that is the necessary condition for enjoying most literature--we must
admit the vivacity and, at times, the real eloquence of Disraeli's
rhetoric. In 'Contarini Fleming' he takes a still more ambitious flight,
and with considerable success. Fleming, the embodiment of the poetic
character, is, we might almost say, to other poets what Armine is to
other lovers. He has the same love of brilliant effects, and the same
absence of genuine tenderness. But one other qualification must be made.
We feel some doubts as to his being a poet at all. He has indeed that
amazing vitality with which Disraeli endows all his favourite heroes,
and in which we may recognise the effervescence of youthful genius. But
his genius is so versatile that we doubt its true destination. His
first literary performance is to write a version of 'Vivian Grey,' a
reckless and successful satire; his most remarkable escapade is to put
himself at the head of a band of students, apparently inspired by
Schiller's Robbers to emulate the career of Moor; his greatest feat is a
sudden stroke of diplomacy which enables him to defeat the plans of more
veteran statesmen. And when he has gone through his initiation, wooed
and won his marvellous beauty, and lost her in an ideal island, the
final shape of his aspirations is curiously characteristic. Having
become rich quite unexpectedly--for he did not know that he was to be
the hero of one of Disraeli's novels--he resolved to 'create a
paradise.' He bought a Palladian pile, with a large estate and beautiful
gardens. In this beautiful scene he intends to erect a Saracenic palace
full of the finest works of modern and ancient art; and in time he hopes
to 'create a scene which may rival in beauty and variety, though not in
extent, the villa of Hadrian, whom I have always considered the most
accomplished and sumptuous character of antiquity.' He has already laid
the foundation of a tower which is to rise to a height of at least a
hundred and fifty feet, and is to equal in solidity and design the most
celebrated works of antiquity. Certainly the scheme is magnificent; but
it is scarcely the ambition which one might have expected from a poet.
Rather it is the design of a man endowed with a genuine artistic
temperament, but with a strange desire to leave some showy and tangible
memorial of his labours. His ambition is not to stir men's souls with
profound thought, or to soften by some new harmonies the weary
complaints of suffering humanity, but to startle the world by the
splendid embodiment in solid marble of the most sumptuous dreams of a
cultivated imagination. Contarini Fleming, indeed, as he shows by a
series of brilliant travellers' sketches, is no mean master of what may
be called poetical prose. His pictures of life and scenery are
vivacious, rapid, and decisive. In later years, the habit of
parliamentary oratory seems to have injured Disraeli's style. In
'Lothair' there is a good deal of slipshod verbiage. But in these
earlier stories the style is generally excellent till it becomes too
ambitious. It has a kind of metallic glitter, brilliant, sparkling with
numerous flashes of wit and fancy, and never wanting in sharpness of
effect, though it may be deficient in delicacy. Yet the author, who is
of necessity to be partly identified with the hero of 'Contarini
Fleming,' is distinctly not a poet; and the incapacity is most evident
when he endeavours to pass the inexorable limits. The distinction
between poetry and rhetoric is as profound as it is undefinable. A true
poet, as possessing an exquisite sensibility to the capacities of his
instrument, does not try to get the effects of metre when he is writing
without its restrictions and its advantages. Disraeli shows occasionally
a want of this delicacy of perception by breaking into a kind of
compromise between the two which can only be called Ossianesque. The
effect, for example, of such a passage as the following is, to my taste
at least, simply grotesque:--
'Still the courser onward rushes; still his mighty heart supports him.
Season and space, the glowing soil, the burning ray, yield to the
tempest of his frame, the thunder of his nerves, and lightning of his
veins.
'Food or water they have none. No genial fount, no graceful tree, rise
with their pleasant company. Never a beast or bird is there, in that
hoary desert bare. Nothing breaks the almighty stillness. Even the
jackal's felon cry might seem a soothing melody. A grey wild cat, with
snowy whiskers, out of a withered bramble stealing, with a youthful
snake in its ivory teeth, in the moonlight gleams with glee. This is
their sole society.'
And so on. Some great writers have made prose as melodious as verse; and
Disraeli can at times follow their example successfully. But one likes
to know what one is reading; and the effect of this queer expression is
as if, in the centre of a solemn march, were incorporated a few
dancing-steps, _à propos_ to nothing, and then subsiding into a regular
pace. Milton wrote grand prose and grand verse; but you are never
uncertain whether a fragment of 'Paradise Lost' may or may not have been
inserted by mere accident in the 'Areopagitica.'
