which has not been sufficiently remarked ; it is the habituation of
Beatrice to her sin ; it becomes no longer merely sin but custom.
Such is the essence of the tragedy of Macbeth the habituation to
-
crime. And in the end Beatrice, having been so long the enforced
conspirator of De Flores, becomes (and this is permanently true
to human nature) more his partner, his mate, than the mate and
partner of the man for the love of whom she consented to the
190
THOMAS M I D DLETON
crime. Her lover disappears not only from the scene but from her
own imagination. When she says of De Flores,
A wondrous necessary man, my lord,
her praise is more than half sincere ; and at the end she belongs
far more to De Flores - towards whom, at the beginning, she felt
strong physical repulsion - than to her lover Alsemero. It is De
Flores, in the end, to whom she belongs as Francesca to Paolo :
Bmeath the stars, upon yon meteor
Ever hung my fate, 'mmzgst things corruptible;
I ne'er could pluck it from him; my loathing
Was prophet to the rest, but ne'er believed.
And De Flores's cry is perfectly sincere and in character :
I loved this woman in spite of her heart;
Her love I earned out ofPiracquo's murder . . .
Yes, and her honour's prize
Was my reward; I thank l�fe for nothing
But that pleasure ; it was so sweet to me,
That I have drunk up all, left none behind
For any man to pledge me.
The tragedy of Beatrice is not that she has lost Alsemero, for
whose possession she played ; it is that she has won De Flores.
Such tragedies are not limited to Elizabethan times : they happen
every day and perpetually. The greatest tragedies are occupied
with great and permanent moral conflicts : the great tragedies of
lEschylus, of Sophocles, of Corneille, of Racine, of Shakespeare
have the same burden. In poetry, in dramatic technique, Tire
Changeling is inferior to the best plays of Webster. But in the
moral essence of tragedy it is safe to say that in this play Middleton
is surpassed by one Elizabethan alone, and that is Shakespeare. In
some respects in which Elizabethan tragedy can be compared to
French or to Greek tragedy Tire Changeling stands above every
tragic play of its time, except those of Shakespeare.
The genius which blazed in The Changeling was fitful but not
accidental. The best tragedy after The Chaugeling is Women
Beware Women. The thesis of the play, as the title indicates, is
more arbitrary and less fundamental. The play itself, although less
disfigured by ribaldry or clowning, is more tedious. Middleton
sinks himself in conventional moralizing of the epoch ; so that, if
we are impatient, we decide that he gives merely a document of
191
A P P R E C I A T I ONS OF I N D I V I DUAL AUTHORS
1 9 1 8- 1 9 3 0
·
Elizabethan humbug - and th�n suddenly a personage will blaze
out in genuine fire of vituperation. The wickedness of the personages in Women Beware Women is conventional wickedness of the stage of the time ; yet slowly the exasperation of Bianca, the
wife who married beneath her, beneath the ambitions to which
she was entitled, emerges from the negative ; slowly the real
human passions emerge from the mesh of interest in which they
begin. And here again Middleton, in writing what appears on the
surface a conventional picture-palace Italian melodrama of the
time, has caught permanent human feelings. And in this play
Middleton shows his interest - more than any of his contemporaries - in innuendo and double meanings ; and makes use of that game of chess, which he was to use more openly and directly
for satire in that perfect piece of literary political art, A Game at
Chess. The irony could not be improved upon :
Did I not say my duke would fetch you o'er, Widow ?
I think you spoke in earnest when you said it, madam.
And my black king makes all the haste he can too.
Well, madam, we may meet with him in time yet.
I've given thee blind mate twice.
There is hardly anything truer in Elizabethan drama than Bianca's
gradual self-will and self-importance in consequence of her
courtship by the Duke :
Troth, you speak wondrous well for your old house here;
'Twill shortly fall down at your .feet to thank you,
Or stoop, when you go to bed, like a good child,
To ask you blessing.
In spite of all the long-winded speeches, in spite of all the conventional ltalianate horrors, Bianca remains, like Beatrice in The Changeling, a real woman ; as real, indeed, as any woman of
Elizabethan tragedy. Bianca is a woman of the type who is
purely moved by vanity.
But if Middleton understood woman in tragedy better than any
of the Elizabethans - better than the creator of the Duchess of
Malfy, better than Marlowe, better than Tourneur, or Shirley, or
Fletcher, better than any of them except Shakespeare alone - he
was also able, in his comedy, to present a finer woman than any
of them. The Roaring Girl has no apparent relation to Middleton's
tragedies, yet it is agreed to be primarily the work of Middleton.
It is typical of the comedies of Middleton, and it is the best. In his
tragedies Middleton employs all the Italianate horrors of his time,
192
THOMAS MI DDLETON
and obviously for the purpose of pleasing the taste of his time ; yet
underneath we feel always a quiet and undisturbed vision of
things as they are and not 'another thing'. So in his comedies.
