for fusing into a single phrase, two or more diverse impressions .
. . . in her strong toil of grace
of Shakespeare is such a fusion ; the metaphor identified itself
with what suggests it; the resultant is one and is unique :
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Does the silk worm expend her yellow labours ? . . .
Why does yon fellow falsify highways
And lays his life between the judge's lips
To refine such a one ? keeps horse and mm
To beat their valours for her ?
Let the common sewer take it from distinction . . . .
Lust and forgetfulness have been amongst us . . . .
These lines of Tourneur and of Middleton exhibit that perpetual
slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new
and sudden combinations, meanings perpetually eingeschachtelt
into meanings, which evidences a very high development of the
senses, a development of the English language which we have
perhaps never equalled. And, indeed, with the end of Chapman,
Middleton, Webster, Tourneur, Donne we end a period when the
intellect was immediately at the tips of the senses. Sensation became word and word was sensation. The next period is the period of Milton (though still with a Marvell in it) ; and this period is
initiated by Massinger.
It is not that the word becomes less exact. Massinger is, in a
wholly eulogistic sense, choice and correct. And the decay of the
senses is not inconsistent with a greater sophistication of language. But every vital development in language is a development of feeling as well. The verse of Shakespeare and the major Shakespearian dramatists is an innovation of this kind, a true mutation of species. The verse practised by Massinger is a different verse
from that of his predecessors ; but it is not a development based
on, or resulting from, a new way of feeling. On the contrary, it
seems to lead us away from feeling altogether.
We mean that Massinger must be placed as much at the beginning of one period as at the end of another. A certain Boyle, quoted by Mr. Cruickshank, says that Milton's blank verse owes
much to the study of Massinger's.
In the indefinable touches which make up the music of a verse [says
Boyle], in the artistic distribution of pauses, and in the unerring choice
and grouping of just those words which strike the ear as the perfection
of harmony, there are, if we leave Cyril Tourneur's Atheist's Tragedy
out of the question, only two masters in the drama, Shakespeare in his
latest period and Massinger.
This Boyle must have had a singular ear to have preferred
Tourneur's secondary work to his Revenger's Tragedy, and one
must think that he had never glanced at Ford. But though the
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appraisal be ludicrous, the praise is not undeserved. Mr. Cruickshank has given us an excellent example of Massinger's syntax : What though my father
Writ man before he was so, and confirm'd it,
By numbering that day no part of his life
In which he did not service to his country;
Was he to be free therefore from the laws
And ceremonious form in your decrees ?
Or else because he did as much as man
In those three memorable overthrows,
At Gramon, Morat, Na11cy, where his master,
The warlike Charalois, with whose misfortunes
I bear his name, lost treasure, men, and life,
To be excused from payment of those sums
Which (his own patrimony spent) his zeal
To serve his country forced him to take up ?
It is impossible to deny the masterly construction of this passage ;
perhaps there is not one living poet who could do the like. I t is
impossible to deny the originality. The language is pure and
correct, free from muddiness or turbidity. Massinger does not
confuse metaphors, or heap them one upon another. He is lucid,
though not easy. But if Massinger's age, 'without being exactly
corrupt, lacks moral fibre', Massinger's verse, without being
exactly corrupt, suffers from cerebral anaemia. To say that an
involved style is necessarily a bad style would be preposterous.
But such a style should follow the involutions of a mode of perceiving, registering, and digesting impressions which is also involved. It is to be feared that the feeling of Massinger is simple
and overlaid with received ideas. Had Massinger had a nervous
system as refined as that of Middleton, Tourneur, Webster, or
Ford, his style would be a triumph. But such a nature was not at
hand, and Massinger precedes, not another Shakespeare, but
Milton.
Massinger is, in fact, at a further remove from Shakespeare
than that other precursor of Milton - John Fletcher. Fletcher was
above all an opportunist, in his verse, in his momentary effects,
never quite a pastiche ; in his structure ready to sacrifice everything to the single scene. To Fletcher, because he was more intelligent, less will be forgiven. Fletcher had a cunning guess at
feelings, and betrayed them ; Massinger was unconscious and
innocent. As an artisan of the theatre he is not inferior to Fletcher,
and his best tragedies have an honester unity than Bonduca. But
the unity is superficial. In the Roman Actor the development of
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parts is out of all proportion to the central theme ; in the Unnatural Combat, in spite of the de_ft handling of suspense and the quick shift from climax to a new suspense, the first part of the
play is the hatred of Malefort for his son and the second part is his
passion for his daughter. It is theatrical skill, not an artistic
conscience arranging emotions, that holds the two parts together.
