea, with

here and there the huge fronds of a palm rising from among them, they

made a truly African picture. On the brown ridge above the village were

fourteen huge windmills, nearly all in motion. I found a road leading,

along the brink of the overhanging cliffs, toward the castle of Belver,

whose brown mediaeval turrets rose against a gathering thunder-cloud.

This fortress, built as a palace for the kings of Majorca immediately

after the expulsion of the Moors, is now a prison. It has a superb

situation, on the summit of a conical hill, covered with umbrella-pines.

In one of its round, massive towers, Arago was imprisoned for two months

in 1808. He was at the time employed in measuring an arc of the

meridian, when news of Napoleon's violent measures in Spain reached

Majorca. The ignorant populace immediately suspected the astronomer of

being a spy and political agent, and would have lynched him at once.

Warned by a friend, he disguised himself as a sailor, escaped on board a

boat in the harbor, and was then placed in Belver by the authorities, in

order to save his life. He afterwards succeeded in reaching Algiers,

where he was seized by order of the Bey, and made to work as a slave.

Few men of science have known so much of the romance of life.

I had a long walk to Belver, but I was rewarded by a grand view of the

Bay of Palma, the city, and all the southern extremity of the island. I

endeavored to get into the fields, to seek other points of view; but

they were surrounded by such lofty walls that I fancied the owners of

the soil could only get at them by scaling-ladders. The grain and trees

on either side of the road were hoary with dust, and the soil of the

hue of burnt chalk, seemed never to have known moisture. But while I

loitered on the cliffs the cloud in the west had risen and spread; a

cold wind blew over the hills, and the high gray peaks behind Valdemosa

disappeared, one by one, in a veil of rain. A rough _tartana_, which

performed the service of an omnibus, passed me returning to the city,

and the driver, having no passengers, invited me to ride. "What is your

fare?" I asked. "Whatever people choose to give," said he,--which was

reasonable enough: and I thus reached the Four Nations in time to avoid

a deluge.

The Majorcans are fond of claiming their island as the birthplace of

Hannibal. There are some remains supposed to be Carthaginian near the

town of Alcudia, but, singularly enough, not a fragment to tell of the

Roman domination, although their _Balearis Major_ must have been then,

as now, a rich and important possession. The Saracens, rather than the

Vandals, have been the spoilers of ancient art. Their religious

detestation of sculpture was at the bottom of this destruction. The

Christians could consecrate the old temple to a new service, and give

the names of saints to the statues of the gods; but to the Moslem every

representation of the human form was worse than blasphemy. For this

reason, the symbols of the most ancient faith, massive and

unintelligible, have outlived the monuments of those which followed.

In a forest of ancient oaks near the village of Arta, there still exists

a number of Cyclopean constructions, the character of which is as

uncertain as the date of their erection. They are cones of huge,

irregular blocks, the jambs and lintels of the entrances being of single

stones. In a few the opening is at the top, with rude projections

resembling a staircase to aid in the descent. Cinerary urns have been

found in some of them, yet they do not appear to have been originally

constructed as tombs. The Romans may have afterwards turned them to that

service. In the vicinity there are the remains of a Druid circle, of

large upright monoliths. These singular structures were formerly much

more numerous, the people (who call them "the altars of the Gentiles")

having destroyed a great many in building the village and the

neighboring farm-houses.

I heard a great deal about a cavern on the eastern coast of the island,

beyond Arta. It is called the Hermit's Cave, and the people of Palma

consider it the principal thing to be seen in all Majorca. Their

descriptions of the place, however, did not inspire me with any very

lively desire to undertake a two days' journey for the purpose of

crawling on my belly through a long hole, and then descending a shaky

rope-ladder for a hundred feet or more. When one has performed these

feats, they said, he finds himself in an immense hall, supported by

stalactitic pillars, the marvels of which cannot be described. Had the

scenery of the eastern part of the island been more attractive, I should

have gone as far as Arta; but I wished to meet the steamer Minorca at

Alcudia, and there were but two days remaining.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] _Souvenirs d'un Voyage d'Art a l'Isle de Majorque._ Par J.-B.

Laurens.

MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.

In the present paper we propose to consider six dramatists who were more

immediately the contemporaries of Shakespeare and Jonson, and who have

the precedence in time, and three of them, if we may believe some

critics, not altogether without claim to the precedence in merit, of

Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, and Ford. These are Heywood,

Middleton, Marston, Dekkar, Webster, and Chapman.

They belong to the school of dramatists of which Shakespeare was the

head, and which is distinguished from the school of Jonson by essential

differences of principle. Jonson constructed his plays on definite

external rules, and could appeal confidently to the critical

understanding, in case the regularity of his plot and the keeping of his

characters were called in question. Shakespeare constructed his, not

according to any rules which could be drawn from the practice of other

dramatists, but according to those interior laws which the mind, in its

creative action, instinctively divines and spontaneously obeys. In his

case, the appeal is not to the understanding alone, but to the feelings

and faculties which were concerned in producing the work itself; and the

symmetry of the whole is felt by hundreds who could not frame an

argument to sustain it. The laws to which his genius submitted were

different from those to which other dramatists had submitted, because

the time, the circumstances, the materials, the purpose aimed at, were

different. The time demanded a drama which should represent human life

in all its diversity, and in which the tragic and comic, the high and

the low, should be in juxtaposition, if not in combination. The

dramatists of whom we are about to speak represented them in

juxtaposition, and rarely succeeded in vitally combining them so as to

produce symmetrical works. Their comedy and tragedy, their humor and

passion, move in parallel rather than in converging lines. They have

diversity; but as their diversity neither springs from, nor tends to, a

central principle of organization or of order, the result is often a

splendid anarchy of detached scenes, more effective as detached than as

related. Shakespeare alone had the comprehensive energy of impassioned

imagination to fuse into unity the almost unmanageable materials of his

drama, to organize this anarchy into a new and most complex order, and

to make a world-wide variety of character and incident consistent with

oneness of impression. Jonson, not pretending to give his work this

organic form, put forth his whole strength to give it mechanical

regularity; every line in his solidest plays costing him, as the wits

said, "a cup of sack." But the force implied in a Shakespearian drama, a

force that crushes and dissolves the resisting materials into their

elements, and recombines or fuses them into a new substance, is a force

so different in kind from Jonson's, that it would of course be idle to

attempt an estimate of its superiority in degree. And in regard to those

minor dramatists who will be the subjects of the present paper, if they

fall below Jonson in general ability, they nearly all afford scenes and

passages superior to his best in depth of passion, vigor of imagination,

and audacious self-committal to the primitive instincts of the heart.

The most profuse, but perhaps the least poetic of these dramatists, was

Thomas Heywood, of whom little is known, except that he was one of the

most prolific writers the world has ever seen. In 1598 he became an

actor, or, as Henslowe, who employed him, phrases it, "came and hired

himself to me as a covenanted servant for two years." The date of his

first published drama is 1601; that of his last published work, a

"General History of Women," is 1657. As early as 1633 he represents

himself as having had an "entire hand, or at least a main finger," in

two hundred and twenty plays, of which only twenty-three were printed.