Not to dwell upon such minor defects, nobody can read 'Contarini
Fleming' or 'Henrietta Temple' without recognising the admirable talent
and exuberant vitality of the author. They have the faults of juvenile
performances; they are too gaudy; the author has been tempted to turn
aside too frequently in search of some brilliant epigram; he has
mistaken bombast for eloquence, and mere flowery brilliance for warmth
of emotion. But we might hope that longer experience and more earnest
purpose might correct such defects. Alas! in the year of their
publication, Disraeli first entered Parliament. His next works comprised
the trilogy, where the artistic aim has become subordinate to the
political or biological; and some thirty years of parliamentary labours
led to 'Lothair,' of which it is easiest to assume that it is a
practical joke on a large scale, or a prolonged burlesque upon
Disraeli's own youthful performances. May one not lament the degradation
of a promising novelist into a Prime Minister?
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Perhaps I ought to substitute 'Lord Beaconsfield' for Disraeli; but
I am writing of the author of 'Coningsby,' rather than of the author of
'Endymion:' and I will therefore venture to preserve the older name.
[5] 'He never loved that loved not at first sight,' says Marlowe, and
Shakespeare after him. I cannot say whether this be an undesigned
literary coincidence or an appropriation. Disraeli, we know, was skilful
in the art of annexation. One or two instances may be added. Here is a
clear case of borrowing. Fuller says in the character of the good
sea-captain in the 'Holy State'--'Who first taught the water to imitate
the creatures on land, so that the sea is the stable of horse-fishes,
the stye of hog-fishes, the kennel of dog-fishes, and in all things, the
sea is the ape of the land?' Essper George, in 'Vivian Grey,' says to
the sea: 'O thou indifferent ape of earth, what art thou, O bully ocean,
but the stable of horse-fishes, the stall of cow-fishes, the stye of
hog-fishes, and the kennel of dog-fishes?' Other cases may be more
doubtful. On one occasion, Disraeli spoke of the policy of his opponents
as a combination of 'blundering and plundering.' The jingle was thought
to be adapted from a previous epigram about 'meddling and muddling;' but
here is the identical phrase: Coleridge wrote in the 'Courier:' 'The
writer, whilst abroad, was once present when most bitter complaints were
made of the ----government. "Government!" exclaimed a testy old captain
of a Mediterranean trading-vessel, "call it _blunderment_ or
_plunderment_ or what you like--only not a _government_!"'--Coleridge's
'Essays on his own Times,' p. 893. Disraeli is sometimes credited with
the epigram in 'Lothair' about critics being authors who have failed. I
know not who said this first; but it was certainly not Disraeli. Landor
makes Porson tell Southey: 'Those who have failed as writers turn
reviewers.' The classical passage is in Sainte-Beuve. Balzac, he says,
said somewhere of a sculptor who had become discouraged: 'Redevenu
artiste _in partibus_, il avait beaucoup de succès dans les salons, il
était consulté par beaucoup d'amateurs; _il passa critique comme tous
les impuissants qui mentent à leurs débuts_.' Sainte-Beuve, naturally
indignant at a phrase aimed against his craft, if not against himself,
says that this may be true of a sculptor or painter who deserts his art
in order to talk; 'mais, dans l'ordre de la pensée, cette parole de M.
de Balzac qui revient souvent sous la plume de toute une école de jeunes
littérateurs, est à la fois (je leur en demande pardon) une injustice et
une erreur.'--'Causeries du Lundi,' vol. ii. p. 455. A very similar
phrase is to be found in a book where one would hardly look for such
epigrams, Marryat's 'King's Own.' But to trace such witticisms to their
first source is a task for 'Notes and Queries.'
_MASSINGER_
In one of the best of his occasional essays, Kingsley held a brief for
the plaintiffs in the old case of Puritans _versus_ Playwrights. The
litigation in which this case represents a minor issue has lasted for a
period far exceeding that of the most pertinacious lawsuit, and is not
likely to come to an end within any assignable limits of time. When the
discussion is pressed home, it is seen to involve fundamentally
different conceptions of human life and its purposes; and it can only
cease when we have discovered the grounds of a permanent conciliation
between the ethical and the æsthetic elements of human nature. The
narrower controversy between the stage and the Church has itself a long
history. It has left some curious marks upon English literature. The
prejudice which uttered itself through the Puritan Prynne was inherited,
in a later generation, by the High-Churchmen Collier and William Law.
The attack, it is true, may be ostensibly directed--as in Kingsley's
essay--against the abuse of the stage rather than against the stage
itself. Kingsley pays the usual tribute to Shakespeare whilst denouncing
the whole literature of which Shakespeare's dramas are the most
conspicuous product. But then, everybody always distinguishes in terms
between the use and the abuse; and the line of demarcation generally
turns out to be singularly fluctuating and uncertain. You can hardly
demolish Beaumont and Fletcher without bringing down some of the
outlying pinnacles, if not shaking the very foundations, of the temple
sacred to Shakespeare.
