The Age of Shakespeare Part 3

Among his numerous pamphlets, satirical or declamatory, on the manners of his time and the observations of his experience, one alone stands out as distinct from the rest by right of such astonis.h.i.+ng superiority in merit of style and interest of matter that I prefer to reserve it for separate and final consideration. But it would require more time and labor than I can afford to give an adequate account of so many effusions or improvisations as served for fuel to boil the scanty and precarious pot of his uncertain and uncomfortable sustenance. "The Wonderful Year"

of the death of Elizabeth, the accession of James, and the devastation of London by pestilence, supplied him with matter enough for one of his quaintest and liveliest tracts: in which the historical part has no quality so valuable or remarkable as the grotesque mixture of horror and humor in the anecdotes appended "like a merry epilogue to a dull play, of purpose to shorten the lives of long winter's nights that lie watching in the dark for us," with touches of rude and vivid pleasantry not unworthy to remind us, I dare not say of the _Decameron_, but at least of the _Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles_. In "The Seven Deadly Sins of London"--one of the milder but less brilliant _Latter-day Pamphlets_ of a gentler if no less excitable Carlyle--there are touches of earnest eloquence as well as many quaint and fitful ill.u.s.trations of social history; but there is less of humorous vigor and straightforward realism than in the preceding tract. And yet there are good things to be gathered out of this effusive and vehement lay sermon; this sentence, for example, is worth recollection: "He is not slothful that is only lazy, that only wastes his good hours and his silver in luxury and licentious ease:--no, he is the true slothful man, that does no good."

And there is genuine insight as well as honesty and courage in his remonstrance with the self-love and appeal against the self-deceit of his countrymen, so p.r.o.ne to cry out on the cruelty of others, on the blood-thirstiness of Frenchmen and Spaniards, and to overlook the heavy-headed brutality of their own habitual indifference and neglect.

Although the cruelty of penal laws be now abrogated, yet the condition of the poorest among us is a.s.suredly not such that we can read without a sense of their present veracity the last words of this sentence: "Thou set'st up posts to whip them when they are alive: set up an hospital to comfort them being sick, or purchase ground for them to dwell in when they be well; _and that is, when they be dead_." The next of Dekker's tracts is more of a mere imitation than any of his others: the influence of a more famous pamphleteer and satirist, Tom Nash, is here not only manifest as that of a model, but has taken such possession of his disciple that he is hardly more than a somewhat servile copyist; not without a touch of his master's more serious eloquence, but with less than little of his peculiar energy and humor. That rus.h.i.+ng wind of satire, that storm of resonant invective, that inexhaustible volubility of contempt, which rages through the controversial writings of the lesser poet, has sunk to a comparative whisper; the roar of his Homeric or Rabelaisian laughter to a somewhat forced and artificial chuckle.

This "News from h.e.l.l, brought by the Devil's Carrier," and containing "The Devil's Answer to Pierce Penniless," might have miscarried by the way without much more loss than that of such an additional proof as we could have been content to spare of Dekker's incompetence to deal with a subject which he was curiously fond of handling in earnest and in jest.

He seems indeed to have fancied himself, if not something of a Dante, something at least of a Quevedo; but his terrors are merely tedious, and his painted devils would not terrify a babe. In this tract, however, there are now and then some fugitive felicities of expression; and this is more than can be said for either the play or the poem in which he has gone, with feebler if not more uneasy steps than Milton's Satan, over the same ground of burning marl. There is some spirit in the prodigal's denunciation of his miserly father: but the best thing in the pamphlet is the description of the soul of a hero bound for paradise, whose name is given only in the revised and enlarged edition which appeared a year later under the t.i.tle of "A Knight's Conjuring; done in earnest; discovered in jest." The narrative of "William Eps his death" is a fine example of that fiery sympathy with soldiers which glows in so many pages of Dekker's verse, and flashes out by fits through the murky confusion of his worst and most formless plays; but the introduction of thil hero is as fine a pa.s.sage of prose as he has left us:

The foremost of them was a personage of so composed a presence, that Nature and Fortune had done him wrong, if they had not made him a soldier. _In his countenance there was a kind of indignation, fighting with a kind of exalted joy_, which by his very gesture were apparently decipherable; for he was jocund, that his soul went out of him in so glorious a triumph; but disdainfully angry, that she wrought her enlargement through no more dangers: yet were there bleeding witnesses enow on his breast, which testified, he did not yield till he was conquered, and was not conquered, till there was left nothing of a man in him to be overcome.

