perhaps there is not one living poet who could do the like. It is
impossible to deny the originality. The language is pure and correct,
free from muddiness or turbidity. Massinger does not confuse metaphors,
or heap them one upon another. He is lucid, though not easy. But if
Massinger’s age, “without being exactly corrupt, lacks moral fibre,”
Massinger’s verse, without being exactly corrupt, suffers from cerebral
anæmia. To say that an involved style is necessarily a bad style would
be preposterous. But such a style should follow the involutions of a
mode of perceiving, registering, and digesting impressions which is also
involved. It is to be feared that the feeling of Massinger is simple and
overlaid with received ideas. Had Massinger had a nervous system as
refined as that of Middleton, Tourneur, Webster, or Ford, his style
would be a triumph. But such a nature was not at hand, and Massinger
precedes, not another Shakespeare, but Milton.
Massinger is, in fact, at a further remove from Shakespeare than that
other precursor of Milton—John Fletcher. Fletcher was above all an
opportunist, in his verse, in his momentary effects, never quite a
pastiche; in his structure ready to sacrifice everything to the single
scene. To Fletcher, because he was more intelligent, less will be
forgiven. Fletcher had a cunning guess at feelings, and betrayed them;
Massinger was unconscious and innocent. As an artisan of the theatre he
is not inferior to Fletcher, and his best tragedies have an honester
unity than _Bonduca_. But the unity is superficial. In the _Roman Actor_
the development of parts is out of all proportion to the central theme;
in the _Unnatural Combat_, in spite of the deft handling of suspense and
the quick shift from climax to a new suspense, the first part of the
play is the hatred of Malefort for his son and the second part is his
passion for his daughter. It is theatrical skill, not an artistic
conscience arranging emotions, that holds the two parts together. In the
_Duke of Milan_ the appearance of Sforza at the Court of his conqueror
only delays the action, or rather breaks the emotional rhythm. And we
have named three of Massinger’s best.
A dramatist who so skilfully welds together parts which have no reason
for being together, who fabricates plays so well knit and so remote from
unity, we should expect to exhibit the same synthetic cunning in
character. Mr. Cruickshank, Coleridge, and Leslie Stephen are pretty
well agreed that Massinger is no master of characterization. You can, in
fact, put together heterogeneous parts to form a lively play; but a
character, to be living, must be conceived from some emotional unity. A
character is not to be composed of scattered observations of human
nature, but of parts which are felt together. Hence it is that although
Massinger’s failure to draw a moving character is no greater than his
failure to make a whole play, and probably springs from the same
defective sensitiveness, yet the failure in character is more
conspicuous and more disastrous. A “living” character is not necessarily
“true to life.” It is a person whom we can see and hear, whether he be
true or false to human nature as we know it. What the creator of
character needs is not so much knowledge of motives as keen sensibility;
the dramatist need not understand people; but he must be exceptionally
aware of them. This awareness was not given to Massinger. He inherits
the traditions of conduct, female chastity, hymeneal sanctity, the
fashion of honour, without either criticizing or informing them from his
own experience. In the earlier drama these conventions are merely a
framework, or an alloy necessary for working the metal; the metal itself
consisted of unique emotions resulting inevitably from the
circumstances, resulting or inhering as inevitably as the properties of
a chemical compound. Middleton’s heroine, for instance, in the
_Changeling_, exclaims in the well-known words—
Why, ’tis impossible thou canst be so wicked,
To shelter such a cunning cruelty
To make his death the murderer of my honour!
The word “honour” in such a situation is out of date, but the emotion of
Beatrice at that moment, given the conditions, is as permanent and
substantial as anything in human nature. The emotion of Othello in Act
V. is the emotion of a man who discovers that the worst part of his own
soul has been exploited by some one more clever than he; it is this
emotion carried by the writer to a very high degree of intensity. Even
in so late and so decayed a drama as that of Ford, the framework of
emotions and morals of the time is only the vehicle for statements of
feeling which are unique and imperishable: Ford’s and Ford’s only.