It would be regrettable, could one stop to regret the one-sided and
illogical construction of the human mind, that a fair judgment in such
matters seems to require incompatible qualities. Your impartial critic
or historian is generally a man who leaves out of account nothing but
the essential. His impartiality means sympathy with the commonplace, and
incapacity for understanding heroic faith and overpowering enthusiasm.
He fancies that a man or a book can be judged by balancing a list of
virtues and vices as if they were separate entities lying side by side
in a box, instead of different aspects of a vital force. On the other
hand, the vivid imagination which restores dead bones to life makes its
possessor a partisan in extinct quarrels, and as short-sighted and
unfair a partisan as the original actors. Roundheads and Cavaliers have
been dead these two centuries.
Dumb are those names erewhile in battle loud;
Dreamfooted as the shadow of a cloud,
They flit across the ear.
Yet few even amongst modern writers are capable of doing justice to both
sides without first making both sides colourless. Hallam judges men in
the throes of a revolution as though they were parties in a lawsuit to
be decided by precedents and parchments, and Carlyle cannot appreciate
Cromwell's magnificent force of character without making him all but
infallible and impeccable. Critics of the early drama are equally
one-sided. The exquisite literary faculty of Charles Lamb revelled in
detecting beauties which had been covered with the dust of oblivion
during the reign of Pope. His appreciation was intensified by that charm
of discovery which finds its typical utterance in Keats's famous sonnet.
He was scarcely a more impartial judge of Fletcher or Ford than 'Stout
Cortes' of the new world revealed by his enterprise. We may willingly
defer to his judgment of the relative value of the writers whom he
discusses, but we must qualify his judgment of their intrinsic
excellence by the recollection that he speaks as a lover. To him and
other thoroughgoing admirers of the old drama the Puritanical onslaught
upon the stage presented itself as the advent of a gloomy superstition,
ruthlessly stamping out all that was beautiful in art and literature.
Kingsley, an admirable hater, could perceive only the opposite aspect of
the phenomena. To him the Puritan protest appears as the voice of the
enlightened conscience; the revolution means the troubling of the turbid
waters at the descent of the angel; Prynne's 'Histriomastix' is the
blast of the trumpet at which the rotten and polluted walls of Jericho
are to crumble into dust. The stage, which represented the tone of
aristocratic society, rightfully perished with the order which it
flattered. Courtiers had learnt to indulge in a cynical mockery of
virtue, or to find an unholy attraction in the accumulation of
extravagant horrors. The English drama, in short, was one of those evil
growths which are fostered by deeply-seated social corruption, and are
killed off by the breath of a purer air. That such phenomena occur at
times is undeniable. Mr. Symonds has recently shown us, in his history
of the Renaissance, how the Italian literature to which our English
dramatists owed so many suggestions was the natural fruit of a society
poisoned at the roots. Nor, when we have shaken off that spirit of
slavish adulation in which modern antiquarians and critics have regarded
the so-called Elizabethan dramatists, can we deny that there are
symptoms of a similar mischief in their writings. Some of the most
authoritative testimonials have a suspicious element. Praise has been
lavished upon the most questionable characteristics of the old drama.
Apologists have been found, not merely for its daring portrayal of human
passion, but for its wanton delight in the grotesque and the horrible
for its own sake; and some critics have revenged themselves for the
straitlaced censures of Puritan morality by praising work in which the
author strives to atone for imaginative weakness by a choice of
revolting motives. Such adulation ought to have disappeared with the
first fervour of rehabilitation. Much that has been praised in the old
drama is rubbish, and some of it disgusting rubbish.
The question, however, remains, how far we ought to adopt either view of
the situation? Are we bound to cast aside the later dramas of the school
as simply products of corruption? It may be of interest to consider the
light thrown upon this question by the works of Massinger, nearly the
last of the writers who can really claim a permanent position in
literature. Massinger, born in 1584, died in 1639. His surviving works
were composed, with one exception, after 1620. They represent,
therefore, the tastes of the playgoing classes during the rapid
development of the great struggle which culminated in the rebellion. In
a literary sense it is the period when the imaginative impulse
represented by the great dramatists was running low. It is curious to
reflect that, if Shakespeare had lived out his legitimate allowance of
threescore years and ten, he might have witnessed the production, not
only of the first, but of nearly all the best works of his school; had
his life been prolonged for ten years more, he would have witnessed its
final extinction. Within these narrow limits of time the drama had
undergone a change corresponding to the change in the national mood. The
difference, for example, between Marlowe and Massinger at the opening
and the close of the period--though their births were separated by only
twenty years--corresponds to the difference between the temper of the
generation which repelled the Armada and the temper of the generation
which fretted under the rule of the first Stuarts. The misnomer of
Elizabethan as applied to the whole school indicates an implicit
perception that its greater achievements were due to the same impulse
which took for its outward and visible symbol the name of the great
Queen. But it has led also to writers being too summarily classed
together who really represent very different phases in a remarkable
evolution. After making all allowances for personal idiosyncrasies, we
can still see how profoundly the work of Massinger is coloured by the
predominant sentiment of the later epoch.