"True it is," he says, "that my plays are not exposed to the world in

volumes, to bear the title of Works, as others: one reason is, that many

of them, by shifting and change of companies, have been negligently

lost; others of them are still retained in the hands of some actors, who

think it against their peculiar profit to have them come in print; and a

third, that it was never any great ambition in me to be in this kind

voluminously read." It was said of him, by a contemporary, that he "not

only acted every day, but also obliged himself to write a sheet every

day for several years; but many of his plays being composed loosely in

taverns, occasions them to be so mean." Besides his labors as a

playwright, he worked as translator, versifier, and general maker of

books. Late in life he conceived the design of writing the lives of all

the poets of the world, including his contemporaries. Had this project

been carried out, we should have known something about the external life

of Shakespeare; for Heywood must have carried in his brain many of those

facts which we of this age are most curious to know.

Heywood's best plays evince large observation, considerable dramatic

skill, a sweet and humane spirit, and an easy command of language. His

style, indeed, is singularly simple, pure, clear, and straightforward;

but it conveys the impression of a mind so diffused as almost to be

characterless, and incapable of flashing its thoughts through the images

of imaginative passion. He is more prosaic, closer to ordinary life and

character, than his contemporaries. Two of his plays, and the best of

them all, "A Woman killed with Kindness," and "The English Traveller,"

are thoroughly domestic dramas, the first, and not the worst, of their

class. The plot of "The English Traveller" is specially good; and in

reading few works of fiction do we receive a greater shock of surprise

than in Geraldine's discovery of the infidelity of Wincott's wife, whom

he loves with a Platonic devotion. It is as unanticipated as the

discovery, in Jonson's "Silent Woman," that Epicaene is no woman at all,

while at the same time it has less the appearance of artifice, and is

more the result of natural causes.

With less fluency of diction, less skill in fastening the reader's

interest to his fable, harsher in versification, and generally clumsier

in construction, the best plays of Thomas Middleton are still superior

to Heywood's in force of imagination, depth of passion, and fulness of

matter. It must, however, be admitted that the sentiments which direct

his powers are not so fine as Heywood's. He depresses the mind, rather

than invigorates it. The eye he cast on human life was not the eye of a

sympathizing poet, but rather that of a sagacious cynic. His

observation, though sharp, close, and vigilant, is somewhat ironic and

unfeeling. His penetrating, incisive intellect cuts its way to the heart

of a character as with a knife; and if he lays bare its throbs of guilt

and weakness, and lets you into the secrets of its organization, he

conceives his whole work is performed. This criticism applies even to

his tragedy of "Women beware Women," a drama which shows a deep study of

the sources of human frailty, considerable skill in exhibiting the

passions in their consecutive, if not in their conflicting action, and a

firm hold upon character; but it lacks pathos, tenderness, and humanity;

its power is out of all proportion to its geniality; the characters,

while they stand definitely out to the eye, are seen through no

visionary medium of sentiment and fancy; and the reader feels the force

of Leantio's own agonizing complaint, that his affliction is

"Of greater weight than youth was made to bear,

As if a punishment of after-life

Were fall'n upon man here, so new it is

To flesh and blood, so strange, so insupportable."

There is, indeed, no atmosphere to Middleton's mind; and the hard, bald

caustic peculiarity of his genius, which is unpleasingly felt in

reading any one of his plays, becomes a source of painful weariness as

we plod doggedly through the five thick volumes of his works. Like the

incantations of his own witches, it "casts a thick scurf over life." It

is most powerfully felt in his tragedy of "The Changeling," at once the

most oppressive and impressive effort of his genius. The character of De

Flores in this play has in it a strangeness of iniquity, such as we

think is hardly paralleled in the whole range of the Elizabethan drama.

The passions of this brute imp are not human. They are such as might be

conceived of as springing from the union of animal with fiendish

impulses, in a nature which knew no law outside of its own lust, and was

as incapable of a scruple as of a sympathy.

But of all the dramatists of the time, the most disagreeable in

disposition, though by no means the least powerful in mind, was John

Marston. The time of his birth is not known; his name is entangled in

contemporary records with that of another John Marston; and we may be

sure that his mischief-loving spirit would have been delighted could he

have anticipated that the antiquaries, a century after his death, would

be driven to despair by the difficulty of discriminating one from the

other. It is more than probable, however, that he was the John Marston

who was of a respectable family in Shropshire; who took his bachelor's

degree at Oxford in 1592; and who was afterwards married to a daughter

of the chaplain of James the First. Whatever may have been Marston's

antecedents, they were such as to gratify his tastes as a cynical

observer of the crimes and follies of men,--an observer whose hatred of

evil sprang from no love of good, but to whom the sight of depravity and

baseness was welcome, inasmuch as it afforded him me occasion to wreak

his own scorn and pride. His ambition was to be the English Juvenal; and

it must be conceded that he had the true Iago-like disposition "to spy

out abuses." Accordingly, in 1598, he published a series of venomous

satires called "The Scourge of Villanie," rough in versification,

condensed in thought, tainted in matter, evincing a cankered more than a

caustic spirit, and producing an effect at once indecent and inhuman. To

prove that this scourging of villany, which would have put

Mephistopheles to the blush, was inspired by no respect for virtue, he

soon followed it up with a poem so licentious that, before it was

circulated to any extent, it was suppressed by order of Archbishop

Whitgift, and nearly all the copies destroyed. A writer could not be

thus dishonored without being brought prominently into notice, and old

Henslowe, the manager, was after him at once to secure his libellous

ability for the Rose. Accordingly, we learn from Henslowe's diary, under

date of September 28, 1599, that he had lent to William Borne "to lend

unto John Mastone," "the new poete," "the sum of forty shillings," in

earnest of some work not named. There is an undated letter of Marston to

Henslowe, written probably in reference to this matter, which is

characteristic in its disdainfully confident tone. Thus it runs:--

"MR. HENSLOWE, at the Rose on the Bankside.

"If you like my playe of Columbus, it is verie well, and you

shall give me noe more than twentie poundes for it, but If

nott, lett me have it by the Bearer againe, as I know the

kinges men will freelie give me as much for it, and the

profitts of the third daye moreover.

"Soe I rest yours,

"JOHN MARSTON."

He seems not to have been popular among the band of dramatists he now

joined, and it is probable that his insulting manners were not sustained

by corresponding courage. Ben Jonson had many quarrels with him, both

literary and personal, and mentions one occasion on which he beat him,

and took away his pistol. His temper was Italian rather than English,

and one would conceive of him as quicker with the stiletto than the

fist. His connection with the stage ceased in 1613, after he had

produced a number of dramas, of which nine have been preserved. He died

about twenty years afterwards, in 1634, seemingly in comfortable

circumstances.

Marston's plays, whether comedies or tragedies, all bear the mark of his

bitter and misanthropic spirit,--a spirit that seemed cursed by the

companionship of its own thoughts, and forced them out through a

well-grounded fear that they would fester if left within. His comedies

of "The Malcontent," "The Fawn," and "What You Will," have no genuine

mirth, though an abundance of scornful wit,--of wit which, in his own

words, "stings, blisters, galls off the skin, with the acrimony of its

sharp quickness." The baser its objects, the brighter its gleam. It is

stimulated by the desire to give pain, rather than the wish to

communicate pleasure. Marston is not without sprightliness, but his

sprightliness is never the sprightliness of the kid, though it is

sometimes that of the hyena, and sometimes that of the polecat. In his

Malcontent he probably drew a nattering likeness of his inner self: yet

the most compassionate reader of the play would experience little pity

in seeing the Malcontent hanged. So much, indeed, of Marston's satire is

directed at depravity, that Ben Jonson used to say that "Marston wrote

his father-in-law's preachings, and his father-in-law his comedies." It

is to be hoped, however, that the spirit of the chaplain's tirades

against sins was not, like his son-in-law's, worse than the sins

themselves.

