friends for what they have done, while we endeavour to neutralize
Professor Murray’s influence upon Greek literature and English language
in his translations by making better translations. The choruses from
Euripides by H. D. are, allowing for errors and even occasional
omissions of difficult passages, much nearer to both Greek and English
than Mr. Murray’s. But H. D. and the other poets of the “Poets’
Translation Series” have so far done no more than pick up some of the
more romantic crumbs of Greek literature; none of them has yet shown
himself competent to attack the _Agamemnon_. If we are to digest the
heavy food of historical and scientific knowledge that we have eaten we
must be prepared for much greater exertions. We need a digestion which
can assimilate both Homer and Flaubert. We need a careful study of
Renaissance Humanists and Translators, such as Mr. Pound has begun. We
need an eye which can see the past in its place with its definite
differences from the present, and yet so lively that it shall be as
present to us as the present. This is the creative eye; and it is
because Professor Murray has no creative instinct that he leaves
Euripides quite dead.
“Rhetoric” and Poetic Drama
The death of Rostand is the disappearance of the poet whom, more than
any other in France, we treated as the exponent of “rhetoric,” thinking
of rhetoric as something recently out of fashion. And as we find
ourselves looking back rather tenderly upon the author of _Cyrano_ we
wonder what this vice or quality is that is associated as plainly with
Rostand’s merits as with his defects. His rhetoric, at least, suited him
at times so well, and so much better than it suited a much greater poet,
Baudelaire, who is at times as rhetorical as Rostand. And we begin to
suspect that the word is merely a vague term of abuse for any style that
is bad, that is so evidently bad or second-rate that we do not recognize
the necessity for greater precision in the phrases we apply to it.
Our own Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry—in so nice a problem it is much
safer to stick to one’s own language—is repeatedly called “rhetorical.”
It had this and that notable quality, but, when we wish to admit that it
had defects, it is rhetorical. It had serious defects, even gross
faults, but we cannot be considered to have erased them from our
language when we are so unclear in our perception of what they are. The
fact is that both Elizabethan prose and Elizabethan poetry are written
in a variety of styles with a variety of vices. Is the style of Lyly, is
Euphuism, rhetorical? In contrast to the elder style of Ascham and Elyot
which it assaults, it is a clear, flowing, orderly and relatively pure
style, with a systematic if monotonous formula of antitheses and
similes. Is the style of Nashe? A tumid, flatulent, vigorous style very
different from Lyly’s. Or it is perhaps the strained and the mixed
figures of speech in which Shakespeare indulged himself. Or it is
perhaps the careful declamation of Jonson. The word simply cannot be
used as synonymous with bad writing. The meanings which it has been
obliged to shoulder have been mostly opprobrious; but if a precise
meaning can be found for it this meaning may occasionally represent a
virtue. It is one of those words which it is the business of criticism
to dissect and reassemble. Let us avoid the assumption that rhetoric is
a vice of manner, and endeavour to find a rhetoric of substance also,
which is right because it issues from what it has to express.
At the present time there is a manifest preference for the
“conversational” in poetry—the style of “direct speech,” opposed to the
“oratorical” and the rhetorical; but if rhetoric is any convention of
writing inappropriately applied, this conversational style can and does
become a rhetoric—or what is supposed to be a conversational style, for
it is often as remote from polite discourse as well could be. Much of
the second and third rate in American _vers libre_ is of this sort; and
much of the second and third rate in English Wordsworthianism. There is
in fact no conversational or other form which can be applied
indiscriminately; if a writer wishes to give the effect of speech he
must positively give the effect of himself talking in his own person or
in one of his rôles; and if we are to express ourselves, our variety of
thoughts and feelings, on a variety of subjects with inevitable
rightness, we must adapt our manner to the moment with infinite
variations. Examination of the development of Elizabethan drama shows
this progress in adaptation, a development from monotony to variety, a
progressive refinement in the perception of the variations of feeling,
and a progressive elaboration of the means of expressing these
variations. This drama is admitted to have grown away from the
rhetorical expression, the bombast speeches, of Kyd and Marlowe to the
subtle and dispersed utterance of Shakespeare and Webster. But this
apparent abandonment or outgrowth of rhetoric is two things: it is
partly an improvement in language and it is partly progressive variation
in feeling. There is, of course, a long distance separating the furibund
fluency of old Hieronimo and the broken words of Lear. There is also a
difference between the famous
Oh eyes no eyes, but fountains full of tears!
