of his time and the observations of his experience, one alone stands out
as distinct from the rest by right of such astonishing superiority in
merit of style and interest of matter that I prefer to reserve it for
separate and final consideration. But it would require more time and
labor than I can afford to give an adequate account of so many effusions
or improvisations as served for fuel to boil the scanty and precarious
pot of his uncertain and uncomfortable sustenance. "The Wonderful Year"
of the death of Elizabeth, the accession of James, and the devastation
of London by pestilence, supplied him with matter enough for one of his
quaintest and liveliest tracts: in which the historical part has no
quality so valuable or remarkable as the grotesque mixture of horror and
humor in the anecdotes appended "like a merry epilogue to a dull play,
of purpose to shorten the lives of long winter's nights that lie
watching in the dark for us," with touches of rude and vivid pleasantry
not unworthy to remind us, I dare not say of the _Decameron_, but at
least of the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_. In "The Seven Deadly Sins of
London"--one of the milder but less brilliant _Latter-day Pamphlets_ of
a gentler if no less excitable Carlyle--there are touches of earnest
eloquence as well as many quaint and fitful illustrations of social
history; but there is less of humorous vigor and straightforward realism
than in the preceding tract. And yet there are good things to be
gathered out of this effusive and vehement lay sermon; this sentence,
for example, is worth recollection: "He is not slothful that is only
lazy, that only wastes his good hours and his silver in luxury and
licentious ease:--no, he is the true slothful man, that does no good."
And there is genuine insight as well as honesty and courage in his
remonstrance with the self-love and appeal against the self-deceit of
his countrymen, so prone to cry out on the cruelty of others, on the
blood-thirstiness of Frenchmen and Spaniards, and to overlook the
heavy-headed brutality of their own habitual indifference and neglect.
Although the cruelty of penal laws be now abrogated, yet the condition
of the poorest among us is assuredly not such that we can read without a
sense of their present veracity the last words of this sentence: "Thou
set'st up posts to whip them when they are alive: set up an hospital to
comfort them being sick, or purchase ground for them to dwell in when
they be well; _and that is, when they be dead_." The next of Dekker's
tracts is more of a mere imitation than any of his others: the influence
of a more famous pamphleteer and satirist, Tom Nash, is here not only
manifest as that of a model, but has taken such possession of his
disciple that he is hardly more than a somewhat servile copyist; not
without a touch of his master's more serious eloquence, but with less
than little of his peculiar energy and humor. That rushing wind of
satire, that storm of resonant invective, that inexhaustible volubility
of contempt, which rages through the controversial writings of the
lesser poet, has sunk to a comparative whisper; the roar of his Homeric
or Rabelaisian laughter to a somewhat forced and artificial chuckle.
This "News from Hell, brought by the Devil's Carrier," and containing
"The Devil's Answer to Pierce Penniless," might have miscarried by the
way without much more loss than that of such an additional proof as we
could have been content to spare of Dekker's incompetence to deal with a
subject which he was curiously fond of handling in earnest and in jest.
He seems indeed to have fancied himself, if not something of a Dante,
something at least of a Quevedo; but his terrors are merely tedious, and
his painted devils would not terrify a babe. In this tract, however,
there are now and then some fugitive felicities of expression; and this
is more than can be said for either the play or the poem in which he has
gone, with feebler if not more uneasy steps than Milton's Satan, over
the same ground of burning marl. There is some spirit in the prodigal's
denunciation of his miserly father: but the best thing in the pamphlet
is the description of the soul of a hero bound for paradise, whose name
is given only in the revised and enlarged edition which appeared a year
later under the title of "A Knight's Conjuring; done in earnest;
discovered in jest." The narrative of "William Eps his death" is a fine
example of that fiery sympathy with soldiers which glows in so many
pages of Dekker's verse, and flashes out by fits through the murky
confusion of his worst and most formless plays; but the introduction of
thil hero is as fine a passage of prose as he has left us:
The foremost of them was a personage of so composed a presence,
that Nature and Fortune had done him wrong, if they had not
made him a soldier. _In his countenance there was a kind of
indignation, fighting with a kind of exalted joy_, which by his
very gesture were apparently decipherable; for he was jocund,
that his soul went out of him in so glorious a triumph; but
disdainfully angry, that she wrought her enlargement through no
more dangers: yet were there bleeding witnesses enow on his
breast, which testified, he did not yield till he was conquered,
and was not conquered, till there was left nothing of a man in
him to be overcome.
