to verify. The rough and crude genius of that perverse and powerful
writer is not seen here by any means at its best. I should say that his
call was rather toward tragedy than toward comedy; that his mastery of
severe and serious emotion was more genuine and more natural than his
command of satirical or grotesque realism. The tragedy in which he has
grappled with the subject afterward so differently handled in the first
and greatest of Landor's tragedies is to me of far more interest and
value than such comedies as that which kindled the enthusiasm of a loyal
Londoner in the civic sympathies of Lamb. Disfigured as it is toward the
close by indulgence in mere horror and brutality after the fashion of
Andronicus or Jeronimo, it has more beauty and power and pathos in its
best scenes than a reader of his comedies would have expected. But in
the underplot of "A Fair Quarrel" Rowley's besetting faults of
coarseness and quaintness, stiffness and roughness, are so flagrant and
obtrusive that we cannot avoid a feeling of regret and irritation at
such untimely and inharmonious evidence of his partnership with a poet
of finer if not of sturdier genius. The same sense of discord and
inequality will be aroused on comparison of the worse with the better
parts of "The Old Law." The clumsiness and dulness of the farcical
interludes can hardly be paralleled in the rudest and hastiest scenes of
Middleton's writing: while the sweet and noble dignity of the finer
passages have the stamp of his ripest and tenderest genius on every line
and in every cadence. But for sheer bewildering incongruity there is no
play known to me which can be compared with "The Mayor of Queenborough."
Here again we find a note so dissonant and discordant in the lighter
parts of the dramatic concert that we seem at once to recognize the
harsher and hoarser instrument of Rowley. The farce is even more
extravagantly and preposterously mistimed and misplaced than that which
disfigures the play just mentioned: but I thoroughly agree with Mr.
Bullen's high estimate of the power displayed and maintained throughout
the tragic and poetic part of this drama; to which no previous critic
has ever vouchsafed a word of due acknowledgment. The story is ugly and
unnatural, but its repulsive effect is transfigured or neutralized by
the charm of tender or passionate poetry; and it must be admitted that
the hideous villany of Vortiger and Horsus affords an opening for
subsequent scenic effects of striking and genuine tragical interest.
The difference between the genius of Middleton and the genius of Dekker
could not be better illustrated than by comparison of their attempts at
political and patriotic allegory. The lazy, slovenly, impatient genius
of Dekker flashes out by fits and starts on the reader of the play in
which he has expressed his English hatred of Spain and Popery, his
English pride in the rout of the Armada, and his English gratitude for
the part played by Queen Elizabeth in the crowning struggle of the time:
but his most cordial admirer can hardly consider "The Whore of Babylon"
a shining or satisfactory example of dramatic art. The play which
brought Middleton into prison, and earned for the actors a sum so far
beyond parallel as to have seemed incredible till the fullest evidence
was procured, is one of the most complete and exquisite works of
artistic ingenuity and dexterity that ever excited or offended,
enraptured or scandalized an audience of friends or enemies: the only
work of English poetry which may properly be called Aristophanic. It has
the same depth of civic seriousness, the same earnest ardor and devotion
to the old cause of the old country, the same solid fervor of enthusiasm
and indignation, which animated the third great poet of Athens against
the corruption of art by the sophistry of Euripides and the corruption
of manhood by the sophistry of Socrates. The delicate skill of the
workmanship can only be appreciated by careful and thorough study; but
that the infusion of poetic fancy and feeling into the generally comic
and satiric style is hardly unworthy of the comparison which I have
ventured to challenge, I will take but one brief extract for evidence:
Upon those lips, the sweet fresh buds of youth,
The holy dew of prayer lies, like pearl
Dropt from the opening eyelids of the morn
Upon a bashful rose.
Here for once even "that celestial thief" John Milton has impaired
rather than improved the effect of the beautiful phrase borrowed from an
earlier and inferior poet. His use of Middleton's exquisite image is not
quite so apt--so perfectly picturesque and harmonious--as the use to
which it was put by the inventor.