If Marston's comic vein is thus, to use one of Dekkar's phrases, that of

"a thorny-toothed rascal," it may be supposed that his tragic is a still

fiercer libel on humanity. His tragedies, indeed, though not without a

gloomy power, are extravagant and horrible in conception and conduct.

Even when he copies, he makes the thing his own by caricaturing it. Thus

the plot of "Antonio's Revenge" is plainly taken from "Hamlet," but it

is "Hamlet" passed through Marston's intellect and imagination, and so

debased as to look original. Still, the intellect in Marston's tragedies

strikes the reader as forcible in itself, and as capable of achieving

excellence, if it could only be divorced from the bad disposition and

deformed conscience which direct its exercise. He has fancy, and he

frequently stutters into imagination; but the imp that controls his

heart corrupts his taste and taints his sense of beauty, and the result

is that he has a malicious satisfaction in deliberately choosing words

whose uncouthness finds no extenuation in their expressiveness, and in

forging elaborate metaphors which disgust rather than delight. His

description of a storm at sea is among the least unfavorable specimens

of this perversion of his poetical powers:--

"The sea grew mad:

* * * *

Strait swarthy darkness _popt out_ Phoebus' eye,

And blurred the jocund face of bright-cheek'd day;

Whilst cruddled fogs masked even darkness' brow;

Heaven bade's good night, and the rocks groaned

At the intestine uproar of the main."

It must be allowed that both his tragedies and comedies are full of

strong and striking thoughts, which show a searching inquisition into

the worst parts of human nature. Occasionally he expresses a general

truth with great felicity, as when he says,

"Pygmy cares

Can shelter under patience' shield; but giant griefs

Will burst all covert."

His imagination is sometimes stimulated into unusual power in expressing

the fiercer and darker passions; as, for example, in this image:--

"O, my soul's enthroned

In the triumphant chariot of revenge!"

And in this:--

"Ghastly amazement! with upstarted hair,

Shall hurry on before, and usher us,

Whilst trumpets clamor with a sound of death."

He has three descriptions of morning, which seem to have been written in

emulation of Shakespeare's in "Hamlet"; two of them being found in the

tragedy which "Hamlet" suggested.

"Is not yon gleam the shuddering morn that flakes

With silver tincture the east verge of heaven?

* * * *

For see the dapple-gray coursers of the morn

Beat up the light with their bright silver hoofs,

And chase it through the sky.

* * * *

Darkness is fled: look; look, infant morn hath drawn

Bright silver curtains 'bout the couch of night;

And now Aurora's house trots azure rings,

Breathing fair light about the firmament."

These last two lines appear feeble enough as contrasted with the

beautiful intensity of imagination in Emerson's picturing of the same

scene:--

"O, tenderly the haughty Day

_Fills his blue urn with fire_."

The most beautiful passage in Marston's plays is the lament of a father

over the dead body of his son, who has been defamed. It is so apart from

his usual style, as to breed the suspicion that the worthy chaplain's

daughter, whom he made Mrs. Marston, must have given it to him from her

purer imagination:--

"Look on those lips,

Those now lawn pillows, on whose tender softness

Chaste modest speech, stealing from out his breast,

Had wont to rest itself, as loath to post

From out so fair an inn: look, look, they seem

To stir.

And breathe defiance to black obloquy."

If among the dramatists of the period any person could be selected who

in disposition was the opposite of Marston, it would be Thomas

Dekkar,--a man whose inborn sweetness and gleefulness of soul carried

him through vexations and miseries which would have crushed a spirit

less hopeful, cheerful, and humane. He was probably born about the year

1575; commenced his career as player and playwright before 1598; and for

forty years was an author by profession, that is, was occupied in

fighting famine with his pen. The first intelligence we have of him is

characteristic of his whole life. It is from Henslowe's Diary, under

date of February, 1598: "Lent unto the company, to discharge Mr. Decker

out of the counter in the powltry, the sum of 40 shillings." Oldys tells

us that "he was in King's Bench Prison from 1613 to 1616"; and the

antiquary adds ominously, "how much longer I know not." Indeed, Dr.

Johnson's celebrated condensation of the scholar's life would stand for

a biography of Dekkar:--

"Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail."

This forced familiarity with poverty and distress does not seem to have

imbittered his feelings or weakened the force and elasticity of his

mind. He turned his calamities into commodities. If indigence threw him

into the society of the ignorant, the wretched, and the depraved, he

made the knowledge of low life lie thus obtained serve his purpose as

dramatist or pamphleteer. Whatever may have been the effect of his

vagabond habits on his principles, they did not stain the sweetness and

purity of his sentiments. There is an innocency in his very coarseness,

and a brisk, bright good-nature chirps in his very scurrility. In the

midst of distresses of all kinds, he still seems, like his own

Fortunatus, "all felicity up to the brims"; but that his content with

Fortune is not owing to an unthinking ignorance of her caprice and

injustice is proved by the words he puts into her mouth:--

"This world is Fortune's ball wherewith she sports.

Sometimes I strike it up into the air,

And then create I emperors and kings;

Sometimes I spurn it, at which spurn crawls out

The wild beast multitude: curse on, you fools,

'Tis I that tumble princes from their thrones,

And gild false brows with glittering diadems;

'T is I that tread on necks of conquerors,

And when like semi-gods they have been drawn

In ivory chariots to the Capitol,

Circled about with wonder of all eyes,

The shouts of every tongue, love of all hearts,

Being swoln with their own greatness, I have pricked

The bladder of their pride, and made them die

As water-bubbles (without memory):

Whilst the true-spirited soldier stands by

Bareheaded, and all bare, whilst at his scars

They scoff, that ne'er durst view the face of wars.

I set an idiot's cap on virtue's head,

Turn learning out of doors, clothe wit in rags,

And paint ten thousand images of loam

In gaudy silken colors: on the backs

Of mules and asses I make asses ride.

Only for sport to see the apish world

Worship such beasts with sound idolatry.

She sits and smiles to hear some curse her name,

And some with adoration crown her fame."

The boundless beneficence of Dekkar's heart is specially embodied in

the character of the opulent lord, Jacomo Gentili, in his play of "The

Wonder of a Kingdom." When Gentili's steward brings him the book in

which the amount of his charities is recorded, he exclaims

impatiently:--

"Thou vain vainglorious fool, go burn that book;

No herald needs to blazon charity's arms.

* * * *

I launch not forth a ship, with drums and guns

And trumpets, to proclaim my gallantry;

He that will read the wasting of my gold

Shall find it writ in ashes, which the wind

Will scatter ere he spells it."

He will have neither wife nor children. When, he says,

"I shall have one hand in heaven,

To write my happiness in leaves of stars,

A wife would pluck me by the other down.