The comedies are long-winded ; the fathers are heavy fathers, and
rant as heavy fathers should ; the sons are wild and wanton sons,
and perform all the pranks to be expected of them ; the machinery
is the usual Elizabethan machinery ; Middleton is solicitous to
please his audience with what they expect ; but there is underneath the same steady impersonal passionless observation of human nature. The Roaring Girl is as artificial as any comedy of
the time ; its plot creaks loudly ; yet the Girl herself is always real.
She may rant, she may behave preposterously, but she remains a
type of the sort of woman who has renounced all happiness for
herself and who lives only for a principle. Nowhere more clearly
than in The Roaring Girl can the hand of Middleton be distinguished from the hand of Dekker. Dekker is all sentiment ; and, indeed, in the so admired passages of A Fair Quarrel, applauded
by Lamb, the mood if not the hand of Dekker seems to the
unexpert critic to be more present than Middleton's. A Fair
Quarrel seems as much, if not more, Dekker's than Middleton's.
Similarly with The Spanish Gypsy, which can with difficulty be
attributed to Middleton. But the feeling about Moll Cut-Purse of
The Roaring Girl is Middleton's rather than anybody's. In Middleton's tragedy there is a strain of realism underneath, which is one with the poetry ; and in his comedy we find the same thing.
In her recent book on The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy,
Miss Kathleen Lynch calls attention to the gradual transition
from Elizabethan-Jacobean to Restoratio
n comedy. She observes,
what is certainly true, that Middleton is the greatest 'realist' in
Jacobean comedy. Miss Lynch's extremely suggestive thesis is
that the transition from Elizabethan-Jacobean to later Caroline
comedy is primarily economic : that the interest changes from the
citizen aping gentry to the citizen become gentry and accepting
that code of manners. In the comedy of Middleton certainly there
is as yet no code of manners ; but the merchant of Cheapside is
aiming at becoming a member of the county gentry. Miss Lynch
remarks : 'Middleton's keen concentration on the spectacle of the
interplay of different social classes marks an important development in realistic comedy'. She calls attention to this aspect of Middleton's comedy, that it marks, better than the romantic
comedy of Shakespeare, or the comedy of Jonson, occupied with
what Jonson thought to be permanent and not transient aspects of
human nature, the transition between the aristocratic world which
preceded the Tudors and the plutocratic modern world which the
Tudors initiated and encouraged. By the time of the return of
193
APPREC I AT I ONS OF I ND I V I �UAL AUTHORS · I 9 1 1l- 1 9 3 0
Charles II, as Miss Lynch points out, society had been reorganized and formed, and social c.onventions had been created.
In the Tudor times birth still counted (though nearly all the great
families were extinct) ; by the time of Charles II only breeding
counted. The comedy of Middleton, and the comedy of Brome,
and the comedy of Shirley, is intermediate, as Miss Lynch remarks. Middleton, she observed, marks the transitional stage in which the London tradesman was anxious to cease to be a tradesman and to become a country gentleman. The words of his City Magnate in Michaelmas Terme had not yet lost their point :
A fine journey in the Whitsun holydays, i'faith, to ride with a number
of citizens and their wives, some upon pillions, some upon sidesaddles, I and little Thomasine i' the middle, our son and heir, Sim Quomodo, in a peach-colour taffeta jacket, some horse length, or a long
yard before us - there will be a fine show on's I can tell you.
But Middleton's comedy is not, like the comedy of Congreve,
the comedy of a set social behaviour ; it is still, like the later
comedy of Dickens, the comedy of individuals, in spite of the
continual motions of city merchants towards county gentility. In
the comedy of the Restoration a figure such as that of Moll Cut
Purse would have been impossible. As a social document the
comedy of Middleton illustrates the transition from government
by a landed aristocracy to government by a city aristocracy
gradually engrossing the land. As such it is of the greatest interest.
But as literature, as a dispassionate picture of human nature,
Middleton's comedy deserves to be remembered chiefly by its
real - perpetually real - and human figure of Moll the Roaring
Girl. That Middleton's comedy was 'photographic', that it introduces us to the low life of the time far better than anything in the comedy of Shakespeare or the comedy of Jonson, better than
anything except the pamphlets of Dekker and Greene and Nashe,
there is little doubt. But it produced one great play - The Roaring
Girl - a great play in spite of the tedious long speeches of some of
the principal characters, in spite of the clumsy machinery of the
plot : for the reason that Middleton was a great observer of
human nature, without fear, without sentiment, without prejudice.
And Middleton in the end - after criticism has subtracted all
that Rowley, all that Dekker, all that others contributed - is a
great example of great English drama. He has no message ; he is
merely a great recorder. Incidentally, in flashes and when the
dramatic need comes, he is a great poet, a great master of
versification :
194
THOMAS M I DDLETON
I that am of your blood was taken from you
For your better health; look no more upon't,
But cast it to the ground regardlessly,
Let the common sewer take it from distinction.
