The Age of Shakespeare Part 2

A long war disturb'd your minde, Here your perfect peace is sign'd.

Of what is't, fooles make such vaine keeping?

Sin their conception, their birth, weeping: Their life, a generall mist of error, Their death, a hideous storme of terror.

Strew your haire with powders sweete: Don cleane linnen, bath[e] your feete, And (the foule feend more to checke) A crucifixe let blesse your necke: 'Tis now full tide 'tweene night and day, End your groane, and come away.

(_The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy_: 1623: sig. K, K 2.)

The toll of the funereal rhythm, the heavy chime of the solemn and simple verse, the mournful menace and the brooding presage of its note, are but the covering, as it were, or the outer expression, of the tragic significance which deepens and quickens and kindles to its close.

Aeschylus and Dante have never excelled, nor perhaps have Sophocles and Shakespeare ever equalled in impression of terrible effect, the fancy of bidding a live woman array herself in the raiment of the grave, and do for her own living body the offices done for a corpse by the ministers attendant on the dead.

The murderous humorist whose cynical inspiration gives life to these deadly lines is at first sight a less plausible, but on second thoughts may perhaps seem no less possible a character than Flamineo. Pure and simple ambition of the Napoleonic order is the motive which impels into infamy the aspiring parasite of Brachiano: a savage melancholy inflames the baffled greed of Bosola to a pitch of wickedness not unqualified by relenting touches of profitless remorse, which come always either too early or too late to bear any serviceable fruit of compa.s.sion or redemption. There is no deeper or more Shakespearean stroke of tragic humor in all Webster's writings than that conveyed in the scornful and acute reply--almost too acute perhaps for the character--of Bosola's remorseless patron to the remonstrance or appeal of his instrument against the insatiable excess and persistence of his cruelty: "Thy pity is nothing akin to thee." He has more in common with Romelio in "The Devil's Law-case," an a.s.sa.s.sin who misses his aim and flounders into penitence much as that discomfortable drama misses its point and stumbles into vacuity: and whose unsatisfactory figure looks either like a crude and unsuccessful study for that of Bosola, or a disproportioned and emasculated copy from it. But to him too Webster has given the fitful force of fancy or inspiration which finds expression in such sudden s.n.a.t.c.hes of funereal verse as this:

How then can any monument say "Here rest these bones till the last day,"

When Time, swift both of foot and feather, May bear them the s.e.xton kens not whither?

What care I, then, though my last sleep Be in the desert or the deep, No lamp nor taper, day and night, To give my charnel chargeable light?

I have there like quant.i.ty of ground, And at the last day I shall be found.

The villanous laxity of versification which deforms the grim and sardonic beauty of these occasionally rough and halting lines is perceptible here and there in "The d.u.c.h.ess of Malfy," but comes to its head in "The Devil's Law-case." It cannot, I fear, be denied that Webster was the first to relax those natural bonds of n.o.ble metre "whose service is perfect freedom"--as Shakespeare found it, and combined with perfect loyalty to its law the most perfect liberty of living and sublime and spontaneous and accurate expression. I can only conjecture that this greatest of the Shakespeareans was misguided out of his natural line of writing as exemplified and perfected in the tragedy of Vittoria, and lured into this cross and crooked by-way of immetrical experiment, by the temptation of some theory or crotchet on the score of what is now called naturalism or realism; which, if there were any real or natural weight in the reasoning that seeks to support it, would of course do away, and of course ought to do away, with dramatic poetry altogether: for if it is certain that real persons do not actually converse in good metre, it is happily no less certain that they do not actually converse in bad metre. In the hands of so great a tragic poet as Webster a peculiar and impressive effect may now and then be produced by this anomalous and illegitimate way of writing; it certainly suits well with the thoughtful and fantastic truculence of Bosola's reflections on death and dissolution and decay--his "talk fit for a charnel," which halts and hovers between things hideous and things sublime. But it is a step on the downward way that leads to the negation or the confusion of all distinctions between poetry and prose; a result to which it would be grievous to think that the example of Shakespeare's greatest contemporary should in any way appear to conduce.

The doctrine or the motive of chance (whichever we may prefer to call it) is seen in its fullest workings and felt in its furthest bearings by the student of Webster's masterpiece. The fifth act of "The d.u.c.h.ess of Malfy" has been a.s.sailed on the very ground which it should have been evident to a thoughtful and capable reader that the writer must have intended to take up--on the ground that the whole upshot of the story is dominated by sheer chance, arranged by mere error, and guided by pure accident. No formal scheme or religious principle of retribution would have been so strangely or so thoroughly in keeping with the whole scheme and principle of the tragedy. After the overwhelming terrors and the overpowering beauties of that unique and marvellous fourth act, in which the genius of this poet spreads its fullest and its darkest wing for the longest and the strongest of its flights, it could not but be that the subsequent action and pa.s.sion of the drama should appear by comparison unimpressive or ineffectual; but all the effect or impression possible of attainment under the inevitable burden of this difficulty is achieved by natural and simple and straightforward means. If Webster has not made the part of Antonio dramatically striking and attractive--as he probably found it impossible to do--he has at least bestowed on the fugitive and unconscious widower of his murdered heroine a pensive and manly grace of deliberate resignation which is not without pathetic as well as poetical effect. In the beautiful and well-known scene where the echo from his wife's unknown and new-made grave seems to respond to his meditative mockery and forewarn him of his impending death, Webster has given such reality and seriousness to an old commonplace of contemporary fancy or previous fas.h.i.+on in poetry that we are fain to forget the fantastic side of the conception and see only the tragic aspect of its meaning. A weightier objection than any which can be brought against the conduct of the play might be suggested to the minds of some readers--and these, perhaps, not too exacting or too captious readers--by the sudden vehemence of transformation which in the great preceding act seems to fall like fire from heaven upon the two chief criminals who figure on the stage of murder. It seems rather a miraculous retribution, a judicial violation of the laws of nature, than a reasonably credible consequence or evolution of those laws, which strikes Ferdinand with madness and Bosola with repentance. But the whole atmosphere of the action is so charged with thunder that this double and simultaneous shock of moral electricity rather thrills us with admiration and faith than chills us with repulsion or distrust. The pa.s.sionate intensity and moral ardor of imagination which we feel to vibrate and penetrate through every turn and every phrase of the dialogue would suffice to enforce upon our belief a more nearly incredible revolution of nature or revulsion of the soul.

