Volume 1 / Part 3 — PART III.—Prose (continued 2)

The greatest speak with a sad resignation of the infinite obscurity which embraces our poor, short, glimmering life, our life, which is but a troubled dream;[420] the sad state of humanity, which is but passion, madness, and sorrow; the human being who is himself, perhaps, but a vain phantom, a grievous sick man's dream. In their eyes we roll down a fatal slope, where chance dashes us one against the other, and the inner destiny which urges us onward, only shatters after it has blinded us. And at the end of all is "the silent grave, no conversation, no joyful tread of friends, no voice of lovers, no careful father's counsel; nothing's heard, nor nothing is, but all oblivion, dust, and endless darkness."[421] If yet there were nothing. "To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to dream." To dream sadly, to fall into a nightmare like the nightmare of life, like that in which we are struggling and crying to-day, gasping with hoarse throat!—this is their idea of man and of existence, the national idea, which fills the stage with calamities and despair, which makes a display of tortures and massacres, which abounds in madness and crime, which holds up death as the issue throughout. A threatening and sombre fog veils their mind like their sky, and joy, like the sun, only appears in its full force now and then. They are different from the Latin race, and in the common Renaissance they are regenerated otherwise than the Latin races. The free and full development of pure nature which, in Greece and Italy, ends in the painting of beauty and happy energy, ends here in the painting of ferocious energy, agony, and death.

SECTION IV.—The Poets of the Period

Thus was this theatre produced; a theatre unique in history, like the admirable and fleeting epoch from which it sprang, the work and the picture of this young world, as natural, as unshackled, and as tragic as itself. When an original and national drama springs up, the poets who establish it carry in themselves the sentiments which it represents. They display better than other men the feelings of the public, because those feelings arc stronger in them than in other men. The passions which surround them, break forth in their heart with a harsher or a juster cry, and hence their voices become the voices of all. Chivalric and Catholic Spain had her interpreters in her enthusiasts and her Don Quixotes: in Calderon, first a soldier, afterwards a priest; in Lope de Vega, a volunteer at fifteen, a passionate lover, a wandering duelist, a soldier of the Armada, finally, a priest and familiar of the Holy Office; so full of fervor that he fasts till he is exhausted, faints with emotion while singing mass, and in his flagellations stains the walls of his cell with blood. Calm and noble Greece had in her principal tragic poet one of the most accomplished and fortunate of her sons:[422] Sophocles, first in song and palaestra; who at fifteen sang, unclad, the pæan before the trophy of Salamis, and who afterwards, as ambassador, general, ever loving the gods and impassioned for his state, presented, in his life as in his works, the spectacle of the incomparable harmony which made the beauty of the ancient world, and which the modern world will never more attain to. Eloquent and worldly France, in the age which carried the art of good manners and conversation to its highest pitch, finds, to write her oratorical tragedies and to paint her drawing-room passions, the most able craftsman of words, Racine, a courtier, a man of the world; the most capable, by the delicacy of his tact and the adaptation of his style, of making men of the world and courtiers speak. So in England the poets are in harmony with their works. Almost all are Bohemians; they sprang from the people,[423] were educated, and usually studied at Oxford or Cambridge, but they were poor, so that their education contrasts with their condition. Ben Jonson is the step-son of a bricklayer, and himself a bricklayer; Marlowe is the son of a shoemaker; Shakespeare of a wool merchant; Massinger of a servant of a noble family.[424] They live as they can, get into debt, write for their bread, go on the stage. Peele, Lodge, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Heywood, are actors; most of the details which we have of their lives are taken from the journal of Henslowe, a retired pawnbroker, later a money-lender and manager of a theatre, who gives them work, advances money to them, receives their manuscripts or their wardrobes as security. For a play he gives seven or eight pounds; after the year 1600 prices rise, and reach as high as twenty or twenty-five pounds. It is clear that, even after this increase, the trade of author scarcely brings in bread. In order to earn money, it was necessary, like Shakespeare, to become a manager, to try to have a share in the property of a theatre; but such success is rare, and the life which they lead, a life of actors and artists, improvident, full of excess, lost amid debauchery and acts of violence, amidst women of evil fame, in contact with young profligates, among the temptations of misery, imagination and license, generally leads them to exhaustion, poverty, and death. Men received enjoyment from them, but neglected and despised them. One actor, for a political allusion, was sent to prison, and only just escaped losing his ears; great men, men in office, abused them like servants. Heywood, who played almost every day, bound himself, in addition, to write a sheet daily, for several years composes at haphazard in taverns, labors and sweats like a true literary hack, and dies leaving two hundred and twenty pieces, of which most are lost. Kyd, one of the earliest in date, died in misery. Shirley, one of the last, at the end of his career, was obliged to become once more a schoolmaster. Massinger dies unknown; and in the parish register we find only this sad mention of him: "Philip Massinger, a stranger." A few months after the death of Middleton, his widow was obliged to ask alms of the City, because he had left nothing. Imagination, as Drummond said of Ben Jonson, oppressed their reason; it is the common failing of poets. They wish to enjoy, and give themselves wholly up to enjoyment; their mood, their heart governs them; in their life, as in their works, impulses are irresistible; desire comes suddenly, like a wave, drowning reason, resistance—often even giving neither reason nor resistance time to show themselves.[425] Many are roisterers, sad roisterers of the same sort, such as Musset and Murger, who give themselves up to every passion, and "drown their sorrows in the bowl"; capable of the purest and most poetic dreams, of the most delicate and touching tenderness, and who yet can only undermine their health and mar their fame. Such are Nash, Decker, and Greene; Nash, a fantastic satirist, who abused his talent, and conspired like a prodigal against good fortune; Decker, who passed three years in the King's Bench prison; Greene, above all, a pleasing wit, copious, graceful, who took a delight in destroying himself, publicly with tears confessing his vices,[426] and the next moment plunging into them again. These are mere androgynes, true courtesans, in manners, body, and heart. Quitting Cambridge, "with good fellows as free-living as himself," Greene had travelled over Spain, Italy, "in which places he sawe and practizde such villainie as is abhominable to declare." You see the poor man is candid, not sparing himself; he is natural; passionate in everything, repentance or otherwise; above all of ever-varying mood; made for self-contradiction; not self-correction. On his return he became, in London, a supporter of taverns, a haunter of evil places. In his "Groatsworth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance" he says:

"I was dround in pride, whoredom was my daily exercise, and gluttony with drunkenness was my onely delight.... After I had wholly betaken me to the penning of plaies (which was my continuall exercise) I was so far from calling upon God that I sildome thought on God, but tooke such delight in swearing and blaspheming the name of God that none could thinke otherwise of me than that I was the child of perdition. These vanities and other trifling pamphlets I penned of love and vaine fantasies was my chiefest stay of living; and for those my vaine discourses I was beloved of the more vainer sort of people, who being my continuall companions, came still to my lodging, and there would continue quaffing, carowsing, and surfeting with me all the day long.... If I may have my disire while I live I am satisfied; let me shift after death as I may.... 'Hell!' quoth I; 'what talke you of hell to me? I know if I once come there I shall have the company of better men than myselfe; I shall also meete with some madde knaves in that place, and so long as I shall not sit there alone, my care is the lesse.... If I feared the judges of the bench no more than I dread the judgments of God I would before I slept dive into one carles bagges or other, and make merrie with the shelles I found in them so long as they would last.'"

A little later he is seized with remorse, marries, depicts in delicious verse the regularity and calm of an upright life; then returns to London, spends his property and his wife's fortune with "a sorry ragged queane," in the company of ruffians, pimps, sharpers, courtesans; drinking, blaspheming, wearing himself out by sleepless nights and orgies; writing for bread, sometimes amid the brawling and effluvia of his wretched lodging, lighting upon thoughts of adoration and love, worthy of Rolla;[427] very often disgusted with himself, seized with a fit of weeping between two merry bouts, and writing little pieces to accuse himself, to regret his wife, to convert his comrades, or to warn young people against the tricks of prostitutes and swindlers. He was soon worn out by this kind of life; six years were enough to exhaust him. An indigestion arising from Rhenish wine and pickled herrings finished him. If it had not been for his landlady, who succored him, he "would have perished in the streets." He lasted a little longer, and then his light went out; now and then he begged her "pittifully for a penny pott of malmesie"; he was covered with lice, he had but one shirt, and when his own was "awashing," he was obliged to borrow her husband's. "His doublet and hose and sword were sold for three shillinges," and the poor folks paid the cost of his burial, four shillings for the winding sheet, and six and fourpence for the burial.

In such low places, on such dunghills, amid such excesses and violence, dramatic genius forced its way, and amongst others, that of the first, of the most powerful, of the true founder of the dramatic school, Christopher Marlowe.

Marlowe was an ill-regulated, dissolute, outrageously vehement and audacious spirit, but grand and sombre, with the genuine poetic frenzy; pagan moreover, and rebellious in manners and creed. In this universal return to the senses, and in this impulse of natural forces which brought on the Renaissance, the corporeal instincts and the ideas which hallow them, break forth impetuously. Marlowe, like Greene, like Kett,[428] is a sceptic, denies God and Christ, blasphemes the Trinity, declares Moses "a juggler," Christ more worthy of death than Barabas, says that "yf he wer to write a new religion, he wolde undertake both a more excellent and more admirable methode," and "almost in every company he commeth, perswadeth men to Athiesme."[429] Such were the rages, the rashnesses, the excesses which liberty of thought gave rise to in these new minds, who for the first time, after so many centuries, dared to walk unfettered. From his father's shop, crowded with children, from the straps and awls, he found himself studying at Cambridge, probably through the patronage of a great man, and on his return to London, in want, amid the license of the green-room, the low houses and taverns, his head was in a ferment, and his passions became excited. He turned actor; but having broken his leg in a scene of debauchery, he remained lame, and could no longer appear on the boards. He openly avowed his infidelity, and a prosecution was begun, which, if time had not failed, would probably have brought him to the stake. He made love to a drab, and in trying to stab his rival, his hand was turned, so that his own blade entered his eye and his brain, and he died, cursing and blaspheming. He was only thirty years old.