What may be considered corrupt or decadent in the morals of Massinger is
not an alteration or diminution in morals; it is simply the
disappearance of all the personal and real emotions which this morality
supported and into which it introduced a kind of order. As soon as the
emotions disappear the morality which ordered it appears hideous.
Puritanism itself became repulsive only when it appeared as the survival
of a restraint after the feelings which it restrained had gone. When
Massinger’s ladies resist temptation they do not appear to undergo any
important emotion; they merely know what is expected of them; they
manifest themselves to us as lubricious prudes. Any age has its
conventions; and any age might appear absurd when its conventions get
into the hands of a man like Massinger—a man, we mean, of so
exceptionally superior a literary talent as Massinger’s, and so paltry
an imagination. The Elizabethan morality was an important convention;
important because it was not consciously of one social class alone,
because it provided a framework for emotions to which all classes could
respond, and it hindered no feeling. It was not hypocritical, and it did
not suppress; its dark corners are haunted by the ghosts of Mary Fitton
and perhaps greater. It is a subject which has not been sufficiently
investigated. Fletcher and Massinger rendered it ridiculous; not by not
believing in it, but because they were men of great talents who could
not vivify it; because they could not fit into it passionate, complete
human characters.
The tragedy of Massinger is interesting chiefly according to the
definition given before; the highest degree of verbal excellence
compatible with the most rudimentary development of the senses.
Massinger succeeds better in something which is not tragedy; in the
romantic comedy. _A Very Woman_ deserves all the praise that Swinburne,
with his almost unerring gift for selection, has bestowed upon it. The
probable collaboration of Fletcher had the happiest result; for
certainly that admirable comic personage, the tipsy Borachia, is handled
with more humour than we expect of Massinger. It is a play which would
be enjoyable on the stage. The form, however, of romantic comedy is
itself inferior and decadent. There is an inflexibility about the poetic
drama which is by no means a matter of classical, or neoclassical, or
pseudo-classical law. The poetic drama might develop forms highly
different from those of Greece or England, India or Japan. Conceded the
utmost freedom, the romantic drama would yet remain inferior. The poetic
drama must have an emotional unity, let the emotion be whatever you
like. It must have a dominant tone; and if this be strong enough, the
most heterogeneous emotions may be made to reinforce it. The romantic
comedy is a skilful concoction of inconsistent emotion, a _revue_ of
emotion. _A Very Woman_ is surpassingly well plotted. The debility of
romantic drama does not depend upon extravagant setting, or preposterous
events, or inconceivable coincidences; all these might be found in a
serious tragedy or comedy. It consists in an internal incoherence of
feelings, a concatenation of emotions which signifies nothing.
From this type of play, so eloquent of emotional disorder, there was no
swing back of the pendulum. Changes never come by a simple reinfusion
into the form which the life has just left. The romantic drama was not a
new form. Massinger dealt not with emotions so much as with the social
abstractions of emotions, more generalized and therefore more quickly
and easily interchangeable within the confines of a single action. He
was not guided by direct communications through the nerves. Romantic
drama tended, accordingly, toward what is sometimes called the
“typical,” but which is not the truly typical; for the _typical_ figure
in a drama is always particularized—an individual. The tendency of the
romantic drama was toward a form which continued it in removing its more
conspicuous vices, was toward a more severe external order. This form
was the Heroic Drama. We look into Dryden’s “Essay on Heroic Plays,” and
we find that “love and valour ought to be the subject of an heroic
poem.” Massinger, in his destruction of the old drama, had prepared the
way for Dryden. The intellect had perhaps exhausted the old conventions.
It was not able to supply the impoverishment of feeling.
Such are the reflections aroused by an examination of some of
Massinger’s plays in the light of Mr. Cruickshank’s statement that
Massinger’s age “had much culture, but, without being exactly corrupt,
lacked moral fibre.” The statement may be supported. In order to fit
into our estimate of Massinger the two admirable comedies—_A New Way to
Pay Old Debts_ and _The City Madam_—a more extensive research would be
required than is possible within our limits.