It is so difficult for even the very greatest poets to give any vivid force of living interest to a figure of pa.s.sive endurance that perhaps the only instance of perfect triumph over this difficulty is to be found in the character of Desdemona. Shakespeare alone could have made her as interesting as Imogen or Cordelia; though these have so much to do and dare, and she after her first appearance has simply to suffer: even Webster could not give such individual vigor of characteristic life to the figure of his martyr as to the figure of his criminal heroine. Her courage and sweetness, her delicacy and sincerity, her patience and her pa.s.sion, are painted with equal power and tenderness of touch: yet she hardly stands before us as distinct from others of her half-angelic sisterhood as does the White Devil from the fellows.h.i.+p of her comrades in perdition. But if, as we may a.s.suredly a.s.sume, it was on the twenty-third "nouell" of William Painter's _Palace of Pleasure_ that Webster's crowning masterpiece was founded, the poet's moral and spiritual power of transfiguration is here even more admirable than in the previous case of his other and wellnigh coequally consummate poem.

The narrative degrades and brutalizes the widowed heroine's affection for her second husband to the actual level of the vile conception which the poet attributes and confines to the foul imagination of her envious and murderous brothers. Here again, and finally and supremely here, the purifying and exalting power of Webster's n.o.ble and magnanimous imagination is gloriously unmistakable by all and any who have eyes to read and hearts to recognize.

For it is only with Shakespeare that Webster can ever be compared in any way to his disadvantage as a tragic poet: above all others of his country he stands indisputably supreme. The place of Marlowe indeed is higher among our poets by right of his primacy as a founder and a pioneer: but of course his work has not--as of course it could not have--that plenitude and perfection of dramatic power in construction and dramatic subtlety in detail which the tragedies of Webster share in so large a measure with the tragedies of Shakespeare. Marston, the poet with whom he has most in common, might almost be said to stand in the same relation to Webster as Webster to Shakespeare. In single lines and: phrases, in a few detached pa.s.sages and a very few distinguishable scenes, he is worthy to be compared with the greater poet; he suddenly rises and dilates to the stature and the strength of a model whom usually he can but follow afar off. Marston, as a tragic poet, is not quite what Webster would be if his fame depended simply on such scenes as those in which the n.o.ble mother of Vittoria breaks off her daughter's first interview with Brachiano--spares, and commends to G.o.d's forgiveness, the son who has murdered his brother before her eyes--and lastly appears "in several forms of distraction," "grown a very old woman in two hours," and singing that most pathetic and imaginative of all funereal invocations which the finest critic of all time so justly and so delicately compared to the watery dirge of Ariel. There is less refinement, less exaltation and perfection of feeling, less tenderness of emotion and less n.o.bility of pa.s.sion, but hardly less force and fervor, less weighty and sonorous ardor of expression, in the very best and loftiest pa.s.sages of Marston: but his genius is more uncertain, more fitful and intermittent, less harmonious, coherent, and trustworthy than Webster's. And Webster, notwithstanding an occasional outbreak into Aristophanic license of momentary sarcasm through the sardonic lips of such a cynical ruffian as Ferdinand or Plamineo, is without exception the cleanliest, as Marston is beyond comparison the coa.r.s.est writer of his time. In this as in other matters of possible comparison that "vessel of deathless wrath," the implacable and inconsolable poet of sympathy half maddened into rage and aspiration goaded backward to despair--it should be needless to add the name of Cyril Tourneur--stands midway between these two more conspicuous figures of their age. But neither the father and master of poetic pessimists, the splendid and sombre creator of Vindice and his victims, nor any other third whom our admiration may discern among all the greatest of their fellows, can be compared with Webster on terms more nearly equal than those on which Webster stands in relation to the sovereign of them all.

THOMAS DEKKER

Of all English poets, if not of all poets on, record, Dekker is perhaps the most difficult to cla.s.sify. The grace and delicacy, the sweetness and spontaneity of his genius are not more obvious and undeniable than the many defects which impair and the crowning deficiency which degrades it. As long, but so long only, as a man retains some due degree of self-respect and respect for the art he serves or the business he follows, it matters less for his fame in the future than for his prosperity in the present whether he retains or discards any vestige of respect for any other obligation in the world. Francois Villon, compared with whom all other reckless and disreputable men of genius seem patterns of austere decency and elevated regularity of life, was as conscientious and self-respectful an artist as a Virgil or a Tennyson: he is not a great poet only, but one of the most blameless, the most perfect, the most faultless among his fellows in the first cla.s.s of writers for all time. If not in that cla.s.s, yet high in the cla.s.s immediately beneath it, the world would long since have agreed to enrol the name of Thomas Dekker, had he not wanted that one gift which next to genius is the most indispensable for all aspirants to a station among the masters of creative literature. For he was by nature at once a singer and a maker: he had the gift of native music and the birthright of inborn invention. His song was often sweet as honey; his fancy sometimes as rich and subtle, his imagination as delicate and strong, as that of the very greatest among dramatists or poets. For gentle grace of inspiration and vivid force of realism he is eclipsed at his very best by Shakespeare's self alone. No such combination or alternation of such admirable powers is discernible in any of his otherwise more splendid or sublime compeers. And in one gift, the divine gift of tenderness, he comes nearer to Shakespeare and stands higher above others than in any other quality of kindred genius.