Think what poetry could emanate from a life so passionate, and occupied in such a manner! First, exaggerated declamation, heaps of murder, atrocities, a pompous and furious display of tragedy bespattered with blood, and passions raised to a pitch of madness. All the foundations of the English stage, "Ferrex and Porrex, Cambyses, Hieronymo," even the "Pericles" of Shakespeare, reach the same height of extravagance, magniloquence and horror.[430] It is the first outbreak of youth. Recall Schiller's "Robbers," and how modern democracy has recognized for the first time its picture in the metaphors and cries of Charles Moor.[431] So here the characters struggle and roar, stamp on the earth, gnash their teeth, shake their fists against heaven. The trumpets sound, the drums beat, coats of mail file past armies clash, men stab each other, or themselves; speeches are full of gigantic threats and lyrical figures;[432] kings die, straining a bass voice; "now doth ghastly death with greedy talons gripe my bleeding heart, and like a harpy tires on my life." The hero in "Tamburlaine the Great"[433] is seated on a chariot drawn by chained kings; he burns towns, drowns women and children, puts men to the sword, and finally, seized with an inscrutable sickness, raves in monstrous outcries against the gods, whose hands afflict his soul, and whom he would fain dethrone. There already is the picture of senseless pride, of blind and murderous rage, which passing through many devastations, at last arms against heaven itself. The overflowing of savage and immoderate instinct produces this mighty sounding verse, this prodigality of carnage, this display of splendors and exaggerated colors, this railing of demoniacal passions, this audacity of grand impiety. If in the dramas which succeed it, "The Massacre at Paris," "The Jew of Malta," the bombast decreases, the violence remains. Barabas the Jew maddened with hate, is henceforth no longer human; he has been treated by the Christians like a beast, and he hates them like a beast. He advises his servant Ithamore in the following words:

"Hast thou no trade? then listen to my words, And I will teach thee that shall stick by thee: First, be thou void of these affections, Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear; Be mov'd at nothing, see thou pity none, But to thyself smile when the Christians moan. ... I walk abroad a-nights, And kill sick people groaning under walls; Sometimes I go about and poison wells.... Being young, I studied physic, and began To practice first upon the Italian; There I enrich'd the priests with burials, And always kept the sexton's arms in ure With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells.... I fill'd the jails with bankrouts in a year, And with young orphans planted hospitals; And every moon made some or other mad, And now and then one hang himself for grief, Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll How I with interest tormented him."[434]

All these cruelties he boasts of and chuckles over, like a demon who rejoices in being a good executioner, and plunges his victims in the very extremity of anguish. His daughter has two Christian suitors; and by forged letters he causes them to slay each other. In despair she takes the veil, and to avenge himself he poisons his daughter and the whole convent. Two friars wish to denounce him, then to convert him; he strangles the first, and jokes with his slave Ithamore, a cut-throat by profession, who loves his trade, rubs his hands with joy, and says:

"Pull amain, 'Tis neatly done, sir; here's no print at all. So, let him lean upon his staff; excellent! he stands as if he were begging of bacon."[435] "O mistress, I have the bravest, gravest, secret, subtle, bottlenosed knave to my master, that ever gentleman had."[436]

The second friar comes up, and they accuse him of the murder.

"Barabas. Heaven bless me! what, a friar a murderer! When shall you see a Jew commit the like? Ithamore. Why, a Turk could ha' done no more. Bar. To-morrow is the sessions; you shall do it— Come Ithamore, let's help to take him hence. Friar. Villains, I am a sacred person; touch me not. Bar. The law shall touch you; we'll but lead you, we: 'Las, I could weep at your calamity!"[437]

We have also two other poisonings, an infernal machine to blow up the Turkish garrison, a plot to cast the Turkish commander into a well. Barabas falls into it himself, and dies in the hot caldron,[438] howling, hardened, remorseless, having but one regret, that he had not done evil enough. These are the ferocities of the Middle Ages; we might find them to this day among the companions of Ali Pacha, among the pirates of the Archipelago; we retain pictures of them in the paintings of the fifteenth century, which represent a king with his court, seated calmly round a living man who is being flayed; in the midst the flayer on his knees is working conscientiously, very careful not to spoil the skin.[439]

All this is pretty strong, you will say; these people kill too readily, and too quickly. It is on this very account that the painting is a true one. For the specialty of the men of the time, as of Marlowe's characters, is the abrupt commission of a deed; they are children, robust children. As a horse kicks out instead of speaking, so they pull out their knives instead of asking an explanation. Nowadays we hardly know what nature is; instead of observing it we still retain the benevolent prejudices of the eighteenth century; we only see it humanized by two centuries of culture, and we take its acquired calm for an innate moderation. The foundations of the natural man are irresistible impulses, passions, desires, greeds; all blind. He sees a woman,[440] thinks her beautiful; suddenly he rushes towards her; people try to restrain him, he kills these people, gluts his passion, then thinks no more of it, save when at times a vague picture of a moving lake of blood crosses his brain and makes him gloomy. Sudden and extreme resolves are confused in his mind with desire; barely planned, the thing is done; the wide interval which a Frenchman places between the idea of an action and the action itself is not to be found here.[441] Barabas conceived murders, and straightway murders were accomplished; there is no deliberation, no pricks of conscience; that is how he commits a score of them; his daughter leaves him, he becomes unnatural, and poisons her; his confidential servant betrays him, he disguises himself, and poisons him. Rage seizes these men like a fit, and then they are forced to kill. Benvenuto Cellini relates how, being offended, he tried to restrain himself, but was nearly suffocated; and that in order to cure himself, he rushed with his dagger upon his opponent. So, in "Edward the Second," the nobles immediately appeal to arms; all is excessive and unforeseen: between two replies the heart is turned upside down, transported to the extremes of hate or tenderness. Edward, seeing his favorite Gaveston again, pours out before him his treasure, casts his dignities at his feet, gives him his seal, himself, and, on a threat from the Bishop of Coventry, suddenly cries:

"Throw off his golden mitre, rend his stole, And in the channel christen him anew."[442]

Then, when the queen supplicates:

"Fawn not on me, French strumpet! get thee gone.... Speak not unto her: let her droop and pine."[443]

Furies and hatreds clash together like horsemen in battle. The Earl of Lancaster draws his sword on Gaveston to slay him, before the king; Mortimer wounds Gaveston. These powerful loud voices growl; the noblemen will not even let a dog approach the prince, and rob them of their rank. Lancaster says of Gaveston:

"... He comes not back, Unless the sea cast up his shipwrack'd body. Warwick. And to behold so sweet a sight as that, There's none here but would run his horse to death."[444]

They have seized Gaveston, and intend to hang him "at a bough"; they refuse to let him speak a single minute with the king. In vain they are entreated; when they do at last consent, they are sorry for it; it is a prey they want immediately, and Warwick, seizing him by force, "strake off his head in a trench." Those are the men of the Middle Ages. They have the fierceness, the tenacity, the pride of big, well-fed, thorough-bred bull-dogs. It is this sternness and impetuosity of primitive passions which produced the Wars of the Roses, and for thirty years drove the nobles on each other's swords and to the block.

What is there beyond all these frenzies and gluttings of blood? The idea of crushing necessity and inevitable ruin in which everything sinks and comes to an end. Mortimer, brought to the block, says with a smile:

"Base Fortune, now I see, that in thy wheel There is a point, to which, when men aspire, They tumble headlong down: that point I touch'd, And, seeing there was no place to mount up higher, Why should I grieve at my declining fall?— Farewell, fair queen; weep not for Mortimer, That scorns the world, and, as a traveller, Goes to discover countries yet unknown."[445]

Weigh well these grand words; they are a cry from the heart, the profound confession of Marlowe, as also of Byron, and of the old sea-kings. The northern paganism is fully expressed in this heroic and mournful sigh: it is thus they imagine the world so long as they remain on the outside of Christianity, or as soon as they quit it. Thus, when men see in life, as they did, nothing but a battle of unchecked passions, and in death but a gloomy sleep, perhaps filled with mournful dreams, there is no other supreme good but a day of enjoyment and victory. They glut themselves, shutting their eyes to the issue, except that they may be swallowed up on the morrow. That is the master-thought of "Doctor Faustus," the greatest of Marlowe's dramas: to satisfy his soul, no matter at what price, or with what results:

"A sound magician is a mighty god.... How am I glutted with conceit of this!... I'll have them fly to India for gold, Ransack the ocean for orient pearl.... I'll have them read me strange philosophy, And tell the secrets of all foreign kings; I'll have them wall all Germany with brass, And make swift Rhine circle fair Wertenberg.... Like lions shall they guard us when we please; Like Almain rutters with their horsemen's staves, Or Lapland giants, trotting by our sides; Sometimes like women, or unwedded maids, Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows Than have the white breasts of the queen of love."[446]

What brilliant dreams, what desires, what vast or voluptuous wishes, worthy of a Roman Cæsar or an Eastern poet, eddy in this teeming brain! To satiate them, to obtain four-and-twenty years of power, Faustus gave his soul, without fear, without need of temptation, at the first outset, voluntarily, so sharp is the prick within:

"Had I as many souls as there be stars, I'd give them all for Mephistophilis. By him I'll be great emperor of the world, And make a bridge thorough the moving air.... Why shouldst thou not? Is not thy soul thine own?"[447]

And with that he gives himself full swing: he wants to know everything, to have everything; a book in which he can behold all herbs and trees which grow upon the earth; another in which shall be drawn all the constellations and planets; another which shall bring him gold when he wills it, and "the fairest courtezans"; another which summons "men in armour" ready to execute his commands, and which holds "whirlwinds, tempests, thunder and lightning" chained at his disposal. He is like a child, he stretches out his hands for everything shining; then grieves to think of hell, then lets himself be diverted by shows:

"Faustus. O this feeds my soul! Lucifer. Tut, Faustus, in hell is all manner of delight. Faustus. Oh, might I see hell, and return again, How happy were I then!..."[448]

He is conducted, being invisible, over the whole world: lastly to Rome, amongst the ceremonies of the pope's court. Like a schoolboy during a holiday, he has insatiable eyes, he forgets everything before a pageant, he amuses himself in playing tricks, in giving the pope a box on the ear, in beating the monks, in performing magic tricks before princes, finally in drinking, feasting, filling his belly, deadening his thoughts. In his transport he becomes an atheist, and says there is no hell, that those are "old wives' tales." Then suddenly the sad idea knocks at the gates of his brain.