II
Massinger’s tragedy may be summarized for the unprepared reader as being
very dreary. It is dreary, unless one is prepared by a somewhat
extensive knowledge of his livelier contemporaries to grasp without
fatigue precisely the elements in it which are capable of giving
pleasure; or unless one is incited by a curious interest in
versification. In comedy, however, Massinger was one of the few masters
in the language. He was a master in a comedy which is serious, even
sombre; and in one aspect of it there are only two names to mention with
his: those of Marlowe and Jonson. In comedy, as a matter of fact, a
greater variety of methods were discovered and employed than in tragedy.
The method of Kyd, as developed by Shakespeare, was the standard for
English tragedy down to Otway and to Shelley. But both individual
temperament, and varying epochs, made more play with comedy. The comedy
of Lyly is one thing; that of Shakespeare, followed by Beaumont and
Fletcher, is another; and that of Middleton is a third. And Massinger,
while he has his own comedy, is nearer to Marlowe and Jonson than to any
of these.
Massinger was, in fact, as a comic writer, fortunate in the moment at
which he wrote. His comedy is transitional; but it happens to be one of
those transitions which contain some merit not anticipated by
predecessors or refined upon by later writers. The comedy of Jonson is
nearer to caricature; that of Middleton a more photographic delineation
of low life. Massinger is nearer to Restoration comedy, and more like
his contemporary, Shirley, in assuming a certain social level, certain
distinctions of class, as a postulate of his comedy. This resemblance to
later comedy is also the important point of difference between Massinger
and earlier comedy. But Massinger’s comedy differs just as widely from
the comedy of manners proper; he is closer to that in his romantic
drama—in _A Very Woman_—than in _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_; in his
comedy his interest is not in the follies of love-making or the
absurdities of social pretence, but in the unmasking of villainy. Just
as the Old Comedy of Molière differs in principle from the New Comedy of
Marivaux, so the Old Comedy of Massinger differs from the New Comedy of
his contemporary Shirley. And as in France, so in England, the more
farcical comedy was the more serious. Massinger’s great comic rogues,
Sir Giles Overreach and Luke Frugal, are members of the large English
family which includes Barabas and Sir Epicure Mammon, and from which Sir
Tunbelly Clumsy claims descent.
What distinguishes Massinger from Marlowe and Jonson is in the main an
inferiority. The greatest comic characters of these two dramatists are
slight work in comparison with Shakespeare’s best—Falstaff has a third
dimension and Epicure Mammon has only two. But this slightness is part
of the nature of the art which Jonson practised, a smaller art than
Shakespeare’s. The inferiority of Massinger to Jonson is an inferiority,
not of one type of art to another, but within Jonson’s type. It is a
simple deficiency. Marlowe’s and Jonson’s comedies were a view of life;
they were, as great literature is, the transformation of a personality
into a personal work of art, their lifetime’s work, long or short.
Massinger is not simply a smaller personality: his personality hardly
exists. He did not, out of his own personality, build a world of art, as
Shakespeare and Marlowe and Jonson built.
In the fine pages which Remy de Gourmont devotes to Flaubert in his
_Problème du Style_, the great critic declares:
La vie est un dépouillement. Le but de l’activité propre de l’homme
est de nettoyer sa personnalité, de la laver de toutes les
souillures qu’y déposa l’éducation, de la dégager de toutes les
empreintes qu’y laissèrent nos admirations adolescentes;
and again:
Flaubert incorporait toute sa sensibilité à ses œuvres.... Hors de
ses livres, où il se transvasait goutte à goutte, jusqu’à la lie,
Flaubert est fort peu intéressant....
Of Shakespeare notably, of Jonson less, of Marlowe (and of Keats to the
term of life allowed him), one can say that they _se transvasaient
goutte à goutte_; and in England, which has produced a prodigious number
of men of genius and comparatively few works of art, there are not many
writers of whom one can say it. Certainly not of Massinger. A brilliant
master of technique, he was not, in this profound sense, an artist. And
so we come to inquire how, if this is so, he could have written two
great comedies. We shall probably be obliged to conclude that a large
part of their excellence is, in some way which should be defined,
fortuitous; and that therefore they are, however remarkable, not works
of perfect art.