That the poet's loyalty and devotion were at least as ardent when offered by his grat.i.tude to sailors as to soldiers we may see by this description of "The Seaman" in his next work:

A progress doth he take from realm to realm, With goodly water-pageants borne before him; The safety of the land sits at his helm, No danger here can touch, but what runs o'er him: But being in heaven's eye still, it doth restore him To livelier spirts; to meet death with ease, _If thou wouldst know thy maker, search the seas_.[1]

[Footnote 1: The italics are here the author's.]

These homely but hearty lines occur in a small and mainly metrical tract bearing a t.i.tle so quaint that I am tempted to transcribe it at length: "The Double PP. A Papist in Arms. Bearing Ten several s.h.i.+elds.

Encountered by the Protestant. At Ten several Weapons. A Jesuit Marching before them. Cominus and Eminus." There are a few other vigorous and pointed verses in this little patriotic impromptu, but the greater part of it is merely curious and eccentric doggrel.

The next of Dekker's tracts or pamphlets was the comparatively well-known "Gull's Hornbook." This brilliant and vivid little satire is so rich in simple humor, and in life-like photography taken by the sunlight of an honest and kindly nature, that it stands second only to the author's masterpiece in prose, "The Bachelor's Banquet," which has waited so much longer for even the limited recognition implied by a private reprint. There are so many witty or sensible or humorous or grotesque excerpts to be selected from this pamphlet--and not from the parts borrowed or copied from a foreign satire on the habits of slovenly Hollanders--that I take the first which comes under my notice on reopening the book; a study which sets before us in fascinating relief the professional poeticule of a period in which as yet clubs, coteries, and newspapers were not--or at the worst were nothing to speak of:

If you be a Poet, and come into the Ordinary (though it can be no great glory to be an ordinary Poet) order yourself thus.

Observe no man, doff not cap to that gentleman to-day at dinner, to whom, not two nights since, you were beholden for a supper; but, after a turn or two in the room, take occasion (pulling out your gloves) to have Epigram, or Satire, or Sonnet fastened in one of them, that may (as it were unwittingly to you) offer itself to the Gentlemen: they will presently desire it: but, without much conjuration from them, and a pretty kind of counterfeit lothness in yourself, do not read it; and, though it be none of your own, swear you made it.

This coupling of injunction and prohibition is worthy of Shakespeare or of Sterne:

Marry, if you chance to get into your hands any witty thing of another man's, that is somewhat better, I would counsel you then, if demand be made who composed it, you may say: "'Faith, a learned Gentleman, a very worthy friend." And this seeming to lay it on another man will be counted either modesty in you, or a sign that you are not ambitious of praise, _or else that you dare not take it upon you, for fear of the sharpness it carries with it_.

The modern poetaster by profession knows a trick worth any two of these: but it is curious to observe the community of baseness, and the comparative innocence of awkwardness and inexperience, which at once connote the species and denote the specimens of the later and the earlier animalcule.

The "Jests to make you merry," which in Dr. Grosart's edition are placed after "The Gull's Horn-book," though dated two years earlier, will hardly give so much entertainment to any probable reader in our own time as "The Misery of a Prison, and a Prisoner," will give him pain to read of in the closing pages of the same pamphlet, when he remembers how long--at the lowest computation--its author had endured the loathsome and hideous misery which he has described with such bitter and pathetic intensity and persistency in detail. Well may Dr. Grosart say that "it shocks us to-day, though so far off, to think of 1598 to 1616 onwards covering so sorrowful and humiliating trials for so finely touched a spirit as was Dekker's"; but I think as well as hope that there is no sort of evidence to that surely rather improbable as well as deplorable effect. It may be "possible," but it is barely possible, that some "seven years' continuous imprisonment" is the explanation of an ambiguous phrase which is now incapable of any certain solution, and capable of many an interpretation far less deplorable than this. But in this professedly comic pamphlet there are pa.s.sages as tragic, if not as powerful, as any in the immortal pages of _Pickwick_ and _Little Dorrit_ which deal with a later but a too similar phase of prison discipline and tradition:

The thing that complained was a man:--"Thy days have gone over thee like the dreams of a fool, thy nights like the watchings of a madman.--Oh sacred liberty! with how little devotion do men come into thy temples, when they cannot bestow upon thee too much honor! Thy embracements are more delicate than those of a young bride with her lover, and to be divorced from thee is half to be d.a.m.ned! For what else is a prison but the very next door to h.e.l.l? It is a man's grave, wherein he walks alive: it is a sea wherein he is always s.h.i.+pwrackt: it is a lodging built out of the world: it is a wilderness where all that wander up and down grow wild, and all that come into it are devoured."

In Dekker's next pamphlet, his "Dream," there are perhaps half a dozen tolerably smooth and vigorous couplets immersed among many more vacuous and vehement in the intensity of their impotence than any reader and admirer of his more happily inspired verse could be expected to believe without evidence adduced. Of imagination, faith, or fancy, the ugly futility of this infernal vision has not--unless I have sought more than once for it in vain--a single saving trace or compensating shadow.

Two years after he had tried his hand at an imitation of Nash, Dekker issued the first of the pamphlets in which he attempted to take up the succession of Robert Greene as a picaresque writer, or purveyor of guide-books through the realms of rascaldom. "The Bellman of London," or Rogue's Horn-book, begins with a very graceful and fanciful description of the quiet beauty and seclusion of a country retreat in which the author had sought refuge from the turmoil and forgetfulness of the vices of the city; and whence he was driven back upon London by disgust at the discovery of villany as elaborate and roguery as abject in the beggars and thieves of the country as the most squalid recesses of metropolitan vice or crime could supply. The narrative of this accidental discovery is very lively and spirited in its straightforward simplicity, and the subsequent revelations of rascality are sometimes humorous as well as curious: but the demand for such literature must have been singularly persistent to evoke a sequel to this book next year, "Lantern and Candle-light; or, the Bellman's Second Night-walk," in which Dekker continues his account of vagrant and villanous society, its lawless laws and its unmannerly manners; and gives the reader some vivid studies, interspersed with facile rhetoric and interlarded with indignant declamation, of the tricks of horse-dealers and the s.h.i.+fts of gypsies--or "moon-men" as he calls them; a race which he regarded with a mixture of angry perplexity and pa.s.sionate disgust. "A Strange Horse-race" between various virtues and vices gives occasion for the display of some allegoric ingenuity and much indefatigable but fatiguing pertinacity in the exposure of the more exalted swindlers of the age--the crafty bankrupts who antic.i.p.ated the era of the Merdles described by d.i.c.kens, but who can hardly have done much immediate injury to a capitalist of the rank of Dekker. Here too there are glimpses of inventive spirit and humorous ingenuity; but the insufferable iteration of jocose demonology and infernal burlesque might tempt the most patient and the most curious of readers to devote the author, with imprecations or invocations as elaborate as his own, to the spiritual potentate whose "last will and testament" is transcribed into the text of this pamphlet.

In "The Dead Term" such a reader will find himself more or less relieved by the return of his author to a more terrene and realistic sort of allegory. This recriminatory dialogue between the London and the Westminster of 1608 is now and then rather flatulent in its reciprocity of rhetoric, but is enlivened by an occasional breath of genuine eloquence, and redeemed by touches of historic or social interest. The t.i.tle and motto of the next year's pamphlet--"Work for Armourers; or, the Peace is Broken.--G.o.d help the Poor, the rich can s.h.i.+ft"--were presumably designed to attract the casual reader, by what would now be called a sensational device, to consideration of the social question between rich and poor--or, as he puts it, between the rival queens, Poverty and Money. The forces on either side are drawn out and arrayed with pathetic ingenuity, and the result is indicated with a quaint and grim effect of humorous if indignant resignation. "The Raven's Almanack"

of the same year, though portentous in its menace of plague, famine, and civil war, is less noticeable for its moral and religious declamation than for its rather amusing than edifying anecdotes; which, it must again be admitted, in their mixture of jocular sensuality with somewhat ferocious humor, rather remind us of King Louis XI. than of that royal novelist's Italian models or precursors. "A Rod for Runaways" is the t.i.tle of a tract which must have somewhat perplexed the readers who came to it for practical counsel or suggestion, seeing that the very t.i.tle-page calls their attention to the fact that, "if they look back, they may behold many fearful judgments of G.o.d, sundry ways p.r.o.nounced upon this city, and on several persons, both flying from it and staying in it." What the medical gentleman to whom this tract was dedicated may have thought of the author's logic and theology, we can only conjecture. But even in this little pamphlet there are anecdotes and details which would repay the notice of a social historian as curious in his research and as studious in his condescension as Macaulay.