Nothing in the age of Shakespeare is so difficult for an Englishman of
our own age to realize as the temper, the intelligence, the serious and
refined elevation of an audience which was at once capable of enjoying
and applauding the roughest and coarsest kinds of pleasantly, the rudest
and crudest scenes of violence, and competent to appreciate the finest
and the highest reaches of poetry, the subtlest and the most sustained
allusions of ethical or political symbolism. The large and long
popularity of an exquisite dramatic or academic allegory such as
"Lingua," which would seem to appeal only to readers of exceptional
education, exceptional delicacy of perception, and exceptional quickness
of wit, is hardly more remarkable than the popular success of a play
requiring such keen constancy of attention, such vivid wakefulness and
promptitude of apprehension, as this even more serious than fantastic
work of Middleton's. The vulgarity and puerility of all modern attempts
at any comparable effect need not be cited to throw into relief the
essential finish, the impassioned intelligence, the high spiritual and
literary level, of these crowded and brilliant and vehement five acts.
Their extreme cleverness, their indefatigable ingenuity, would in any
case have been remarkable: but their fulness of active and poetic life
gives them an interest far deeper and higher and more permanent than the
mere sense of curiosity and wonder.
But if "A Game at Chess" is especially distinguished by its complete and
thorough harmony of execution and design, the lack of any such artistic
merit in another famous work of Middleton's is such as once more to
excite that irritating sense of inequality, irregularity, inconstancy of
genius and inconsequence of aim, which too often besets and bewilders
the student of our early dramatists. There is poetry enough in "The
Witch" to furnish forth a whole generation of poeticules: but the
construction or composition of the play, the arrangement and evolution
of event, the distinction or development of character, would do less
than little credit to a boy of twelve; who at any rate would hardly have
thought of patching up so ridiculous a reconciliation between intending
murderers and intended victims as here exceeds in absurdity the chaotic
combination of accident and error which disposes of inconvenient or
superfluous underlings. But though neither Mr. Dyce nor Mr. Bullen has
been at all excessive or unjust in his animadversions on these flagrant
faults and follies, neither editor has given his author due credit for
the excellence of style, of language and versification, which makes this
play readable throughout with pleasure, if not always without
impatience. Fletcher himself, the acknowledged master of the style here
adopted by Middleton, has left no finer example of metrical fluency and
melodious ease. The fashion of dialogue and composition is no doubt
rather feminine than masculine: Marlowe and Jonson, Webster and
Beaumont, Tourneur and Ford--to cite none but the greatest of
authorities in this kind--wrote a firmer if not a freer hand, struck a
graver if not a sweeter note of verse: this rapid effluence of easy
expression is liable to lapse into conventional efflux of facile
improvisation: but such command of it as Middleton's is impossible to
any but a genuine and a memorable poet.
As for the supposed obligations of Shakespeare to Middleton or Middleton
to Shakespeare, the imaginary relations of "The Witch" to "Macbeth" or
"Macbeth" to "The Witch," I can only say that the investigation of this
subject seems to me as profitable as a research into the natural
history of snakes in Iceland. That the editors to whom we owe the
miserably defaced and villanously garbled text which is all that has
reached us of "Macbeth," not content with the mutilation of the greater
poet, had recourse to the interpolation of a few superfluous and
incongruous lines or fragments from the lyric portions of the lesser
poet's work--that the players who mangled Shakespeare were the pilferers
who plundered Middleton--must be obvious to all but those (if any such
yet exist anywhere) who are capable of believing the unspeakably
impudent assertion of those mendacious malefactors that they have left
us a pure and perfect edition of Shakespeare. These passages are all
thoroughly in keeping with the general tone of the lesser work: it would
be tautology to add that they are no less utterly out of keeping with
the general tone of the other. But in their own way nothing can be
finer: they have a tragic liveliness in ghastliness, a grotesque
animation of horror, which no other poet has ever conceived or conveyed
to us. The difference between Michael Angelo and Goya, Tintoretto and
Gustave Doré, does not quite efface the right of the minor artists to
existence and remembrance.