As little is known of Massinger's life as of the lives of most of the
contemporary dramatists who had the good or ill fortune to be born
before the days of the modern biographical mania. It is known that he,
like most of his brethren, suffered grievously from impecuniosity; and
he records in one of his dedications his obligations to a patron without
whose bounty he would for many years have 'but faintly subsisted.' His
father had been employed by Henry, Earl of Pembroke; but Massinger,
though acknowledging a certain debt of gratitude to the Herbert family,
can hardly have received from them any effective patronage. Whatever
their relations may have been, it has been pointed out by Professor
Gardiner[6] that Massinger probably sympathised with the political views
represented by the two sons of his father's patron, who were
successively Earls of Pembroke during the reigns of the first James and
Charles. On two occasions he got into trouble with the licenser for
attacks, real or supposed, upon the policy of the Government. More than
one of his plays contain, according to Professor Gardiner, references to
the politics of the day as distinct as those conveyed by a cartoon in
'Punch.' The general result of his argument is to show that Massinger
sympathised with the views of an aristocratic party who looked with
suspicion upon the despotic tendencies of Charles's Government, and
thought that they could manage refractory parliaments by adopting a more
spirited foreign policy. Though in reality weak and selfish enough, they
affected to protest against the materialising and oppressive policy of
the extreme Royalists. How far these views represented any genuine
convictions, and how far Massinger's adhesion implied a complete
sympathy with them, or might indicate that kind of delusion which often
leads a mere literary observer to see a lofty intention in the schemes
of a selfish politician, are questions which I am incompetent to
discuss, and which obviously do not admit of a decided answer. They
confirm, as far as they go, the general impression as to Massinger's
point of view which we should derive from his writings without special
interpretation. 'Shakespeare,' says Coleridge, 'gives the permanent
politics of human nature' (whatever they may be!), 'and the only
predilection which appears shows itself in his contempt of mobs and the
populace. Massinger is a decided Whig; Beaumont and Fletcher
high-flying, passive-obedience Tories.' The author of 'Coriolanus,' one
would be disposed to say, showed himself a thoroughgoing aristocrat,
though in an age when the popular voice had not yet given utterance to
systematic political discontent. He was still a stranger to the
sentiments symptomatic of an approaching revolution, and has not
explicitly pronounced upon issues hardly revealed even to
The prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming of things to come.
The sense of national unity evolved in the great struggle with Spain had
not yet been lost in the discord of the rising generation. The other
classifications may be accepted with less reserve. The dramatists
represented the views of their patrons. The drama reflected in the main
the sentiments of an aristocratic class alarmed by the growing vigour of
the Puritanical citizens. Fletcher is, as Coleridge says, a
thoroughgoing Tory; his sentiments in 'Valentinian' are, to follow the
same guidance, so 'very slavish and reptile' that it is a trial of
charity to read them. Nor can we quite share Coleridge's rather needless
surprise that they should emanate from the son of a bishop, and that the
duty to God should be the supposed basis. A servile bishop in those days
was not a contradiction in terms, and still less a servile son of a
bishop; and it must surely be admitted that the theory of Divine Right
may lead, illogically or otherwise, to reptile sentiments. The
difference between Fletcher and Massinger, who were occasional
collaborators and apparently close friends (Massinger, it is said, was
buried in Fletcher's grave), was probably due to difference of
temperament as much as to the character of Massinger's family
connection. Massinger's melancholy is as marked as the buoyant gaiety of
his friend and ally. He naturally represents the misgivings which must
have beset the more thoughtful members of his party, as Fletcher
represented the careless vivacity of the Cavalier spirit. Massinger is
given to expatiating upon the text that
Subjects' lives
Are not their prince's tennis-balls, to be bandied
In sport away.
The high-minded Pulcheria, in the 'Emperor of the East,' administers a
bitter reproof to a slavish 'projector' who
Roars out
All is the King's, his will above the laws;
who whispers in his ear that nobody should bring a salad from his garden
without paying 'gabel,' or kill a hen without excise; who suggests that,
if a prince wants a sum of money, he may make impossible demands from a
city and exact arbitrary fines for its non-performance.
Is this the way
To make our Emperor happy? Can the groans
Of his subjects yield him music? Must his thresholds
Be wash'd with widows' and wrong'd orphans' tears,
Or his power grow contemptible?
Professor Gardiner tells us that at the time at which these lines were
written they need not have been taken as referring to Charles. But the
vein of sentiment which often occurs elsewhere is equally significant of
Massinger's view of the political situation of the time. We see what
were the topics that were beginning to occupy men's minds.