Beneath the stars, upon yon meteor
Ever hung my fate, 'mongst things corruptible;
I ne'er could pluck it from him; my loathing
Was prophet to the rest, but ne'er believed.
The man who wrote these lines remains inscrutable, solitary,
unadmired ; welcoming collaboration, indifferent to fame ; dying
no one knows when and no one knows how ; attracting, in three
hundred years, no personal admiration. Yet he wrote one tragedy
which more than any play except those of Shakespeare has a
profound and permanent moral value and horror ; and one comedy
which more than any Elizabethan comedy realizes a free and
noble womanhood.
195
FRANC I S HERBERT BRADLEY
It is unusual that a book so famous and so influential should
remain out of print so long as Bradley's Ethical Studies. 1 The one
edition appeared in 1876 : Bradley's refusal to reprint it never
wavered. In 1 893, in a footnote in Appearance and Reality, and in
words characteristic of the man, he wrote : 'I feel that the appearance of other books, as well as the decay of those superstitions against which largely it was directed, has left me free to consult
my own pleasure in the matter.' The dates of his three books, the
Ethical Studies in 1876, the Principles of Logic in 1883, and
Appearance and Reality in 1 893, leave us in no doubt that his
pleasure was the singular one of thinking rather than the common
one of writing books. And Bradley always assumed, with what
will remain for those who did not know him a curious blend of
humility and irony, an attitude of extreme diffiden<:e about his
own work. His Ethical Studies, he told us (or told our fathers), did
not aim at 'the construction of a system of Moral Philosophy'. The
first words of the preface to his Principles of Logic are : 'The
following work makes no claim to supply any systematic treatment
of logic'. He begins the preface to Appearance and Reality with
the words : 'I have described the following work as an essay in
metaphysics. Neither in form nor extent does it carry out the idea
of a system.' The phrase for each book is almost the same. And
many readers, having in mind Bradley's polemical irony and his
obvious zest in using it, his habit of discomfiting an opponent with
a sudden profession of ignorance, of inability to understand, or of
incapacity for abstruse thought, have concluded that this is all a
mere pose - and even a somewhat unscrupulous one. But deeper
study of Bradley's mind convinces us that the modesty is real,
and his irony the weapon of a modest and highly sensitive man.
Indeed, if this had been a pose it would never have worn so well
as it has. We have to consider, then, what is the nature of Bradley's
influence and why his writings and his personality fascinate those
whom they do fascinate ; and what are his claims to permanence.
1 Ethical Studies, by F. H. Bradley, O.M., LL.D. Second Edition
(Oxford : Clarendon Press. London : Milford).
196
FRAN C I S HERBERT B R AD LEY
Certainly one of the reasons for
the power he still exerts, as
well as an indubitable claim to permanence, is his great gift of
style. It is for his purposes - and his purposes are more varied
than is usually supposed - a perfect style. Its perfection has prevented it from cutting any great figure in prose anthologies and literature manuals, for it is perfectly welded with the matter.
Ruskin's works are extremely readable in snippets even for many
who take not a particle of interest in the things in which Ruskin
was so passionately interested. Hence he survives in anthologies,
while his books have fallen into undue neglect. Bradley's books
can never fall into this neglect because they will never rise to this
notoriety ; they come to the hands only of those who are qualified
to treat them with respect. But perhaps a profounder difference
between a style like Bradley's and a style like Ruskin's is a greater
purity and concentration of purpose. One feels that the emotional
intensity of Ruskin is partly a deflection of something that was
baffled in life, whereas Bradley, like Newman, is directly and
wholly that which he is. For the secret of Bradley's style, like that
of Bergson - whom he resembles in this if in nothing else - is the
intense addiction to an intellectual passion.
The nearest resemblance in style, however, is not Ruskin but
Matthew Arnold. It has not been sufficiently observed that
Bradley makes use of the same means as Arnold, and for similar
ends. To take first the most patent resemblance, we find in
Bradley the same type of fun as that which Arnold has with his
young friend Arminius. In The Principles of Logic there is a
celebrated passage in which Bradley is attacking the theory of
association of ideas according to Professor Bain, and explains how
on this principle an infant comes to recognize a lump of sugar :
A young child, or one of the lower animals, is given on Monday a round
piece of sugar, eats it and finds it sweet. On Tuesday it sees a square
piece of sugar, and proceeds to eat it . . . . Tuesday's sensation and
Monday's image are not only separate facts, which, because alike, are
therefore not the same ; but they differ perceptibly both in quality and
environment. What is to lead the mind to take one for the other ?
Sudden at this crisis, and in pity at distress, there leaves the heaven
Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot Page 28