This objection raised by Leslie Stephen to Massinger’s method of
revealing a villain has great cogency; but I am inclined to believe that
the cogency is due to a somewhat different reason from that which Leslie
Stephen assigns. His statement is too _apriorist_ to be quite
trustworthy. There is no reason why a comedy or tragedy villain should
not declare himself, and in as long a period as the author likes; but
the sort of villain who may run on in this way is a simple villain
(simple not _simpliste_). Barabas and Volpone can declare their
character, because they have no inside; appearance and reality are
coincident; they are forces in particular directions. Massinger’s two
villains are not simple. Giles Overreach is essentially a great force
directed upon small objects; a great force, a small mind; the terror of
a dozen parishes instead of the conqueror of a world. The force is
misapplied, attenuated, thwarted, by the man’s vulgarity: he is a great
man of the City, without fear, but with the most abject awe of the
aristocracy. He is accordingly not simple, but a product of a certain
civilization, and he is not wholly conscious. His monologues are meant
to be, not what he thinks he is, but what he really is: and yet they are
not the truth about him, and he himself certainly does not know the
truth. To declare himself, therefore, is impossible.
Nay, when my ears are pierced with widows’ cries,
And undone orphans wash with tears my threshold,
I only think what ’tis to have my daughter
Right honourable; and ’tis a powerful charm
Makes me insensible of remorse, or pity,
Or the least sting of conscience.
This is the wrong note. Elsewhere we have the right:
Thou art a fool;
In being out of office, I am out of danger;
Where, if I were a justice, besides the trouble,
I might or out of wilfulness, or error,
Run myself finely into a praemunire,
And so become a prey to the informer,
No, I’ll have none of’t; ’tis enough I keep
Greedy at my devotion: so he serve
My purposes, let him hang, or damn, I care not....
And how well tuned, well modulated, here, the diction! The man is
audible and visible. But from passages like the first we may be
permitted to infer that Massinger was unconscious of trying to develop a
different kind of character from any that Marlowe or Jonson had
invented.
Luke Frugal, in _The City Madam_, is not so great a character as Sir
Giles Overreach. But Luke Frugal just misses being almost the greatest
of all hypocrites. His humility in the first act of the play is more
than half real. The error in his portraiture is not the extravagant
hocus-pocus of supposed Indian necromancers by which he is so easily
duped, but the premature disclosure of villainy in his temptation of the
two apprentices of his brother. But for this, he would be a perfect
chameleon of circumstance. Here, again, we feel that Massinger was
conscious only of inventing a rascal of the old simpler farce type. But
the play is not a farce, in the sense in which _The Jew of Malta_, _The
Alchemist_, _Bartholomew Fair_ are farces. Massinger had not the
personality to create great farce, and he was too serious to invent
trivial farce. The ability to perform that slight distortion of _all_
the elements in the world of a play or a story, so that this world is
complete in itself, which was given to Marlowe and Jonson (and to
Rabelais) and which is prerequisite to great farce, was denied to
Massinger. On the other hand, his temperament was more closely related
to theirs than to that of Shirley or the Restoration wits. His two
comedies therefore occupy a place by themselves. His ways of thinking
and feeling isolate him from both the Elizabethan and the later Caroline
mind. He might almost have been a great realist; he is killed by
conventions which were suitable for the preceding literary generation,
but not for his. Had Massinger been a greater man, a man of more
intellectual courage, the current of English literature immediately
after him might have taken a different course. The defect is precisely a
defect of personality. He is not, however, the only man of letters who,
at the moment when a new view of life is wanted, has looked at life
through the eyes of his predecessors, and only at manners through his
own.
Swinburne as Poet
It is a question of some nicety to decide how much must be read of any
particular poet. And it is not a question merely of the size of the
poet. There are some poets whose every line has unique value. There are
others who can be taken by a few poems universally agreed upon. There
are others who need be read only in selections, but what selections are
read will not very much matter. Of Swinburne, we should like to have the
_Atalanta_ entire, and a volume of selections which should certainly
contain _The Leper_, _Laus Veneris_, and _The Triumph of Time_. It ought
to contain many more, but there is perhaps no other single poem which it
would be an error to omit. A student of Swinburne will want to read one
of the Stuart plays and dip into _Tristram of Lyonesse_. But almost no
one, to-day, will wish to read the whole of Swinburne. It is not because
Swinburne is voluminous; certain poets, equally voluminous, must be read
entire. The necessity and the difficulty of a selection are due to the
peculiar nature of Swinburne’s contribution, which, it is hardly too
much to say, is of a very different kind from that of any other poet of
equal reputation.