In the Duke of Milan the appearance of Sforza at the Court of his
conqueror only delays the action, or rather breaks the emotional
rhythm. And we have named three of Massinger's best.
A dramatist who so skilfully welds together parts which have no
reason for being together, who fabricates plays so well knit and so
remote from unity, we should expect to exhibit the same synthetic
cunning in character. Mr. Cruickshank, Coleridge, and Leslie
Stephen are pretty well agreed that Massinger is no master of
characterization. You can, in fact, put together heterogeneous
parts to form a lively play ; but a character, to be living, must be
conceived from some emotional unity. A character is not to be
composed of scattered observations of human nature, but of parts
which are felt together. Hence it is that although Massinger's
failure to draw a moving character is no greater than his failure to
make a whole play, and probably springs from the same defective
sensitiveness, yet the failure in character is more conspicuous and
more disastrous. A 'living' character is not necessarily 'true to
life'. It is a person whom we can see and hear, whether he be true
or false to human nature as we know it. What the creator of
character needs is not so much knowledge of motives as keen
sensibility ; the dramatist need not understand people ; but he
must be exceptionally aware of them. This
awareness was not
given to Massinger. He inherits the traditions of conduct, female
chastity, hymeneal sanctity, the fashion of honour, without either
criticizing or informing them from his own experience. In the
earlier drama these conventions are merely a framework, or an
alloy necessary for working the metal ; the metal itself consisted of
unique emotions resulting inevitably from the circumstances,
resulting or inhering as inevitably as the properties of a chemical
compound. Middleton's heroine, for instance, in The Changeling,
exclaims in the well-known words :
Why, 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked,
To shelter such a cunning cruelty
To make his death the murderer of my honour!
The word 'honour' in such a situation is out of date, but the
emotion of Beatrice at that moment, given the conditions, is as
permanent and substantial as anything in human nature. The
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emotion of Othello in Act V. is the emotion of a man who discovers that the worst part of his own soul has been exploited by someone more clever than he ; it is this emotion carried by the
writer to a very high degree of intensity. Even in so late and so
decayed a drama as that of Ford, the framework of emotions and
morals of the time is only the vehicle for statements of feeling
which are unique and imperishable : Ford's and Ford's only.
What may be considered corrupt or decadent in the morals of
Massinger is not an alteration or diminution in morals ; it is
simply the disappearance of all the personal and real emotions
which this morality supported and into which it introduced a kind
of order. As soon as the emotions disappear the morality which
ordered it appears hideous. Puritanism itself became repulsive
only when it appeared as the survival of a restraint after the feelings which it restrained had gone. When Massinger's ladies resist temptation they do not appear to undergo any important emotion ;
they merely know what is expected of them ; they manifest themselves to us as lubricious prudes. Any age has its conventions ; and any age might appear absurd when its conventions get into the
hands of a man like Massinger - a man, we mean, of so exceptionally superior a literary talent as Massinger's, and so paltry an imagination. The Elizabethan morality was an important convention ; important because it was not consciously of one social class alone, because it provided a framework for emotions to
which all classes could respond, and it hindered no feeling. It was
not hypocritical, and it did not suppress ; its dark corners are
haunted by the ghost of Mary Fitton and perhaps greater. It is a
subject which has not been sufficiently investigated. Fletcher and
Massinger rendered it ridiculous ; not by not believing it, but
because they were men of great talents �·ho could not vivify it ;
because they could not fit into it passionate, complete human
characters.
The tragedy of Massinger is interesting chiefly according to the
definition given before ; the highest degree of verbal excellence
compatible with the most rudimentary development of the senses.
Massinger succeeds better in something which is not tragedy ; in
the romantic comedy. A VerJ' Woman deserves all the praise that
Swinburne, with his almost unerring gift of selection, has bestowed upon it. The probable collaboration of Fletcher had the happiest result ; for certainly that admirable comic personage, the
tipsy Borachia, is handled with more humour than we expect of
Massinger. It is a play which would be enjoyable on the stage.
