piece of work which we owe to the single hand of Marston. A more
brilliant and amusing play than "The Dutch Courtesan," better composed,
better constructed, and better written, it would be difficult to
discover among the best comic and romantic works of its incomparable
period. The slippery and sanguinary strumpet who gives its name to the
play is sketched with such admirable force and freedom of hand as to
suggest the existence of an actual model who may unconsciously have sat
for the part under the scrutiny of eyes as keen and merciless as ever
took notes for a savagely veracious caricature--or for an unscrupulously
moral exposure. The jargon in which her emotions are expressed is as
Shakespearean in its breadth and persistency as that of Dr. Caius or
Captain Fluellen; but the reality of those emotions is worthy of a
less farcical vehicle for the expression of such natural craft and
passion. The sisters, Beatrice and Crispinella, seem at first too
evidently imitated from the characters of Aurelia and Phoenixella in the
earliest surviving comedy of Ben Jonson; but the "comedy daughter," as
Dickens (or Skimpole) would have expressed it, is even more coarsely and
roughly drawn than in the early sketch of the more famous dramatist. On
the other hand, it must be allowed--though it may not be recognized
without a certain sense of surprise--that the nobler and purer type of
womanhood or girlhood which we owe to the hand of Marston is far above
comparison with any which has been accomplished or achieved by the
studious and vehement elaboration of Ben Jonson's. The servility of
subservience which that great dramatist exacts from his typically
virtuous women--from the abject and anaemic wife of a Corvino or a
Fitzdottrel--is a quality which could not coexist with the noble and
loving humility of Marston's Beatrice. The admirable scene in which she
is brought face to face with the impudent pretentions of the woman who
asserts herself to have been preferred by the betrothed lover of the
expectant bride is as pathetic and impressive as it is lifelike and
original; and even in the excess of gentleness and modesty which prompts
the words, "I will love you the better; I cannot hate what he affected,"
there is nothing less noble or less womanly than in the subsequent reply
to the harlot's repeated taunts and inventions of insult: "He did not
ill not to love me, but sure he did not well to mock me: gentle minds
will pity, though they cannot love; yet peace and my love sleep with
him." The powerful soliloquy which closes the scene expresses no more
than the natural emotion of the man who has received so lovely a
revelation of his future bride's invincible and single-hearted love:
Cannot that woman's evil, jealousy,
Despite disgrace, nay, which is worse, contempt,
Once stir thy faith?
Coarse as is often the language of Marston's plays and satires, the man
was not coarse-minded--not gross of spirit nor base of nature--who could
paint so delicately and simply a figure so beautiful in the tenderness
of its purity.
The farcical underplot of this play is worthy of Molière in his broader
mood of farce. Hardly any Jourdain or Pourceaugnac, any George Dandin
or Comtesse d'Escarbagnas of them all, undergoes a more grotesque
experience or plays a more ludicrous part than is devised for Mr. and
Mrs. Mulligrub by the ingenuity of the indefatigable Cocledemoy--a
figure worthy to stand beside any of the tribe of Mascarille as _fourbum
imperator_. The animation and variety of inventive humor which keep
the reader's laughing attention awake and amused throughout these
adventurous scenes of incident and intrigue are not more admirable than
the simplicity and clearness of evolution or composition which recall
and rival the classic masterpieces of Latin and French comedy. There
is perhaps equal fertility of humor, but there certainly is not equal
harmony of structure in the play which Marston published next
year--"Parasitaster; or, the Fawn"; a name probably suggested by that of
Ben Jonson's "Poetaster," in which the author had himself been the
subject of a greater man's rage and ridicule. The wealth and the waste
of power displayed and paraded in this comedy are equally admirable and
lamentable; for the brilliant effect of its various episodes and
interludes is not more obvious than the eclipse of the central interest,
the collapse of the serious design, which results from the agglomeration
of secondary figures and the alternations of perpetual by-play. Three or
four better plays might have been made out of the materials here hurled
and huddled together into one. The Isabelle of Molière is not more
amusing or more delightful in her audacity of resource, in her
combination of loyalty with duplicity, innocence with intrigue, than the
daring and single-hearted young heroine of this play; but the "École des
Maris" is not encumbered with such a crowd of minor interests and
characters, of subordinate humors and complications, as the reader of
Marston's comedy finds interposed and intruded between his attention and
the main point of interest. He would fain see more of Dulcimel and
Tiberio, the ingenious and enterprising princess, the ingenuous and
responsive prince; he is willing to see as much as is shown him of their
fathers, the masquerading philosopher and the self-complacent dupe;
Granuffo, the patrician prototype of Captain John Bunsby, may take a
seat in the chambers of his memory beside the commander of the Cautious
Clara; the humors of a jealous foul-minded fool and a somewhat
audaciously virtuous wife may divert him by the inventive and vigorous
exposure of their various revolutions and results; but the final
impression is one of admiring disappointment and possibly ungrateful
regret that so much energetic satire and so much valuable time should
have been spent on the somewhat nauseous follies of "sickly knights" and
"vicious braggarts" that the really admirable and attractive parts of
the design are cramped and crowded out of room for the due development
of their just and requisite proportions.