This bark has thus long sailed about the world,

My soul the pilot, and yet never listened

To such a mermaid's song.

* * * *

My heirs shall be poor children fed on alms;

Soldiers that want limbs; scholars poor and scorned;

And these will be a sure inheritance

Not to decay; manors and towns will fall,

Lordships and parks, pastures and woods, be sold;

But this land still continues to the lord:

No tricks of law can me beguile of this.

But of the beggar's dish, I shall drink healths

To last forever; whilst I live, my roof

Shall cover naked wretches; when I die,

'T is dedicated to St. Charity."

We should not do justice to Dekkar's disposition, even after these

quotations, did we omit that enumeration of positives and negatives

which, in his view, make up the character of the happy man:--

"He that in the sun is neither beam nor moat,

He that's not mad after a petticoat,

He for whom poor men's curse dig no grave,

He that is neither lord's nor lawyer's slave,

He that makes This his sea and That his shore,

He that in 's coffin is richer than before,

He that counts Youth his sword and Age his staff.

He that upon his death-bed is a swan.

And dead no crow,--he is a Happy Man."

As Dekkar wrote under the constant goad of necessity, he seems to have

been indifferent to the requirements of art. That "wet-eyed wench,

Care," was as absent from his ink as from his soul. Even his best plays,

"Old Fortunatus," "The Wonder of a Kingdom," and another whose title

cannot be mentioned, are good in particular scenes and characters rather

than good as wholes. Occasionally, as in the character of Signior

Orlando Friscobaldo, he strikes off a fresh, original, and masterly

creation, consistently sustained throughout, and charming us by its

lovableness, as well as thrilling us by its power; but generally his

sentiment and imagination break upon us in unexpected felicities,

strangely better than what surrounds them. These have been culled by the

affectionate admiration of Lamb, Hunt, and Hazlitt, and made familiar to

all English readers. To prove how much finer, in its essence, his genius

was than the genius of so eminent a dramatist as Massinger, we only need

to compare Massinger's portions of the play of "The Virgin Martyr" with

Dekkar's. The scene between Dorothea and Angelo, in which she recounts

her first meeting with him as a "sweet-faced beggar-boy," and the scene

in which Angelo brings to Theophilus the basket of fruits and flowers

which Dorothea has plucked in Paradise, are inexpressibly beautiful in

their exquisite subtlety of imagination and artless elevation of

sentiment. It is difficult to understand how a writer capable of such

refinements as these should have left no drama which is a part of the

classical literature of his country.

One of these scenes--that between Dorothea, the Virgin Martyr, and

Angelo, an angel who waits upon her in the disguise of a page--we cannot

refrain from quoting, familiar as it must be to many readers:--

"_Dor._ My book and taper.

"_Ang._ Here, most holy mistress.

"_Dor._ Thy voice bends forth such music, that I never

Was ravished with a more celestial sound.

Were every servant in the world like thee,

So full of goodness, angels would come down

To dwell with us; thy name is Angelo,

And like that name thou art. Get thee to rest;

Thy youth with too much watching is oppressed.

"_Ang._ No, my dear lady; I could weary stars,

And force the wakeful moon to lose her eyes,

By my late watching, but to wait on you.

When at your prayers you kneel before the altar,

Methinks I'm singing with some quire in heaven,

So blest I hold me in your company.

Therefore, my most loved mistress, do not bid

Your boy, so serviceable, to get hence,

For then you break his heart.

"_Dor._ Be nigh me still then.

In golden letters down I'll set that day

Which gave thee to me. Little did I hope

To meet such worlds of comfort in thyself,

This little pretty body, when I, coming

Forth of the temple, heard my beggar-boy,

My sweet-faced, godly beggar-boy, crave an alms,

Which with glad hand I gave,--with lucky hand!

And when I took thee home, my most chaste bosom

Methought was filled with no hot wanton fire,

But with a holy flame, mounting since higher,

On wings of cherubim, than it did before.

"_Ang._ Proud am I that my lady's modest eye

So likes so poor a servant.

"_Dor._ I have offered

Handfuls of gold but to behold thy parents.

I would leave kingdoms, were I queen of some,

To dwell with thy good father....

Show me thy parents;

Be not ashamed.

"_Angelo._ I am not: I did never

Know who my mother was; but by yon palace,

Filled with bright heavenly courtiers, I dare assure you,

And pawn these eyes upon it, and this hand,

My father is in heaven; and, pretty mistress,

If your illustrious hour-glass spend his sand,

No worse than yet it does upon my life,

You and I both shall meet my father there,

And he shall bid you welcome.

"_Dor._ O blessed day!

We all long to be there, but lose the way."

But the passage in all Dekkar's works which will be most likely to

immortalize his name is that often-quoted one, taken from a play whose

very name is unmentionable to prudish ears:--

"Patience, my lord! why, 't is the soul of peace;

It makes men look like gods--The best of men

That e'er wore earth about him was a Sufferer,

A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit;

The first true gentleman that ever breathed."

A more sombre genius than Dekkar, though a genius more than once

associated with his own in composition, was John Webster, of whose

biography nothing is certainly known, except that he was a member of the

Merchant Tailors' Company. His works have been thrice republished within

thirty years; but the perusal of the whole does not add to the

impression left on the mind by his two great tragedies. His comic talent

was small; and for all the mirth in his comedies of "Westward Hoe" and

"Northward Hoe" we are probably indebted to his associate, Dekkar. His

play of "Appius and Virginia" is far from being an adequate rendering of

one of the most beautiful and affecting fables that ever crept into

history. "The Devil's Law Case," a tragi-comedy, has not sufficient

power to atone for the want of probability in the plot and want of

nature in the characters. The historical play of "Sir Thomas Wyatt" can

only be fitly described by using the favorite word in which Ben Jonson

was wont to condense his critical opinions,--"It is naught." But "The

White Devil" and "The Duchess of Malfy" are tragedies which even so rich

and varied a literature as the English could not lose without a sensible

diminution of its treasures.

Webster was one of those writers whose genius consists in the expression

of special moods, and who, outside of those moods, cannot force their

creative faculties into vigorous action. His mind by instinctive

sentiment was directed to the contemplation of the darker aspects of

life. He brooded over crime and misery until his imagination was

enveloped in their atmosphere, found a fearful joy in probing their

sources and tracing their consequences, became strangely familiar with

their physiognomy and psychology, and felt a shuddering sympathy with

their "deep groans and terrible ghastly looks." There was hardly a

remote corner of the soul, which hid a feeling capable of giving mental

pain, into which this artist in agony had not curiously peered; and his

meditations on the mysterious disorder produced in the human

consciousness by the rebound of thoughtless or criminal deeds might have

found fit expression in the lines of the great poet of our own times:--

"Action is momentary,--

The motion of a muscle, this way or that.

Suffering is long, obscure, and infinite."