"I will renounce this magic, and repent... My heart's so harden'd I cannot repent: Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven, But fearful echoes thunder in mine ears, 'Faustus, thou are damn'd!' then swords and knives, Poison, guns, halters, and envenom'd steel Are laid before me to despatch myself; And long ere this I should have done the deed, Had not sweet pleasure conquer'd deep despair. Have not I made blind Homer sing to me Of Alexander's love and Œnon's death? And hath not he, that built the walls of Thebes With ravishing sound of his melodious harp, Made music with my Mephistophilis? Why should I die, then, or basely despair? I am resolv'd; Faustus shall ne'er repent.— Come Mephistophilis, let us dispute again, And argue of divine astrology. Tell me, are there many heavens above the moon? Are all celestial bodies but one globe, As is the substance of this centric earth?..."[449] "One thing... let me crave of thee To glut the longing of my heart's desire.... Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss! Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!— Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena.... O thou art fairer than the evening air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!"[450]

"Oh, my God, I would weep! but the devil draws in my tears. Gush forth blood, instead of tears! yea, life and soul! Oh, he stays my tongue! I would lift up my hands; but see, they hold them, they hold them; Lucifer and Mephistophilis...."[451]

"Ah, Faustus, Now hast thou but one bare hour to live, And then thou must be damn'd perpetually! Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven, That time may cease, and midnight never come.... The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike, The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd. Oh, I'll leap up to my God!—Who pulls me down?— See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ, Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ, Yet will I call on him.... Ah, half the hour is past! 'twill all be past anon.... Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years, A hundred thousand, and at last be sav'd.... It strikes, it strikes.... Oh soul, be chang'd into little water-drops, And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!"[452]

There is the living, struggling, natural, personal man, not the philosophic type which Goethe has created, but a primitive and genuine man, hot-headed, fiery, the slave of his passions, the sport of his dreams, wholly engrossed in the present, moulded by his lusts, contradictions, and follies, who amidst noise and starts, cries of pleasure and anguish, rolls, knowing it and willing it, down the slope and crags of his precipice. The whole English drama is here, as a plant in its seed, and Marlowe is to Shakespeare what Perugino was to Raphael.

SECTION V.—Formation of the Drama

Gradually art is being formed; and toward the close of the century it is complete. Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Webster, Massinger, Ford, Middleton, Heywood, appear together, or close upon each other, a new and favored generation, flourishing largely in the soil fertilized by the efforts of the generation which preceded them. Henceforth the scenes are developed and assume consistency, the characters cease to move all of a piece, the drama is no longer like a piece of statuary. The poet who a little while ago knew only how to strike or kill, introduces now a sequence of situation and a rationale in intrigue. He begins to prepare the way for sentiments, to forewarn us of events, to combine effects, and we find a theatre at last, the most complete, the most life-like, and also the most strange that ever existed.

We must follow its formation, and regard the drama when it was formed, that is, in the minds of its authors. What was going on in these minds? What sorts of ideas were born there, and how were they born? In the first place, they see the event, whatever it be, and they see it as it is; I mean that they have it within themselves, with its persons and details, beautiful and ugly, even dull and grotesque. If it is a trial, the judge is there, in their minds, in his place, with his physiognomy and his warts; the plaintiff in another place, with his spectacles and brief-bag; the accused is opposite, stooping and remorseful; each with his friends, cobblers, or lords; then the buzzing crowd behind, all with their grinning faces, their bewildered or kindling eyes.[453] It is a genuine trial which they imagine, a trial like those they have seen before the justice, where they screamed or shouted as witnesses or interested parties, with their quibbling terms, their pros and cons, the scribblings, the sharp voices of the counsel, the stamping of feet, the crowding, the smell of their fellow-men, and so forth. The endless myriads of circumstances which accompany and influence every event, crowd round that event in their heads, and not merely the externals, that is, the visible and picturesque traits, the details of color and costume, but also, and chiefly, the internals, that is, the motions of anger and joy, the secret tumult of the soul, the ebb and flow of ideas and passions which are expressed by the countenance, swell the veins, make a man to grind his teeth, to clench his fists, which urge him on or restrain him. They see all the details, the tides that sway a man, one from without, another from within, one through another, one within another, both together without faltering and without ceasing. And what is this insight but sympathy, an imitative sympathy, which puts us in another's place, which carries over their agitations to our own breasts, which makes our life a little world, able to reproduce the great one in abstract? Like the characters they imagine, poets and spectators make gestures, raise their voices, act. No speech or story can show their inner mood, but it is the scenic effect which can manifest it. As some men invent a language for their ideas, so these act and mimic them; theatrical imitation and figured representation is their genuine speech: all other expression, the lyrical song of Æschylus, the reflective symbolism of Goethe, the oratorical development of Racine, would be impossible for them. Involuntarily, instantaneously, without forecast, they cut life into scenes, and carry it piecemeal on the boards; this goes so far that often a mere character becomes an actor,[454] playing a part within a part; the scenic faculty is the natural form of their mind. Beneath the effort of this instinct, all the accessory parts of the drama come before the footlights and expand before your eyes. A battle has been fought; instead of relating it, they bring it before the public, trumpets and drums, pushing crowds, slaughtering combatants. A shipwreck happens; straightway the ship is before the spectator, with the sailors' oaths, the technical orders of the pilot. Of all the details of human life,[455] tavern-racket and statesmen's councils, scullion's talk and court processions, domestic tenderness and pandering—none is to small or too lofty: these things exist in life—let them exist on the stage, each in full, in the rough, atrocious, or absurd, just as they are, no matter how. Neither in Greece, nor Italy, nor Spain, nor France, has an art been seen which tried so boldly to express the soul, and its innermost depths—the truth, and the whole truth.

How did they succeed, and what is this new art which tramples on all ordinary rules? It is an art for all that, since it is natural; a great art, since it embraces more things, and that more deeply than others do, like the art of Rembrandt and Rubens; but like theirs, it is a Teutonic art, and one whose every step is in contrast with those of classical art. What the Greeks and Romans, the originators of the latter, sought in everything, was charm and order. Monuments, statues, and paintings, the theatre, eloquence and poetry, from Sophocles to Racine, they shaped all their work in the same mould, and attained beauty by the same method. In the infinite entanglement and complexity of things, they grasped a small number of simple ideas, which they embraced in a small number of simple representations, so that the vast confused vegetation of life is presented to the mind from that time forth, pruned and reduced, and perhaps easily embraced at a single glance. A square of walls with rows of columns all alike; a symmetrical group of draped or undraped forms; a young man standing up and raising one arm; a wounded warrior who will not return to the camp, though they beseech him: this, in their noblest epoch, was their architecture, their painting, their sculpture, and their theatre. No poetry but a few sentiments not very intricate, always natural, not toned down, intelligible to all; no eloquence but a continuous argument, a limited vocabulary, the loftiest ideas brought down to their sensible origin, so that children can understand such eloquence and feel such poetry; and in this sense they are classical.[456] In the hands of Frenchmen, the last inheritors of the simple art, these great legacies of antiquity undergo no change. If poetic genius is less, the structure of mind has not altered. Racine puts on the stage a sole action, whose details he adjusts, and whose course he regulates; no incident, nothing unforeseen, no appendices or incongruities; no secondary intrigue. The subordinate parts are effaced; at the most four or five principal characters, the fewest possible; the rest, reduced to the condition of confidants, take the tone of their masters, and merely reply to them. All the scenes are connected, and flow insensibly one into the other, and every scene, like the entire piece, has its order and progress. The tragedy stands out symmetrically and clear in the midst of human life, like a complete and solitary temple which limns its regular outline on the luminous azure of the sky, in England all is different. All that the French call proportion and fitness is wanting; Englishmen do not trouble themselves about them, they do not need them. There is no unity; they leap suddenly over twenty years, or five hundred leagues. There are twenty scenes in an act—we stumble without preparation from one to the other, from tragedy to buffoonery; usually it appears as though the action gained no ground; the different personages waste their time in conversation, dreaming, displaying their character. We were moved, anxious for the issue, and here they bring us in quarrelling servants, lovers making poetry. Even the dialogue and speeches, which we would think ought particularly to be of a regular and continuous flow of engrossing ideas, remain stagnant, or are scattered in windings and deviations. At first sight we fancy we are not advancing, we do not feel at every phrase that we have made a step. There are none of those solid pleadings, none of those conclusive discussions, which every moment add reason to reason, objection to objection; people might say that the different personages only knew how to scold, to repeat themselves, and to mark time. And the disorder is as great in general as in particular things. They heap a whole reign, a complete war, an entire novel, into a drama; they cut up into scenes an English chronicle or an Italian novel: this is all their art; the events matter little; whatever they are, they accept them. They have no idea of progressive and individual action. Two or three actions connected endwise, or entangled one within another, two or three incomplete endings badly contrived, and opened up again; no machinery but death, scattered right and left and unforeseen: such is the logic of their method. The fact is, that our logic, the Latin, fails them. Their mind does not march by the smooth and straightforward paths of rhetoric and eloquence. It reaches the same end, but by other approaches. It is at once more comprehensive and less regular than ours. It demands a conception more complete, but less consecutive. It proceeds, not as with us, by a line of uniform steps, but by sudden leaps and long pauses. It does not rest satisfied with a simple idea drawn from a complex fact, but demands the complex fact entire, with its numberless particularities, its interminable ramifications. It sees in man not a general passion—ambition, anger, or love; not a pure quality—happiness, avarice, folly; but a character, that is, the imprint, wonderfully complicated, which inheritance, temperament, education, calling, age, society, conversation, habits, have stamped on every man; an incommunicable and individual imprint, which, once stamped in a man, is not found again in any other. It sees in the hero not only the hero, but the individual, with his manner of walking, drinking, swearing, blowing his nose; with the tone of his voice, whether he is thin or fat;[457] and thus plunges to the bottom of things, with every look, as by a miner's deep shaft. This sunk, it little cares whether the second shaft be two paces or a hundred from the first; enough that it reaches the same depth, and serves equally well to display the inner and visible layer. Logic is here from beneath, not from above. It is the unity of a character which binds the two actions of the personage, as the unity of an impression connects the two scenes of a drama. To speak exactly, the spectator is like a man whom we should lead along a wall pierced at separate intervals with little windows; at every window he catches for an instant a glimpse of a new landscape, with its million details: the walk over, if he is of Latin race and training, he finds a medley of images jostling in his head, and asks for a map that he may recollect himself; if he is of German race and training, he perceives as a whole, by natural concentration, the wide country which he has only seen piecemeal. Such a conception, by the multitude of details which it combines, and by the depth of the vistas which it embraces, is a half-vision which shakes the whole soul. What its works are about to show us is, with what energy, what disdain of contrivance, what vehemence of truth, it dares to coin and hammer the human medal; with what liberty it is able to reproduce in full prominence worn-out characters, and the extreme flights of virgin nature.

