of England is her literature and the greatest glory of English
literature is its poetry, it is not less true that the greatest glory of
English poetry lies rather in its dramatic than its epic or its lyric
triumphs. The name of Shakespeare is above the names even of Milton and
Coleridge and Shelley: and the names of his comrades in art and their
immediate successors are above all but the highest names in any other
province of our song. There is such an overflowing life, such a superb
exuberance of abounding and exulting strength, in the dramatic poetry of
the half-century extending from 1590 to 1640, that all other epochs of
English literature seem as it were but half awake and half alive by
comparison with this generation of giants and of gods. There is more sap
in this than in any other branch of the national bay-tree: it has an
energy in fertility which reminds us rather of the forest than the
garden or the park. It is true that the weeds and briers of the
underwood are but too likely to embarrass and offend the feet of the
rangers and the gardeners who trim the level flower-plots or preserve
the domestic game of enclosed and ordered lowlands in the tamer demesnes
of literature. The sun is strong and the wind sharp in the climate which
reared the fellows and the followers of Shakespeare. The extreme
inequality and roughness of the ground must also be taken into account
when we are disposed, as I for one have often been disposed, to wonder
beyond measure at the apathetic ignorance of average students in regard
of the abundant treasure to be gathered from this wildest and most
fruitful province in the poetic empire of England. And yet, since
Charles Lamb threw open its gates to all comers in the ninth year of the
nineteenth century, it cannot but seem strange that comparatively so few
should have availed themselves of the entry to so rich and royal an
estate. The subsequent labors of Mr. Dyce made the rough ways plain and
the devious paths straight for all serious and worthy students. And now
again Mr. Bullen has taken up a task than which none more arduous and
important, none worthier of thanks and praise, can be undertaken by an
English scholar. In his beautiful and valuable edition of Marlowe there
are but two points to which exception may be taken. It was, I think, a
fault of omission to exclude the apocryphal play of "Lust's Dominion"
from a place in the appendix: it was, I am certain, a fault of
commission to admit instead of it the much bepuffed and very puffy
rubbish of the late Mr. Home. That clever, versatile, and energetic
writer never went so far out of his depth or floundered so pitifully in
such perilous waters as when he ventured to put verses of his own into
the mouth of Christopher Marlowe. These errors we must all hope to see
rectified in a second issue of the text: and meantime we can but welcome
with all possible gratitude and applause the magnificent series of old
plays by unknown writers which we owe to the keen research and the fine
appreciation of Marlowe's latest editor. Of these I may find some future
occasion to speak: my present business is with the admirable poet who
has been promoted to the second place in Mr. Bullen's collection of the
English dramatists.
The selection of Middleton for so distinguished a place of honor may
probably not approve itself to the judgment of all experts in dramatic
literature. Charles Lamb, as they will all remember, would have advised
the editor "to begin with the collected plays of Heywood": which as yet,
like the plays of Dekker and of Chapman, remain unedited in any serious
or scholarly sense of the term. The existing reprints merely reproduce,
without adequate elucidation or correction, the corrupt and chaotic text
of the worst early editions: while Middleton has for upward of half a
century enjoyed the privilege denied to men who are usually accounted
his equals if not his superiors in poetic if not in dramatic genius.
Even for an editor of the ripest learning and the highest ability there
is comparatively little to do where Mr. Dyce has been before him in the
field. However, we must all give glad and grateful welcome to a new
edition of a noble poet who has never yet received his full meed of
praise and justice: though our gratitude and our gladness may be
quickened and dilated by the proverbial sense of further favors to come.
The first word of modern tribute to the tragic genius of Thomas
Middleton was not spoken by Charles Lamb. Four years before the
appearance of the priceless volume which established his fame forever
among all true lovers of English poetry by copious excerpts from five
of his most characteristic works, Walter Scott, in a note on the
fifty-sixth stanza of the second fytte of the metrical romance of "Sir
Tristrem," had given a passing word of recognition to the "horribly
striking" power of "some passages" in Middleton's masterpiece: which
was first reprinted eleven years later, in the fourth volume of Dilke's
_Old Plays_. Lamb, surprisingly enough, has given not a single extract
from that noble tragedy: it was reserved for Leigh Hunt, when speaking
of its author, to remark that "there is one character of his (De Flores
in 'The Changeling') which, for effect at once tragical, probable, and
poetical, surpasses anything I know of in the drama of domestic life."
The praise is not a whit too high; the truth could not have been better
said.
The play with which Mr. Bullen, altering the arrangement adopted by Mr.