With this proclivity of his imagination, Webster's power as a dramatist

consists in confining the domain of his tragedy within definite limits,

in excluding all variety of incident and character which could interfere

with his main design of awaking terror and pity, and in the intensity

with which he arrests, and the tenacity with which he holds the

attention, as he drags the mind along the pathway which begins in

misfortune or guilt, and ends in death. He is such a spendthrift of his

stimulants, and accumulates horror on horror, and crime on crime, with

such fatal facility, that he would render the mind callous to his

terrors, were it not that what is acted is still less than what is

suggested, and that the souls of his characters are greater than their

sufferings or more terrible than their deeds. The crimes and the

criminals belong to Italy as it was in the sixteenth century, when

poisoning and assassination were almost in the fashion; the feelings

with which they are regarded are English; and the result of the

combination is to make the poisoners and assassins more fiendishly

malignant in spirit than they actually were. Thus Ferdinand, in "The

Duchess of Malfy," is the conception formed by an honest, deep-thoughted

Englishman of an Italian duke and politician, who had been educated in

those maxims of policy which were generalized by Machiavelli. Webster

makes him a devil, but a devil with a soul to be damned. The Duchess,

his sister, is discovered to be secretly married to her steward; and in

connection with his brother, the Cardinal, the Duke not only resolves on

her death, but devises a series of preliminary mental torments to madden

and break down her proud spirit. The first is an exhibition of wax

figures, representing her husband and children as they appeared in

death. Then comes a dance of madmen, with dismal howls and songs and

speeches. Then a tomb-maker whose talk is of the charnel-house, and who

taunts her with her mortality. She interrupts his insulting homily with

the exclamation, "Am I not thy Duchess?" "Thou art," he scornfully

replies, "some great woman sure, for riot begins to sit on thy forehead

(clad in gray hairs) twenty years sooner than on a merry milkmaid's.

Thou sleepest worse than if a mouse should be forced to take up her

lodging in a cat's ear; a little infant that breeds its teeth, should

it lie with thee, would cry out, as if thou wert the more unquiet

bedfellow." This mockery only brings from her firm spirit the proud

assertion, "I am Duchess of Malfy still." Indeed, her mind becomes

clearer and calmer as the tortures proceed. At first she had imprecated

curses on her brothers, and cried,

"Plagues that make lanes through largest families,

Consume them!"

But now, when the executioners appear, when her dirge is sung,

containing those tremendous lines,

"Of what is 't fools make such vain keeping?

Sin their conception, their birth weeping,

Their life a general mist of error,

Their death a hideous storm of terror,"--

when all that malice could suggest for her torment has been expended,

and the ruffians who have been sent to murder her approach to do their

office, her attitude is that of quiet dignity, forgetful of her own

sufferings, solicitous for others. Her attendant, Cariola, screams out:

"Hence, villains, tyrants, murderers: alas!

What will you do with my lady? Call for help.

"_Duchess._ To whom,--to our next neighbors?

They are mad folks.

"_Bosola._ Remove that noise.

"_Duchess._ Farewell, Cariola.

In my last will I have not much to give:

A many hungry guests have fed upon me;

Thine will be a poor reversion.

"_Cariola._ I will die with her.

"_Duchess._ I pray thee, look thou giv'st my little boy

Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl

Say her prayers ere she sleep. Now what you please:

What death?

"_Bosola._ Strangling; here are your executioners.

* * * *

"_Duchess._ Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength

Must pull down heaven upon me:

Yet stay, heaven-gates are not so highly arched

As princes' palaces; they that enter there

Must go upon their knees. Come, violent death.

Serve for mandragora to make me sleep.

Go, tell my brothers; when I am laid out,

They then may feed in quiet."

The strange, unearthly stupor which precedes the remorse of Ferdinand

for her murder is true to nature, and especially his nature. Bosola,

pointing to the dead body of the Duchess, says:

"Fix your eye here.

"_Ferd._ Constantly.

"_Bosola._ Do you not weep?

Other sins only speak; murther shrieks out:

The element of water moistens the earth,

But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens.

"_Ferd._ Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle;

She died young.

"_Bosola._ I think not so; her infelicity

Seemed to have years too many.

"_Ferd._ She and I were twins:

And should I die this instant, I had lived

Her time to a minute."

We have said that Webster's peculiarity is the tenacity of his hold on

the mental and moral constitution of his characters. We know of their

appetites and passions only by their effects on their souls. He has

properly no sensuousness. Thus in "The White Devil," his other great

tragedy, the events proceed from the passion of Brachiano for Vittoria

Corombona,--a passion so intense as to lead one to order the murder of

his wife, and the other the murder of her husband. If either Fletcher or

Ford had attempted the subject, the sensual and emotional motives to the

crime would have been represented with overpowering force, and expressed

in the most alluring images, so that wickedness would have been almost

resolved into weakness; but Webster lifts the wickedness at once from

the senses into the region of the soul, exhibits its results in

spiritual depravity, and shows the Satanic energy of purpose which may

spring from the ruins of the moral will. There is nothing lovable in

Vittoria. She seems, indeed, almost without sensations; and the

affection between her and Brachiano is simply the magnetic attraction

which one evil spirit has for another evil spirit. Francisco, the

brother of Brachiano's wife, says to him:

"Thou hast a wife, our sister; would I had given

Both her white hands to death, bound and locked fast

In her last winding-sheet, when I gave thee

But one."

This is the language of the intensest passion, but as applied to the

adulterous lover of Vittoria it seems little more than the utterance of

reasonable regret; for devil can only truly mate with devil, and

Vittoria is Brachiano's real "affinity."

The moral confusion they produce by their deeds is traced with more than

Webster's usual steadiness of nerve and clearness of vision. The evil

they inflict is a cause of evil in others; the passion which leads to

murder rouses the fiercer passion which aches for vengeance; and at

last, when the avengers of crime have become morally as bad as the

criminals, they are all involved in a common destruction. Vittoria is

probably Webster's most powerful delineation. Bold, bad, proud,

glittering in her baleful beauty, strong in that evil courage which

shrinks from crime as little as from danger, she meets her murderers

with the same self-reliant scorn with which she met her judges. "Kill

her attendant first," exclaimed one of them.

"_Vittoria._ You shall not kill her first; behold my breast:

I will be waited on in death; my servant

Shall never go before me.

"_Gasparo._ Are you so brave!

"_Vittoria._ Yes, I shall welcome death,

As princes do some great ambassadors;

I'll meet thy weapon half-way.

"_Lodovico._ Strike, strike,

With a joint motion.

"_Vittoria._ 'T was a manly blow;

The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant,

And then thou wilt be famous."

Webster tells us, in the Preface to "The White Devil," that he does not

"write with a goose-quill winged with two feathers"; and also hints that

the play failed in representation through its being acted in winter in

"an open and black theatre," and because it wanted "a full and

understanding auditory." "Since that time," he sagely adds, "I have

noted most of the people that come to the playhouse resemble those

ignorant asses who, visiting stationers' shops, their use is not to

inquire for good books, but new books." And then comes the

ever-recurring wail of the playwright, Elizabethan as well as Georgian,

respecting the taste of audiences. "Should a man," he says, "present to

such an auditory the most sententious tragedy that ever was written,

observing all the critical laws, as height of style, and gravity of

person, enrich it with the sententious chorus, and, as it were, enliven

death in the passionate and weighty _Nuntius_; yet after all this divine

rapture, _O dura messorum ilia_, the breath that comes from the

uncapable multitude is able to poison it."

Of all the contemporaries of Shakespeare, Webster is the most

Shakespearian. His genius was not only influenced by its contact with

one side of Shakespeare's many-sided mind, but the tragedies we have

been considering abound in expressions and situations either suggested

by or directly copied from the tragedies of him he took for his model.