The form, however, of romantic comedy is itself inferior and
decadent. There is an inflexibility about the poetic drama which
is by no means a matter of classical, or neoclassical, or pseudo-
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classical law. The poetic drama might develop forms highly
different from those of Greece or England, India or Japan. Conceded the utmost freedom, the romantic drama would yet remain inferior. The poetic drama must have an emotional unity, let the
emotion be whatever you like. It must have a dominant tone ; and
if this be strong enough, the most heterogeneous emotions may be
made to reinforce it. The romantic comedy is a skilful concoction
of inconsistent emotion, a revue of emotion. A Very Woman is
surpassingly well plotted. The debility of romantic drama does
not depend upon extravagant setting, or preposterous events, or
inconceivable coincidences : all these might be found in a serious
tragedy or comedy. I t consists in an internal incoherence of
feelings, a concatenation of emotions which signifies nothing.
From this type of play, so eloquent of emotional disorder, there
was no swing back of the pendulum. Changes never come by a
simple reinfusion into the form which the life has just left. The
romantic drama was not a new form. Massinger dealt not with
emotions so much as with the social abstractions of emotions,
more generalized and therefore more quickly and easily interchangeable within the confines of a single action. He was not guided by direct communications through the nerves. Romantic
drama tended, accordingly, toward what is sometimes called the
'typical', but which is not the truly typical ; for the 0'Pical figure
in a drama is always particularized - an individual. The tendency
of the romantic drama was towards a form which continued it in
removing its more conspicuous vices, was towards a more severe
external order. This form was the Heroic Drama. We look into
Dryden's 'Essay on Heroic Plays', and we find that 'love and
valour ought to be the subject of an heroic poem'. Massinger, in
his destruction of the old drama, had prepared the way for
Dryden. The intellect had perhaps exhausted the old conventions.
It was not able to supply the impoverishment of feeling . . . .
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ANDREW MARVELL
The tercentenary of the former member for Hull deserves not
only the celebration proposed by that favoured borough, but a
little serious reflection upon his writing. That is an act of piety,
which is very different from the resurrection of a deceased
reputation. Marvell has stood high for some years ; his best poems
are not very many, and not only must be well known, from the
Golden Treasury and the Oxford Book of English Verse, but must
also have been enjoyed by numerous readers. His grave needs
neither rose nor rue nor laurel ; there is no imaginary justice to be
done ; we may think about him, if there be need for thinking, for
our own benefit, not his. To bring the poet back to life - the great,
the perennial, task of criticism - is in this case to squeeze the drops
of the essence of two or three poems ; even confining ourselves to
these, we may find some precious liquor unknown to the present
age. Not to determine rank, but to isolate this quality, is the
critical labour. The fact that of all Marvell's verse, which is itself
not a great quantity, the really valuable part consists of a very
few poems indicates that the unknown quality of which we speak
is pr
obably a literary rather than a personal quality ; or, more
truly, that it is a quality of a civilization, of a traditional habit of
life. A poet like Donne, or like Baudelaire or Laforgue, may
almost be considered the inventor of an attitude, a system of
feeling or of morals. Donne is difficult to analyse : what appears at
one time a curious personal point of view may at another time
appear rather the precise concentration of a kind of feeling
diffused in the air about him. Donne and his shroud, the shroud
and his motive for wearing it, are inseparable, but they are not the
same thing. The seventeenth century sometimes seems for more
than a moment to gather up and to digest into its art all the experience of the human mind which (from the same point of view) the later centuries seem to have been partly engaged in repudiating. But Donne would have been an individual at any time and place ; Marvell's best verse is the product of European, that is to
say Latin, culture.
Out of that high style developed from Marlowe through Jonson
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(for Shakespeare does not lend himself to these genealogies) the
seventeenth century separated tw9 qualities : wit and magniloquence. Neither is as simple or as apprehensible as its name seems to imply, and the two are not in practice antithetical ; both are
conscious and cultivated, and the mind which cultivates one may
cultivate the other. The actual poetry, of Marvell, of Cowley, of
Milton, and of others, is a blend in varying proportions. And we
must be on guard not to employ the terms with too wide a comprehension ; for like the other fluid terms with which literary criticism deals, the meaning alters with the age, and for precision
we must rely to some degree upon the literacy and good taste of
the reader. The wit of the Caroline poets is not the wit of Shakespeare, and it is not the wit of Dryden, the great master of contempt, or of Pope, the great master of hatred, or of Swift, the
great master of disgust. What is meant is some quality which is
common to the songs in Comus and Cowley's Anacreontics and
Marvell's Horatian Ode. It is more than a technical accomplishment, or the vocabulary and syntax of an epoch ; it is, what we have designated tentatively as wit, a tough reasonableness beneath
the slight lyric grace. You cannot find it in Shelley or Keats or
Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot Page 23