And with all these gifts, if the vulgar verdict of his own day and of later days be not less valid than vulgar, he was a failure. There is a pathetic undertone of patience and resignation not unqualified by manly though submissive regret, which recurs now and then, or seems to recur, in the personal accent of his subdued and dignified appeal to the casual reader, suggestive of a sense that the higher triumphs of art, the brighter prosperities of achievement, were not reserved for him; and yet not unsuggestive of a consciousness that, if this be so, it is not so through want of the primal and essential qualities of a poet. For, as Lamb says, Dekker "had poetry enough for anything"; at all events, for anything which can be accomplished by a poet endowed in the highest degree with the gifts of graceful and melodious fancy, tender and cordial humor, vivid and pathetic realism, a spontaneous refinement and an exquisite simplicity of expression. With the one great gift of seriousness, of n.o.ble ambition, of self-confidence rooted in self-respect, he must have won an indisputable instead of a questionable place among the immortal writers of his age. But this gift had been so absolutely withheld from him by nature or withdrawn from him by circ.u.mstance that he has left us not one single work altogether worthy of the powers now revealed and now eclipsed, now suddenly radiant and now utterly extinct, in the various and voluminous array of his writings. Although his earlier plays are in every way superior to his later, there is evidence even in the best of them of the author's infirmity of hand. From the first he shows himself idly or perversely or impotently p.r.o.ne to loosen his hold on character and story alike before his plot can be duly carried out or his conceptions adequately developed. His "pleasant Comedie of 'The Gentle Craft,'" first printed three years before the death of Queen Elizabeth, is one of his brightest and most coherent pieces of work, graceful and lively throughout, if rather thin-spun and slight of structure: but the more serious and romantic part of the action is more lightly handled than the broad light comedy of the mad and merry Lord Mayor Simon Eyre, a figure in the main original and humorous enough, but somewhat over-persistent in ostentation and repet.i.tion of jocose catch-words after the fas.h.i.+on of mine host of the Garter; a type which Shakespeare knew better than to repeat, but of which his inferiors seem to have been enamoured beyond all reason. In this fresh and pleasant little play there are few or no signs of the author's higher poetic abilities: the style is pure and sweet, simple and spontaneous, without any hint of a quality not required by the subject: but in the other play of Dekker's which bears the same date as this one his finest and rarest gifts of imagination and emotion, feeling and fancy, color and melody, are as apparent as his ingrained faults of levity and laziness. The famous pa.s.sage in which Webster couples together the names of "Mr. Shakespeare, Mr. Dekker, and Mr. Heywood," seems explicable when we compare the style of "Old Fortunatus" with the style of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Dekker had as much of the peculiar sweetness, the gentle fancy, the simple melody of Shakespeare in his woodland dress, as Heywood of the homely and n.o.ble realism, the heartiness and humor, the st.u.r.dy sympathy and joyful pride of Shakespeare in his most English mood of patriotic and historic loyalty. Not that these qualities are wanting in the work of Dekker: he was an ardent and a combative patriot, ever ready to take up the cudgels in prose or rhyme for England and her yeomen against Popery and the world: but it is rather the man than the poet who speaks on these occasions: his singing faculty does not apply itself so naturally to such work as to the wild wood-notes of pa.s.sion and fancy and pathos which in his happiest moments, even when they remind us of Shakespeare's, provoke no sense of unworthiness or inequality in comparison with these. It is not with the most popular and famous names of his age that the sovereign name of Shakespeare is most properly or most profitably to be compared. His genius has really far less in common with that of Jonson or of Fletcher than with that of Webster or of Dekker. To the last-named poet even Lamb was for once less than just when he said of the "frantic Lover" in "Old Fortunatus" that "he talks pure Biron and Romeo; he is almost as poetical as they." The word "almost" should be supplanted by the word "fully"; and the criticism would then be no less adequate than apt. Sidney himself might have applauded the verses which clothe with living music a pa.s.sion as fervent and as fiery a fancy as his own. Not even in the rapturous melodies of that matchless series of songs and sonnets which glorify the inseparable names of Astrophel and Stella will the fascinated student find a pa.s.sage more enchanting than this:

Thou art a traitor to that white and red Which sitting on her cheeks (being Cupid's throne) Is my heart's sovereign: O, when she is dead, This wonder, Beauty, shall be found in none.

Now Agripyne's not mine, I vow to be In love with nothing but deformity.

O fair Deformity, I muse all eyes Are not enamoured of thee: thou didst never Murder men's hearts, or let them pine like wax, Melting against the sun of thy disdain;[1]

Thou art a faithful nurse to Chast.i.ty; Thy beauty is not like to Agripyne's, For cares, and age, and sickness, hers deface, But thine's eternal: O Deformity, Thy fairness is not like to Agripyne's, For, dead, her beauty will no beauty have, But thy face looks most lovely in the grave.

[Footnote 1: As even Lamb allowed the meaningless and immetrical word "destiny" to stand at the end of this line in place of the obviously right reading, it is not wonderful that all later editors of this pa.s.sage should hitherto have done so.]