Oh life no life, but lively form of death!
and the superb “additions to Hieronimo.”[7]
Footnote 7:
Of the authorship it can only be said that the lines are by some
admirer of Marlowe. This might well be Jonson.
We think of Shakespeare perhaps as the dramatist who concentrates
everything into a sentence, “Pray you undo this button,” or “Honest
honest Iago”; we forget that there is a rhetoric proper to Shakespeare
at his best period which is quite free from the genuine Shakespearean
vices either of the early period or the late. These passages are
comparable to the best bombast of Kyd or Marlowe, with a greater command
of language and a greater control of the emotion. _The Spanish Tragedy_
is bombastic when it descends to language which was only the trick of
its age; _Tamburlaine_ is bombastic because it is monotonous, inflexible
to the alterations of emotion. The really fine rhetoric of Shakespeare
occurs in situations where a character in the play _sees himself_ in a
dramatic light:
_Othello._ And say, besides,—that in Aleppo once....
_Coriolanus._ If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there,
That like an eagle in a dovecote, I
Fluttered your Volscians in Corioli.
Alone I did it. Boy!
_Timon._ Come not to me again; but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood....
It occurs also once in _Antony and Cleopatra_, when Enobarbus is
inspired to see Cleopatra in this dramatic light:
The barge she sat in....
Shakespeare made fun of Marston, and Jonson made fun of Kyd. But in
Marston’s play the words were expressive of nothing; and Jonson was
criticizing the feeble and conceited language, not the emotion, not the
“oratory.” Jonson is as oratorical himself, and the moments when his
oratory succeeds are, I believe, the moments that conform to our
formula. Notably the speech of Sylla’s ghost in the induction to
_Catiline_, and the speech of Envy at the beginning of _The Poetaster_.
These two figures are contemplating their own dramatic importance, and
quite properly. But in the Senate speeches in _Catiline_, how tedious,
how dusty! Here we are spectators not of a play of characters, but of a
play of forensic, exactly as if we had been forced to attend the sitting
itself. A speech in a play should never appear to be intended to move us
as it might conceivably move other characters in the play, for it is
essential that we should preserve our position of spectators, and
observe always from the outside though with complete understanding. The
scene in _Julius Cæsar_ is right because the object of our attention is
not the speech of Antony (_Bedeutung_) but the effect of his speech upon
the mob, and Antony’s intention, his preparation and consciousness of
the effect. And in the rhetorical speeches from Shakespeare which have
been cited, we have this necessary advantage of a new clue to the
character, in noting the angle from which he views himself. But when a
character _in_ a play makes a direct appeal to us, we are either the
victims of our own sentiment, or we are in the presence of a vicious
rhetoric.
These references ought to supply some evidence of the propriety of
Cyrano on Noses. Is not Cyrano exactly in this position of contemplating
himself as a romantic, a dramatic figure? This dramatic sense on the
part of the characters themselves is rare in modern drama. In
sentimental drama it appears in a degraded form, when we are evidently
intended to accept the character’s sentimental interpretation of
himself. In plays of realism we often find parts which are never allowed
to be consciously dramatic, for fear, perhaps, of their appearing less
real. But in actual life, in many of those situations in actual life
which we enjoy consciously and keenly, we are at times aware of
ourselves in this way, and these moments are of very great usefulness to
dramatic verse. A very small part of acting is that which takes place on
the stage! Rostand had—whether he had anything else or not—this dramatic
sense, and it is what gives life to Cyrano. It is a sense which is
almost a sense of humour (for when anyone is conscious of himself as
acting, something like a sense of humour is present). It gives Rostand’s
characters—Cyrano at least—a gusto which is uncommon on the modern
stage. No doubt Rostand’s people play up to this too steadily. We
recognize that in the love scenes of Cyrano in the garden, for in _Romeo
and Juliet_ the profounder dramatist shows his lovers melting into
incoherent unconsciousness of their isolated selves, shows the human
soul in the process of forgetting itself. Rostand could not do that; but
in the particular case of Cyrano on Noses, the character, the situation,
the occasion were perfectly suited and combined. The tirade generated by
this combination is not only genuinely and highly dramatic: it is
possibly poetry also. If a writer is incapable of composing such a scene
as this, so much the worse for his poetic drama.
