The Complete Poetical Works of George Chapman

by George Chapman

  The rumour is singular enough, and it would be curious to know if at least any such threat or attempt were actually made. From Carr at all events we can hardly believe that it would have come; for it must be set down to his credit that in the days of obscurity which followed on his disgrace and retirement he seems to have befriended the poet whose humbler chances of court favour had presumably fallen with his own. It was unlikely that any man ever so slightly associated with the recollection of a matter which the king was probably of all men least desirous to keep in mind should again be summoned by two of the Inns of Court, as Chapman had been summoned the year before, to compose the marriage masque for a royal wedding. More inauspicious by far though far more innocent than those of Somerset were the nuptials he had then been chosen to celebrate; the nuptials of Elizabeth, called the Queen of Hearts, with Frederick, one day to be surnamed the Winter-King. For that fatal marriage-feast of ‘Goody Palsgrave’ and her hapless bridegroom he had been bidden to provide due decorations of pageantry and verse; and had produced at least some bright graceful couplets and stanzas, among others hardly so definable. But to such a task he was now not likely to be called again; the turning-point of his fortunes as far as they hung upon the chance of patronage at court was the wedding day of Carr. As a favourite of the dead prince to whom his Homer had been inscribed in weighty and worthy verses, he may have been thought fit the year before to assist as the laureate of a day at the marriage which had been postponed by the death of the bride’s brother in the preceding autumn; and some remembrance of the favour shown him by the noble youth for whom the country if not the court had good reason to mourn may have kept his name for a while before the eyes of the better part of the courtiers, if a better part there were : but if ever, as we may conjecture, his fortune had passed through its hour of rise and its day of progress, we must infer that its decline was sudden and its fall irremediable.

  In the same year which witnessed the unlucky venture of his Andromeda Chapman put forth a poem on the death of Lord Russell of Thornhaugh, a patron, it should seem, of a far other kind than Carr; distinguished as a soldier in the field now only memorable to us for the death of Sir Philip Sidney, where if report may be trusted his romantic or Homeric valour was worthy to have employed the pen of a translator of the Iliad ; and yet more remarkable for the comparative justice and mercy displayed in his military administration of Ireland. This epicede, longer and more ornate than that issued two years before on Prince Henry, is neither much worse nor much better in substance and in style. Each may boast of some fine and vigorous verses, and both are notable as examples of the poet’s somewhat troubled and confused elevation of thought and language. In Eugenia especially the same high note of moral passion alternates with the same sharp tone of contemptuous complaint that we find in The Tears of Peace and in the very last verses affixed by way of epilogue to his translation of the Hymns and other Homeric fragments. This bitterness of insinuation or invective against meaner scholars or artists we should set down rather to a genuine hatred of bad work, a genuine abhorrence of base ambition and false pretence, than to any unjust or malevolent instinct of mere jealousy; which yet might perhaps be found pardonable to the neglected and laborious old age of a high-minded artist and hard-working scholar such as Chapman. There are impressive touches of a higher mood in the funeral hymn which completes the somewhat voluminous tribute of ceremonial verse offered up at the grave of Lord Russell; but the greater part of the poem is more noticeable for quaintness than for any better quality, being indeed eccentric in execution as in conception beyond the wont even of Chapman. It carries, however, some weight of thought, and contains probably the longest and minutest catalogue ever given in verse of the signs of an approaching storm; a description which shows at once the close and intense observation of nature, the keen and forcible power of reproduction, and the utter incompetence to select and arrange his material, alike and at all times distinctive of this poet.

  Four years after the miscarriage of Andromeda we find his translation of Hesiod ushered in by a dignified appeal and compliment to ‘the truly Greek inspiration and absolutely Attic elocution’ of no less a patron than Bacon; ‘whose all-acknowledged faculty hath banished flattery therein even from the court; much more from my country and more than upland simplicity.’ But for his Odyssey and Hymns of Homer, as well as for his plea addressed to the country on behalf of the beleaguered handful of troops serving with Sir Horace Vere, he sought or found no patronage but that of Carr; and that this should not have failed him gives evidence of some not ignoble quality in one whom we are accustomed only to regard as the unloveliest of the Ganymedes whose Jupiter was James. In the dedication of the Hymns he refers to the retired life of his disgraced patron in a tone which might not unworthily have saluted the more honourable seclusion of a better man. To these as to others of Chapman’s moral verses Coleridge has paid a tribute of thoughtful and memorable praise, deserved no less by the fragments of ethical poetry printed some years earlier with a metrical version, after that of Petrarca, of the penitential Psalms. Among these there are many grains of genuine thought, of terse and grave expression, worth remark and remembrance. So much indeed may be said in parting of Chapman’s poetry as a whole; in all his poems of dedication or mere compliment, as in the elaborate and eloquent rhapsody prefixed to Ben Jonson’s Sejanus, we shall find some weight of reflection and some energy of utterance: in the commendatory verses to Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess we shall find something better; four of the loveliest lines in the language, perfect for melody, purity, and simple sweetness of colour.