Shakespeare has nothing more exquisite in expression of pa.s.sionate fancy, more earnest in emotion, more spontaneous in simplicity, more perfect in romantic inspiration. But the poet's besetting sin of laxity, his want of seriousness and steadiness, his idle, shambling, s.h.i.+fty way of writing, had power even then, in the very prime of his promise, to impede his progress and impair his chance of winning the race which he had set himself--and yet which he had hardly set himself--to run. And if these things were done in the green tree, it was only too obvious what would be done in the dry; it must have been clear that this golden-tongued and gentle-hearted poet had not strength of spirit or fervor of ambition enough to put conscience into his work and resolution into his fancies. But even from such headlong recklessness as he had already displayed no reader could have antic.i.p.ated so singular a defiance of all form and order, all coherence and proportion, as is exhibited in his "Satiromastix." The controversial part of the play is so utterly alien from the romantic part that it is impossible to regard them as component factors of the same original plot. It seems to me unquestionable that Dekker must have conceived the design, and probable that he must have begun the composition, of a serious play on the subject of William Rufus and Sir Walter Tyrrel, before the appearance of Ben Jonson's "Poetaster" impelled or instigated him to some immediate attempt at rejoinder; and that being in a feverish hurry to retort the blow inflicted on him by a heavier hand than his own he devised--perhaps between jest and earnest--the preposterously incoherent plan of piecing out his farcical and satirical design by patching and st.i.tching it into his unfinished scheme of tragedy. It may be a.s.sumed, and it is much to be hoped, that there never existed another poet capable of imagining--much less of perpetrating--an incongruity so monstrous and so perverse. The explanation so happily suggested by a modern critic that William Rufus is meant for Shakespeare, and that "Lyly is Sir Vaughan ap Rees," wants only a little further development, on the principle of a.n.a.logy, to commend itself to every scholar. It is equally obvious that the low-bred and foul-mouthed ruffian Captain Tucca must be meant for Sir Philip Sidney; the vulgar idiot Asinius Bubo for Lord Bacon; the half-witted underling Peter Flash for Sir Walter Raleigh; and the immaculate Celestina, who escapes by stratagem and force of virtue from the villanous designs of Shakespeare, for the lady long since indicated by the perspicacity of a Chalmers as the object of that lawless and desperate pa.s.sion which found utterance in the sonnets of her unprincipled admirer--Queen Elizabeth. As a previous suggestion of my own, to the effect that George Peele was probably the real author of "Romeo and Juliet," has had the singular good-fortune to be not merely adopted but appropriated--in serious earnest--by a contemporary student, without--- as far as I am aware--a syllable of acknowledgment, I cannot but antic.i.p.ate a similar acceptance in similar quarters for the modest effort at interpretation now submitted to the judgment of the ingenuous reader.

Gifford is not too severe on the palpable incongruities of Dekker's preposterous medley: but his impeachment of Dekker as a more virulent and intemperate controversialist than Jonson is not less preposterous than the structure of this play. The n.o.bly gentle and manly verses in which the less fortunate and distinguished poet disclaims and refutes the imputation of envy or malevolence excited by the favor enjoyed by his rival in high quarters should have sufficed, in common justice, to protect him from such a charge. There is not a word in Jonson's satire expressive of anything but savage and unqualified scorn for his humbler antagonist: and the tribute paid by that antagonist to his genius, the appeal to his better nature which concludes the torrent of recrimination, would have won some word of honorable recognition from any but the most unscrupulous and ungenerous of partisans. That Dekker was unable to hold his own against Jonson when it came to sheer hard hitting--that on the ground or platform of personal satire he was as a light-weight pitted against a heavy-weight--is of course too plain, from the very first round, to require any further demonstration. But it is not less plain that in delicacy and simplicity and sweetness of inspiration the poet who could write the scene in which the bride takes poison (as she believes) from the hand of her father, in presence of her bridegroom, as a refuge from the pa.s.sion of the king, was as far above Jonson as Jonson was above him in the robuster qualities of intellect or genius. This most lovely scene, for pathos tempered with fancy and for pa.s.sion distilled in melody, is comparable only with higher work, of rarer composition and poetry more pure, than Jonson's: it is a very treasure-house of verses like jewels, bright as tears and sweet as flowers. When Dekker writes like this, then truly we seem to see his right hand in the left hand of Shakespeare.

To find the names of Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker amicably a.s.sociated in the composition of a joint poem or pageant within the s.p.a.ce of a year from the publication of so violent a retort by the latter to so vehement an attack by the former must amuse if it does not astonish the reader least capable of surprise at the boyish readiness to quarrel and the boyish readiness to shake hands which would seem to be implied in so startling a change of relations. In all the huge, costly, wearisome, barbaric, and pedantic ceremonial which welcomed into London the Solomon of Scotland, the exhausted student who attempts to follow the ponderous elaboration of report drawn up by these reconciled enemies will remark the solid and sedate merit of Jonson's best couplets with less pleasure than he will receive from the quaint sweetness of Dekker's lyric notes.