A more eccentric, uneven, and incomposite piece of work than "The
Insatiate Countess" it would be difficult to find in English or in other
literature. The opening scene is picturesque and impressive; the closing
scene of the serious part is noble and pathetic; but the intervening
action is of a kind which too often aims at the tragic and hits the
burlesque. The incessant inconstancy of passion which hurries the
fantastic heroine through such a miscellaneous multitude of improvised
intrigues is rather a comic than a tragic motive for the conduct of a
play; and the farcical rapidity with which the puppets revolve makes it
impossible for the most susceptible credulity to take any real interest
or feel any real belief in the perpetual rotation of their feverish
moods and motives, their irrational doings and sufferings. The humor of
the underplot constantly verges on horse-play, and is certainly neither
delicate nor profound; but there is matter enough for mirth in it to
make the reader duly grateful for the patient care and admirable insight
which Mr. Bullen has brought to bear upon the really formidable if
apparently trivial task of reducing the chaotic corruption and confusion
of the text to reasonable form and comprehensible order. William
Barkstead, a narrative poet of real merit, and an early minister at the
shrine of Shakespeare, has been credited with the authorship of this
play: I am inclined to agree with the suggestion of its latest
editor--its first editor in any serious sense of the word--that both he
and Marston may have had a hand in it. His "Myrrha" belongs to the same
rather morbid class of poems as Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis" and
Marston's "Pygmalion's Image." Of the three Shakespeare's is not more
certainly the finest in occasional touches of picturesque poetry than it
is incomparably the most offensive to good taste and natural instinct on
the score of style and treatment. Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" can only
be classed with these elaborate studies of sensual aberration or excess
by those "who can see no difference between Titian and French
photographs." (I take leave, for once in a way, to quote from a private
letter--long since addressed to the present commentator by the most
illustrious of writers on art.)
There are some pretty verses and some ingenious touches in Marston's
"Entertainment," offered to Lady Derby by her daughter and son-in-law;
but the Latinity of his city pageant can scarcely have satisfied the
pupil of Buchanan, unless indeed the reputation of King James's tutor
as a Latin versifier or master of prosody has been scandalously usurped
under the falsest of pretences: a matter on which I am content to accept
the verdict of Landor. His contribution to Sir Robert Chester's
problematic volume may perhaps claim the singular distinction of being
more incomprehensible, more crabbed, more preposterous, and more
inexplicable than any other copy of verses among the "divers poetical
essays--done by the best and chiefest of our modern writers, with their
names subscribed to their particular works," in which Marston has the
honor to stand next to Shakespeare; and however far he may be from any
pretention to rival the incomparable charm of Shakespeare's opening
quatrain--incomparable in its peculiar melody and mystery except with
other lyrics of Shakespeare's or of Shelley's, it must, I think, be
admitted that an impartial student of both effusions will assign to
Marston rather than to Shakespeare the palm of distinction on the score
of tortuous obscurity and enigmatic verbiage. It may be--as it seems
to me--equally difficult to make sense of the greater and the lesser
poet's riddles and rhapsodies; but on the whole I cannot think that
Shakespeare's will be found so desperately indigestible by the ordinary
intelligence of manhood as Marston's. "The turtles fell to work, and
ate each other up," in a far more comprehensible and reasonable poem of
Hood's; and most readers of Chester's poem and the verses appended to it
will be inclined to think that it might have been as well--except for a
few lines of Shakespeare's and of Jonson's which we could not willingly
spare--if the Phoenix and Turtle had set them the example.
