In almost every scene there are examples of sound and noble thought clothed in the sober colours of terse and masculine poetry; of deep and high meditation touched now and then with the ardour of a fervid spirit and the light of a subtle fancy. At every page some passage of severe beauty reminds us with how great a spirit we are called to commune, and stand in the presence of how proud and profound a mind. His equal love for the depths and the heights of speculation may too often impel this poet to overstrain his powers of thought and utterance in the strong effort to dive or to soar into an atmosphere too thin or a sea too stormy to admit the facile and natural play of his vigorous faculties; but when these are displayed in their full strength and clearness the study of them gives us some taste of the rare and haughty pleasure that their owner must have taken in their exercise. Here as elsewhere I had taken note in my mind of special verses and passages fit for extraction, which might give some sample of the general power and charm of the keen intellect and the fine imagination that shape and inform the scheme and action of the poem; but to cite one or more instances of these would be to wrong the profuse and liberal genius which has sown them broadcast in so rich a soil. The reader who seeks them for himself with a judging eye and an apprehensive spirit will not be unlikely to make of The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois, for the wealth and the weight of its treasures of ethical beauty, his chosen and peculiar favourite among the works of Chapman.
In the last of this stately line of tragic poems dealing with the recent or immediate history of France we find the same prevailing qualities of moral force and poetic dignity. The tragedy of Chabot is more equable and less ambitious in treatment than any of its compeers; but the model given in its hero of majestic faith and august integrity may be classed among the purest and most perfect studies that we have from the sculptor’s hand. The serene and stainless figure of a wholly righteous and loyal man is so thoroughly and truthfully sustained by the high instinct and spiritual sense of the poet that we may trace and recognise from the first a nature so inflexible at once and so sensitive as to refuse all shelter or compromise which might rather protect than vindicate his innocence from the attacks of fraud and injustice, and when cleared of all their charges and restored to all his honours to lie down and die of the wound inflicted by the mere shame of suspicion: a heart so stout and so tender that it could resist all shocks and strokes of power or treachery, and bleed to death for grief to be distrusted where most of all it had deserved to find trust. But here again the singleness and purity of the interest could hardly be expected to secure success on the stage; and though we have no hint as to the good or ill fortune of this high-toned poem, we may conjecture that it could hardly have been redeemed from popular indifference by the dramatic power and pathetic impression of the scene in which the wife and father-in-law of the arraigned admiral prevail by the justice and dignity of their appeal upon the pride and prepossession of the queen. Yet this at least, and the last scene in which Chabot dies at the feet of his repentant master with a prayer for the pardon of his enemy on the lips that kiss for the last time the hand which must confer it, should have found favour with an audience capable of doing justice to the high desert of such austere and unseductive excellence. As we have no external ground for conjecture by what original impulse or bias of mind the genius of Chapman was attracted to the study and representation on an English stage of subjects derived from the annals of contemporary France, or what freak of perverse and erratic instinct may have led him to bring before a Protestant audience the leading criminals of the Catholic party under any but an unfavourable aspect, so we have no means of guessing whether or not any conscious reason or principle induced him to present in much the same light three princes of such diverse characters as the first Francis and the third and fourth Henries of France. Indeed, but for a single reference to his ransom ‘from Pavian thraldom’ (Act ii. Scene 3), we should be wholly at a loss to recognise in the royal master of Chabot the radiant and exuberant lover of the whole world of women,
ce roi sacré chevalier par Bayard,
Jeune homme auquel ii faut des plaisirs de vieillard,