Admirable as are many of Ben Jonson's songs for their finish of style and fulness of matter, it is impossible for those who know what is or should be the special aim or the distinctive quality of lyric verse to place him in the first cla.s.s--much less, in the front rank--of lyric poets. He is at his best a good way ahead of such song-writers as Byron; but Dekker at his best belongs to the order of such song-writers as Blake or Sh.e.l.ley. Perhaps the very finest example of his flawless and delicate simplicity of excellence in this field of work may be the well-known song in honor of honest poverty and in praise of honest labor which so gracefully introduces the heroine of a play published in this same year of the accession of James--"Patient Grissel"; a romantic tragicomedy so attractive for its sweetness and lightness of tone and touch that no reader will question the judgment or condemn the daring of the poets who ventured upon ground where Chaucer had gone before them with such gentle stateliness of step and such winning tenderness of gesture. His deepest note of pathos they have not even attempted to reproduce: but in freshness and straightforwardness, in frankness and simplicity of treatment, the dramatic version is not generally unworthy to be compared with the narrative which it follows afar off.[1] Chettle and Haughton, the a.s.sociates of Dekker in this enterprise, had each of them something of their colleague's finer qualities; but the best scenes in the play remind me rather of Dekker's best early work than of "Robert, Earl of Huntington" or of "Englishmen for My Money." So much has been said of the evil influence of Italian example upon English character in the age of Elizabeth, and so much has been made of such confessions or imputations as distinguish the clamorous and malevolent penitence of Robert Greene, that it is more than agreeable to find at least one dramatic poet of the time who has the manliness to enter a frank and contemptuous protest against this habit of malignant self-excuse. "Italy," says an honest gentleman in this comedy to a lying and impudent gull, "Italy infects you not, but your own diseased spirits. Italy? Out, you froth, you sc.u.m! because your soul is mud, and that you have breathed in Italy, you'll say Italy has denied you: away, you boar: thou wilt wallow in mire in the sweetest country in the world."

[Footnote 1: I may here suggest a slight emendation in the text of the spirited and graceful scene with which this play opens. The original reads:

So fares it with coy dames, who, great with scorn, Shew the care-pined hearts that sue to them.

The word _Shew_ is an obvious misprint--but more probably, I venture to think, for the word _Shun_ than for the word _Fly_, which is subst.i.tuted by Mr. Collier and accepted by Dr. Grosart.]

There are many traces of moral or spiritual weakness and infirmity in the writings of Dekker and the scattered records or indications of his unprosperous though not unlaborious career: but there are manifest and manifold signs of an honest and earnest regard for justice and fair dealing, as well as of an inexhaustible compa.s.sion for suffering, an indestructible persistency of pity, which found characteristic expression in the most celebrated of his plays. There is a great gulf between it and the first of Victor Hugo's tragedies: yet the instinct of either poet is the same, as surely as their common motive is the redemption of a fallen woman by the influence of twin-born love and shame. Of all Dekker's works, "The Honest Wh.o.r.e" comes nearest to some reasonable degree of unity and harmony in conception and construction; his besetting vice of reckless and s.l.u.ttish incoherence has here done less than usual to deform the proportions and deface the impression of his design. Indeed, the connection of the two serious plots in the first part is a rare example of dexterous and happy simplicity in composition: the comic underplot of the patient man and shrewish wife is more loosely attached by a slighter thread of relation to these two main stories, but is so amusing in its light and facile play of inventive merriment and harmless mischief as to need no further excuse. Such an excuse, however, might otherwise be found in the plea that it gives occasion for the most beautiful, the most serious, and the most famous pa.s.sage in all the writings of its author. The first scene of this first part has always appeared to me one of the most effective and impressive on our stage: the interruption of the mock funeral by the one true mourner whose pa.s.sion it was intended to deceive into despair is so striking as a mere incident or theatrical device that the n.o.ble and simple style in which the graver part of the dialogue is written can be no more than worthy of the subject: whereas in other plays of Dekker's the style is too often beneath the merit of the subject, and the subject as often below the value of the style. The subsequent revival of Infelice from her trance is represented with such vivid and delicate power that the scene, short and simple as it is, is one of the most fascinating in any play of the period. In none of these higher and finer parts of the poem can I trace the touch of any other hand than the princ.i.p.al author's: but the shopkeeping scenes of the underplot have at least as much of Middleton's usual quality as of Dekker's; homely and rough-cast as they are, there is a certain finish or thoroughness about them which is more like the careful realism of the former than the slovenly naturalism of the latter. The coa.r.s.e commonplaces of the sermon on prost.i.tution by which Bellafront is so readily and surprisingly reclaimed into respectability give sufficient and superfluous proof that Dekker had nothing of the severe and fiery inspiration which makes a great satirist or a great preacher; but when we pa.s.s again into a sweeter air than that of the boudoir or the pulpit, it is the unmistakable note of Dekker's most fervent and tender mood of melody which enchants us in such verses as these, spoken by a lover musing on the portrait of a mistress whose coffin has been borne before him to the semblance of a grave:

Of all the roses grafted on her cheeks, Of all the graces dancing in her eyes, Of all the music set upon her tongue, Of all that was past woman's excellence In her white bosom, look, a painted board Circ.u.mscribes all!

Is there any other literature, we are tempted to ask ourselves, in which the writer of these lines, and of many as sweet and perfect in their inspired simplicity as these, would be rated no higher among his countrymen than Thomas Dekker?

From the indisputable fact of Middleton's partners.h.i.+p in this play Mr.