The strange and strangely beautiful tragic poem, which could not have
come down to us under a stupider or a less appropriate name than that
apparently conferred on it by the licenser of "The Second Maiden's
Tragedy," must by all evidence of internal and external probability be
almost unquestionably assigned to the hand of Middleton. The masterly
daring of the stage effect, which cannot or should not be mistaken for
the merely theatrical audacity of a headlong impressionist at any price,
is not more characteristic of the author than the tender and passionate
fluency of the flawless verse. The rather eccentric intermittency of the
supernatural action is a no less obviously plausible reason for
assigning it to the creator of so realistic a witch and so singular a
succubus. But such a dramatic poem as this would be a conspicuous jewel
in the crown of any but a supremely great dramatist and poet. And the
musical or metrical harmony of the verse, imperceptible as it may be or
rather must always be to the long-eared dunces who can only think to
hear through their clumsy fingers, is so like Fletcher's as to suggest
that if any part of Shakespeare's "King Henry VIII." is attributable to
a lesser hand than his it may far more plausibly be assigned to
Middleton's than to Fletcher's. Had it or could it have been the work of
Fletcher, the clamorous and multitudinous satellites who preferred him
with such furious fatuity of acclamation to so inconsiderable a rival
as Shakespeare would hardly have abstained from reclaiming it on behalf
of the great poet whom it pleased their imbecility to set so far above
one so immeasurably and so unutterably greater.
The tragedy of "Women Beware Women," whether or not it be accepted as
the masterpiece of Middleton, is at least an excellent example of the
facility and fluency and equable promptitude of style which all students
will duly appreciate and applaud in the riper and completer work of this
admirable poet. It is full to overflowing of noble eloquence, of
inventive resource and suggestive effect, of rhetorical affluence and
theatrical ability. The opening or exposition of the play is quite
masterly: and the scene in which the forsaken husband is seduced into
consolation by the temptress of his wife is worthy of all praise for the
straightforward ingenuity and the serious delicacy by which the action
is rendered credible and the situation endurable. But I fear that few or
none will be found to disagree with my opinion that no such approbation
or tolerance can be reasonably extended so as to cover or condone the
offences of either the underplot or the upshot of the play. The one is
repulsive beyond redemption by elegance of style, the other is
preposterous beyond extenuation on the score of logical or poetical
justice. Those who object on principle to solution by massacre must
object in consistency to the conclusions of "Hamlet" and "King Lear";
nor are the results of Webster's tragic invention more questionable or
less inevitable than the results of Shakespeare's: but the dragnet of
murder which gathers in the characters at the close of this play is as
promiscuous in its sweep as that cast by Cyril Tourneur over the
internecine shoal of sharks who are hauled in and ripped open at the
close of "The Revenger's Tragedy." Had Middleton been content with the
admirable subject of his main action, he might have given us a simple
and unimpeachable masterpiece: and even as it is he has left us a noble
and memorable work. It is true that the irredeemable infamy of the
leading characters degrades and deforms the nature of the interest
excited: the good and gentle old mother whose affectionate simplicity is
so gracefully and attractively painted passes out of the story and drops
out of the list of actors just when some redeeming figure is most needed
to assuage the dreariness of disgust with which we follow the fortunes
of so meanly criminal a crew: and the splendid eloquence of the only
other respectable person in the play is not of itself sufficient to make
a living figure, rather than the mere mouthpiece for indignant emotion,
of so subordinate and inactive a character as the Cardinal. The lower
comedy of the play is identical in motive with that which defaces the
master-work of Ford: more stupid and offensive it hardly could be. But
the high comedy of the scene between Livia and the Widow is as fine as
the best work in that kind left us by the best poets and humorists of
the Shakespearean age; it is not indeed unworthy of the comparison with
Chaucer's which it suggested to the all but impeccable judgment of
Charles Lamb.