who in our own age has been far otherwise presented on the theatre of a far mightier poet. There is no hint in the play that any more prevailing and less legitimate influence than a wife’s was brought to bear in favour of Chabot on a king with whom his lawful consort might have been supposed of all women the least likely to prevail; and by this suppression or disguise of the personal interest actually exerted on behalf of his hero the dramatist has defrauded of her due credit the real friend of the fallen admiral; for it was not at the instance of the queen, but at the instance of Madame d’Etampes, a kinswoman of Chabot, that the chancellor Poyet was arrested and disgraced in the same year (1542) which had seen the fall, the restoration, and the death by heart-break of the faithful minister who owed not to the intercession of the king’s wife but to his own alliance by blood with the king’s mistress that revenge which at the first occasion given the duchess was not slow to exact from her lover on the triumphant enemy of her kinsman. The haughty integrity which involved and upheld Chabot in danger and disgrace, and the susceptible pride which when restored to favour could no longer support him under the sense of past degradation, are painted from the life of history; but his poet may be thought to have somewhat softened the harsher features of that arrogance and roughness of temper which impaired the high qualities and imperilled the high station of the brave and upright admiral who dared his king to find a ground for his impeachment. And if we miss in Chapman’s portrait those chivalrous and amorous features which long kept fresh in popular fancy the knightly fame of Francis I., the figure set before us is not wanting in a kingly grace and dignity which the dramatist has chosen to bestow with an equal hand on the grandson to whom neither history nor tradition has assigned even so much of ‘the king-becoming graces’ as may be allowed to the conqueror of Marignano. Chapman indeed has in this case taken so little care to preserve the historic relations of his leading characters that the king by whose intervention Bussy d’Amboise was betrayed to the jealousy of Monsoreau appears not as the treacherous enemy but as the trusty friend and patron of his brother’s rebellious favourite; pardons and prefers him to the rank of his own, and adopts him into that station by the surname of his eagle; while instead of the king it is here the Duke of Anjou who delivers his refractory minion into the murderous snare set for him by an injured husband. But if I read aright the hinted imputation of Branteme, it would seem that some years before he put into the hands of Monsoreau the intercepted correspondence of Bussy with his wife the king had already laid an ambush of ‘twelve good men’ armed with pistols, and ‘mounted on Spanish horses taken from the stables of a very great personage who had set them on,’ to attempt the life of his brother’s indomitable champion, who was preserved as well by his own presence of mind and discretion as by the good fortune which befell him to find the door of a neighbour’s house ajar for him to slip through and fasten it against pursuit. Being compelled after this adventure to leave Paris in consequence of his threats ‘to slit folk’s nostrils, and that he would kill everybody’ in retaliation for this nocturnal assault, the gallant bravo was escorted out of the city by all the noble retainers of his ignoble patron the Duke of Anjou, but by three gentlemen only of the king’s household brigade, his kinsman Branteme, whom he charged at parting to bear back his defiance to the whole court, M. de Neuville, and the hero Crillon, who in spite of his attachment to the king’s party refused to forsake the friendship of so stout a swordsman. Although the first standard edition of Branteme’s Lives was not published by a descendant of his family till thirty-two years after the death of Chapman, it is singular that the English poet who thought fit to choose as a subject for tragedy the fate of a man at the time of whose murder he had himself reached the age of twenty should also have thought fit so seriously to alter the facts of his story for no discernible reason but a desire to shift the charge of the principal villainy from the should
ers of a king to those of his brother. In either play dedicated to the memory of Bussy-who at the wildest pitch of his windy and boisterous vanity can never have anticipated that twenty-eight years after his death he would figure on the page of a foreign poet as a hero of the Homeric or Lucanian type-the youngest son of Catharine de’Medici is drawn in colours as hateful as those of truth or tradition; whereas the last king of his line is handled with such remarkable forbearance that his most notorious qualities are even less recognisable than those of his grandfather in the delicate and dignified study of Chapman. A reader indeed, if such a one were possible, who should come to the perusal of these plays with no previous knowledge of French history, would find little difference or distinction between Henri de Valois and Henri de Bourbon; and would probably carry away the somewhat inaccurate impression that the slayer of the Duke of Guise and the judge of the Duke of Biron were men of similar tastes and manners, respectable if not venerable for their private virtues, elegant and sententious in their habitual choice of language, grave and decorous in their habitual carriage and discourse, and equally imbued with a fine and severe sense of responsibility for the