Yet he seems to have had no conception of the superiority of Shakespeare

to all other dramatists; and in his Preface to "The White Devil," after

speaking of the "full and heightened style of Master Chapman, the

labored and understanding works of Master Jonson, the no less worthy

composures of the both worthily excellent Master Beaumont and Master

Fletcher," he adds his approval, "without wrong last to be named," of

"the right happy and copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master

Dekkar, and Master Heywood." This is not half so felicitous a

classification as would be made by a critic of our century, who should

speak of the "right happy and copious industry" of Master Goethe, Master

Dickens, and Master G. P. R. James.

Webster's reference, however, to "the full and heightened style of

Master Chapman" is more appropriate; for no writer of that age impresses

us more by a certain rude heroic height of character than George

Chapman. Born in 1559, and educated at the University of Oxford, he

seems, on his first entrance into London life, to have acquired the

patronage of the noble, and the friendship of all who valued genius and

scholarship. He was among the few men whom Ben Jonson said he loved. His

greatest performance, and it was a gigantic one, was his translation of

Homer, which, in spite of obvious faults, excels all other translations

in the power to rouse and lift and inflame the mind. Some eminent

painter, we believe Barry, said that, when he went into the street after

reading it, men seemed ten feet high. Pope averred that the translation

of the Iliad might be supposed to have been written by Homer before he

arrived at years of discretion; and Coleridge declares the version of

the Odyssey to be as truly an original poem as the Faery Queen. Chapman

himself evidently thought that he was the first translator who had been

admitted into intimate relations with Homer's soul, and caught by direct

contact the sacred fury of his inspiration. He says finely of those who

had attempted his work in other languages:

"They failed to search his deep and treasures heart.

The cause was, since they wanted the fit key

Of Nature, in their downright strength of art,

With Poesy to open Poesy."

Chapman was also a voluminous dramatist, and of his many comedies and

tragedies some sixteen were printed. It is to be feared that the last

twenty years of his long and honorable life were passed in a desperate

struggle for the means of subsistence. But his ideas of the dignity of

his art were so inwoven into his character that he probably met calamity

bravely. Poesy he early professed to prefer above all worldly wisdom,

being composed, in his own words, of the "sinews and souls of all

learning, wisdom, and truth." "We have example sacred enough," he said,

"that true Poesy's humility, poverty, and contempt are badges of

divinity, not vanity. Bray then, and bark against it, ye wolf-faced

worldlings, that nothing but riches, honors, and magistracy" can content

"I (for my part) shall ever esteem it much more manly and sacred, in

this harmless and pious study, to sit until I sink into my grave, than

shine in your vainglorious bubbles and impieties; all your poor

policies, wisdoms, and their trappings, at no more valuing than a musty

nut." These sentiments were probably fresh in his heart when, in 1634,

friendless and poor, at the age of seventy-five, he died. Anthony Wood

describes him as "a person of most reverend aspect, religious and

temperate; qualities," he spitefully adds, "rarely meeting in a poet."

Chapman was a man with great elements in his nature, which were so

imperfectly harmonized that what he was found but a stuttering

expression in what he wrote and did. There were gaps in his mind; or, to

use Victor Hugo's image, "his intellect was a book with some leaves torn

out." His force, great as it was, was that of an Ajax, rather than that

of an Achilles. Few dramatists of the time afford nobler passages of

description and reflection. Few are wiser, deeper, manlier in their

strain of thinking. But when we turn to the dramas from which these

grand things have been detached, we find extravagance, confusion, huge

thoughts lying in helpless heaps, sublimity in parts conducing to no

general effect of sublimity, the movement lagging and unwieldy, and the

plot urged on to the catastrophe by incoherent expedients. His

imagination partook of the incompleteness of his intellect. Strong

enough to clothe the ideas and emotions of a common poet, it was plainly

inadequate to embody the vast, half-formed conceptions which gasped for

expression in his soul in its moments of poetic exaltation. Often we

feel his meaning, rather than apprehend it. The imagery has the

indefiniteness of distant objects seen by moonlight. There are whole

passages in his works in which he seems engaged in expressing Chapman to

Chapman, like the deaf egotist who only placed his trumpet to his ear

when he himself talked.

This criticism applies more particularly to his tragedies, and to his

expression of great sentiments and passions. His comedies, though

over-informed with thought, reveal him to us as a singularly sharp,

shrewd, and somewhat cynical observer, sparkling with worldly wisdom,

and not deficient in airiness any more than wit. Hazlitt, we believe,

was the first to notice that Monsieur D'Olive, in the comedy of that

name, is "the undoubted prototype of that light, flippant, gay, and

infinitely delightful class of character, of the professed men of wit

and pleasure about town, which we have in such perfection in Wycherly

and Congreve, such as Sparkish, Witwond, Petulant, &c., both in the

sentiments and the style of writing"; and Tharsalio in "The Widow's

Tears," and Ludovico in "May-Day," have the hard impudence and cynical

distrust of virtue, the arrogant and glorying self-_un_righteousness,

that distinguish another class of characters which the dramatists of the

age of Charles and Anne were unwearied in providing with insolence and

repartees. Occasionally we have a jest which Falstaff would not disown.

Thus in "May-Day," when Cuthbert, a barber, approaches Quintiliano, to

get, if possible, "certain odd crowns" the latter owes him, Quintiliano

says, "I think thou 'rt newly married?" "I am indeed, sir," is the

reply. "I thought so; keep on thy hat, man, 't will be the less

perceived." Chapman, in his comedies generally, shows a kind of

philosophical contempt for woman, as a frailer and flimsier, if fairer,

creature than man, and he sustains his bad judgment with infinite

ingenuity of wilful wit and penetration of ungracious analysis. In "The

Widow's Tears" this unpoetic infidelity to the sex pervades the whole

plot and incidents, as well as gives edge to many an incisive sarcasm.

My sense, says Tharsalio, "tells me how short-lived widows' tears are,

that their weeping is in truth but laughing under a mask, that they

mourn in their gowns and laugh in their sleeves; all of which I believe

as a Delphian oracle, and am resolved to burn in that faith." "He," says

Lodovico, in "May-Day,"--he "that holds religious and sacred thought of

a woman, he that holds so reverend a respect to her that he will not

touch her but with a kist hand and a timorous heart, he that adores her

like his goddess, let him be sure she will shun him like her slave....

Whereas nature made" women "but half fools, we make 'em all fool: and

this is our palpable flattery of them, where they had rather have plain

dealing." In all Chapman's comic writing there is something of Ben

Jonson's mental self-assertion and disdainful glee in his own

superiority to the weakness he satirizes.