  It is better to think of Chapman as the just and generous friend of other and younger men’s genius than to remark except in passing on his quarrel in old age with Jonson, of which we know nothing but by an unhappy fragment of virulent and worthless verse, transcribed it should seem during his last illness by some foolish and officious friend or flatterer (as we may conceive) of the old man’s petulances and infirmities. For these there is reason to fear that we may have to make more allowance than must under all circumstances be claimed by age and sickness, even where adversity has no share in the sufferings of the last years of a laborious and noble life. After the fall of Chapman’s fortunes, if as I have conjectured we may suppose them to have risen for a while under the patronage of Prince Henry and collapsed with the favour of Carr, he lived for twenty years without further success on the stage to which he had given so much of the best labour and the best faculty of his mind: and we may doubt whether the friends or patrons of his old age were numerous or generous enough to secure these latter years against neglect and obscurity. One comfort, however, must have been with him to the last, whether or not we agree with Gifford in accepting the apparent evidence for the poverty and solitude in which he died; the comfort of great work done, the recollection of high hopes attained, the evidence of daring dreams made real and fruitful of fame not yet to be. Some ten years before his death the poet of sixty-five could look on his completed version of all the Homeric poems, and say:-

  The work that I was born to do is done.

  It was a great work, and one wrought in a great spirit and if, as he says of Homer, not without evident and immediate reference to his own lot, ‘like a man verecundi ingenii (which he witnesseth of himself), he lived unhonoured and needy till his death,’ we may believe that he did not live dissatisfied or dejected. Unworthy indeed would the workman have been of his own work if from the contemplation of it he had been too poor in spirit or too covetous of reward to draw the consolation of a high content. This strong and sovereign solace against all the evils that can beset the failing age and fallen fortunes of a brave man he surely deserved, if ever man deserved, to have and to retain. His work was done; neither time nor trouble could affect that; neither age nor misfortune could undo it. He had lived long and worked hard, and the end of all the valiant labour and strenuous endurance that must have gone to the performance of his task had not been less than triumphant. He had added a monument t
o the temple which contains the glories of his native language, the godlike images and the costly relics of its past; he had built himself a massive and majestic memorial, where for all the flaws and roughness of the weather-beaten work the great workmen of days unborn would gather to give honour to his name. He had kindled a fire which the changing winds of time were not to put out, the veering breath of taste and opinion was never to blow upon so hard but that some would return to warm themselves at its heat and to cheer themselves with its light. He showed what he could of Homer to the lifted eyes of Keats, and the strong and fiery reflection was to the greater poet as very dawn itself, the perfect splendour of Hellenic sunrise. Much of precious and undying praise has been worthily bestowed on it; but while anything of English poetry shall endure the sonnet of Keats will be the final word of comment, the final note of verdict on Chapman’s Homer.

  This of course was the sovereign labour of his life; and to this the highest of his other works can only be considered as bringing some addition of honour. That there is yet in these enough to serve as the foundation of a lasting fame I have made it the purpose of my present task to show. But his name will always first recall neither the plays nor the poems which might well have sufficed for the work and the witness of a briefer or less fruitful life; the great enterprise of which the firstfruits were given to the world in his fortieth year and the last harvest was garnered in his sixty-sixth must be the first and last claim of his memory on the reverence of all students who shall ever devote the best of their time and of their thought to loving research or to thankful labour in the full field of English poetry. The indomitable force and fire of Chapman’s genius have given such breath and spirit to his Homeric poems that whatever their faults and flaws may be they are at least not those of other men’s versions; they have a seed and salt of personal life which divide them from the class of translated works and remove them (it might wellnigh be said) into the rank of original poems. By the standard of original work they may be more fairly and more worthily judged than by the standard of pure translation: and upon their worth as tested by that standard the judgment of Coleridge and. of Lamb has been passed once for all, without fear of appeal or danger of reversal while the language in which the poems were written and the judgment given shall endure. To all lovers of high poetry the great old version of our Homer-Lucan must be dear for its own sake and for that of the men who have loved and held it in honour; to those who can be content with fire for light and force for harmony it must give pleasure inconceivable by such as cannot but remember and repine for the lack of that sweet and equal exaltation of style which no English poet of his age, and Chapman less than any, could hope even faintly to reproduce or to recall. In his original poems the most turgid and barbarous writer of a time whose poets had almost every other merit in a higher degree than those Grecian gifts of perfect form, of perfect light, and of perfect measure, which are the marks of the Homeric poems no less than of the Sophoclean drama, he could not so put off his native sin of forced and inflated obscurity as to copy in the hot high colours of a somewhat strained and tattered canvas more than the outlines of the divine figures which his strong hand and earnest eye were bent to bring before his readers’ sight. It is much that his ardour and vigour, his energy and devotion, should have done the noble and memorable work they have. That ‘unconquerable quaintness’ which Lamb was the first to point out as the one perpetual note of infirmity and imperfection in the great work of Chapman is more hopelessly alien from the quality of the original than any other defect but that of absolute weakness or sterility of spirit could be. Altering the verdict of Bentley on Pope, we may say that instead of a very pretty it is a very noble poem, but it must not be called Homer. Quaintness and he, to steal a phrase from Juliet, are many miles asunder.