SECTION VI.—Furious Passions—Exaggerated Characters

Let us consider the different personages which this art, so suited to depict real manners, and so apt to paint the living soul, goes in search of amidst the real manners and the living souls of its time and country. They are of two kinds, as befits the nature of the drama: one which produces terror, the other which moves to pity; these graceful and feminine, those manly and violent. All the differences of sex, all the extremes of life, all the resources of the stage, are embraced in this contrast; and if ever there was a complete contrast, it is here.

The reader must study for himself some of these pieces, or he will have no idea of the fury into which the stage is hurled: force and transport are driven every instant to the point of atrocity, and further still, if there be any further. Assassinations, poisonings, tortures, outcries of madness and rage; no passion and no suffering are too extreme for their energy or their effort. Anger is with them a madness, ambition a frenzy, love a delirium. Hippolyto, who has lost his mistress, says, "Were thine eyes clear as mine, thou mightst behold her, watching upon yon battlements of stars, how I observe them."[458] Aretus, to be avenged on Valentinian, poisons him after poisoning himself, and with the death-rattle in his throat, is brought to his enemy's side, to give him a foretaste of agony. Queen Brunhalt has panders with her on the stage, and causes her two sons to slay each other. Death everywhere; at the close of every play, all the great people wade in blood: with slaughter and butcheries, the stage becomes a field of battle or a churchyard.[459] Shall I describe a few of these tragedies? In the "Duke of Milan," Francesco, to avenge his sister, who has been seduced, wishes to seduce in his turn the Duchess Marcelia, wife of Sforza, the seducer; he desires her, he will have her; he says to her, with cries of love and rage:

"For with this arm I'll swim through seas of blood, Or make a bridge, arch'd with the bones of men, But I will grasp my aims in you, my dearest, Dearest, and best of women!"[460]

For he wishes to strike the duke through her, whether she lives or dies, if not by dishonor, at least by murder; the first is as good as the second, nay, better, for so he will do a greater injury. He calumniates her, and the duke, who adores her, kills her; then, being undeceived, loses his senses, will not believe she is dead, has the body brought in, kneels before it, rages and weeps. He knows now the name of the traitor, and at the thought of him he swoons or raves:

"I'll follow him to hell, but I will find him, And there live a fourth Fury to torment him. Then, for this cursed hand and arm that guided The wicked steel, I'll have them, joint by joint, With burning irons sear'd off, which I will eat, I being a vulture fit to taste such carrion."[461]

Suddenly he gasps for breath, and falls; Francesco has poisoned him. The duke dies, and the murderer is led to torture. There are worse scenes than this; to find sentiments strong enough, they go to those which change the very nature of man. Massinger puts on the stage a father who judges and condemns his daughter, stabbed by her husband; Webster and Ford, a son who assassinates his mother; Ford, the incestuous loves of a brother and sister.[462] Irresistible love overtakes them; the ancient love of Pasiphaë and Myrrha, a kind of madness-like enchantment, and beneath which the will entirely gives way. Giovanni says:

"Lost! I am lost! My fates have doom'd my death! The more I strive, I love; the more I love, The less I hope: I see my ruin certain.... I have even wearied heaven with pray'rs, dried up The spring of my continual tears, even starv'd My veins with daily fasts: what wit or art Could counsel, I have practis'd; but, alas! I find all these but dreams, and old men's tales, To fright unsteady youth: I am still the same; Or I must speak, or burst."[463]

What transports follow! what fierce and bitter joys, and how short too, how grievous and mingled with anguish, especially for her! She is married to another. Read for yourself the admirable and horrible scene which represents the wedding night. She is pregnant, and Soranzo, the husband, drags her along the ground, with curses, demanding the name of her lover:

"Come strumpet, famous whore?... Harlot, rare, notable harlot, That with thy brazen face maintain'st thy sin, Was there no man in Parma to be bawd To your loose cunning whoredom else but I? Must your hot itch and plurisy of lust, The heyday of your luxury, be fed Up to a surfeit, and could none but I Be pick'd out to be cloak to your close tricks, Your belly-sports?—Now I must be the dad To all that gallimaufry that is stuff'd In thy corrupted bastard-bearing womb? Say, must I? Annabella. Beastly man? why, 'tis thy fate. I su'd not to thee.... S. Tell me by whom."[464]

She gets excited, feels and cares for nothing more, refuses to tell the name of her lover, and praises him in the following words. This praise in the midst of danger is like a rose she has plucked, and of which the odor intoxicates her:

"A. Soft! 'twas not in my bargain. Yet somewhat, sir, to stay your longing stomach I am content t' acquaint you with the man, The more than man, that got this sprightly boy— (For 'tis a boy, and therefore glory, sir, Your heir shall be a son.) S. Damnable monster? A. Nay, and you will not hear, I'll speak no more. S. Yes, speak, and speak thy last. A. A match, a match?... You, why you are not worthy once to name His name without true worship, or, indeed, Unless you kneel'd to hear another name him. S. What was he call'd? A. We are not come to that; Let it suffice that you shall have the glory To father what so brave a father got.... S. Dost thou laugh? Come, whore, tell me your lover, or, by truth, I'll hew thy flesh to shreds; who is't?"[465]

She laughs; the excess of shame and terror has given her courage; she insults him, she sings; so like a woman!

"A. (Sings) Che morte piu dolce che morire per amore. S. Thus will I pull thy hair, and thus I'll drag Thy lust be-leper'd body through the dust.... (Hales her up and down) A. Be a gallant hangman.... I leave revenge behind, and thou shalt feel't.... (To Vasquez.) Pish, do not beg for me, I prize my life As nothing; if the man will needs be mad, Why, let him take it."[466]

In the end all is discovered, and the two lovers know they must die. For the last time, they see each other in Annabella's chamber, listening to the noise of the feast below which shall serve for their funeral feast. Giovanni, who has made his resolve like a madman, sees Annabella richly dressed, dazzling. He regards her in silence, and remembers the past. He weeps and says:

"These are the funeral tears, Shed on your grave; these furrow'd-up my cheeks When first I lov'd and knew not how to woo.... Give me your hand: how sweetly life doth run In these well-colour'd veins! How constantly These palms do promise health!... Kiss me again, forgive me.... Farewell."[467]

He then stabs her, enters the banqueting room, with her heart upon his dagger:

"Soranzo see this heart, which was thy wife's. Thus I exchange it royally for thine."[468]

He kills him, and casting himself on the swords of banditti, dies. It would seem that tragedy could go no further.

But it did go further; for if these are melodramas, they are sincere, composed, not like those of to-day, by Grub Street writers for peaceful citizens, but by impassioned men, experienced in tragical arts, for a violent, over-fed, melancholy race. From Shakespeare to Milton, Swift, Hogarth, no race has been more glutted with coarse expressions and horrors, and its poets supply them plentifully; Ford less so than Webster; the latter a sombre man, whose thoughts seem incessantly to be haunting tombs and charnel-houses. "Places in court," he says, "are but like beds in the hospital, where this man's head lies at that man's foot, and so lower and lower."[469] Such are his images. No one has equalled Webster in creating desperate characters, utter wretches, bitter misanthropes,[470] in blackening and blaspheming human life, above all, in depicting the shameless depravity and refined ferocity of Italian manners.[471] The Duchess of Malfi has secretly married her steward Antonio, and her brother learns that she has children; almost mad[472] with rage and wounded pride, he remains silent, waiting until he knows the name of the father; then he arrives all of a sudden, means to kill her, but so that she shall taste the lees of death. She must suffer much, but above all, she must not die too quickly! She must suffer in mind; these griefs are worse than the body's. He sends assassins to kill Antonio, and meanwhile comes to her in the dark, with affectionate words; he pretends to be reconciled, and suddenly shows her waxen figures, covered with wounds, whom she takes for her slaughtered husband and children. She staggers under the blow, and remains in gloom without crying out. Then she says:

"Good comfortable fellow, Persuade a wretch that's broke upon the wheel To have all his bones new set; entreat him live To be executed again. Who must despatch me?... Bosola. Come, be of comfort, I will save your life. Duchess. Indeed, I have not leisure to tend So small a business. B. Now, by my life, I pity you. D. Thou art a fool, then, To waste thy pity on a thing so wretched As cannot pity itself. I am full of daggers."[473]

Slow words, spoken in a whisper, as in a dream, or as if she were speaking of a third person. Her brother sends to her a company of madmen, who leap and howl and rave around her in mournful wise; a pitiful sight, calculated to unseat the reason; a kind of foretaste of hell. She says nothing, looking upon them; her heart is dead, her eyes fixed, with vacant stare:

"Cariola. What think you of, madam? Duchess. Of nothing: When I muse thus, I sleep. C. Like a madman, with your eyes open? D. Dost thou think we shall know one another In the other world? C. Yes, out of question. D. O that it were possible we might But hold some two days' conference with the dead! From them I should learn somewhat, I am sure, I never shall know here. I'll teach thee a miracle; I am not mad yet, to my cause of sorrow: The heaven o'er my head seems made of molten brass, The earth of flaming sulphur, yet I am not mad. I am acquainted with sad misery As the tann'd galley-slave is with his oar...."[474]

In this state, the limbs, like those of one who has been newly executed, still quiver, but the sensibility is worn out; the miserable body only stirs mechanically; it has suffered too much. At last the gravedigger comes with executioners, a coffin, and they sing before her a funeral dirge:

"Duchess. Farewell, Cariola... I pray thee, look thou giv'st my little boy Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl Say her prayers ere she sleep.—Now, what you please: What death? Bosola. Strangling; here are your executioners. D. I forgive them: The apoplexy, catarrh, or cough o' the lungs Would do as much as they do.... My body Bestow upon my women, will you?... Go, tell my brothers, when I am laid out, They then may feed in quiet."[475]

After the mistress the maid; the latter cries and struggles:

"Cariola. I will not die; I must not; I am contracted To a young gentleman. 1st Executioner. Here's your wedding-ring. C. If you kill me now, I am damn'd. I have not been at confession This two years. B. When?[476] C. I am quick with child."[477]

They strangle her also, and the two children of the duchess. Antonio is assassinated; the cardinal and his mistress, the duke and his confidant, are poisoned or butchered; and the solemn words of the dying, in the midst of this butchery, utter, as from funereal trumpets, a general curse upon existence:

"We are only like dead walls or vaulted graves, That, ruin'd yield no echo. Fare you well.... O this gloomy world! In what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness, Doth womanish and fearful mankind live!"[478] "In all our quest of greatness, Like wanton boys, whose pastime is their care, We follow after bubbles blown in the air. Pleasure of life, what is't? only the good hours Of an ague; merely a preparative to rest, To endure vexation.... Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust, Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust."[479]

You will find nothing sadder or greater from the Edda to Lord Byron.

We can well imagine what powerful characters are necessary to sustain these terrible dramas. All these personages are ready for extreme acts; their resolves break forth like blows of a sword; we follow, meet at every change of scene their glowing eyes, wan lips, the starting of their muscles, the tension of their whole frame. Their powerful will contracts their violent hands, and their accumulated passion breaks out in thunderbolts, which tear and ravage all around them, and in their own hearts. We know them, the heroes of this tragic population, Iago, Richard III, Lady Macbeth, Othello, Coriolanus, Hotspur, full of genius, courage, desire, generally mad or criminal, always self-driven to the tomb. There are as many around Shakespeare as in his own works. Let me exhibit one character more, written by the same dramatist, Webster. No one, except Shakespeare, has seen further into the depths of diabolical and unchained nature. The "White Devil" is the name which he gives to his heroine. His Vittoria Corombona receives as her lover the Duke of Brachiano, and at the first interview dreams of the issue:

"To pass away the time, I'll tell your grace A dream I had last night."

It is certainly well related, and still better chosen, of deep meaning and very clear import. Her brother Flaminio says, aside:

"Excellent devil! she hath taught him in a dream To make away his duchess and her husband."[480]

So, her husband, Camillo, is strangled, the Duchess poisoned, and Vittoria, accused of the two crimes, is brought before the tribunal. Step by step, like a soldier brought to bay with his back against a wall, she defends herself, refuting and defying advocates and judges, incapable of blenching or quailing, clear in mind, ready in word, amid insults and proofs, even menaced with death on the scaffold. The advocate begins to speak in Latin.

"Vittoria. Pray my lord, let him speak his usual tongue; I'll make no answer else. Francisco de Medicis. Why, you understand Latin. V. I do, sir; but amongst this auditory Which come to hear my cause, the half or more May be ignorant in't."

She wants a duel, bare-breasted, in open day, and challenges the advocate:

"I am at the mark, sir: I'll give aim to you, And tell you how near you shoot."

She mocks his legal phraseology, insults him, with biting irony:

"Surely, my lords, this lawyer here hath swallow'd Some pothecaries' bills, or proclamations; And now the hard and undigestible words Come up, like stones we use give hawks for physic: Why, this is Welsh to Latin."

Then, to the strongest adjuration of the judges:

"To the point, Find me but guilty, sever head from body, We'll part good friends; I scorn to hold my life At yours, or any man's entreaty, sir.... These are but feigned shadows of my evils: Terrify babes, my lord, with painted devils; I am past such needless palsy. For your names Of whore and murderess, they proceed from you, As if a man should spit against the wind; The filth returns in's face."[481]

Argument for argument: she has a parry for every blow: a parry and a thrust:

"But take you your course: it seems you have beggar'd me first, And now would fain undo me. I have houses. Jewels, and a poor remnant of crusadoes: Would those would make you charitable!"

Then, in a harsher voice:

"In faith, my lord, you might go pistol flies; The sport would be more noble."

They condemn her to be shut up in a house of convertites:

"V. A house of convertites! What's that? Monticelso. A house of penitent whores. V. Do the noblemen in Rome Erect it for their wives, that I am sent To lodge there?"[482]

The sarcasm comes home like a sword-thrust; then another behind it; then cries and curses. She will not bend, she will not weep. She goes off erect, bitter and more haughty than ever:

"I will not weep; No, I do scorn to call up one poor tear To fawn on your injustice: bear me hence Unto this house of what's your mitigating title? Mont. Of convertites. V. It shall not be a house of convertites; My mind shall make it honester to me Than the Pope's palace, and more peaceable Than thy soul, though thou art a cardinal."[483]

Against her furious lover, who accuses her of unfaithfulness, she is as strong as against her judges; she copes with him, casts in his teeth the death of his duchess, forces him to beg pardon, to marry her; she will play the comedy to the end, at the pistol's mouth, with the shamelessness and courage of a courtesan and an empress;[484] snared at last, she will be just as brave and more insulting when the dagger's point threatens her:

"Yes, I shall welcome death As princes do some great ambassadors; I'll meet thy weapon half way.... 'Twas a manly blow; The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant; And then thou wilt be famous."[485]

When a woman unsexes herself, her actions transcend man's, and there is nothing which she will not suffer or dare.

SECTION VII.—Female Characters

Opposed to this band of tragic characters, with their distorted features, brazen fronts, combative attitudes, is a troop of sweet and timid figures, pre-eminently tender-hearted, the most graceful and loveworthy whom it has been given to man to depict. In Shakespeare you will meet them in Miranda, Juliet, Desdemona, Virgilia, Ophelia, Cordelia, Imogen; but they abound also in the others; and it is a characteristic of the race to have furnished them, as it is of the drama to have represented them. By a singular coincidence, the women are more of women, the men more of men, here than elsewhere. The two natures go each to its extreme: in the one to boldness, the spirit of enterprise and resistance, the warlike, imperious, and unpolished character; in the other to sweetness, devotion, patience, inextinguishable affection[486]—a thing unknown in distant lands, in France especially so: a woman in England gives herself without drawing back, and places her glory and duty in obedience, forgiveness, adoration, wishing and professing only to be melted and absorbed daily deeper and deeper in him whom she has freely and forever chosen.[487] It is this, an old German instinct, which these great painters of instinct diffuse here, one and all: Penthea, Dorothea, in Ford and Greene; Isabella and the Duchess of Malfi, in Webster; Bianca, Ordella, Arethusa, Juliana, Euphrasia, Amoret, and others, in Beaumont and Fletcher: there are a score of them who, under the severest tests and the strongest temptations, display this wonderful power of self-abandonment and devotion.[488] The soul, in this race, is at once primitive and serious. Women keep their purity longer than elsewhere. They lose respect less quickly; weigh worth and characters less suddenly: they are less apt to think evil, and to take the measure of their husbands. To this day, a great lady, accustomed to company, blushes in the presence of an unknown man, and feels bashful like a little girl: the blue eyes are dropped, and a child-like shame flies to her rosy cheeks. Englishwomen have not the smartness, the boldness of ideas, the assurance of bearing, the precocity, which with the French make of a young girl, in six months, a woman of intrigue and the queen of a drawing-room.[489] Domestic life and obedience are more easy to them. More pliant and more sedentary, they are at the same time more concentrated and introspective, more disposed to follow the noble dream called duty, which is hardly generated in mankind but by silence of the senses. They are not tempted by the voluptuous sweetness which in southern countries is breathed out in the climate, in the sky, in the general spectacle of things; which dissolves every obstacle, which causes privation to be looked upon as a snare and virtue as a theory. They can rest content with dull sensations, dispense with excitement, endure weariness; and in this monotony of a regulated existence, fall back upon themselves, obey a pure idea, employ all the strength of their hearts in maintaining their moral dignity. Thus supported by innocence and conscience, they introduce into love a profound and upright sentiment, abjure coquetry, vanity, and flirtation: they do not lie nor simper. When they love, they are not tasting a forbidden fruit, but are binding themselves for their whole life. Thus understood, love becomes almost a holy thing; the spectator no longer wishes to be spiteful or to jest; women do not think of their own happiness, but of that of the loved ones; they aim not at pleasure, but at devotion. Euphrasia, relating her history to Philaster, says:

"My father oft would speak Your worth and virtue; and, as I did grow More and more apprehensive, I did thirst To see the man so prais'd; but yet all this Was but a maiden longing, to be lost As soon as found; till sitting in my window, Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a god, I thought (but it was you), enter our gates. My blood flew out, and back again as fast, As I had puff'd it forth and suck'd it in Like breath: Then was I call'd away in haste To entertain you. Never was a man, Heav'd from a sheep-cote to a sceptre, rais'd So high in thoughts as I: You left a kiss Upon these lips then, which I mean to keep From you forever. I did hear you talk, Far above singing! After you were gone, I grew acquainted with my heart, and search'd What stirr'd it so: Alas! I found it love; Yet far from lust; for could I but have liv'd In presence of you, I had had my end."[490]

She had disguised herself as a page,[491] followed him, was his servant; what greater happiness for a woman than to serve on her knees the man she loves? She let him scold her, threaten her with death, wound her.