_Cyrano_ satisfies, as far as scenes like this can satisfy, the
requirements of poetic drama. It must take genuine and substantial human
emotions, such emotions as observation can confirm, typical emotions,
and give them artistic form; the degree of abstraction is a question for
the method of each author. In Shakespeare the form is determined in the
unity of the whole, as well as single scenes; it is something to attain
this unity, as Rostand does, in scenes if not the whole play. Not only
as a dramatist, but as a poet, he is superior to Maeterlinck, whose
drama, in failing to be dramatic, fails also to be poetic. Maeterlinck
has a literary perception of the dramatic and a literary perception of
the poetic, and he joins the two; the two are not, as sometimes they are
in the work of Rostand, fused. His characters take no conscious delight
in their rôle—they are sentimental. With Rostand the centre of gravity
is in the expression of the emotion, not as with Maeterlinck in the
emotion which cannot be expressed. Some writers appear to believe that
emotions gain in intensity through being inarticulate. Perhaps the
emotions are not significant enough to endure full daylight.
In any case, we may take our choice: we may apply the term “rhetoric” to
the type of dramatic speech which I have instanced, and then we must
admit that it covers good as well as bad. Or we may choose to except
this type of speech from rhetoric. In that case we must say that
rhetoric is any adornment or inflation of speech which is _not done for
a particular effect_ but for a general impressiveness. And in this case,
too, we cannot allow the term to cover all bad writing.
Some Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe
“Marloe was stabd with a dagger, and dyed swearing”
A more friendly critic, Mr. A. C. Swinburne, observes of this poet that
“the father of English tragedy and the creator of English blank verse
was therefore also the teacher and the guide of Shakespeare.” In this
sentence there are two misleading assumptions and two misleading
conclusions. Kyd has as good a title to the first honour as Marlowe;
Surrey has a better title to the second; and Shakespeare was not taught
or guided by one of his predecessors or contemporaries alone. The less
questionable judgment is, that Marlowe exercised a strong influence over
later drama, though not himself as great a dramatist as Kyd; that he
introduced several new tones into blank verse, and commenced the
dissociative process which drew it farther and farther away from the
rhythms of rhymed verse; and that when Shakespeare borrowed from him,
which was pretty often at the beginning, Shakespeare either made
something inferior or something different.
The comparative study of English versification at various periods is a
large tract of unwritten history. To make a study of blank verse alone,
would be to elicit some curious conclusions. It would show, I believe,
that blank verse within Shakespeare’s lifetime was more highly
developed, that it became the vehicle of more varied and more intense
art-emotions than it has ever conveyed since; and that after the
erection of the Chinese Wall of Milton, blank verse has suffered not
only arrest but retrogression. That the blank verse of Tennyson, for
example, a consummate master of this form in certain applications, is
cruder (_not_ “rougher” or less perfect in technique) than that of half
a dozen contemporaries of Shakespeare; cruder, because less capable of
expressing complicated, subtle, and surprising emotions.
Every writer who has written any blank verse worth saving has produced
particular tones which his verse and no other’s is capable of rendering;
and we should keep this in mind when we talk about “influences” and
“indebtedness.” Shakespeare is “universal” (if you like) because he has
more of these tones than anyone else; but they are all out of the one
man; one man cannot be more than one man; there might have been six
Shakespeares at once without conflicting frontiers; and to say that
Shakespeare expressed nearly all human emotions, implying that he left
very little for anyone else, is a radical misunderstanding of art and
the artist—a misunderstanding which, even when explicitly rejected, may
lead to our neglecting the effort of attention necessary to discover the
specific properties of the verse of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The
development of blank verse may be likened to the analysis of that
astonishing industrial product coal-tar. Marlowe’s verse is one of the
earlier derivatives, but it possesses properties which are not repeated
in any of the analytic or synthetic blank verses discovered somewhat
later.