The lack of moral interest and sympathetic attraction in the characters
and the story, which has been noted as the principal defect in the
otherwise effective composition of "Women Beware Women," is an objection
which cannot be brought against the graceful tragicomedy of "The Spanish
Gipsy." Whatever is best in the tragic or in the romantic part of this
play bears the stamp of Middleton's genius alike in the sentiment and
the style. "The code of modern morals," to borrow a convenient phrase
from Shelley, may hardly incline us to accept as plausible or as
possible the repentance and the redemption of so brutal a ruffian as
Roderigo: but the vivid beauty of the dialogue is equal to the vivid
interest of the situation which makes the first act one of the most
striking in any play of the time. The double action has some leading
points in common with two of Fletcher's, which have nothing in common
with each other: Merione in "The Queen of Corinth" is less interesting
than Clara, but the vagabonds of "Beggars' Bush" are more amusing than
Rowley's or Middleton's. The play is somewhat deficient in firmness or
solidity of construction: it is, if such a phrase be permissible, one of
those half-baked or underdone dishes of various and confused
ingredients, in which the cook's or the baker's hurry has impaired the
excellent materials of wholesome bread and savory meat. The splendid
slovens who served their audience with spiritual work in which the gods
had mixed "so much of earth, so much of heaven, and such impetuous
blood"--the generous and headlong purveyors who lavished on their daily
provision of dramatic fare such wealth of fine material and such
prodigality of superfluous grace--the foremost followers of Marlowe and
of Shakespeare were too prone to follow the impetuous example of the
first rather than the severe example of the second. There is perhaps not
one of them--and Middleton assuredly is not one--whom we can reasonably
imagine capable of the patience and self-respect which induced
Shakespeare to rewrite the triumphantly popular parts of Romeo, of
Falstaff, and of Hamlet with an eye to the literary perfection and
permanence of work which in its first light outline had won the crowning
suffrage of immediate or spectacular applause.
The rough-and-ready hand of Rowley may be traced, not indeed in the more
high-toned passages, but in many of the most animated scenes of "The
Spanish Gipsy." In the most remarkable of the ten masks or interludes
which appear among the collected works of Middleton the two names are
again associated. To the freshness, liveliness, and spirited ingenuity
of this little allegorical comedy Mr. Bullen has done ample justice in
his excellent critical introduction. "The Inner-Temple Masque," less
elaborate than "The World Tost at Tennis," shows no lack of homely humor
and invention: and in the others there is as much waste of fine flowing
verse and facile fancy as ever excited the rational regret of a modern
reader at the reckless profusion of literary power which the great poets
of the time were content to lavish on the decoration or exposition of an
ephemeral pageant. Of Middleton's other minor works, apocryphal or
genuine, I will only say that his authorship of "Microcynicon"--a dull
and crabbed imitation of Marston's worst work as a satirist--seems to me
utterly incredible. A lucid and melodious fluency of style is the mark
of all his metrical writing; and this stupid piece of obscure and clumsy
jargon could have been the work of no man endowed with more faculty of
expression than informs or modulates the whine of an average pig. Nor is
it rationally conceivable that the Thomas Middleton who soiled some
reams of paper with what he was pleased to consider or to call a
paraphrase of the "Wisdom of Solomon" can have had anything but a poet's
name in common with a poet. This name is not like that of the great
writer whose name is attached to "The Transformed Metamorphosis": there
can hardly have been two Cyril Tourneurs in the field, but there may
well have been half a dozen Thomas Middletons. And Tourneur's abortive
attempt at allegoric discourse is but a preposterous freak of prolonged
eccentricity: this paraphrase is simply a tideless and interminable sea
of limitless and inexhaustible drivel. There are three reasons--two of
them considerable, but the third conclusive--for assigning to Middleton
the two satirical tracts in the style of Nash, or rather of Dekker,
which appeared in the same year with his initials subscribed to their
prefatory addresses. Mr. Dyce thought they were written by the poet
whose ready verse and realistic humor are both well represented in their
text: Mr. Bullen agrees with Mr. Dyce in thinking that they are the
work of Middleton. And Mr. Carew Hazlitt thinks that they are not.
No such absolute and final evidence as this can be adduced in favor or
disfavor of the theory which would saddle the reputation of Middleton
with the authorship of a dull and disjointed comedy, the work (it has
hitherto been supposed) of the German substitute for Shakespeare.
Middleton has no doubt left us more crude and shapeless plays than "The
Puritan"; none, in my opinion--excepting always his very worst authentic
example of farce or satire, "The Family of Love"--so heavy and so empty
and so feeble. If it must be assigned to any author of higher rank than
the new Shakespeare, I would suggest that it is much more like Rowley's
than like Middleton's worst work. Of the best qualities which
distinguish either of these writers as poet or as humorist, it has not
the shadow or the glimmer of a vestige.