A prayer-book written or compiled by a poet of Dekker's rank in Dekker's age would have some interest for the reader of a later generation even if it had not the literary charm which distinguishes the little volume of devotions now reprinted from a single and an imperfect copy. We cannot be too grateful for the good-fortune and the generous care to which we are indebted for this revelation of a work of genius so curious and so delightful that the most fanatical of atheists or agnostics, the hardest and the driest of philosophers, might be moved and fascinated by the exquisite simplicity of its beauty. Hardly even in those almost incomparable collects which Macaulay so aptly compared with the sonnets of Milton shall we find sentences or pa.s.sages more perfect in their union of literary grace with ardent sincerity than here. Quaint as are several of the prayers in the professional particulars of their respective appeals, this quaintness has nothing of irreverence or incongruity: and the subtle simplicity of cadence in the rhythmic movement of the style is so nearly impeccable that we are perplexed to understand how so exquisite an ear as was Dekker's at its best can have been tolerant of such discord or insensible to such collapse as so often disappoints or shocks us in the hastier and cruder pa.s.sages of his faltering and fluctuating verse. The prayer for a soldier going to battle and his thanksgiving after victory are as n.o.ble in the dignity of their devotion as the prayers for a woman in travail and "for them that visit the sick" are delicate and earnest in their tenderness. The prayer for a prisoner is too beautiful to stand in need of the additional and pathetic interest which it derives from the fact of its author's repeated experience of the misery it expresses with such piteous yet such manful resignation. The style of these faultlessly simple devotions is almost grotesquely set off by the relief of a comparison with the bloated bombast and flatulent pedantry of a prayer by the late Queen Elizabeth which Dekker has transcribed into his text--it is hardly possible to suppose, without perception of the contrast between its hideous jargon and the refined purity of his own melodious English. The prayer for the Council is singularly n.o.ble in the eloquence of its patriotism: the prayer for the country is simply magnificent in the austere music of its fervent cadences: the prayer in time of civil war is so pa.s.sionate in its cry for deliverance from all danger of the miseries then or lately afflicting the continent that it might well have been put up by a loyal patriot in the very heat of the great war which Dekker might have lived to see break out in his own country. The prayer for the evening is so beautiful as to double our regret for the deplorable mutilation which has deprived us of all but the opening of the morning prayer.[1] The feathers fallen from the wings of these "Four Birds of Noah's Ark" would be worth more to the literary ornithologist than whole flocks of such "tame villatic fowl" as people the ordinary coops and hen-roosts of devotional literature.

[Footnote 1: A noticeable instance of the use of a common word in the original and obsolete sense of its derivation may be cited from the unfortunately truncated and scanty fragment of a prayer for the court: "Oh Lord, be thou a husband" (house-band) "to that great household of our King."]

One work only of Dekker's too often overtasked and heavy-laden genius remains to be noticed: it is one which gives him a high place forever among English humorists. No sooner has the reader run his eye over the first three or four pages than he feels himself, with delight and astonishment, in the company of a writer whose genius is akin at once to Goldsmith's and to Thackeray's; a writer whose style is so pure and vigorous, so lucid and straightforward, that we seem to have already entered upon the best age of English prose. Had Mr. Matthew Arnold, instead of digging in Chapman for preposterous barbarisms and eccentricities of pedantry, chanced to light upon this little treatise, or had he condescended to glance over Daniel's compact and admirable "Defence of Rhyme," he would have found in writers of the despised Shakespearean epoch much more than a foretaste of those excellent qualities which he imagined to have been first imported into our literature by writers of the age of Dryden. The dialogue of the very first couple introduced with such skilful simplicity of presentation at the opening of Dekker's pamphlet is worthy of Sterne: the visit of the gossip or kinswoman in the second chapter is worthy of Moliere, and the humors of the monthly nurse in the third are worthy of d.i.c.kens. The lamentations of the lady for the decay of her health and beauty in consequence of her obsequious husband's alleged neglect, "no more like the woman I was than an apple is like an oyster"; the description of the poor man making her broth with his own hands, jeered at by the maids and trampled underfoot by Mrs. Gamp; the preparations for the christening supper and the preliminary feast of scandal--are full of such bright and rich humor as to recall even the creator of Dogberry and Mrs. Quickly.