If the apparently apocryphal Mountebank's Masque be really the work of
Marston--and it is both coarse enough and clever enough to deserve the
attribution of his authorship--there is a singular echo in it from the
opening of Jonson's "Poetaster," the furious dramatic satire which
blasted for upward of two centuries the fame or the credit of the poet
to whose hand this masque has been hitherto assigned. In it, after a
full allowance of rough and ribald jocosity, the presence of a poet
becomes manifest with the entrance of an allegoric figure whose
declamatory address begins with these words:
Light, I salute thee; I, Obscurity,
The son of Darkness and forgetful Lethe;
I, that envy thy brightness, greet thee now,
Enforced by Fate.
Few readers of these lines will forget the verses with which Envy plays
prologue to "Poetaster; or, his Arraignment":
Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves,
Wishing thy golden splendor pitchy darkness.
Whoever may be the author of this masque, there are two or three
couplets well worth remembrance in one of the two versions of its text:
It is a life is never ill
To lie and sleep in roses still.
* * * * *
Who would not hear the nightingale still sing,
Or who grew ever weary of the spring?
The day must have her night, the spring her fall,
All is divided, none is lord of all.
These verses are worthy of a place in any one of Mr. Bullen's beautiful
and delightful volumes of lyrics from Elizabethan song-books; and higher
praise than this no lyrical poet could reasonably desire.
An inoffensive monomaniac, who thought fit to reprint a thing in
dramatic or quasi-dramatic form to which I have already referred in
passing--"Histriomastix; or, the Player Whipt"--thought likewise fit to
attribute to John Marston, of all men on earth, a share in the
concoction of this shapeless and unspeakable piece of nonsense. The fact
that one of the puppets in the puppet-show is supposed to represent a
sullen scholar, disappointed, impoverished, and virulent, would have
suggested to a rational reader that the scribbler who gave vent to the
impotence of his rancor in this hopeless ebullition of envious despair
had set himself to ape the habitual manner of Jonson and the occasional
manner of Marston with about as much success as might be expected from a
malignant monkey when attempting to reproduce in his grimaces the
expression of human indignation and contempt. But to students of natural
or literary history who cannot discern the human from the simious
element it suggests that the man thus imitated must needs have been the
imitator of himself; and the fact that the whole attempt at satire is
directed against dramatic poetry--that all the drivelling venom of a
dunce's denunciation, all the virulent slaver of his grovelling
insolence, is aimed at the stage for which Marston was employed in
writing--weighs nothing in the scales of imbecility against the
consideration that Marston's or Jonson's manner is here and there more
or less closely imitated; that we catch now and then some such echo of
his accent, some such savor of his style, as may be discovered or
imagined in the very few scattered lines which show any glimmer of
capacity for composition or versification. The eternal theme of envy,
invented by Jonson and worked to death by its inventor, was taken up
again by Marston and treated with a vigorous acerbity not always
unworthy of comparison with Jonson's; the same conception inspired with
something of eloquence the malignant idiocy of the satirical dunce who
has left us, interred and embedded in a mass of rubbish, a line or two
like these which he has put into the mouth of his patron saint or
guardian goddess, the incarnate essence of Envy:
Turn, turn, thou lackey to the winged time!
I envy thee in that thou art so slow,
And I so swift to mischief.
But the entire affair is obviously an effusion and an example of the
same academic sagacity or lucidity of appreciation which found utterance
in other contemporary protests of the universities against the universe.
In that abyss of dulness "The Return from Parnassus," a reader or a
diver who persists in his thankless toil will discover this pearl of a
fact--that men of culture had no more hesitation in preferring Watson to
Shakespeare than they have in preferring Byron to Shelley. The author of
the one deserves to have been the author of the other. Nobody can have
been by nature such a fool as to write either: art, education,
industry, and study were needful to achieve such composite perfection of
elaborate and consummate idiocy.