Dyce, opens his edition of Middleton, is a notable example of the best
and the worst qualities which distinguish or disfigure the romantic
comedy of the Shakespearean age. The rude and reckless composition, the
rough intrusion of savorless farce, the bewildering combinations of
incident and the far more bewildering fluctuations of character--all the
inconsistencies, incongruities, incoherences of the piece are forgotten
when the reader remembers and reverts to the passages of exquisite and
fascinating beauty which relieve and redeem the utmost errors of
negligence and haste. To find anything more delightful, more satisfying
in its pure and simple perfection of loveliness, we must turn to the
very best examples of Shakespeare's youthful work. Nay, it must be
allowed that in one or two of the master's earliest plays--in "Two
Gentlemen of Verona," for instance--we shall find nothing comparable for
charm and sincerity of sweet and passionate fancy with such enchanting
verses as these:
O happy persecution, I embrace thee
With an unfettered soul! So sweet a thing
It is to sigh upon the rack of love,
Where each calamity is groaning witness
Of the poor martyr's faith. I never heard
Of any true affection, but 'twas nipt
With care, that, like the caterpillar, eats
The leaves off the spring's sweetest book, the rose.
Love, bred on earth, is often nursed in hell:
By rote it reads woe, ere it learn to spell.
Again: the "secure tyrant, but unhappy lover," whose prisoner and rival
has thus expressed his triumphant resignation, is counselled by his
friend to "go laugh and lie down," as not having slept for three nights;
but answers, in words even more delicious than his supplanter's:
Alas, how can I? he that truly loves
Burns out the day in idle fantasies;
And when the lamb bleating doth bid good-night
Unto the closing day, then tears begin
To keep quick time unto the owl, whose voice
Shrieks like the bellman in the lover's ears:
Love's eye the jewel of sleep, O, seldom wears!
The early lark is wakened from her bed,
Being only by love's plaints disquieted;
And, singing in the morning's ear, she weeps,
Being deep in love, at lovers' broken sleeps:
But say a golden slumber chance to tie
With silken strings the cover of love's eye,
Then dreams, magician-like, mocking present
Pleasures, whose fading leaves more discontent.
Perfect in music, faultless in feeling, exquisite in refined simplicity
of expression, this passage is hardly more beautiful and noble than one
or two in the play which follows. "The Phoenix" is a quaint and homely
compound of satirical realism in social studies with Utopian invention
in the figure of an ideal prince, himself a compound of Harun-al-Rashid
and "Albert the Good," who wanders through the play as a detective in
disguise, and appears in his own person at the close to discharge in
full the general and particular claims of justice and philanthropy. The
whole work is slight and sketchy, primitive if not puerile in parts, but
easy and amusing to read; the confidence reposed by the worthy monarch
in noblemen of such unequivocal nomenclature as Lord Proditor,
Lussurioso, and Infesto, is one of the signs that we are here still on
the debatable borderland between the old Morality and the new Comedy--a
province where incarnate vices and virtues are seen figuring and
posturing in what can scarcely be called masquerade. But the two fine
soliloquies of Phoenix on the corruption of the purity of law (act i.
scene iv.) and the profanation of the sanctity of marriage (act ii.
scene ii.) are somewhat riper and graver in style, with less admixture
of rhyme and more variety of cadence, than the lovely verses above
quoted. Milton's obligation to the latter passage is less direct than
his earlier obligation to a later play of Middleton's from which he
transferred one of the most beautiful as well as most famous images in
"Lycidas": but his early and intimate acquaintance with Middleton had
apparently (as Mr. Dyce seems to think[1]) left in the ear of the blind
old poet a more or less distinct echo from the noble opening verses of
the dramatist's address to "reverend and honorable matrimony."
[Footnote 1: Mr. Dyce would no doubt have altered his opinion had he
lived to see the evidence adduced by the Director of the New Meltun
Society that the real author of "A Game at Chess" was none other than
John Milton himself, whose earliest poems had appeared the year before
the publication of that anti-papal satire. This discovery is only less
curious and precious than a later revelation which we must accept on the
same authority, that "Comus" was written by Sir John Suckling, "Paradise
Regained" by Lord Rochester, and "Samson Agonistes" by Elkanah Settle:
while on the other hand it may be affirmed with no less confidence that
Milton--who never would allow his name to be spelled right on the
title-page or under the dedication of any work published by him--owed
his immunity from punishment after the Restoration to the admitted fact
that he was the real author of Dryden's "Astraea Redux."]