That the poet's loyalty and devotion were at least as ardent when
offered by his gratitude to sailors as to soldiers we may see by this
description of "The Seaman" in his next work:
A progress doth he take from realm to realm,
With goodly water-pageants borne before him;
The safety of the land sits at his helm,
No danger here can touch, but what runs o'er him:
But being in heaven's eye still, it doth restore him
To livelier spirts; to meet death with ease,
_If thou wouldst know thy maker, search the seas_.[1]
[Footnote 1: The italics are here the author's.]
These homely but hearty lines occur in a small and mainly metrical
tract bearing a title so quaint that I am tempted to transcribe it at
length: "The Double PP. A Papist in Arms. Bearing Ten several Shields.
Encountered by the Protestant. At Ten several Weapons. A Jesuit Marching
before them. Cominùs and Eminùs." There are a few other vigorous and
pointed verses in this little patriotic impromptu, but the greater part
of it is merely curious and eccentric doggrel.
The next of Dekker's tracts or pamphlets was the comparatively
well-known "Gull's Hornbook." This brilliant and vivid little satire is
so rich in simple humor, and in life-like photography taken by the
sunlight of an honest and kindly nature, that it stands second only to
the author's masterpiece in prose, "The Bachelor's Banquet," which has
waited so much longer for even the limited recognition implied by a
private reprint. There are so many witty or sensible or humorous or
grotesque excerpts to be selected from this pamphlet--and not from the
parts borrowed or copied from a foreign satire on the habits of slovenly
Hollanders--that I take the first which comes under my notice on
reopening the book; a study which sets before us in fascinating relief
the professional poeticule of a period in which as yet clubs, coteries,
and newspapers were not--or at the worst were nothing to speak of:
If you be a Poet, and come into the Ordinary (though it can be
no great glory to be an ordinary Poet) order yourself thus.
Observe no man, doff not cap to that gentleman to-day at dinner,
to whom, not two nights since, you were beholden for a supper;
but, after a turn or two in the room, take occasion (pulling out
your gloves) to have Epigram, or Satire, or Sonnet fastened in
one of them, that may (as it were unwittingly to you) offer
itself to the Gentlemen: they will presently desire it: but,
without much conjuration from them, and a pretty kind of
counterfeit lothness in yourself, do not read it; and, though it
be none of your own, swear you made it.
This coupling of injunction and prohibition is worthy of Shakespeare or
of Sterne:
Marry, if you chance to get into your hands any witty thing of
another man's, that is somewhat better, I would counsel you
then, if demand be made who composed it, you may say: "'Faith,
a learned Gentleman, a very worthy friend." And this seeming to
lay it on another man will be counted either modesty in you, or
a sign that you are not ambitious of praise, _or else that you
dare not take it upon you, for fear of the sharpness it carries
with it_.
The modern poetaster by profession knows a trick worth any two of these:
but it is curious to observe the community of baseness, and the
comparative innocence of awkwardness and inexperience, which at once
connote the species and denote the specimens of the later and the
earlier animalcule.
The "Jests to make you merry," which in Dr. Grosart's edition are placed
after "The Gull's Horn-book," though dated two years earlier, will
hardly give so much entertainment to any probable reader in our own time
as "The Misery of a Prison, and a Prisoner," will give him pain to read
of in the closing pages of the same pamphlet, when he remembers how
long--at the lowest computation--its author had endured the loathsome
and hideous misery which he has described with such bitter and pathetic
intensity and persistency in detail. Well may Dr. Grosart say that "it
shocks us to-day, though so far off, to think of 1598 to 1616 onwards
covering so sorrowful and humiliating trials for so finely touched a
spirit as was Dekker's"; but I think as well as hope that there is no
sort of evidence to that surely rather improbable as well as deplorable
effect. It may be "possible," but it is barely possible, that some
"seven years' continuous imprisonment" is the explanation of an
ambiguous phrase which is now incapable of any certain solution, and
capable of many an interpretation far less deplorable than this. But in
this professedly comic pamphlet there are passages as tragic, if not as
powerful, as any in the immortal pages of _Pickwick_ and _Little
Dorrit_ which deal with a later but a too similar phase of prison
discipline and tradition:
The thing that complained was a man:--"Thy days have gone over
thee like the dreams of a fool, thy nights like the watchings of
a madman.--Oh sacred liberty! with how little devotion do men
come into thy temples, when they cannot bestow upon thee too
much honor! Thy embracements are more delicate than those of a
young bride with her lover, and to be divorced from thee is half
to be damned! For what else is a prison but the very next door
to hell? It is a man's grave, wherein he walks alive: it is a
sea wherein he is always shipwrackt: it is a lodging built out
of the world: it is a wilderness where all that wander up and
down grow wild, and all that come into it are devoured."