Dyce was induced to a.s.sume the very questionable inference of his partners.h.i.+p in the sequel which was licensed for acting five years later. To me this second part seems so thoroughly of one piece and one pattern, so apparently the result of one man's invention and composition, that without more positive evidence I should hesitate to a.s.sign a share in it to any colleague of the poet under whose name it first appeared. There are far fewer scenes or pa.s.sages in this than in the preceding play which suggest or present themselves for quotation or selection: the tender and splendid and pensive touches of pathetic or imaginative poetry which we find in the first part, we shall be disappointed if we seek in the second: its incomparable claim on our attention is the fact that it contains the single character in all the voluminous and miscellaneous works of Dekker which gives its creator an indisputable right to a place of perpetual honor among the imaginative humorists of England, and therefore among the memorable artists and creative workmen of the world. Apart from their claim to remembrance as poets and dramatists of more or less artistic and executive capacity, Dekker and Middleton are each of them worthy to be remembered as the inventor or discoverer of a wholly original, interesting, and natural type of character, as essentially inimitable as it is undeniably unimitated: the savage humor and cynic pa.s.sion of De Flores, the genial pa.s.sion and tender humor of Orlando Friscobaldo, are equally lifelike in the truthfulness and completeness of their distinct and vivid presentation. The merit of the play in which the character last named is a leading figure consists mainly or almost wholly in the presentation of the three princ.i.p.al persons: the reclaimed harlot, now the faithful and patient wife of her first seducer; the broken-down, ruffianly, light-hearted and light-headed libertine who has married her; and the devoted old father who watches in the disguise of a servant over the changes of her fortune, the sufferings, risks, and temptations which try the purity of her penitence and confirm the fort.i.tude of her constancy.

Of these three characters I cannot but think that any dramatist who ever lived might have felt that he had reason to be proud. It is strange that Charles Lamb, to whom of all critics and all men the pathetic and humorous charm of the old man's personality might most confidently have been expected most cordially to appeal, should have left to Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt the honor of doing justice to so beautiful a creation--the crowning evidence to the greatness of Dekker's gifts, his power of moral imagination and his delicacy of dramatic execution. From the first to the last word of his part the quaint sweet humor of the character is sustained with an instinctive skill which would do honor to a far more careful and a far more famous artist than Dekker. The words with which he receives the false news of his fallen daughter's death: "Dead? my last and best peace go with her!"--those which he murmurs to himself on seeing her again after seventeen years of estrangement: "The mother's own face, I ha' not forgot that"--prepare the way for the admirable final scene in which his mask of anger drops off, and his ostentation of obduracy relaxes into tenderness and tears. "Dost thou beg for him, thou precious man's meat, thou? has he not beaten thee, kicked thee, trod on thee? and dost thou fawn on him like his spaniel? has he not p.a.w.ned thee to thy petticoat, sold thee to thy smock, made ye leap at a crust? yet wouldst have me save him?--What, dost thou hold him? let go his hand: if thou dost not forsake him, a father's everlasting blessing fall upon both your heads!" The fusion of humor with pathos into perfection of exquisite accuracy in expression which must be recognized at once and remembered forever by any competent reader of this scene is the highest quality of Dekker as a writer of prose, and is here displayed at its highest: the more poetic or romantic quality of his genius had already begun to fade out when this second part of his finest poem was written.

Hazlitt has praised the originality, dexterity, and vivacity of the effect produced by the stratagem which Infelice employs for the humiliation of her husband, when by accusing herself of imaginary infidelity under the most incredibly degrading conditions she entraps him into gratuitous fury and turns the tables on him by the production of evidence against himself; and the scene is no doubt theatrically effective: but the grace and delicacy of the character are sacrificed to this comparatively unworthy consideration: the pure, high-minded, n.o.ble-hearted lady, whose loyal and pa.s.sionate affection was so simply and so attractively displayed in the first part of her story, is so lamentably humiliated by the cunning and daring immodesty of such a device that we hardly feel it so revolting an incongruity as it should have been to see this princess enjoying, in common with her father and her husband, the spectacle of imprisoned harlots on penitential parade in the Bridewell of Milan; a thoroughly Hogarthian scene in the grim and vivid realism of its tragicomic humor.

But if the poetic and realistic merits of these two plays make us understand why Webster should have coupled its author with the author of "Twelfth Night" and "The Merry Wives of Windsor," the demerits of the two plays next published under his single name are so grave, so gross, so manifold, that the writer seems unworthy to be coupled as a dramatist with a journeyman poet so far superior to him in honest thoroughness and smoothness of workmans.h.i.+p as, even at his very hastiest and crudest, was Thomas Heywood. In style and versification the patriotic and anti-Catholic drama which bears the Protestant and apocalyptic t.i.tle of "The Wh.o.r.e of Babylon" is still, upon the whole, very tolerably spirited and fluent, with gleams of fugitive poetry and glimpses of animated action; but the construction is ponderous and puerile, the declamation vacuous and vehement. An Aeschylus alone could have given us, in a tragedy on the subject of the Salamis of England, a fit companion to the "Persae"; which, as Shakespeare let the chance pa.s.s by him, remains alone forever in the incomparable glory of its trumphant and sublime perfection. Marlowe perhaps might have made something of it, though the task would have taxed his energies to the utmost, and overtasked the utmost of his skill; Dekker could make nothing. The Empress of Babylon is but a poor slipshod ragged prost.i.tute in the hands of this poetic beadle: "non ragioniam di lei, ma guarda e pa.s.sa."

Of the three plays in which Dekker took part with Webster, the two plays in which he took part with Ford, and the second play in which he took part with Middleton, I have spoken respectively in my several essays on those other three poets. The next play which bears his name alone was published five years later than the political or historical sketch or study which we have just dismissed; and which, compared with it, is a tolerable if not a creditable piece of work. It is difficult to abstain from intemperate language in speaking of such a dramatic abortion as that which bears the grotesque and puerile inscription, "If this be not a good Play, the Devil is in it." A worse has seldom discredited the name of any man with a spark of genius in him. Dryden's delectable tragedy of "Amboyna," Lee's remarkable tragicomedy of "Gloriana," Pope's elegant comedy of "Three Hours after Marriage," are scarcely more unworthy of their authors, more futile or more flaccid or more audacious in their headlong and unabashed incompetence. Charity would suggest that it must have been written against time in a debtor's prison, under the influence of such liquor as Catherina Bountinall or Doll Tearsheet would have flung at the tapster's head with an accompaniment of such language as those eloquent and high-spirited ladies, under less offensive provocation, were wont to lavish on the officials of an oppressive law.