In passing from a comedy like "May-Day" to a tragedy like "Bussy

D'Ambois," we find some difficulty in recognizing the features of the

same nature. "Bussy D'Ambois" represents a mind not so much in creation

as in eruption, belching forth smoke, ashes, and stones, no less than

flame. Pope speaks of it as full of fustian; but fustian is rant in the

words when there is no corresponding rant in the soul; whilst Chapman's

tragedy, like Marlowe's "Tamburlaine," indicates a greater swell in the

thoughts and passions of his characters than in their expression. The

poetry is to Shakespeare's what gold ore is to gold. Veins and lumps of

the precious metal gleam on the eye from the duller substance in which

it is imbedded. Here are specimens:--

"_Man is torch borne in the wind; a dream

But of a shadow_, summed with all his substance;

And as great seamen, using all their wealth

And skills in Neptune's deep invisible paths,

In tall ships richly built and ribbed with brass,

To put a girdle round about the world,

When they have done it (coming near their haven)

Are fain to give a warning piece, and call

A poor stayed fisherman, that never past

His country's sight, to waft and guide them in:

So when we wander furthest through the waves

_Of glassy glory and the gulfs of state_,

Topped with all titles, spreading all our reaches,

As if each private arm would sphere the earth,

We must to Virtue for her guide resort,

Or we shall shipwreck in our safest port."

"In a king

All places are contained. His words and looks

Are like the flashes and the bolts of Jove;

His deeds inimitable, _like the sea

That shuts still as it opes_, and leaves no tracks,

_Nor prints of precedent for mean men's acts._"

"His great heart will not down: 't is like the sea

That partly by his own internal heat,

Partly the stars' daily and nightly motion,

Their heat and light, and partly of the place

The divers frames, but chiefly by the moon

Bristled with surges, never will be won,

(No, not when th' hearts of all those powers are burst,)

To make retreat into his settled home,

Till he be crowned with his own quiet foam."

"Now, all ye peaceful regents of the night,

Silently gliding exhalations,

_Languishing winds, and murmuring falls of waters,

Sadness of heart, and ominous secureness,

Enchantments, dead sleeps_, all the friends of rest

That ever wrought upon the life of man,

Extend your utmost strengths; and this charmed hour

Fix like the centre."

"There is One

That wakes above, whose eye no sleep can bind:

He sees through doors and darkness and our thoughts."

"O, the dangerous siege

Sin lays about us! and the tyranny

He exercises when he hath expugned:

Like to the horror of a winter's thunder,

Mixed with a gushing storm, that suffer nothing

To stir abroad on earth but their own rages,

Is sin, when it hath gathered head above us."

"Terror of darkness! O thou king of flames!

That with thy music-footed horse doth strike

The clear light out of crystal, on dark earth,

And hurl'st instinctive fire about the world,

Wake, wake, the drowsy and enchanted night,

That sleeps with dead eyes in this heavy riddle:

O thou great prince of shades, where never sun

Sticks his far-darted beams, whose eyes are made

To shine in darkness, and see ever best

Where men are blindest! open now the heart

Of thy abashed oracle, that for fear

Of some ill it includes would feign lie hid,

And rise thou with it in thy greater light."

It is hardly possible to read Chapman's serious verse without feeling

that he had in him the elements of a great nature, and that he was a

magnificent specimen of what is called "irregular genius." And one of

his poems, the dedication of his translation of the Iliad to Prince

Henry, is of so noble a strain, and from so high a mood, that, while

borne along with its rapture, we are tempted to place him in the first

rank of poets and of men. You can feel and hear the throbs of the grand

old poet's heart in such lines as these:--

"O, 't is wondrous much,

Though nothing prized, that the right virtuous touch

Of a well-written soul to virtue moves;

Nor have we souls to purpose, if their loves

Of fitting objects be not so inflamed.

How much were then this kingdom's main soul maimed,

To want this great inflamer of all powers

That move in human souls.

* * * *

Through all the pomp of kingdoms still he shines,

And graceth all his gracers.

* * * *

A prince's statue, or in marble carved,

Or steel, or gold, and shrined, to be preserved,

Aloft on pillars and pyramides,

Time into lowest ruins may depress;

_But drawn with all his virtues in learned verse,

Fame shall resound them on oblivion's hearse,

Till graves gasp with their blasts, and dead men rise._"

OUR PACIFIC RAILROADS.

Two thirds of the United States lie west of the Mississippi River. This

vast domain has already exercised a tremendous influence over our

political destiny. The Territories were the immediate occasion of our

civil war. During an entire generation they furnished the arena for the

prelusive strife of that war. The Missouri Compromise was to us of the

East a flag of truce. But neither nature nor the men who populated the

Western Territories recognized this flag. The vexed question of party

platforms and sectional debate, the right and the reason of slavery,

solved itself in the West with a freedom and rough rapidity natural to

the soil and its population. Climatic limitations and prohibitions went

hand in hand with the inflow of an emigration mainly from the Northern

States,--an emigration fostered by political emotions and fevered by

political injustice. While the South was menacing and the North

deprecating war, far removed from this tumult of words the conflict was

going on, and was being decided. And it was because slavery was doomed

in the great West, and therefore in the nation, that rebellion ensued.

It is worthy of note that the same generation which witnessed the growth

of the Calhoun school of politics in the South, and of the Free Soil and

(afterward) the Republican party in the North, and which followed with

intense interest the stages of the Territorial struggle, witnessed also

the employment of steam and electricity as agents of human progress.

These agents, these organs of velocity, abbreviating time and space,

said, Let the West be East; and before the locomotive the West fled from

Buffalo to Chicago, across the prairies, the Rocky Mountains, the desert

steppes beyond, and down the Pacific slope, until it stared the Orient

into a self-contradiction.

It was on the part of our government a sublime recognition of the power

of steam, that, while it was struggling for existence, it gave its

sanction to the Pacific Railroad enterprise. Curiously enough, it is

through Kansas and Nebraska--the Epidaurus of our Peloponnesian

war--that the two great rival Pacific Railroad routes are to run.

In the summer of 1861, the project of a trans-continental railway

connecting our Pacific communities with the older population of the East

first assumed a practical aspect. For nearly three decades the nation

had been dreaming of the scheme, but it had done little more than dream.

Almost with the earliest track-laying in America, a visionary New-Yorker

startled a sceptical generation by proclaiming the age of steam, and

pointing at the locomotive as the instrument whereby men should yet

penetrate the mysterious depths of the Far West, and secure for our

growing commerce the prize of Asiatic wealth. Curious readers will find

in the New York Courier and Enquirer of 1837 an article by Dr. Hartley

Carver, advocating a Pacific Railroad; and in view of how little was

known at this time of the country beyond the Alleghanies,--so little,

indeed, that the Territories of the extreme West had no definite

outline, but were measured from the crest of the Rocky Mountains,--the

audacity of the proposition might justly have inspired suspicions of the

sanity of its author. But if Dr. Carver was chimerical, he was at least

courageous in his persistence. Ten years later, this lineal descendant

of old John Carver transferred the question from the arena of newspaper

discussion, and boldly memorialized Congress. Here he found a rival

advocate in Asa Whitney, whose brain throbbed with the glowing

possibilities of the Chinese trade, while his specious statistics and

contagious eloquence arrested public attention. Neither of these

projectors, however, found the atmosphere of Washington propitious.

Failing there, they once more had recourse to the press. The discovery

of gold in California gave fresh vigor to the agitation. In 1850, that

notable railroad king, William B. Ogden, lent his name to the

enterprise, and by his cogent and well-considered appeals excited

confidence in statesmen and capitalists. Three years after, Congress

yielded to the popular pressure, and ordered those surveys, the result

of which lies in eleven bulky departmental volumes, and bears the name

of "Pacific Railroad Reports." Then came the Fremont campaign, with its

burning enthusiasm, the Pacific Railroad plank in the Republican

platform, and the defeat which was almost a victory. The succeeding year

a strong effort was made to secure a national charter; but though

supported by the Senate, the measure failed to carry in the Lower House.