In Dekker's next pamphlet, his "Dream," there are perhaps half a dozen
tolerably smooth and vigorous couplets immersed among many more vacuous
and vehement in the intensity of their impotence than any reader and
admirer of his more happily inspired verse could be expected to believe
without evidence adduced. Of imagination, faith, or fancy, the ugly
futility of this infernal vision has not--unless I have sought more than
once for it in vain--a single saving trace or compensating shadow.
Two years after he had tried his hand at an imitation of Nash, Dekker
issued the first of the pamphlets in which he attempted to take up the
succession of Robert Greene as a picaresque writer, or purveyor of
guide-books through the realms of rascaldom. "The Bellman of London," or
Rogue's Horn-book, begins with a very graceful and fanciful description
of the quiet beauty and seclusion of a country retreat in which the
author had sought refuge from the turmoil and forgetfulness of the vices
of the city; and whence he was driven back upon London by disgust at the
discovery of villany as elaborate and roguery as abject in the beggars
and thieves of the country as the most squalid recesses of metropolitan
vice or crime could supply. The narrative of this accidental discovery
is very lively and spirited in its straightforward simplicity, and the
subsequent revelations of rascality are sometimes humorous as well as
curious: but the demand for such literature must have been singularly
persistent to evoke a sequel to this book next year, "Lantern and
Candle-light; or, the Bellman's Second Night-walk," in which Dekker
continues his account of vagrant and villanous society, its lawless laws
and its unmannerly manners; and gives the reader some vivid studies,
interspersed with facile rhetoric and interlarded with indignant
declamation, of the tricks of horse-dealers and the shifts of
gypsies--or "moon-men" as he calls them; a race which he regarded with
a mixture of angry perplexity and passionate disgust. "A Strange
Horse-race" between various virtues and vices gives occasion for the
display of some allegoric ingenuity and much indefatigable but fatiguing
pertinacity in the exposure of the more exalted swindlers of the
age--the crafty bankrupts who anticipated the era of the Merdles
described by Dickens, but who can hardly have done much immediate injury
to a capitalist of the rank of Dekker. Here too there are glimpses of
inventive spirit and humorous ingenuity; but the insufferable iteration
of jocose demonology and infernal burlesque might tempt the most patient
and the most curious of readers to devote the author, with imprecations
or invocations as elaborate as his own, to the spiritual potentate whose
"last will and testament" is transcribed into the text of this pamphlet.
In "The Dead Term" such a reader will find himself more or less relieved
by the return of his author to a more terrene and realistic sort of
allegory. This recriminatory dialogue between the London and the
Westminster of 1608 is now and then rather flatulent in its reciprocity
of rhetoric, but is enlivened by an occasional breath of genuine
eloquence, and redeemed by touches of historic or social interest. The
title and motto of the next year's pamphlet--"Work for Armourers; or,
the Peace is Broken.--God help the Poor, the rich can shift"--were
presumably designed to attract the casual reader, by what would now be
called a sensational device, to consideration of the social question
between rich and poor--or, as he puts it, between the rival queens,
Poverty and Money. The forces on either side are drawn out and arrayed
with pathetic ingenuity, and the result is indicated with a quaint and
grim effect of humorous if indignant resignation. "The Raven's Almanack"
of the same year, though portentous in its menace of plague, famine, and
civil war, is less noticeable for its moral and religious declamation
than for its rather amusing than edifying anecdotes; which, it must
again be admitted, in their mixture of jocular sensuality with somewhat
ferocious humor, rather remind us of King Louis XI. than of that royal
novelist's Italian models or precursors. "A Rod for Runaways" is the
title of a tract which must have somewhat perplexed the readers who came
to it for practical counsel or suggestion, seeing that the very
title-page calls their attention to the fact that, "if they look back,
they may behold many fearful judgments of God, sundry ways pronounced
upon this city, and on several persons, both flying from it and staying
in it." What the medical gentleman to whom this tract was dedicated may
have thought of the author's logic and theology, we can only
conjecture. But even in this little pamphlet there are anecdotes and
details which would repay the notice of a social historian as curious in
his research and as studious in his condescension as Macaulay.