"Blest be that hand! It meant me well. Again, for pity's sake!"[492]

Do what he will, nothing but words of tenderness and adoration can proceed from this heart, these wan lips. Moreover, she takes upon herself a crime of which he is accused, contradicts him when he asserts his guilt, is ready to die in his place. Still more, she is of use to him with the Princess Arethusa, whom he loves; she justifies her rival, brings about their marriage, and asks no other thanks but that she may serve them both. And strange to say, the princess is not jealous.

"Euphrasia. Never, Sir, will I Marry; it is a thing within my vow: But if I may have leave to serve the princess, To see the virtues of her lord and her, I shall have hope to live. Arethusa.... Come, live with me; Live free as I do. She that loves my lord, Curst be the wife that hates her!"[493]

What notion of love have they in this country? Whence happens it that all selfishness, all vanity, all rancor, every little feeling, either personal or base, flees at its approach? How comes it that the soul is given up wholly, without hesitation, without reserve, and only dreams thenceforth of prostrating and annihilating itself, as in the presence of a god? Biancha, thinking Cesario ruined, offers herself to him as his wife; and learning that he is not so, gives him up straightway, without a murmur:

"Biancha. So dearly I respected both your fame And quality, that I would first have perish'd In my sick thoughts, than e'er have given consent To have undone your fortunes, by inviting A marriage with so mean a one as I am: I should have died sure, and no creature known The sickness that had kill'd me... Now since I know There is no difference 'twixt your birth and mine, Not much 'twixt our estates (if any be, The advantage is on my side) I come willingly To tender you the first-fruits of my heart, And am content t' accept you for my husband. Now when you are at the lowest.... Cesario. Why, Biancha, Report has cozen'd thee; I am not fallen From my expected honors or possessions, Tho' from the hope of birth-right. B. Are you not? Then I am lost again! I have a suit too; You'll grant it, if you be a good man.... Pray do not talk of aught what I have said t'ye.... ... Pity me; But never love me more!... I'll pray for you, That you may have a virtuous wife, a fair one; And when I'm dead... C. Fy, fy! B. Think on me sometimes, With mercy for this trespass! C. Let us kiss At parting, as at coming! B. This I have As a free dower to a virgin's grave, All goodness dwell with you!"[494]

Isabella, Brachiano's duchess, is defrayed, insulted by her faithless husband; to shield him from the vengeance of her family, she takes upon herself the blame of the rupture, purposely plays the shrew, and leaving him at peace with his courtesan, dies embracing his picture. Arethusa allows herself to be wounded by Philaster, stays the people who would hold back the murderer's arm, declares that he has done nothing, that it is not he, prays for him, loves him in spite of all, even to the end, as though all his acts were sacred, as if he had power of life and death over her. Ordella devotes herself, that the king, her husband, may have children;[495] she offers herself for a sacrifice, simply, without grand words, with her whole heart:

"Ordella. Let it be what it may then, what it dare, I have a mind will hazard it. Thierry. But, hark you; What may that woman merit, makes this blessing? O. Only her duty, sir. T. 'Tis terrible! O. 'Tis so much the more noble. T. 'Tis full of fearful shadows! O. So is sleep, sir, Or anything that's merely ours, and mortal; We were begotten gods else: but those fears, Feeling but once the fires of noble thoughts, Fly, like the shapes of clouds we form, to nothing. T. Suppose it death! O. I do. T. And endless parting With all we can call ours, with all our sweetness, With youth, strength, pleasure, people, time, nay reason! For in the silent grave, no conversation, No joyful tread of friends, no voice of lovers, No careful father's counsel, nothing's heard, Nor nothing is, but all oblivion, Dust and endless darkness: and dare you, woman, Desire this place? O. 'Tis of all sleeps the sweetest: Children begin it to us, strong men seek it, And kings from height of all their painted glories Fall, like spent exhalations, to this centre.... T. Then you can suffer? O. As willingly as say it. T. Martell, a wonder! Here is a woman that dares die.—Yet, tell me, Are you a wife? O. I am, sir. T. And have children?— She sighs and weeps! O. Oh, none, sir. T. Dare you venture For a poor barren praise you ne'er shall hear, To part with these sweet hopes? O. With all but Heaven."[496]

Is not this prodigious? Can you understand how one human being can thus be separated from herself, forget and lose herself in another? They do so lose themselves, as in an abyss. When they love in vain and without hope, neither reason nor life resist; they languish, grow mad, die like Ophelia. Aspasia, forlorn,

"Walks discontented, with her watry eyes Bent on the earth. The unfrequented woods Are her delight; and when she sees a bank Stuck full of flowers, she with a sigh will tell Her servants what a pretty place it were To bury lovers in; and make her maids Pluck 'em, and strew her over like a corse. She carries with her an infectious grief, That strikes all her beholders; she will sing The mournful'st things that ever ear hath heard, And sigh and sing again; and when the rest Of our young ladies, in their wanton blood, Tell mirthful tales in course, that fill the room With laughter, she will with so sad a look Bring forth a story of the silent death Of some forsaken virgin, which her grief Will put in such a phrase, that, ere she end, She'll send them weeping one by one away."[497]

Like a spectre about a tomb, she wanders forever about the remains of her destroyed love, languishes, grows pale, swoons, ends by causing herself to be killed. Sadder still are those who, from duty or submission, allow themselves to be married while their heart belongs to another. They are not resigned, do not recover, like Pauline in "Polyeucte." They are crushed to death. Penthea, in Ford's "Broken Heart," is as upright, but not so strong, as Pauline; she is the English wife, not the Roman, stoical and calm.[498] She despairs sweetly, silently, and pines to death. In her innermost heart she holds herself married to him to whom she has pledged her soul: it is the marriage of the heart which in her eyes is alone genuine; the other is only disguised adultery. In marrying Bassanes she has sinned against Orgilus; moral infidelity is worse than legal infidelity, and thenceforth she is fallen in her own eyes. She says to her brother:

"Pray, kill me.... Kill me, pray; nay, will ye Ithocles. How does thy lord esteem thee? P. Such an one As only you have made me; a faith-breaker, A spotted whore; forgive me, I am one— In act, not in desires, the gods must witness.... For she's that wife to Orgilus, and lives In known adultery with Bassanes, Is, at the best, a whore. Wilt kill me now?... The handmaid to the wages Of country toil, drinks the untroubled streams With leaping kids, and with the bleating lambs, And so allays her thirst secure; whiles I Quench my hot sighs with fleetings of my tears."[499]

With tragic greatness, from the height of her incurable grief, she throws her gaze on life:

"My glass of life, sweet princess, hath few minutes Remaining to run down; the sands are spent; For by an inward messenger I feel The summons of departure short and certain.... Glories Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams, And shadows soon decaying; on the stage Of my mortality, my youth hath acted Some scenes of vanity, drawn out at length By varied pleasures, sweeten'd in the mixture, But tragical in issue... That remedy Must be a winding-sheet, a fold of lead, And some untrod-on corner in the earth."[500]

There is no revolt, no bitterness; she affectionately assists her brother who has caused her unhappiness; she tries to enable him to win the woman he loves; feminine kindness and sweetness overflow in her in the depths of her despair. Love here is not despotic, passionate, as in southern climes. It is only deep and sad; the source of life is dried up, that is all; she lives no longer, because she cannot; all go by degrees—health, reason, soul; in the end she becomes mad, and behold her dishevelled, with wide staring eyes, with words that can hardly find utterance. For ten days she has not slept, and will not eat any more; and the same fatal thought continually afflicts her heart, amidst vague dreams of maternal tenderness and happiness brought to nought, which come and go in her mind like phantoms:

"Sure, if we were all sirens, we would sing pitifully, And 'twere a comely music, when in parts One sung another's knell; the turtle sighs When he hath lost his mate; and yet some say He must be dead first: 'tis a fine deceit To pass away in a dream! indeed, I've slept With mine eyes open, a great while. No falsehood Equals a broken faith; there's not a hair Sticks on my head, but, like a leaden plummet, It sinks me to the grave: I must creep thither; The journey is not long.... Since I was first a wife, I might have been Mother to many pretty prattling babes; They would have smiled when I smiled; and, for certain, I should have cried when they cried:—truly, brother, My father would have pick'd me out a husband, And then my little ones had been no bastards; But 'tis too late for me to marry now, I'm past child-bearing; Tis not my fault.... Spare your hand; Believe me, I'll not hurt it.... Complain not though I wring it hard: I'll kiss it, Oh, 'tis a fine soft palm!—hark, in thine ear; Like whom do I look, prithee?—nay, no whispering, Goodness! we had been happy; too much happiness Will make folk proud, they say.... There is no peace left for a ravish'd wife, Widow'd by lawless marriage; to all memory Penthea's, poor Penthea's name is strumpeted.... Forgive me; Oh! I faint."[501]

She dies, imploring that some gentle voice may sing her a plaintive air, a farewell ditty, a sweet funeral song. I know nothing in the drama more pure and touching.