It is of Shakespeare again that we are reminded in the next chapter, by the description of the equipage to which the husband of "a woman that hath a charge of children" is reduced when he has to ride to the a.s.sizes in sorrier plight than Petruchio rode in to his wedding; the details remind us also of Balzac in the minute and grotesque intensity of their industrious realism: but the scene on his return reminds us rather of Thackeray at the best of his bitterest mood--the terrible painter of Mrs. Mackenzie and Mrs. General Baynes. "The humor of a woman that marries her inferior by birth" deals with more serious matters in a style not unworthy of Boccaccio; and no comedy of the time--Shakespeare's always excepted--has a scene in it of richer and more original humor than brightens the narrative which relates the woes of the husband who invites his friends to dinner and finds everything under lock and key. Hardly in any of Dekker's plays is the comic dialogue so masterly as here--so vivid and so vigorous in its life-like ease and spontaneity.

But there is not one of the fifteen chapters, devoted each to the description of some fresh "humor," which would not deserve, did s.p.a.ce and time allow of it, a separate note of commentary. The book is simply one of the very finest examples of humorous literature, touched now and then with serious and even tragic effect, that can be found in any language; it is generally and comparatively remarkable for its freedom from all real coa.r.s.eness or brutality, though the inevitable change of manners between Shakespeare's time and our own may make some pa.s.sages or episodes seem now and then somewhat over-particular in plain speaking or detail. But a healthier, manlier, more thoroughly good-natured and good-humored book was never written; nor one in which the author's real and respectful regard for womanhood was more perceptible through the veil of a satire more pure from bitterness and more honest in design.

The list of works over which we have now glanced is surely not inconsiderable; and yet the surviving productions of Dekker's genius or necessity are but part of the labors of his life. If he wanted--as undoubtedly he would seem to have wanted--that "infinite capacity for taking pains" which Carlyle professed to regard as the synonyme of genius, he was at least not deficient in that rough-and-ready diligence which is habitually in harness, and cheerfully or resignedly prepared for the day's work. The names of his lost plays--all generally suggestive of some true dramatic interest, now graver and now lighter--are too numerous to transcribe: but one at least of them must excite unspeakable amazement as well as indiscreet curiosity in every reader of Ariosto or La Fontaine who comes in the course of the catalogue upon such a t.i.tle as "Jocondo and Astolfo." How on earth the famous story of Giocondo could possibly be adapted for representation on the public stage of Shakespearean London is a mystery which the execrable cook of the execrable Warburton has left forever insoluble and inconceivable: for to that female fiend, the object of Sir Walter Scott's antiquarian imprecations, we owe, unless my memory misguides me, the loss of this among other irredeemable treasures.

To do justice upon the faults of this poet is easy for any sciolist: to do justice to his merits is less easy for the most competent scholar and the most appreciative critic. In despite of his rare occasional spurts or outbreaks of self-a.s.sertion or of satire, he seems to stand before us a man of gentle, modest, s.h.i.+ftless, and careless nature, irritable and placable, eager and unsteady, full of excitable kindliness and deficient in strenuous principle; loving the art which he professionally followed, and enjoying the work which he occasionally neglected. There is no unpoetic note in his best poetry such as there is too often--nay, too constantly--in the severer work and the stronger genius of Ben Jonson.

What he might have done under happier auspices, or with a tougher fibre of resolution and perseverance in his character, it is waste of time and thought for his most sympathetic and compa.s.sionate admirers to a.s.sume or to conjecture: what he has done, with all its shortcomings and infirmities, is enough to secure for him a distinct and honorable place among the humorists and the poets of his country.