A prayer-book written or compiled by a poet of Dekker's rank in Dekker's
age would have some interest for the reader of a later generation even
if it had not the literary charm which distinguishes the little volume
of devotions now reprinted from a single and an imperfect copy. We
cannot be too grateful for the good-fortune and the generous care to
which we are indebted for this revelation of a work of genius so curious
and so delightful that the most fanatical of atheists or agnostics, the
hardest and the driest of philosophers, might be moved and fascinated by
the exquisite simplicity of its beauty. Hardly even in those almost
incomparable collects which Macaulay so aptly compared with the sonnets
of Milton shall we find sentences or passages more perfect in their
union of literary grace with ardent sincerity than here. Quaint as are
several of the prayers in the professional particulars of their
respective appeals, this quaintness has nothing of irreverence or
incongruity: and the subtle simplicity of cadence in the rhythmic
movement of the style is so nearly impeccable that we are perplexed to
understand how so exquisite an ear as was Dekker's at its best can have
been tolerant of such discord or insensible to such collapse as so often
disappoints or shocks us in the hastier and cruder passages of his
faltering and fluctuating verse. The prayer for a soldier going to
battle and his thanksgiving after victory are as noble in the dignity of
their devotion as the prayers for a woman in travail and "for them that
visit the sick" are delicate and earnest in their tenderness. The prayer
for a prisoner is too beautiful to stand in need of the additional and
pathetic interest which it derives from the fact of its author's
repeated experience of the misery it expresses with such piteous yet
such manful resignation. The style of these faultlessly simple devotions
is almost grotesquely set off by the relief of a comparison with the
bloated bombast and flatulent pedantry of a prayer by the late Queen
Elizabeth which Dekker has transcribed into his text--it is hardly
possible to suppose, without perception of the contrast between its
hideous jargon and the refined purity of his own melodious English. The
prayer for the Council is singularly noble in the eloquence of its
patriotism: the prayer for the country is simply magnificent in the
austere music of its fervent cadences: the prayer in time of civil war
is so passionate in its cry for deliverance from all danger of the
miseries then or lately afflicting the continent that it might well have
been put up by a loyal patriot in the very heat of the great war which
Dekker might have lived to see break out in his own country. The prayer
for the evening is so beautiful as to double our regret for the
deplorable mutilation which has deprived us of all but the opening of
the morning prayer.[1] The feathers fallen from the wings of these "Four
Birds of Noah's Ark" would be worth more to the literary ornithologist
than whole flocks of such "tame villatic fowl" as people the ordinary
coops and hen-roosts of devotional literature.
[Footnote 1: A noticeable instance of the use of a common word in the
original and obsolete sense of its derivation may be cited from the
unfortunately truncated and scanty fragment of a prayer for the court:
"Oh Lord, be thou a husband" (house-band) "to that great household of
our King."]
One work only of Dekker's too often overtasked and heavy-laden genius
remains to be noticed: it is one which gives him a high place forever
among English humorists. No sooner has the reader run his eye over the
first three or four pages than he feels himself, with delight and
astonishment, in the company of a writer whose genius is akin at once to
Goldsmith's and to Thackeray's; a writer whose style is so pure and
vigorous, so lucid and straightforward, that we seem to have already
entered upon the best age of English prose. Had Mr. Matthew Arnold,
instead of digging in Chapman for preposterous barbarisms and
eccentricities of pedantry, chanced to light upon this little treatise,
or had he condescended to glance over Daniel's compact and admirable
"Defence of Rhyme," he would have found in writers of the despised
Shakespearean epoch much more than a foretaste of those excellent
qualities which he imagined to have been first imported into our
literature by writers of the age of Dryden. The dialogue of the very
first couple introduced with such skilful simplicity of presentation at
the opening of Dekker's pamphlet is worthy of Sterne: the visit of the
gossip or kinswoman in the second chapter is worthy of Molière, and the
humors of the monthly nurse in the third are worthy of Dickens. The
lamentations of the lady for the decay of her health and beauty in
consequence of her obsequious husband's alleged neglect, "no more like
the woman I was than an apple is like an oyster"; the description of the
poor man making her broth with his own hands, jeered at by the maids and
trampled underfoot by Mrs. Gamp; the preparations for the christening
supper and the preliminary feast of scandal--are full of such bright and
rich humor as to recall even the creator of Dogberry and Mrs. Quickly.