When we find a constitution of soul so new, and capable of such great effects, it behooves us to look at the bodies. Man's extreme actions come not from his will, but his nature.[502] In order to understand the great tensions of the whole machine, we must look upon the whole—I mean man's temperament, the manner in which his blood flows, his nerves quiver, his muscles act, the moral interprets the physical, and human qualities have their root in the animal species. Consider then the species in this case—namely, the race; for the sisters of Shakespeare's Ophelia and Virgilia, Goethe's Clara and Margaret, Otway's Belvidera, Richardson's Pamela, constitute a race by themselves, soft and fair, with blue eyes, lily whiteness, blushing, of timid delicacy, serious sweetness, framed to yield, bend, cling. Their poets feel it clearly when they bring them on the stage; they surround them with the poetry which becomes them, the murmur of streams, the pendant willow-tresses, the frail and humid flowers of the country, so like themselves:

"The flower, that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor The azure harebell, like thy veins; no, nor The leaf of eglantine, whom not to slander, Out-sweeten'd not thy breath."[503]

They make them sweet, like the south wind, which with its gentle breath causes the violets to bend their heads, abashed at the slightest reproach, already half bowed down by a tender and dreamy melancholy.[504] Philaster, speaking of Euphrasia, whom he takes to be a page, and who has disguised herself in order to be near him, says:

"Hunting the buck, I found him sitting by a fountain-side, Of which he borrow'd some to quench his thirst, And paid the nymph again as much in tears. A garland lay him by, made by himself, Of many several flowers, bred in the bay, Stuck in that mystic order, that the rareness Delighted me: But ever when he turn'd His tender eyes upon 'em, he would weep, As if he meant to make 'em grow again. Seeing such pretty helpless innocence Dwell in his face, I asked him all his story. He told me, that his parents gentle dy'd, Leaving him to the mercy of the fields, Which gave him roots; and of the crystal springs, Which did not stop their courses; and the sun, Which still, he thank'd him, yielded him his light. Then he took up his garland, and did shew What every flower, as country people hold, Did signify; and how all, order'd thus, Express'd his grief: And, to my thoughts, did read The prettiest lecture of his country art That could be wish'd.... I gladly entertain'd him, Who was as glad to follow; and have got The trustiest, loving'st, and the gentlest boy That ever master kept."[505]

The idyl is self-produced among these human flowers: the dramatic action is stopped before the angelic sweetness of their tenderness and modesty. Sometimes even the idyl is born complete and pure, and the whole theatre is occupied by a sentimental and poetical kind of opera. There are two or three such plays in Shakespeare; in rude Jonson, "The Sad Shepherd"; in Fletcher, "The Faithful Shepherdess." Ridiculous titles nowadays, for they remind us of the interminable platitudes of d'Urfé, or the affected conceits of Florian; charming titles, if we note the sincere and overflowing poetry which they contain. Amoret, the faithful shepherdess, lives in an imaginary country, full of old gods, yet English, like the dewy verdant landscapes in which Rubens sets his nymphs dancing:

"Thro' yon same bending plain That flings his arms down to the main, And thro' these thick woods, have I run, Whose bottom never kiss'd the sun Since the lusty spring began."... "For to that holy wood is consecrate A virtuous well, about whose flow'ry banks The nimble-footed fairies dance their rounds, By the pale moon-shine, dipping oftentimes Their stolen children, so to make them free From dying flesh, and dull mortality...[506] "See the dew-drops, how they kiss Ev'ry little flower that is; Hanging on their velvet heads, Like a rope of christal beads. See the heavy clouds low falling, And bright Hesperus down calling The dead Night from underground."[507]

These are the plants and the aspects of the ever fresh English country, now enveloped in a pale diaphanous mist, now glistening under the absorbing sun, teeming with grasses so full of sap, so delicate, that in the midst of their most brilliant splendor and their most luxuriant life, we feel that to-morrow will wither them. There, on a summer night, the young men and girls, after their custom,[508] go to gather flowers and plight their troth. Amoret and Perigot are together; Amoret,

"Fairer far Than the chaste blushing morn, or that fair star That guides the wand'ring seaman thro' the deep,"

modest like a virgin, and tender as a wife, says to Perigot:

"I do believe thee: 'Tis as hard for me To think thee false, and harder, than for thee To hold me foul."[509]

Strongly as she is tried, her heart, once given, never draws back. Perigot, deceived, driven to despair, persuaded that she is unchaste, strikes her with his sword, and casts her bleeding to the ground. The "sullen shepherd" throws her into a well; but the god lets fall "a drop from his watery locks" into the wound; the chaste flesh closes at the touch of the divine water, and the maiden, recovering, goes once more in search of him she loves:

"Speak, if thou be here, My Perigot! Thy Amoret, thy dear, Calls on thy loved name.... 'Tis thy friend, Thy Amoret; come hither, to give end To these consumings. Look up, gentle boy, I have forgot those pains and dear annoy I suffer'd for thy sake, and am content To be thy love again. Why hast thou rent Those curled locks, where I have often hung Ribbons, and damask-roses, and have flung Waters distill'd to make thee fresh and gay, Sweeter than nosegays on a bridal day? Why dost thou cross thine arms, and hang thy face Down to thy bosom, letting fall apace, From those two little Heav'ns, upon the ground, Show'rs of more price, more orient, and more round, Than those that hang upon the moon's pale brow? Cease these complainings, shepherd! I am now The same I ever was, as kind and free, And can forgive before you ask of me: Indeed, I can and will."[510]

Who could resist her sweet and sad smile? Still deceived, Perigot wounds her again; she falls, but without anger.

"So this work hath end! Farewell, and live! be constant to thy friend That loves thee next."[511]

A nymph cures her, and at last Perigot, disabused, comes and throws himself on his knees before her. She stretches out her arms; in spite of all that he had done, she was not changed:

"I am thy love, Thy Amoret, for evermore thy love! Strike once more on my naked breast, I'll prove As constant still. Oh, could'st thou love me yet, How soon could I my former griefs forget!"[512]

Such are the touching and poetical figures which these poets introduce in their dramas, or in connection with their dramas, amidst murders, assassinations, the clash of swords, the howl of slaughter, striving against the raging men who adore or torment them, like them carried to excess, transported by their tenderness as the others by their violence; it is a complete exposition, as well as a perfect opposition of the feminine instinct ending in excessive self-abandonment, and of masculine harshness ending in murderous inflexibility. Thus built up and thus provided, the drama of the age was enabled to bring out the inner depths of man, and to set in motion the most powerful human emotions; to bring upon the stage Hamlet and Lear, Ophelia and Cordelia, the death of Desdemona and the butcheries of Macbeth.

CHAPTER THIRD

Ben Jonson

SECTION I.—The Man—His Life

When a new civilization brings a new art to light, there are about a dozen men of talent who partly express the general idea, surrounding one or two men of genius who express it thoroughly. Guillen de Castro, Perez de Montalvan, Tirzo de Molina, Ruiz de Alarcon, Agustin Moreto, surrounding Calderon and Lope de Vega; Crayer, Van Oost, Rombouts, Van Thulden, Vandyke, Honthorst, surrounding Rubens; Ford, Marlowe, Massinger, Webster, Beaumont, Fletcher, surrounding Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The first constitute the chorus, the others are the leading men. They sing the same piece together, and at times the chorist is equal to the solo artist; but only at times. Thus, in the dramas which I have just referred to, the poet occasionally reaches the summit of his art, hits upon a complete character, a burst of sublime passion; then he falls back, gropes amid qualified successes, rough sketches, feeble imitations, and at last takes refuge in the tricks of his trade. It is not in him, but in great men like Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, that we must look for the attainment of his idea and the fulness of his art. "Numerous were the wit-combats," says Fuller, "betwixt him (Shakespeare) and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master Jonson (like the former) was built far higher in learning; solid, but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk, but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his wit and invention."[513] Such was Ben Jonson physically and morally, and his portraits do but confirm this just and animated outline: a vigorous, heavy, and uncouth person; a broad and long face, early disfigured by scurvy, a square jaw, large cheeks; his animal organs as much developed as those of his intellect: the sour aspect of a man in a passion or on the verge of a passion; to which add the body of an athlete, about forty years of age, "mountain belly, ungracious gait." Such was the outside, and the inside is like it. He was a genuine Englishman, big and coarsely framed, energetic, combative, proud, often morose, and prone to strange splenetic imaginations. He told Drummond that for a whole night he imagined "that he saw the Carthaginians and Romans fighting on his great toe."[514] Not that he is melancholic by nature; on the contrary, he loves to escape from himself by free and noisy, unbridled merriment, by copious and varied converse, assisted by good Canary wine, which he imbibes, and which ends by becoming a necessity to him. These great phlegmatic butchers' frames require a generous liquor to give them a tone, and to supply the place of the sun which they lack. Expansive moreover, hospitable, even lavish, with a frank imprudent spirit,[515] making him forget himself wholly before Drummond, his Scotch host, an over-rigid and malicious pedant, who has marred his ideas and vilified his character.[516] What we know of his life is in harmony with his person; he suffered much, fought much, dared much. He was studying at Cambridge, when his stepfather, a bricklayer, recalled him, and taught him to use the trowel. He ran away, enlisted as a common soldier, and served in the English army, at that time engaged against the Spaniards in the Low Countries, killed and despoiled a man in single combat, "in the view of both armies." He was a man of bodily action, and he exercised his limbs in early life.[517] On his return to England, at the age of nineteen, he went on the stage for his livelihood, and occupied himself also in touching up dramas. Having been challenged, he fought a duel, was seriously wounded, but killed his adversary; for this he was cast into prison, and found himself "nigh the gallows." A Catholic priest visited and converted him; quitting his prison penniless, at twenty years of age, he married. At last, four years later, his first successful play was acted. Children came, he must earn bread for them; and he was not inclined to follow the beaten track to the end, being persuaded that a fine philosophy—a special nobleness and dignity—ought to be introduced into comedy—that it was necessary to follow the example of the ancients, to imitate their severity and their accuracy, to be above the theatrical racket and the common improbabilities in which the vulgar delighted. He openly proclaimed his intention in his prefaces, sharply railed at his rivals, proudly set forth on the stage[518] his doctrines, his morality, his character. He thus made bitter enemies, who defamed him outrageously and before their audiences, whom he exasperated by the violence of his satires, and against whom he struggled without intermission to the end. He did more, he constituted himself a judge of the public corruption, sharply attacked the reigning vices, "fearing no strumpet's drugs, nor ruffian's stab."[519] He treated his hearers like schoolboys, and spoke to them always like a censor and a master. If necessary, he ventured further. His companions, Marston and Chapman, had been committed to prison for some reflections on the Scotch in one of their pieces called "Eastward-Hoe"; and the report spreading that they were in danger of losing their noses and ears, Jonson, who had written part of the piece, voluntarily surrendered himself a prisoner, and obtained their pardon. On his return, amid the feasting and rejoicing, his mother showed him a violent poison which she intended to put into his drink, to save him from the execution of the sentence; and "to show that she was not a coward," adds Jonson, "she had resolved to drink first." We see that in vigorous actions he found examples in his own family. Toward the end of his life, money was scarce with him; he was liberal, improvident; his pockets always had holes in them, and his hand was always ready to give; though he had written a vast quantity, he was still obliged to write in order to live. Paralysis came on, his scurvy became worse, dropsy set in. He could not leave his room, nor walk without assistance. His last plays did not succeed. In the epilogue to the "New Inn" he says:

"If you expect more than you had to-night, The maker is sick and sad.... All that his faint and fait'ring tongue doth crave, Is, that you not impute it to his brain, That's yet unhurt, altho, set round with pain, It cannot long hold out."