JOHN MARSTON

If justice has never been done, either in his own day or in any after age, to a poet of real genius and original powers, it will generally be presumed, with more or less fairness or unfairness, that this is in great part his own fault. Some perversity or obliquity will be suspected, even if no positive infirmity or deformity can be detected, in his intelligence or in his temperament: some taint or some flaw will be a.s.sumed to affect and to vitiate his creative instinct or his spiritual reason. And in the case of John Marston, the friend and foe of Ben Jonson, the fierce and foul-mouthed satirist, the ambitious and overweening tragedian, the scornful and pa.s.sionate humorist, it is easy for the shallowest and least appreciative reader to perceive the nature and to estimate the weight of such drawbacks or impediments as have so long and so seriously interfered with the due recognition of an independent and remarkable poet. The praise and the blame, the admiration and the distaste excited by his works, are equally just, but are seemingly incompatible: the epithets most exactly appropriate to the style of one scene, one page, one speech in a scene or one pa.s.sage in a speech, are most ludicrously inapplicable to the next. An anthology of such n.o.ble and beautiful excerpts might be collected from his plays, that the reader who should make his first acquaintance with this poet through the deceptive means of so flattering an introduction would be justified in supposing that he had fallen in with a tragic dramatist of the very highest order--with a new candidate for a station in the very foremost rank of English poets. And if the evil star which seems generally to have presided over the literary fortunes of John Marston should misguide the student, on first opening a volume of his works, into some such arid or miry tract of wilderness as too frequently deforms the face of his uneven and irregular demesne, the inevitable sense of disappointment and repulsion which must immediately ensue will too probably discourage a casual explorer from any renewal of his research.

Two of the epithets which Ben Jonson, in his elaborate attack on Marston, selected for ridicule as characteristically grotesque instances of affected and infelicitous innovation--but which nevertheless have taken root in the language, and practically justified their adoption--describe as happily as any that could be chosen to describe the better and the worse quality of his early tragic and satiric style.

These words are "strenuous" and "clumsy." It is perpetually, indefatigably, and fatiguingly strenuous; it is too often vehemently, emphatically, and laboriously clumsy. But at its best, when the clumsy and ponderous incompetence of expression which disfigures it is supplanted by a strenuous felicity of ardent and triumphant aspiration, it has notes and touches in the compa.s.s of its course not unworthy of Webster or Tourneur or even Shakespeare himself. Its occasionally exquisite delicacy is as remarkable as its more frequent excess of coa.r.s.eness, awkwardness, or violent and elaborate extravagance. No sooner has he said anything especially beautiful, pathetic, or sublime, than the evil genius must needs take his turn, exact as it were the forfeit of his bond, impel the poet into some sheer perversity, deface the flow and form of the verse with some preposterous crudity or flatulence of phrase which would discredit the most incapable or the most fantastic novice. And the worst of it all is that he limps or stumbles with either foot alternately. At one moment he exaggerates the license of artificial rhetoric, the strain and swell of the most high-flown and hyperbolical poetic diction; at the next, he falls flat upon the naked level of insignificant or offensive realism.

These are no slight charges; and it is impossible for any just or sober judgment to acquit John Marston of the impeachment conveyed in them. The answer to it is practical and simple: it is that his merits are great enough to outweigh and overshadow them all. Even if his claim to remembrance were merely dependent on the value of single pa.s.sages, this would suffice to secure him his place of honor in the train of Shakespeare. If his most ambitious efforts at portraiture of character are often faulty at once in color and in outline, some of his slighter sketches have a freshness and tenderness of beauty which may well atone for the gravest of his certainly not infrequent offences. The sweet constancy and gentle fort.i.tude of a Beatrice and a Mellida remain in the memory more clearly, leave a more life-like impression of truth on the reader's mind, than the light-headed profligacy and pa.s.sionate instability of such brainless and blood-thirsty wantons as Franceschina and Isabella. In fact, the better characters in Marston's plays are better drawn, less conventional, more vivid and more human than those of the baser sort. Whatever of moral credit may be due to a dramatist who paints virtue better than vice, and has a happier hand at a hero's likeness than at a villain's, must unquestionably be a.s.signed to the author of "Antonio and Mellida." Piero, the tyrant and traitor, is little more than a mere stage property: like Mendoza in "The Malcontent"