We may take it as undisputed that Swinburne did make a contribution;
that he did something that had not been done before, and that what he
did will not turn out to be a fraud. And from that we may proceed to
inquire what Swinburne’s contribution was, and why, whatever critical
solvents we employ to break down the structure of his verse, this
contribution remains. The test is this: agreed that we do not (and I
think that the present generation does not) greatly enjoy Swinburne, and
agreed that (a more serious condemnation) at one period of our lives we
did enjoy him and now no longer enjoy him; nevertheless, the words which
we use to state our grounds of dislike or indifference cannot be applied
to Swinburne as they can to bad poetry. The words of condemnation are
words which express his qualities. You may say “diffuse.” But the
diffuseness is essential; had Swinburne practised greater concentration
his verse would be, not better in the same kind, but a different thing.
His diffuseness is one of his glories. That so little material as
appears to be employed in _The Triumph of Time_ should release such an
amazing number of words, requires what there is no reason to call
anything but genius. You could not condense _The Triumph of Time_. You
could only leave out. And this would destroy the poem; though no one
stanza seems essential. Similarly, a considerable quantity—a volume of
selections—is necessary to give the quality of Swinburne although there
is perhaps no one poem essential in this selection.
If, then, we must be very careful in applying terms of censure, like
“diffuse,” we must be equally careful of praise. “The beauty of
Swinburne’s verse is the sound,” people say, explaining, “he had little
visual imagination.” I am inclined to think that the word “beauty” is
hardly to be used in connection with Swinburne’s verse at all; but in
any case the beauty or effect of sound is neither that of music nor that
of poetry which can be set to music. There is no reason why verse
intended to be sung should not present a sharp visual image or convey an
important intellectual meaning, for it supplements the music by another
means of affecting the feelings. What we get in Swinburne is an
expression by sound, which could not possibly associate itself with
music. For what he gives is not images and ideas and music, it is one
thing with a curious mixture of suggestions of all three.
Shall I come, if I swim? wide are the waves, you see;
Shall I come, if I fly, my dear Love, to thee?
This is Campion, and an example of the kind of music that is not to be
found in Swinburne. It is an arrangement and choice of words which has a
sound-value and at the same time a coherent comprehensible meaning, and
the two things—the musical value and meaning—are two things, not one.
But in Swinburne there is no _pure_ beauty—no pure beauty of sound, or
of image, or of idea.
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
I quote from Shelley, because Shelley is supposed to be the master of
Swinburne; and because his song, like that of Campion, has what
Swinburne has not—a beauty of music and a beauty of content; and because
it is clearly and simply expressed, with only two adjectives. Now, in
Swinburne the meaning and the sound are one thing. He is concerned with
the meaning of the word in a peculiar way: he employs, or rather
“works,” the word’s meaning. And this is connected with an interesting
fact about his vocabulary: he uses the most general word, because his
emotion is never particular, never in direct line of vision, never
focused; it is emotion reinforced, not by intensification, but by
expansion.
There lived a singer in France of old
By the tideless dolorous midland sea.
In a land of sand and ruin and gold
There shone one woman, and none but she.
You see that Provence is the merest point of diffusion here. Swinburne
defines the place by the most general word, which has for him its own
value. “Gold,” “ruin,” “dolorous”: it is not merely the sound that he
wants, but the vague associations of idea that the words give him. He
has not his eye on a particular place, as
Li ruscelletti che dei verdi colli
Del Casentin discendon giuso in Arno....
It is, in fact, the word that gives him the thrill, not the object. When
you take to pieces any verse of Swinburne, you find always that the
object was not there—only the word. Compare
Snowdrops that plead for pardon
And pine for fright