I have read a good deal of bad verse, but anything like the metre of this play I have never come across in all the range of that excruciating experience. The rare and faint indications that the writer was or had been an humorist and a poet serve only to bring into fuller relief the reckless and shameless incompetence of the general workmans.h.i.+p.[1]

[Footnote 1: As I have given elsewhere a sample of Dekker at his best, I give here a sample taken at random from the opening of this unhappy play:

Hie thee to Naples, Rufman; thou shalt find A prince there newly crowned, aptly inclined To any bendings: lest his youthful brows Reach at stars only, weigh down his loftiest boughs With leaden plummets, poison his best thoughts with taste Of things most sensual: if the heart once waste, The body feels consumption: good or bad kings Breed subjects like them: clear streams flow from clear springs.

Turn therefore Naples to a puddle: with a civil Much promising face, and well oiled, play the court devil.

The vigorous melody of these "masculine numbers" is not more remarkable for its virile force and honied fluency than is the lighter dialogue of the play for such brilliant wit or lambent humor as flashes out in pleasantries like this:

_King_. What are you, and whence come you?

_Rufman_. From Helvetia.

_Spendola_. What h.e.l.l says he?

_Jovinelli_. Peace; you shall know hot h.e.l.l [_sic_] time enough.

"I hope here be proofs" that my strictures on the worst work of a poet whose best work I treasure so heartily, and whose best qualities I rate so highly, are rather too sparing than too severe.]

This supernatural and "superlunatical" attempt at serious farce or farcical morality marks the nadir of Dekker's ability as a dramatist.

The diabolic part of the tragicomic business is distinctly inferior to the parallel or similar scenes in the much older play of "Grim the Collier of Croydon," which is perhaps more likely to have been the writer's immediate model than the original story by Machiavelli. The two remaining plays now extant which bear the single name of Dekker give no sign of his highest powers, but are tolerable examples of journeyman's work in the field of romantic or fanciful comedy. "Match Me in London"

is the better play of the two, very fairly constructed after its simple fas.h.i.+on, and reasonably well written in a smooth and unambitious style: "The Wonder of a Kingdom" is a light, slight, rough piece of work, in its contrasts of character as crude and boyish as any of the old moralities, and in its action as mere a dance of puppets: but it shows at least that Dekker had regained the faculty of writing decent verse on occasion. The fine pa.s.sage quoted by Scott in _The Antiquary_ and taken by his editors to be a forgery of his own, will be familiar to many myriads of readers who are never likely to look it up in the original context. Of two masks called "Britannia's Honor" and "London's Tempe" it must suffice to say that the former contains a notable specimen of c.o.c.kney or canine French which may serve to relieve the conscientious reader's weariness, and the latter a comic song of blacksmiths at work which may pa.s.s muster at a pinch as a tolerably quaint and lively piece of rough and ready fancy. But Jonson for the court and Middleton for the city were far better craftsmen in this line than ever was Dekker at his best.

Two plays remain for notice in which the part taken by Dekker would be, I venture to think, unmistakable, even if no external evidence were extant of his partners.h.i.+p in either. As it is, we know that in the winter which saw the close of the sixteenth century he was engaged with the author of "The Parliament of Bees" and the author of "Englishmen for My Money" in the production of a play called "The Spanish Moor's Tragedy." More than half a century afterward a tragedy in which a Spanish Moor is the princ.i.p.al and indeed the only considerable agent was published, and attributed--of all poets in the world--to Christopher Marlowe, by a knavish and ignorant bookseller of the period. That "l.u.s.t's Dominion; or, the Lascivious Queen," was partly founded on a pamphlet published after Marlowe's death was not a consideration sufficient to offer any impediment to this imposture. That the hand which in the year of this play's appearance on the stage gave "Old Fortunatus" to the world of readers was the hand to which we owe the finer scenes or pa.s.sages of "l.u.s.t's Dominion," the whole of the opening scene bears such apparent witness as requires no evidence to support and would require very conclusive evidence to confute it. The sweet spontaneous luxury of the lines in which the queen strives to seduce her paramour out of sullenness has the very ring of Dekker's melody: the rough and reckless rattle of the abrupt rhymes intended to express a sudden vehemence of change and energy; the constant repet.i.tion or reiteration of interjections and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns which are evidently supposed to give an air of pa.s.sionate realism and tragic nature to the jingling and jerky dialogue; many little mannerisms too trivial to specify and too obvious to mistake; the occasional spirit and beauty, the frequent crudity and harshness, of the impetuous and uncertain style; the faults no less than the merits, the merits as plainly as the faults, attest the presence of his fitful and wilful genius with all the defects of its qualities and all the weakness of its strength. The chaotic extravagance of collapse which serves by way of catastrophe to bring the action headlong to a close is not more puerile in the violence of its debility than the conclusions of other plays by Dekker; conclusions which might plausibly appear, to a malcontent or rather to a lenient reader, the improvisations of inebriety. There is but one character which stands out in anything of life-like relief; for the queen and her paramour are but the usual diabolic puppets of the contemporary tragic stage: but there is something of life-blood in the part of the honest and hot-headed young prince. This too is very like Dekker, whose idle and impatient energy could seldom if ever sustain a diffused or divided interest, but except when working hopelessly and heartlessly against time was likely to fix on some special point, and give life at least to some single figure.