conscientious discharge of the highest and hardest duties of their royal office. It is less remarkable, as the dramatist in his dedication to Sir Thomas Howard disclaims all pretension to observe ‘the authentical truth of either person or action,’ as a thing not to be expected ‘in a poem whose subject is not truth, but things like truth,’ that he should have provided to avenge the daring and turbulent desperado who outbraved the gorgeous minions of the king with a simple dress set off by the splendour of six pages in cloth of gold, and then signalised by a fresh insult under the very eyes of Henri his enforced reconciliation with the luckless leader of their crew, a brother of whose name I know nothing but that Georges de Clermont d’Amboise, not a follower of Guise but a leader of the Huguenots, was slain seven years earlier than Bussy in the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Chapman’s apology for the attribution of this name to the apparently imaginary avenger of his brother’s blood is better worth remembering than such inquiries are worth pursuing. ‘Poor envious souls they are,’ says the poet, ‘that cavil at truth’s want in these natural fictions’; a reasonable and memorable protest against the perverse or senseless paradox which confounds truth with fact and refuses to distinguish veracity from reality; and which would not be worth the passing notice of a contemptuous instant if men of genius would forbear to confuse the minds of their feebler and more servile admirers by the adoption and promulgation in the loudest tones of prophecy of such blatant and vacuous babble about ‘kinship of fiction to lying’ and so forth as should properly be left to the lips of the dunces who may naturally believe it, being thick-witted enough to accept as serious reasoning and deliberate opinion the most wilful and preposterous paradoxes thundered forth from pulpit or from tripod in the most riotous and ludicrous paroxysms of wayward humour or fantastic passion.
That the ‘Roman tragedy’ of Caesar and Pompey was earlier in date than most though later in publication than any except Chabot of the French series, we might have conjectured without the evidence of the dedication. It is more unequal and irregular in the proportion of its good parts and its bad than any of Chapman’s tragedies except Bussy d’Ambois; I should imagine it to be a work of nearly the same period; though, as was before intimated, it bears more affinity to the sequel of that play and to the great tragic poem on Biron in the main quality of interest and the preponderance of speech over action. To this play we might adapt a well-known critical remark of Dr. Johnson’s on Henry VIII., much less applicable in that case than in this, and say that the genius of the author comes in and goes out with Cato. Not that even in this case that rhetorical phrase would be wholly accurate; there are noble lines and passages discernible elsewhere ; but the glory of the poem is given it by the scenes in which Cato is the leading figure. I know nothing in moral or contemplative poetry more admirable than the speech in the first scene on fear or mistrust of the gods, and the soliloquy in the last act on sleep and death. The serene and sublime emotion of heroic wisdom is in either passage so touched and tempered with something of the personal ardour of a noble passion that its tone and effect are not merely abstract or didactic but thoroughly dramatic and human, and the weighty words ring in the ear of our remembrance long after the mind has first unconsciously absorbed and retained the lofty sound and sense of the memorable and magnificent verse. It is especially in such examples as these that we perceive the great quality of Chapman’s genius, the true height and purity of its power; majestic intellect lighted and enkindled by poetic imagination, the high beauty of heroic thought warmed and winged with the spiritual fire of a living sentiment. It is true that those who read only the glorious excerpts given from this poem by Charles Lamb will have a nobler impression of its merit than they who read the whole; but those only who read the whole will know all its merit as well as all its demerit; they will find fresh treasures of fine thought and high expression embedded among dense layers of crabbed and con fused rhetoric, wedged in between rocky strata of thick and turgid verse. As there is little other life or movement in the play but that of declamation or discussion, we might presume that if it had ever ‘touched at the stage’ its reception would in all likelihood have been something less than favourable; but we have already remarked on such inexplicable variations of good and ill luck in the fortunes of Chapman’s plays that no conclusion of the kind can be assumed as certain. That it never did lose on any boards its long-preserved immunity from the touch of actors or managers, we may, I suppose, after the author’s assurance of its virginity at the date of publication, be tolerably confident.
The Complete Poetical Works of George Chapman Page 234