The “vices of style” of Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s age is a convenient
name for a number of vices, no one of which, perhaps, was shared by all
of the writers. It is pertinent, at least, to remark that Marlowe’s
“rhetoric” is not, or not characteristically, Shakespeare’s rhetoric;
that Marlowe’s rhetoric consists in a pretty simple huffe-snuffe
bombast, while Shakespeare’s is more exactly a vice of style, a tortured
perverse ingenuity of images which dissipates instead of concentrating
the imagination, and which may be due in part to influences by which
Marlowe was untouched. Next, we find that Marlowe’s vice is one which he
was gradually attenuating, and even, what is more miraculous, turning
into a virtue. And we find that this bard of torrential imagination
recognized many of his best bits (and those of one or two others), saved
them, and reproduced them more than once, almost invariably improving
them in the process.
It is worth while noticing a few of these versions, because they
indicate, somewhat contrary to usual opinion, that Marlowe was a
deliberate and conscious workman. Mr. J. G. Robertson has spotted an
interesting theft of Marlowe’s from Spenser. Here is Spenser (_Faery
Queen_, I. vii. 32):
Like to an almond tree y-mounted high
On top of green Selinis all alone,
With blossoms brave bedeckèd daintily;
Whose tender locks do tremble every one
At every little breath that under heaven is blown.
And here Marlowe (_Tamburlaine_, Part II. Act IV. sc. iii.):
Like to an almond tree y-mounted high
Upon the lofty and celestial mount
Of evergreen Selinus, quaintly deck’d
With blooms more white than Erycina’s brows,
Whose tender blossoms tremble every one
At every little breath that thorough heaven is blown.
This is interesting, not only as showing that Marlowe’s talent, like
that of most poets, was partly synthetic, but also because it seems to
give a clue to some particularly “lyric” effects found in _Tamburlaine_,
not in Marlowe’s other plays, and not, I believe, anywhere else. For
example, the praise of Zenocrate in Part II. Act. II. sc. iv.:
Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven,
As sentinels to warn th’ immortal souls
To entertain divine Zenocrate: etc.
This is not Spenser’s movement, but the influence of Spenser must be
present. There had been no great blank verse before Marlowe; but there
was the powerful presence of this great master of melody immediately
precedent; and the combination produced results which could not be
repeated. I do not think that it can be claimed that Peele had any
influence here.
The passage quoted from Spenser has a further interest. It will be noted
that the fourth line:
With blooms more white than Erycina’s brows
is Marlowe’s contribution. Compare this with these other lines of
Marlowe:
So looks my love, shadowing in her brows
(_Tamburlaine_)
Like to the shadows of Pyramides
(_Tamburlaine_)
and the final and best version:
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than have the white breasts of the queen of love.
(_Doctor Faustus_)
and compare the whole set with Spenser again (_F. Q._):
Upon her eyelids many graces sate
Under the shadow of her even brows,
a passage which Mr. Robertson says Spenser himself used in three other
places.
This economy is frequent in Marlowe. Within _Tamburlaine_ it occurs in
the form of monotony, especially in the facile use of resonant names
(_e.g._ the recurrence of “Caspia” or “Caspian” with the same tone
effect), a practice in which Marlowe was followed by Milton, but which
Marlowe himself outgrew. Again,
Zenocrate, lovlier than the love of Jove,
Brighter than is the silver Rhodope,
is paralleled later by
Zenocrate, the lovliest maid alive,
Fairer than rocks of pearl and precious stone.
One line Marlowe remodels with triumphant success:
And set black streamers in the firmament
(_Tamburlaine_)
becomes
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!
(_Doctor Faustus_)
The verse accomplishments of _Tamburlaine_ are notably two: Marlowe gets
into blank verse the melody of Spenser, and he gets a new driving power
by reinforcing the sentence period against the line period. The rapid
long sentence, running line into line, as in the famous soliloquies
“Nature compounded of four elements” and “What is beauty, saith my
sufferings, then?” marks the certain escape of blank verse from the
rhymed couplet, and from the elegiac or rather pastoral note of Surrey,
to which Tennyson returned. If you contrast these two soliloquies with
the verse of Marlowe’s greatest contemporary, Kyd—by no means a
despicable versifier—you see the importance of the innovation:
The one took sanctuary, and, being sent for out,
Was murdered in Southwark as he passed
To Greenwich, where the Lord Protector lay.