In "Michaelmas Term" the realism of Middleton's comic style is no
longer alloyed or flavored with poetry or fancy. It is an excellent
Hogarthian comedy, full of rapid and vivid incident, of pleasant or
indignant humor. Its successor, "A Trick to Catch the Old One," is by
far the best play Middleton had yet written, and one of the best he ever
wrote. The merit of this and his other good comedies does not indeed
consist in any new or subtle study of character, any Shakespearean
creation or Jonsonian invention of humors or of men: the spendthrifts
and the misers, the courtesans and the dotards, are figures borrowed
from the common stock of stage tradition: it is the vivid variety of
incident and intrigue, the freshness and ease and vigor of the style,
the clear straightforward energy and vivacity of the action, that the
reader finds most praiseworthy in the best comic work of such ready
writers as Middleton and Dekker. The dialogue has sometimes touches of
real humor and flashes of genuine wit: but its readable and enjoyable
quality is generally independent of these. Very witty writing may be
very dreary reading, for want of natural animation and true dramatic
movement: and in these qualities at least the rough-and-ready work of
our old dramatists is seldom if ever deficient.
It is, however, but too probable that the reader's enjoyment may be
crossed with a dash of exasperation when he finds a writer of real
genius so reckless of fame and self-respect as the pressure of want or
the weariness of overwork seems but too often and too naturally to have
made too many of the great dramatic journeymen whose powers were half
wasted or half worn out in the struggle for bare bread. No other excuse
than this can be advanced for the demerit of Middleton's next comedy.
Had the author wished to show how well and how ill he could write at his
worst and at his best, he could have given no fairer proof than by the
publication of two plays issued under his name in the same year 1608.
"The Family of Love" is, in my judgment, unquestionably and incomparably
the worst of Middleton's plays: very coarse, very dull, altogether
distasteful and ineffectual. As a religious satire it is so utterly
pointless as to leave no impression of any definite folly or distinctive
knavery in the doctrine or the practice of the particular sect held up
by name to ridicule: an obscure body of feather-headed fanatics,
concerning whom we can only be certain that they were decent and
inoffensive in comparison with the yelling Yahoos whom the scandalous
and senseless license of our own day allows to run and roar about the
country unmuzzled and unwhipped.
There is much more merit in the broad comedy of "Your Five Gallants," a
curious burlesque study of manners and morals not generally commendable
for imitation. The ingenious and humorous invention which supplies a
centre for the picture and a pivot for the action is most singularly
identical with the device of a modern detective as recorded by the
greatest English writer of his day. "The Butcher's Story," told to
Dickens by the policeman who had played the part of the innocent young
butcher, may be profitably compared by lovers of detective humor with
the story of Fitsgrave--a "thrice worthy" gentleman who under the
disguise of a young gull fresh from college succeeds in circumventing
and unmasking the five associated swindlers of variously villanous
professions by whom a fair and amiable heiress is beleaguered and
befooled. The play is somewhat crude and hasty in construction, but full
of life and fun and grotesque variety of humorous event.
The first of Middleton's plays to attract notice from students of a
later generation, "A Mad World, My Masters," if not quite so thoroughly
good a comedy as "A Trick to Catch the Old One," must be allowed to
contain the very best comic character ever drawn or sketched by the
fertile and flowing pen of its author. The prodigal grandfather, Sir
Bounteous Progress, is perhaps the most life-like figure of a
good-humored and liberal old libertine that ever amused or scandalized
a tolerant or intolerant reader. The chief incidents of the action are
admirably humorous and ingenious; but the matrimonial part of the
catastrophe is something more than repulsive, and the singular
intervention of a real live succubus, less terrible in her seductions
than her sister of the "Contes Drolatiques," can hardly seem happy or
seasonable to a generation which knows not King James and his
Demonology.
Of the two poets occasionally associated with Middleton in the
composition of a play, Dekker seems usually to have taken in hand the
greater part, and Rowley the lesser part, of the composite poem
engendered by their joint efforts. The style of "The Roaring Girl" is
full of Dekker's peculiar mannerisms; slipshod and straggling metre,
incongruous touches or flashes of fanciful or lyrical expression,
reckless and awkward inversions, irrational and irrepressible outbreaks
of irregular and fitful rhyme. And with all these faults it is more
unmistakably the style of a born poet than is the usual style of
Middleton. Dekker would have taken a high place among the finest if not
among the greatest of English poets if he had but had the sense of
form--the instinct of composition. Whether it was modesty, indolence,
indifference, or incompetence, some drawback or shortcoming there was
which so far impaired the quality of his strong and delicate genius that
it is impossible for his most ardent and cordial admirer to say or think
of his very best work that it really does him justice--that it
adequately represents the fulness of his unquestionable powers. And yet
it is certain that Lamb was not less right than usual when he said that
Dekker "had poetry enough for anything." But he had not constructive
power enough for the trade of a playwright--the trade in which he spent
so many weary years of ill-requited labor. This comedy in which we first
find him associated with Middleton is well written and well contrived,
and fairly diverting--especially to an idle or an uncritical reader:
though even such an one may suspect that the heroine here represented as
a virginal virago must have been in fact rather like Dr. Johnson's fair
friend Bet Flint; of whom the Great Lexicographer "used to say that she
was generally slut and drunkard; occasionally whore and thief" (Boswell,
May 8, 1781). The parallel would have been more nearly complete if Moll
Cutpurse "had written her own Life in verse," and brought it to Selden
or Bishop Hall with a request that he would furnish her with a preface
to it.