It is of Shakespeare again that we are reminded in the next chapter, by
the description of the equipage to which the husband of "a woman that
hath a charge of children" is reduced when he has to ride to the assizes
in sorrier plight than Petruchio rode in to his wedding; the details
remind us also of Balzac in the minute and grotesque intensity of their
industrious realism: but the scene on his return reminds us rather of
Thackeray at the best of his bitterest mood--the terrible painter of
Mrs. Mackenzie and Mrs. General Baynes. "The humor of a woman that
marries her inferior by birth" deals with more serious matters in a
style not unworthy of Boccaccio; and no comedy of the time--Shakespeare's
always excepted--has a scene in it of richer and more original humor
than brightens the narrative which relates the woes of the husband
who invites his friends to dinner and finds everything under lock and
key. Hardly in any of Dekker's plays is the comic dialogue so masterly
as here--so vivid and so vigorous in its life-like ease and spontaneity.
But there is not one of the fifteen chapters, devoted each to the
description of some fresh "humor," which would not deserve, did space
and time allow of it, a separate note of commentary. The book is simply
one of the very finest examples of humorous literature, touched now
and then with serious and even tragic effect, that can be found in any
language; it is generally and comparatively remarkable for its freedom
from all real coarseness or brutality, though the inevitable change of
manners between Shakespeare's time and our own may make some passages
or episodes seem now and then somewhat over-particular in plain speaking
or detail. But a healthier, manlier, more thoroughly good-natured and
good-humored book was never written; nor one in which the author's real
and respectful regard for womanhood was more perceptible through the
veil of a satire more pure from bitterness and more honest in design.
The list of works over which we have now glanced is surely not
inconsiderable; and yet the surviving productions of Dekker's genius or
necessity are but part of the labors of his life. If he wanted--as
undoubtedly he would seem to have wanted--that "infinite capacity for
taking pains" which Carlyle professed to regard as the synonyme of
genius, he was at least not deficient in that rough-and-ready diligence
which is habitually in harness, and cheerfully or resignedly prepared
for the day's work. The names of his lost plays--all generally
suggestive of some true dramatic interest, now graver and now
lighter--are too numerous to transcribe: but one at least of them must
excite unspeakable amazement as well as indiscreet curiosity in every
reader of Ariosto or La Fontaine who comes in the course of the
catalogue upon such a title as "Jocondo and Astolfo." How on earth the
famous story of Giocondo could possibly be adapted for representation on
the public stage of Shakespearean London is a mystery which the
execrable cook of the execrable Warburton has left forever insoluble and
inconceivable: for to that female fiend, the object of Sir Walter
Scott's antiquarian imprecations, we owe, unless my memory misguides me,
the loss of this among other irredeemable treasures.
To do justice upon the faults of this poet is easy for any sciolist: to
do justice to his merits is less easy for the most competent scholar and
the most appreciative critic. In despite of his rare occasional spurts
or outbreaks of self-assertion or of satire, he seems to stand before us
a man of gentle, modest, shiftless, and careless nature, irritable and
placable, eager and unsteady, full of excitable kindliness and deficient
in strenuous principle; loving the art which he professionally followed,
and enjoying the work which he occasionally neglected. There is no
unpoetic note in his best poetry such as there is too often--nay, too
constantly--in the severer work and the stronger genius of Ben Jonson.
What he might have done under happier auspices, or with a tougher fibre
of resolution and perseverance in his character, it is waste of time and
thought for his most sympathetic and compassionate admirers to assume or
to conjecture: what he has done, with all its shortcomings and
infirmities, is enough to secure for him a distinct and honorable place
among the humorists and the poets of his country.
JOHN MARSTON