In the last and the greatest work which bears their united names--a work
which should suffice to make either name immortal if immortality were
other than an accidental attribute of genius--the very highest capacity
of either poet is seen at its very best. There is more of mere poetry,
more splendor of style and vehemence of verbal inspiration, in the work
of other poets then writing for the stage: the two masterpieces of
Webster are higher in tone at their highest, more imaginative and more
fascinating in their expression of terrible or of piteous truth: there
are more superb harmonies, more glorious raptures of ardent and eloquent
music, in the sometimes unsurpassed and unsurpassable poetic passion of
Cyril Tourneur. But even Webster's men seem but splendid sketches, as
Tourneur's seem but shadowy or fiery outlines, beside the perfect and
living figure of De Flores. The man is so horribly human, so fearfully
and wonderfully natural, in his single-hearted brutality of devotion,
his absolute absorption of soul and body by one consuming force of
passionately cynical desire, that we must go to Shakespeare for an
equally original and an equally unquestionable revelation of indubitable
truth. And in no play by Beaumont and Fletcher is the concord between
the two partners more singularly complete in unity of spirit and of
style than throughout the tragic part of this play. The underplot from
which it most unluckily and absurdly derives its title is very stupid,
rather coarse, and almost vulgar: but the two great parts of Beatrice
and De Flores are equally consistent, coherent, and sustained in the
scenes obviously written by Middleton and in the scenes obviously
written by Rowley. The subordinate part taken by Middleton in Dekker's
play of "The Honest Whore" is difficult to discern from the context or
to verify by inner evidence: though some likeness to his realistic or
photographic method may be admitted as perceptible in the admirable
picture of Bellafront's morning reception at the opening of the second
act of the first part. But here we may assert with fair confidence that
the first and the last scenes of the play bear the indisputable
sign-manual of William Rowley. His vigorous and vivid genius, his
somewhat hard and curt directness of style and manner, his clear and
trenchant power of straightforward presentation or exposition, may be
traced in every line as plainly as the hand of Middleton must be
recognized in the main part of the tragic action intervening. To Rowley,
therefore, must be assigned the very high credit of introducing and of
dismissing with adequate and even triumphant effect the strangely
original tragic figure which owes its fullest and finest development to
the genius of Middleton. To both poets alike must unqualified and equal
praise be given for the subtle simplicity of skill with which they make
us appreciate the fatal and foreordained affinity between the
ill-favored, rough-mannered, broken-down gentleman and the headstrong,
unscrupulous, unobservant girl whose very abhorrence of him serves only
to fling her down from her high station of haughty beauty into the very
clutch of his ravenous and pitiless passion. Her cry of horror and
astonishment at first perception of the price to be paid for a service
she had thought to purchase with mere money is so wonderfully real in
its artless and ingenuous sincerity that Shakespeare himself could
hardly have bettered it:
Why, 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked,
And shelter such a cunning cruelty,
To make his death the murderer of my honor!
That note of incredulous amazement that the man whom she has just
instigated to the commission of murder "can be so wicked" as to have
served her ends for any end of his own beyond the pay of a professional
assassin is a touch worthy of the greatest dramatist that ever lived.
The perfect simplicity of expression is as notable as the perfect
innocence of her surprise; the candid astonishment of a nature
absolutely incapable of seeing more than one thing or holding more than
one thought at a time. That she, the first criminal, should be honestly
shocked as well as physically horrified by revelation of the real motive
which impelled her accomplice into crime, gives a lurid streak of
tragic humor to the life-like interest of the scene; as the pure
infusion of spontaneous poetry throughout redeems the whole work from
the charge of vulgar subservience to a vulgar taste for the presentation
or the contemplation of criminal horror. Instances of this happy and
natural nobility of instinct abound in the casual expressions which give
grace and animation always, but never any touch of rhetorical
transgression or florid superfluity, to the brief and trenchant
sword-play of the tragic dialogue:
That sigh would fain have utterance: take pity on't,
And lend it a free word; 'las, how it labors
For liberty! I hear the murmur yet
Beat at your bosom.
The wording of this passage is sufficient to attest the presence and
approve the quality of a poet: the manner and the moment of its
introduction would be enough to show the instinctive and inborn insight
of a natural dramatist. As much may be said of the few words which give
us a ghostly glimpse of supernatural terror:
Ha! what art thou that tak'st away the light
Betwixt that star and me! I dread thee not:
'Twas but a mist of conscience.