The plays of Middleton are not so properly divisible into tragic and
comic as into realistic and romantic--into plays of which the mainspring
is essentially prosaic or photographic, and plays of which the
mainspring is principally fanciful or poetical. Two only of the former
class remain to be mentioned: "Anything for a Quiet Life" and "A Chaste
Maid in Cheapside." There is very good stuff in the plot or groundwork
of the former, but the workmanship is hardly worthy of the material, Mr.
Bullen ingeniously and plausibly suggests the partnership of Shirley in
this play: but the conception of the character in which he discerns a
likeness to the touch of the lesser dramatist is happier and more
original than such a comparison would indicate. The young stepmother
whose affectation of selfish levity and grasping craft is really
designed to cure her husband of his infatuation, and to reconcile him
with the son who regards her as his worst enemy, is a figure equally
novel, effective, and attractive. The honest shopkeeper and his shrewish
wife may remind us again of Dickens by their points of likeness to Mr.
and Mrs. Snagsby; though the reformation of the mercer's jealous vixen
is brought about by more humorous and less tragical means than the
repentance of the law-stationer's "little woman." George the apprentice,
through whose wit and energy this happy consummation becomes possible,
is a very original and amusing example of the young Londoner of the
period. But there is more humor, though very little chastity, in the
"Chaste Maid"; a play of quite exceptional freedom and audacity, and
certainly one of the drollest and liveliest that ever broke the bounds
of propriety or shook the sides of merriment.
The opening of "More Dissemblers Besides Women" is as full at once of
comic and of romantic promise as the upshot of the whole is
unsatisfactory--a most lame and impotent conclusion. But some of the
dialogue is exquisite; full of flowing music and gentle grace, of ease
and softness and fancy and spirit; and the part of a poetic or romantic
Joseph Surface, as perfect in the praise of virtue as in the practice of
vice, is one of Middleton's really fine and happy inventions. In the
style of "The Widow" there is no less fluency and facility: it is
throughout identical with that of Middleton's other comedies in metre; a
style which has so many points in common with Fletcher's as to make the
apocryphal attribution of a share in this comedy to the hand of the
greater poet more plausible than many other ascriptions of the kind. I
am inclined nevertheless to agree with Mr. Bullen's apparent opinion
that the whole credit of this brilliant play may be reasonably assigned
to Middleton; and especially with his remark that the only scene in
which any resemblance to the manner of Ben Jonson can be traced by the
most determined ingenuity of critical research is more like the work of
a pupil than like a hasty sketch of the master's. There is no lack of
energetic invention and beautiful versification in another comedy of
adventure and intrigue, "No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's": the unpleasant
or extravagant quality of certain incidents in the story is partially
neutralized or modified by the unfailing charm of a style worthy of
Fletcher himself in his ripest and sweetest stage of poetic comedy.
But high above all the works yet mentioned there stands and will stand
conspicuous while noble emotion and noble verse have honor among English
readers the pathetic and heroic play so memorably appreciated by Charles
Lamb, "A Fair Quarrel." It would be the vainest and emptiest
impertinence to offer a word in echo of his priceless and imperishable
praise. The delicate nobility of the central conception on which the
hero's character depends for its full relief and development should be
enough to efface all remembrance of any defect or default in moral
taste, any shortcoming on the aesthetic side of ethics, which may be
detected in any slighter or hastier example of the poet's invention. A
man must be dull and slow of sympathies indeed who cannot respond in
spirit to that bitter cry of chivalrous and manful agony at sense of the
shadow of a mother's shame:
Quench, my spirit,
And out with honor's naming lights within thee!
Be dark and dead to all respects of manhood!
I never shall have use of valor more.
Middleton has no second hero like Captain Ager: but where is there
another so thoroughly noble and lovable among all the characters of all
the dramatists of his time but Shakespeare?