and Syphax in "Sophonisba," he would be a portentous ruffian if he had a little more life in him; he has to do the deeds and express the emotions of a most b.l.o.o.d.y and crafty miscreant; but it is only now and then that we catch the accent of a real man in his tones of cajolery or menace, dissimulation or triumph. Andrugio, the venerable and heroic victim of his craft and cruelty, is a figure not less living and actual than stately and impressive: the changes of mood from meditation to pa.s.sion, from resignation to revolt, from tenderness to resolution, which mark the development of the character with the process of the action, though painted rather broadly than subtly and with more of vigor than of care, show just such power of hand and sincerity of instinct as we fail to find in the hot and glaring colors of his rival's monotonous ruffianism.

Again, in "The Wonder of Women," the majestic figures of Ma.s.sinissa, Gelosso, and Sophonisba stand out in clearer relief than the traitors of the senate, the lecherous malignity of Syphax, or the monstrous profile of the sorceress Erichtho. In this labored and ambitious tragedy, as in the two parts of "Antonio and Mellida," we see the poet at his best--and also at his worst. A vehement and resolute desire to give weight to every line and emphasis to every phrase has too often misled him into such brakes and jungles of crabbed and convulsive bombast, of stiff and tortuous exuberance, that the reader in struggling through some of the scenes and speeches feels as though he were compelled to push his way through a cactus hedge: the hot and heavy blossoms of rhetoric blaze and glare out of a thickset fence of jagged barbarisms and exotic monstrosities of metaphor. The straining and sputtering declamation of narrative and oratory scarcely succeeds in expressing through a dozen quaint and far-fetched words or phrases what two or three of the simplest would easily and amply have sufficed to convey. But when the poet is content to deliver his message like a man of this world, we discover with mingled satisfaction, astonishment, and irritation that he can write when he pleases in a style of the purest and n.o.blest simplicity; that he can make his characters converse in a language worthy of Sophocles when he does not prefer to make them stutter in a dialect worthy of Lycophron. And in the tragedy of "Sophonisba" the display of this happy capacity is happily reserved for the crowning scene of the poem. It would be difficult to find anywhere a more preposterous or disjointed piece of jargon than the speech of Asdrubal at the close of the second act:

Brook open scorn, faint powers!-- Make good the camp!--No, fly!--yes, what?--wild rage!-- To be a prosperous villain! yet some heat, some hold; But to burn temples, and yet freeze, O cold!

Give me some health; now your blood sinks: thus deeds Ill nourished rot: without Jove nought succeeds.

And yet this pa.s.sage occurs in a poem which contains such a pa.s.sage as the following:

And now with undismayed resolve behold, To save you--you--for honor and just faith Are most true G.o.ds, which we should much adore-- With even disdainful vigor I give up An abhorred life!--You have been good to me, And I do thank thee, heaven. O my stars, I bless your goodness, that with breast unstained, Faith pure, a virgin wife, tried to my glory, I die, of female faith the long-lived story; Secure from bondage and all servile harms, But more, most happy in my husband's arms.

The lofty sweetness, the proud pathos, the sonorous simplicity of these most n.o.ble verses might scarcely suffice to attest the poet's possession of any strong dramatic faculty. But the scene immediately preceding bears evidence of a capacity for terse and rigorous brevity of dialogue in a style as curt and condensed as that of Tacitus or Dante:

_Sophonisba_. What unjust grief afflicts my worthy lord?

_Ma.s.sinissa_. Thank me, ye G.o.ds, with much beholdingness; For, mark, I do not curse you.

_Sophonisba_. Tell me, sweet, The cause of thy much anguish.

_Ma.s.sinissa_. Ha, the cause?

Let's see; wreathe back thine arms, bend down thy neck, Practise base prayers, make fit thyself for bondage.

_Sophonisba_. Bondage!

_Ma.s.sinissa_. Bondage: Roman bondage.

_Sophonisba_. No, no![1]

_Ma.s.sinissa_. How then have I vowed well to Scipio?

_Sophonisba_. How then to Sophonisba?

_Ma.s.sinissa_. Right: which way Run mad? impossible distraction![2]

_Sophonisba_. Dear lord, thy patience; let it maze all power, And list to her in whose sole heart it rests To keep thy faith upright.

_Ma.s.sinissa_. Wilt thou be slaved?