There is a good deal of bad rubbish, and there is some really brilliant
and vigorous writing, in the absurdly named and absurdly constructed
comedy of "Jack Drum's Entertainment"; but in all other points--in plot,
incident, and presentation of character--it is so scandalously beneath
contempt that I am sorry to recognize the hand of Marston in a play
which introduces us to a "noble father," the model of knightly manhood
and refined good sense, who on the news of a beloved daughter's
disappearance instantly proposes to console himself with a heavy
drinking-bout. No graver censure can be passed on the conduct of the
drama than the admission that this monstrous absurdity is not out of
keeping with the rest of it. There is hardly a single character in all
its rabble rout of lunatics who behaves otherwise than would beseem a
probationary candidate for Bedlam. Yet I fear there is more serious
evidence of a circumstantial kind in favor of the theory which would
saddle the fame of Marston with the charge of its authorship than such
as depends on peculiarities of metre and eccentricities of phrase. Some
other poet--though I know of none such--may have accepted and adopted
his theory that "vengeance" must count in verse as a word of three
syllables: I can hardly believe that the fancy would sound sweet in any
second man's ear: but this speciality is not more characteristic than
other and more important qualities of style--the peculiar abruptness,
the peculiar inflation, the peculiar crudity--which denote this comedy
as apparently if not evidently Marstonian. On the other hand, if it were
indeed his, it is impossible to conjecture why his name should have been
withheld from the title-page; and it must not be forgotten that even our
own day is not more fertile than was Marston's in the generation of that
slavish cattle which has always since the age of Horace fed ravenously
and thievishly on the pasture-land of every poet who has discovered or
reclaimed a field or a province of his own.
But our estimate of John Marston's rank or regiment in the noble army of
contemporary poets will not be in any way affected by acceptance or
rejection of any apocryphal addition to the canon of his writings. For
better and for worse, the orthodox and undisputed roll of them will
suffice to decide that question beyond all chance of intelligent or
rational dispute. His rank is high in his own regiment; and the colonel
of that regiment is Ben Jonson. At first sight he may seem rather to
belong to that brighter and more famous one which has Webster among its
captains, Dekker among its lieutenants, Heywood among its privates, and
Shakespeare at its head. Nor did he by any means follow the banner of
Jonson with such automatic fidelity as that imperious martinet of genius
was wont to exact from those who came to be "sealed of the tribe of
Ben." A rigid critic--a critic who should push rigidity to the verge of
injustice--might say that he was one of those recruits in literature
whose misfortune it is to fall between two stools--to halt between two
courses. It is certain that he never thoroughly mastered either the
cavalry drill of Shakespeare or the infantry drill of Jonson. But it is
no less certain that the few finest passages which attest the power and
the purity of his genius as a poet are above comparison with any such
examples of tragic poetry as can be attributed with certainty or with
plausibility to the hand which has left us no acknowledged works in that
line except "Sejanus his Fall" and "Catiline his Conspiracy." It is
superfluous to add that "Volpone" was an achievement only less far out
of his reach than "Hamlet." But this is not to say or to imply that he
does not deserve an honorable place among English poets. His savage and
unblushing violence or vehemence of satire has no taint of gloating
or morbid prurience in the turbid flow of its fitful and furious
rhetoric. The restless rage of his invective is as far as human
utterance can find itself from the cynical infidelity of an Iago. Of him
we may say with more rational confidence what was said of that more
potent and more truculent satirist:
An honest man he is, and hates the slime
That sticks on filthy deeds.