Black Will was burned in Flushing on a stage;
Green was hanged at Osbridge in Kent....
which is not really inferior to:
So these four abode
Within one house together; and as years
Went forward, Mary took another mate;
But Dora lived unmarried till her death.
(Tennyson, _Dora_)
In _Faustus_ Marlowe went farther: he broke up the line, to a gain in
intensity, in the last soliloquy; and he developed a new and important
conversational tone in the dialogues of Faustus with the devil. _Edward
II._ has never lacked consideration: it is more desirable, in brief
space, to remark upon two plays, one of which has been misunderstood and
the other underrated. These are the _Jew of Malta_ and _Dido Queen of
Carthage_. Of the first of these, it has always been said that the end,
even the last two acts, are unworthy of the first three. If one takes
the _Jew of Malta_ not as a tragedy, or as a “tragedy of blood,” but as
a farce, the concluding act becomes intelligible; and if we attend with
a careful ear to the versification, we find that Marlowe develops a tone
to suit this farce, and even perhaps that this tone is his most powerful
and mature tone. I say farce, but with the enfeebled humour of our times
the word is a misnomer; it is the farce of the old English humour, the
terribly serious, even savage comic humour, the humour which spent its
last breath on the decadent genius of Dickens. It has nothing in common
with J. M. Barrie, Captain Bairnsfather, or _Punch_. It is the humour of
that very serious (but very different) play, _Volpone_.
First, be thou void of these affections,
Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear;
Be moved at nothing, see thou pity none ...
As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls:
Sometimes I go about and poison wells ...
and the last words of Barabas complete this prodigious caricature:
But now begins th’ extremity of heat
To pinch me with intolerable pangs:
Die, life! fly, soul! tongue, curse thy fill, and die!
It is something which Shakespeare could not do, and which he could not
have understood.
_Dido_ appears to be a hurried play, perhaps done to order with the
_Æneid_ in front of him. But even here there is progress. The account of
the sack of Troy is in this newer style of Marlowe’s, this style which
secures its emphasis by always hesitating on the edge of caricature at
the right moment:
The Grecian soldiers, tir’d with ten years war,
Began to cry, “Let us unto our ships,
Troy is invincible, why stay we here?”...
By this, the camp was come unto the walls,
And through the breach did march into the streets,
Where, meeting with the rest, “Kill, kill!” they cried....
And after him, his band of Myrmidons,
With balls of wild-fire in their murdering paws ...
At last, the soldiers pull’d her by the heels,
And swung her howling in the empty air....
We saw Cassandra sprawling in the streets ...
This is not Vergil, or Shakespeare; it is pure Marlowe. By comparing the
whole speech with Clarence’s dream, in _Richard III._, one acquires a
little insight into the difference between Marlowe and Shakespeare:
What scourge for perjury
Can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence?
There, on the other hand, is what Marlowe’s style could not do; the
phrase has a concision which is almost classical, certainly Dantesque.
Again, as often with the Elizabethan dramatists, there are lines in
Marlowe, besides the many lines that Shakespeare adapted, that might
have been written by either:
If thou wilt stay,
Leap in mine arms; mine arms are open wide;
If not, turn from me, and I’ll turn from thee;
For though thou hast the heart to say farewell,
I have not power to stay thee.
But the direction in which Marlowe’s verse might have moved, had he not
“dyed swearing,” is quite un-Shakespearean, is toward this intense and
serious and indubitably great poetry, which, like some great painting
and sculpture, attains its effects by something not unlike caricature.
Hamlet and His Problems
Few critics have even admitted that _Hamlet_ the play is the primary
problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the
character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of
critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order,
but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in
criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious
existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe,
who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet
a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet
remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind
of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet,
is the most misleading kind possible. For they both possessed
unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical
aberrations the more plausible by the substitution—of their own Hamlet
for Shakespeare’s—which their creative gift effects. We should be
thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play.
Two recent writers, Mr. J. M. Robertson and Professor Stoll of the
University of Minnesota, have issued small books which can be praised
for moving in the other direction. Mr. Stoll performs a service in
recalling to our attention the labours of the critics of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries,[8] observing that
Footnote 8:
I have never, by the way, seen a cogent refutation of Thomas Rymer’s
objections to _Othello_.