His enemies brutally insulted him:

"Thy Pegasus... He had bequeathed his belly unto thee, To hold that little learning which is fled Into thy guts from out thy emptye head."

Inigo Jones, his colleague, deprived him of the patronage of the court. He was obliged to beg a supply of money from the Lord Treasurer, then from the Earl of Newcastle:

"Disease, the enemy, and his engineers, Want, with the rest of his concealed compeers, Have cast a trench about me, now five years.... The muse not peeps out, one of hundred days; But lies blocked up and straitened, narrowed in, Fixed to the bed and boards, unlike to win Health, or scarce breath, as she had never been."[520]

His wife and children were dead; he lived alone, forsaken, waited on by an old woman. Thus almost always sadly and miserably is dragged out and ends the last act of the human comedy. After so many years, after so many sustained efforts, amid so much glory and genius, we find a poor shattered body, drivelling and suffering, between a servant and a priest.

SECTION II.—His Freedom and Precision of Style

This is the life of a combatant, bravely endured, worthy of the seventeenth century by its crosses and its energy; courage and force abounded throughout. Few writers have labored more, and more conscientiously; his knowledge was vast, and in this age of eminent scholars he was one of the best classics of his time, as deep as he was accurate and thorough, having studied the most minute details and understood the true spirit of ancient life. It was not enough for him to have stored his mind from the best writers, to have their whole works continually in his mind, to scatter his pages whether he would or no, with recollections of them. He dug into the orators, critics, scholiasts, grammarians, and compilers of inferior rank; he picked up stray fragments; he took characters, jokes, refinements, from Athenæus, Libanius, Philostratus. He had so well entered into and digested the Greek and Latin ideas, that they were incorporated with his own. They enter into his speech without incongruity; they spring forth in him as vigorous as at their first birth; he originates even when he remembers. On every subject he had this thirst for knowledge, and this gift of mastering knowledge. He knew alchemy when he wrote the "Alchemist." He is familiar with alembics, retorts, receivers, as if he had passed his life seeking after the philosopher's stone. He explains incineration, calcination, imbibition, rectification, reverberation, as well as Agrippa and Paracelsus. If he speaks of cosmetics,[521] he brings out a shopful of them; we might make out of his plays a dictionary of the oaths and costumes of courtiers; he seems to have a specialty in all branches. A still greater proof of his force is, that his learning in no wise mars his vigor; heavy as is the mass with which he loads himself, he carries it without stooping. This wonderful mass of reading and observation suddenly begins to move, and falls like a mountain on the overwhelmed reader. We must hear Sir Epicure Mammon unfold the vision of splendors and debauchery, in which he means to plunge, when he has learned to make gold. The refined and unchecked impurities of the Roman decadence, the splendid obscenities of Heliogabalus, the gigantic fancies of luxury and lewdness, tables of gold spread with foreign dainties, draughts of dissolved pearls, nature devastated to provide a single dish, the many crimes committed by sensuality against nature, reason, and justice, the delight in defying and outraging law—all these images pass before the eyes with the dash of a torrent and the force of a great river. Phrase follows phrase without intermission, ideas and facts crowd into the dialogue to paint a situation, to give clearness to a character, produced from this deep memory, directed by this solid logic, launched by this powerful reflection. It is a pleasure to see him advance weighted with so many observations and recollections, loaded with technical details and learned reminiscences, without deviation or pause, a genuine literary Leviathan, like the war elephants which used to bear towers, men, weapons, machines, on their backs, and ran as swiftly with their freight as a nimble steed.

In the great dash of this heavy attempt, he finds a path which suits him. He has his style. Classical erudition and education made him a classic, and he writes like his Greek models and his Roman masters. The more we study the Latin races and literatures in contrast with the Teutonic, the more fully we become convinced that the proper and distinctive gift of the first is the art of development; that is, of drawing up ideas in continuous rows, according to the rules of rhetoric and eloquence, by studied transitions, with regular progress, without shock or bounds. Jonson received from his acquaintance with the ancients the habit of decomposing ideas, unfolding them bit by bit in natural order, making himself understood and believed. From the first thought to the final conclusion, he conducts the reader by a continuous and uniform ascent. The track never fails with him as with Shakespeare. He does not advance like the rest by abrupt intuitions, but by consecutive deductions; we can walk with him without need of bounding, and we are continually kept upon the straight path: antithesis of words unfolds antithesis of thoughts; symmetrical phrases guide the mind through difficult ideas; they are like barriers set on either side of the road to prevent our falling into the ditch. We do not meet on our way extraordinary, sudden, gorgeous images, which might dazzle or delay us; we travel on, enlightened by moderate and sustained metaphors. Jonson has all the methods of Latin art; even, when he wishes it, especially on Latin subjects, he has the last and most erudite, the brilliant conciseness of Seneca and Lucan, the squared, equipoised, filed-off antithesis, the most happy and studied artifices of oratorical architecture.[522] Other poets are nearly visionaries; Jonson is almost a logician.

Hence his talent, his successes, and his faults: if he has a better style and better plots than the others, he is not, like them, a creator of souls. He is too much of a theorist, too preoccupied by rules. His argumentative habits spoil him when he seeks to shape and motion complete and living men. No one is capable of fashioning these unless he possesses, like Shakespeare, the imagination of a seer. The human being is so complex that the logician who perceives his different elements in succession can hardly study them all, much less gather them all in one flash, so as to produce the dramatic response or action in which they are concentrated and which should manifest them. To discover such actions and responses, we need a kind of inspiration and fever. Then the mind works as in a dream. The characters move within the poet, almost involuntarily: he waits for them to speak, he remains motionless, hearing their voices, wholly wrapt in contemplation, in order that he may not disturb the inner drama which they are about to act in his soul. That is his artifice: to let them alone. He is quite astonished at their discourse; as he observes them he forgets that it is he who invents them. Their mood, character, education, disposition of mind, situation, attitude, and actions, form within him so well-connected a whole, and so readily unite into palpable and solid beings, that he dares not attribute to his reflection or reasoning a creation so vast and speedy. Beings are organized in him as in nature; that is, of themselves, and by a force which the combinations of his art could not replace.[523] Jonson has nothing wherewith to replace it but these combinations of art. He chooses a general idea—cunning, folly, severity—and makes a person out of it. This person is called Crites, Asper, Sordido, Deliro, Pecunia, Subtil, and the transparent name indicates the logical process which produced it. The poet took an abstract quality, and putting together all the actions to which it may give rise, trots it out on the stage in a man's dress. His characters, like those of La Bruyère and Theophrastus, were hammered out of solid deductions. Now it is a vice selected from the catalogue of moral philosophy, sensuality thirsting for gold: this perverse double inclination becomes a personage, Sir Epicure Mammon; before the alchemist, before the famulus, before his friend, before his mistress, in public or alone, all his words denote a greed of pleasure and of gold, and they express nothing more.[524] Now it is a mania gathered from the old sophists, a babbling with horror of noise; this form of mental pathology becomes a personage, Morose; the poet has the air of a doctor who has undertaken to record exactly all the desires of speech, all the necessities of silence, and to record nothing else. Now he picks out a ridicule, an affectation, a species of folly, from the manners of the dandies and the courtiers; a mode of swearing, an extravagant style, a habit of gesticulating, or any other oddity contracted by vanity or fashion. The hero whom he covers with these eccentricities is overloaded by them. He disappears beneath his enormous trappings; he drags them about with him everywhere; he cannot get rid of them for an instant. We no longer see the man under the dress; he is like a manikin, oppressed under a cloak, too heavy for him. Sometimes, doubtless, his habits of geometrical construction produce personages almost life-like. Bobadil, the grave boaster; Captain Tucca, the begging bully, inventive buffoon, ridiculous talker; Amorphus the traveller, a pedantic doctor of good manners, laden with eccentric phrases, create as much illusion as we can wish; but it is because they are flitting comicalities and low characters. It is not necessary for a poet to study such creatures; it is enough that he discovers in them three or four leading features; it is of little consequence if they always present themselves with the same attitudes; they produce laughter, like the Countess d'Escarbagans or any of the Fâcheux in Molière; we want nothing else of them. On the contrary, the others weary and repel us. They are stage-masks, not living figures. Having acquired a fixed expression, they persist to the end of the piece in their unvarying grimace or their eternal frown. A man is not an abstract passion. He stamps the vices and virtues which he possesses with his individual mark. These vices and virtues receive, on entering into him, a bent and form which they have not in others. No one is unmixed sensuality. Take a thousand sensualists, and you will find a thousand different modes of sensuality; for there are a thousand paths, a thousand circumstances and degrees, in sensuality. If Jonson wanted to make Sir Epicure Mammon a real being, he should have given him the kind of disposition, the species of education, the manner of imagination, which produce sensuality. When we wish to construct a man, we must dig down to the foundations of mankind; that is, we must define to ourselves the structure of his bodily machine, and the primitive gait of his mind. Jonson has not dug sufficiently deep, and his constructions are incomplete; he has built on the surface, and he has built but a single story. He was not acquainted with the whole man and he ignored man's basis; he put on the stage and gave a representation of moral treatises, fragments of history, scraps of satire; he did not stamp new beings on the imagination of mankind.