We may wish that he had not been so much given to trampling and stamping
on that slime as to evoke such malodorous exhalations as infect the
lower and shallower reaches of the river down which he proceeds to steer
us with so strenuous a hand. But it is in a spirit of healthy disgust,
not of hankering delight, that he insists on calling the indignant
attention of his readers to the baser and fouler elements of natural or
social man as displayed in the vicious exuberance or eccentricity of
affectation or of self-indulgence. His real interest and his real
sympathies are reserved for the purer and nobler types of womanhood and
manhood. In his first extant tragedy, crude and fierce and coarse and
awkward as is the general treatment of character and story, the sketch
of Mellida is genuinely beautiful in its pathetic and subdued
simplicity; though certainly no such tender and gentle figure was ever
enchased in a stranger or less attractive setting. There is an odd
mixture of care and carelessness in the composition of his plays which
is exemplified by the fact that another personage in the first part of
the same dramatic poem was announced to reappear in the second part as
a more important and elaborate figure; but this second part opens with
the appearance of his assassin, red-handed from the murder: and the
two parts were published in the same year. And indeed, except in
"Parasitaster" and "The Dutch Courtesan," a general defect in his
unassisted plays is the headlong confusion of plot, the helter-skelter
violence of incident, which would hardly have been looked for in the
work of a professional and practised hand. "What you Will" is modestly
described as "a slight-writ play": but slight and slovenly are not the
same thing; nor is simplicity the equivalent of incoherence. I have
already observed that Marston is apt to be heaviest when he aims at
being lightest; not, like Ben Jonson, through a laborious and
punctilious excess of conscience which is unwilling to let slip any
chance of effect, to let pass any detail of presentation; but rather,
we are tempted to suspect, through a sardonic sense of scorn for the
pefunctory task on which his ambitious and impatient hand is for the
time employed. Now and then, however--or perhaps it would be more
accurate to say once or twice--a gayer note is struck with a lighter
touch than usual: as, for instance, in the excellent parody of Lyly put
into the mouth of an idiot in the first scene of the fifth act of the
first part of "Antonio and Mellida." "You know, the stone called
_lapis_, the nearer it comes to the fire, the hotter it is; and the bird
which the geometricians call _avis_, the farther it is from the earth,
the nearer it is to the heaven; and love, the nigher it is to the flame,
the more remote (there's a word, remote!)--the more remote it is from
the frost." Shakespeare and Scott have condescended to caricature the
style or the manner of the inventor of euphuism: I cannot think their
burlesque of his elaborate and sententious triviality so happy, so
humorous, or so exact as this. But it is not on his capacity as a
satirist or humorist, it is on his occasionally triumphant success as a
serious or tragic poet, that the fame of Marston rests assuredly
established. His intermittent power to rid himself for a while of his
besetting faults, and to acquire or assume for a moment the very
excellences most incompatible with these, is as extraordinary for the
completeness as for the transience of its successful effects. The brief
fourth act of "Antonio and Mellida" is the most astonishing and
bewildering production of belated human genius that ever distracted or
discomfited a student. Verses more delicately beautiful followed by
verses more simply majestic than these have rarely if ever given
assurance of eternity to the fame of any but a great master in song:
Conceit you me: as having clasped a rose
Within my palm, the rose being ta'en away,
My hand retains a little breath of sweet,
So may man's trunk, his spirit slipped away,
Hold still a faint perfume of his sweet guest.
'Tis so: for when discursive powers fly out,
And roam in progress through the bounds of heaven,
The soul itself gallops along with them
As chieftain of this winged troop of thought,
Whilst the dull lodge of spirit standeth waste
Until the soul return.
Then follows a passage of sheer gibberish; then a dialogue of the
noblest and most dramatic eloquence; then a chaotic alternation of sense
and nonsense, bad Italian and mixed English, abject farce and dignified
rhetoric, spirited simplicity and bombastic jargon. It would be more and
less than just to take this act as a sample or a symbol of the author's
usual way of work; but I cannot imagine that a parallel to it, for evil
and for good, could be found in the works of any other writer.
The Muse of this poet is no maiden of such pure and august beauty as
enthralls us with admiration of Webster's; she has not the
gypsy-brightness and vagrant charm of Dekker's, her wild soft glances
and flashing smiles and fading traces of tears; she is no giddy girl,
but a strong woman with fine irregular features, large and luminous
eyes, broad intelligent forehead, eyebrows so thick and close together
that detraction might call her beetle-browed, powerful mouth and chin,
fine contralto voice (with an occasional stammer), expression
alternately repellent and attractive, but always striking and sincere.
No one has ever found her lovely; but there are times when she has a
fascination of her own which fairer and more famous singers might envy
her; and the friends she makes are as sure to be constant as she, for
all her occasional roughness and coarseness, is sure to be loyal in the
main to the nobler instincts of her kind and the loftier traditions of
her sisterhood.
THOMAS MIDDLETON