There is nothing incongruous in his appearance as a playwright in partners.h.i.+p with Middleton or with Chettle, with Haughton or with Day; but a stranger a.s.sociation than that of Ma.s.singer's name with Dekker's it would not be easy to conceive. Could either poet have lent the other something of his own best quality, could Ma.s.singer have caught from Dekker the freshness and spontaneity of his poetic inspiration, and Dekker have learned of Ma.s.singer the conscientious excellence and studious self-respect of his dramatic workmans.h.i.+p, the result must have been one of the n.o.blest and completest masterpieces of the English stage. As it is, the famous and beautiful play which we owe to the alliance of their powers is a proverbial example of incongruous contrasts and combinations. The opening and the closing scenes were very properly and very fortunately consigned to the charge of the younger and sedater poet: so that, whatever discrepancy may disturb the intervening acts, the grave and sober harmonies of a temperate and serious artist begin and end the concert in perfect correspondence of consummate execution. "The first act of 'The Virgin Martyr,'" said Coleridge, "is as fine an act as I remember in any play." And certainly it would be impossible to find one in which the business of the scene is more skilfully and smoothly opened, with more happiness of arrangement, more dignity and dexterity of touch. But most lovers of poetry would give it all, and a dozen such triumphs of scenical and rhetorical composition, for the brief dialogue in the second act between the heroine and her attendant angel. Its simplicity is so childlike, its inspiration so pure in instinct and its expression so perfect in taste, its utterance and its abstinence, its effusion and its reserve, are so far beyond praise or question or any comment but thanksgiving, that these forty-two lines, homely and humble in manner as they are if compared with the refined rhetoric and the scrupulous culture of Ma.s.singer, would suffice to keep the name of Dekker sweet and safe forever among the most memorable if not among the most pre-eminent of his kindred and his age. The four scenes of rough and rank buffoonery which deface this act and the two following have given very reasonable offence to critics from whom they have provoked very unreasonable reflections. That they represent the coa.r.s.er side of the genius whose finer aspect is shown in the sweetest pa.s.sages of the poem has never been disputed by any one capable of learning the rudiments or the accidence of literary criticism. An admirable novelist and poet who had the misfortune to mistake himself for a theologian and a critic was unlucky enough to a.s.sert that he knew not on what ground these brutal buffooneries had been a.s.signed to their unmistakable author; in other words, to acknowledge his ignorance of the first elements of the subject on which it pleased him to write in a tone of critical and spiritual authority. Not even when his unwary and unscrupulous audacity of self-confidence impelled Charles Kingsley to challenge John Henry Newman to the duel of which the upshot left him gasping so piteously on the ground selected for their tournament--not even then did the author of _Hypatia_ display such a daring and immedicable capacity of misrepresentation based on misconception as when this most ingenuously disingenuous of all controversialists avowed himself "aware of no canons of internal criticism which would enable us to decide as boldly as Mr. Gifford does that all the indecency is Dekker's and all the poetry Ma.s.singer's." Now the words of Gifford's note on the dialogue of which I have already spoken, between the saint and the angel, are these: "What follows is exquisitely beautiful.... I am persuaded that this also was written by Dekker." And seeing that no mortal critic but Kingsley ever dreamed of such absurdity as Kingsley rushes forward to refute, his controversial capacity will probably be regarded by all serious students of poetry or criticism as measurable by the level of his capacity for accurate report of fact or accurate citation of evidence.

There are times when we are tempted to denounce the Muse of Dekker as the most s.h.i.+ftless and shameless of slovens or of s.l.u.ts; but when we consider the quant.i.ty of work which she managed to struggle or shuffle through with such occasionally admirable and memorable results, we are once more inclined to reclaim for her a place of honor among her more generally respectable or reputable sisters. I am loath to believe what I see no reason to suppose, that she was responsible for the dismal drivel of a poem on the fall of Jerusalem, which is a.s.signed, on the surely dangerous ground of initials subscribed under the dedication, to a writer who had the misfortune to share these initials with Thomas Deloney. The ballad-writing hack may have been capable of sinking so far below the level of a penny ballad as to perpetrate this monstrous outrage on human patience and on English verse; but the most conclusive evidence would be necessary to persuade a jury of competent readers that a poet must be found guilty of its authors.h.i.+p. And we know that a pamphlet or novelette of Deloney's called "Thomas of Reading; or, the Six Worthy Yeomen of the West," was ascribed to Dekker until the actual author was discovered.[1] Dr. Grosart, to whom we owe the first collected edition of Dekker's pamphlets, says in the introduction to the fifth of his beautiful volumes that he should have doubted the responsibility of Dekker for a poem with which it may perhaps be unfair to saddle even so humble a hackney on the poetic highway as the jaded Pegasus of Deloney, had he not been detected as the author of another religious book. But this latter is a book of the finest and rarest quality--one of its author's most unquestionable claims to immortality in the affection and admiration of all but the most unworthy readers; and "Canaan's Calamity" is one of the worst metrical samples extant of religious rubbish. As far as such inferential evidence can be allowed to attest anything, the fact of Dekker's having written one of the most beautiful and simple of religious books in prose tends surely rather to disprove than to prove his authors.h.i.+p of one of the feeblest and most pretentious of semi-sacred rhapsodies in verse.

[Footnote 1: It would be a very notable addition to Dekker's claims on our remembrance if he had indeed written the admirable narrative, worthy of Defoe at his very best, which describes with such impressive simplicity of tragic effect the presageful or premonitory anguish of a man on his unconscious way to a sudden and a secret death of unimaginable horror. Had Deloney done more such work as this, and abjured the ineffectual service of an inauspicious Muse, his name would now be famous among the founders and the masters of realistic fiction.]