This disastrous rebuff at Washington produced a profound indignation

throughout wide sections; yet it may be questioned whether the arguments

on which the railway scheme was based were sufficiently solid to justify

such encouragement to the investment of floating capital as the passage

of the bill would have implied. Beyond the Missouri River, even on the

line of Western travel, population was as sparsely scattered as in an

Indian reservation. Neither the gold reaches of Colorado nor the

silver-bearing "leads" of the Washoe district had as yet been

discovered. California was known only as a region of placer-digging, and

its agricultural capacities were very inadequately comprehended. Nor had

the Pacific Steamship Company ventured to create its China line. A

railroad certain to cost one hundred and forty millions, as the War

Department asserted, had in prospect for an immediate revenue only the

meagre trade of Salt Lake City, and the freightage of bullion from the

Pacific shore. Indeed, the prevailing faith in the enterprise almost

passes belief, when it is remembered that no satisfactory survey had

been made of the Sierra Nevada. That terrible pile of snow-crowned

peaks, of deep-sunk ravines, of jagged ridges and perilous chasms, where

the winding bridle-track scarcely permits a driver to walk beside his

mule, seemed to defy the skill of our boldest engineers. Overland

travellers reported depths of snow varying from twenty to fifty feet.

Fearful stories were narrated of luckless wagon-trains caught in the

narrow defiles by sudden mountain storms, and perishing helplessly amid

these Alpine rigors. It was surely a legitimate question whether a

railroad were possible in the face of such embarrassments; and it is

fair to attribute the adverse action of Congress to these

considerations, rather than to occult and scarcely explicable sectional

motives.

At the commencement of the next decade, all this, however, was changed.

California had developed into a rich grape-producing country. Its

cereals were beyond the demands of local consumption. A considerable

trade had sprung up with Oregon, the Sandwich Islands, and latterly with

China. The production of quicksilver was on the increase. Valuable

copper mines had recently been opened. Moreover, the immense gold seams

of Colorado, the vast silver deposits in Nevada, and the auriferous

quartz of Idaho, were disclosed almost simultaneously, diverting

population to the interior table-lands, and calling loudly for an

economical method of transit. Upon the Pacific shore, the desire for a

through road suddenly became intensified, while the profitableness of a

railway, at least to the Humboldt Sink, became more and more apparent.

If only the Sierra might be pierced! That appalling obstacle still threw

its shadow over the enterprise. Fortunately, at this very crisis there

wandered down from the mountain, in the pleasant summer days, a railway

surveyor and engineer, Theodore D. Judah, who had had extensive Eastern

experiences, and Californian as well. He was a thin, short,

light-haired Massachusetts man, enthusiastic, conscientious, cautious,

and with a quick eye for discovering the opportunities of science amid

the obstacles of nature,--a trait which in an engineer is rightly named

genius. While engaged in the survey of private claims, he had worked out

what appeared, on a hurried examination, to be a perfectly feasible

route through the hills. At Sacramento he modestly stated this belief;

and in a resident merchant, Mr. C. P. Huntington, he found a willing

listener. Mr. Huntington, who is to the California end of the Pacific

Railroad what Durant is to the co-operating Nebraska branch, describes

in graphic language the earnest consultations, prolonged for several

weeks, which he and a few other friends held in Leland Stanford's store

after the day's business was through. There were seven of these men all

told, not one of them worth less than half a million, and each ready to

stake his entire property in the enterprise, if it promised success. The

maps of the new-comer were consulted, the lines carefully studied, and

the result of their deliberations was the temporary organization of what

is now known as the Central Pacific Railroad Company of California. The

engineer in whose representations so much confidence was placed soon

proved that he was worthy of that confidence; money was forthcoming; an

adequate surveying party was sent out; and in the summer months of 1861,

Judah demonstrated the existence of a route by the South Yuba River and

the Donner Pass greatly superior to all other projected lines, with no

insuperable engineering difficulties, and capable of defence against all

interruption by freshet or snow. In the mean while the State Legislature

had granted a charter to the incorporators in July; and at the first

stockholders' meeting Stanford was elected president and Huntington

vice-president of the company. It was evident, however, that an

undertaking of such vast dimensions could not be completed without

government help; and the Sacramento party, confident that in Mr. Judah's

surveys lay the solution of the Pacific problem, repaired at once to

Washington, and opened anew the railroad agitation.

While the energy of the West was still engaged in penetrating the

secrets of the formidable Sierra, a movement meaning work began to

develop itself on the Eastern border. As a general statement, and

without reference to individual routes, it may be said that in the

Northern cis-Mississippi States there are two separate railroad systems,

running in lines about parallel from east to west; the upper combination

of routes debouching at Chicago, the lower, or central, at St. Louis.

These lines are slightly entangled with the roads concentrating at

Cincinnati and Indianapolis; but the division into an upper and lower

route is sufficiently preserved to admit of distinct classification. The

capitalists of both the great cities which form the terminal points of

these systems had long been equally alive to the vast possibilities of

the Pacific trade, and were eager, not only from local pride, but also

from knowledge of the simplest principles of commercial policy, to

secure to their respective communities the main bulk of this immense

prospective traffic. With this view, Chicago had projected three lines

across the State of Iowa, all of which were ultimately to converge at

Council Bluffs. Thence across the coffee-colored Missouri, over rolling

prairies, and up the slowly curving line of the Platte, stretched an

easily rising ascent, which, engineers affirmed, had been graduated by

nature as the most direct and practicable route for the interoceanic

railroad. As yet no one of these Iowa lines was complete; but they all

had a corporate existence, and their stockholders formed a nucleus for a

distinct Pacific movement.

St Louis, on the other hand, aided by the State of which it was the

commercial capital, had as early as 1851 commenced the construction of

the Missouri Pacific Railway, whose line shot straight as an arrow

westward across the State, curving slightly to the north at its

terminus, which was fixed at Kansas City. Four years later, the

Territorial government of Kansas incorporated the Leavenworth, Pawnee,

and Western Railroad, with privilege to build from Leavenworth to Fort

Riley, and thence westerly. It is apparent that the two companies might

readily connect, and thus form a rival grand trunk Pacific road.

Both the upper and the lower-enterprises, however, remained for many

years after their inception in a quiescent state, serving simply as

topics of newspaper discussion, or of buncombe addresses from local

rostrums. But in 1860-61 the unexpected discovery of large deposits of

the precious metals in Colorado and in Nevada gave an enormous impulse

to the carrying trade of the plains, and the same argument which proved

so cogent in California aroused the Western capitalists from their

lethargy. Rumors of the new line over the Sierra also found their way

East; and the Legislature of Kansas, now a young and vigorous State,

passed a joint resolution in March, 1862, urging on Congress the

immediate creation of a national Pacific Railroad Company. In

anticipation of this action, the agents of the lower route had already

proceeded to Washington, where they found themselves suddenly in the

presence, not only of the representatives of the Central Company of

California, but also of the Chicago projectors and their New York

friends.