  The temperament of Chapman had more in it of an Icelandic than a Hellenic poet’s; and had Homer been no more than the mightiest of skalds or the Iliad than the greatest of sagas, Chapman would have been fitter to play the part of their herald or interpreter. His fiery and turbid style has in it the action rather of earthquakes and volcanoes than of the oceanic verse it labours to represent; it can give us but the pace of a giant for echo of the footfall of a god; it can show but the huge movements of the heaving earth, inflated and inflamed with unequal and violent life, for the innumerable unity and harmony, the radiant and buoyant music of luminous motion, the simplicity and equality of passion and of power, the majestic monochord of single sound underlying as it were at the heart of Homeric verse the multitudinous measures of the epic sea.

  The name of Chapman should always be held great ; yet must it always at first recall the names of greater men. For one who thinks of him as the author of his best play or his loftiest lines of gnomic verse a score will at once remember him as the translator of Homer or the continuator of Marlowe. The most daring enterprise of a life which was full of daring aspiration and arduous labour was this of resuming and completing the ‘mighty line’ of Hero and Leander. For that poem stands out alone amid all the wide and wild poetic wealth of its teeming and turbulent age, as might a small shrine of Parian sculpture amid the rank splendour of a tropic jungle. But no metaphor can aptly express the rapture of relief with which you come upon it amid the poems of Chapman, and drink once more with your whole heart of that well of sweet water after the long draughts you have taken from such brackish and turbid springs as gush up among the sands and thickets of his verse. Faultless indeed this lovely fragment is not; it also bears traces of the Elizabethan barbarism, as though the great queen’s ruff and farthingale had been clapped about the neck and waist of the Medicean Venus; but for all the strange costume we can see that the limbs are perfect still. The name of Marlowe’s poem has been often coupled with that of the ‘first heir’ of Shakespeare’s ‘invention’; but with all reverence to the highest name in letters be it said, the comparison is hardly less absurd than a comparison of Tamburlaine with Othello. With all its overcrowding beauties of detail, Shakespeare’s first poem is on the whole a model of what a young man of genius should not write on such a subject; Marlowe’s is a model of what he should. Scarcely the art of Titian at its highest, and surely not the art of Shakespeare at its dawn, could have made acceptable such an inversion of natural rule as is involved in the attempted violation by a passionate woman of a passionless boy; the part of a Joseph, as no less a moralist than Henri Beyle has observed in his great work on Love, has always a suspicion about it of something ridiculous and offensive; but only the wretchedest of artists could wholly fail to give charm to the picture of such a nuptial night as that of Hero and Leander. The style of Shakespeare’s first essay is, to speak frankly, for the most part no less vicious than the matter: it is burdened and bedizened with all the heavy and fantastic jewellery of Gongora and Marini ; it is written throughout in the style which an Italian scholar knows as that of the seicentisti, and which the duncery of New Grub Street in its immeasurable ignorance would probably designate as ‘Della-Cruscan’; nay, there are yet, I believe, in that quarter rhymesters and libellers to be found who imagine such men as Guido Cavalcanti and Dante Alighieri to have been representative members of the famous and farinaceous academy. Not one of the faults chargeable on Shakespeare’s beautiful but faultful poem can justly be charged on the only not faultless poem of Marlowe. The absence of all cumbrous jewels and ponderous embroideries from the sweet and limpid loveliness of its style is not more noticeable than the absence of such other and possibly such graver flaws as deform and diminish the undeniable charms of Venus and Adonis.

  With leave or without leave of a much-lauded critic who could see nothing in the glorified version or expansion by Marlowe of the little poem of Musxus but ‘a paraphrase, in every sense of the epithet, of the most licentious kind,’ I must avow that I want and am well content to want the sense, whatever it be, which would enable me to discern more offence in that lovely picture of the union of two lovers in body as in soul than I can discern in the parting of Romeo and Juliet. And
if it be always a pleasure to read a page of Marlowe, to read it after a page of Chapman is to the capable student of high verse ‘a pleasure worthy Xerxes the great king.’ Yet there is not a little to be advanced in favour of Chapman’s audacious and arduous undertaking. The poet was not alive, among all the mighty men then living, who could worthily have completed the divine fragment of Marlowe. As well might we look now to find a sculptor who could worthily restore for us the arms of the Venus of Melos-’Our Lady of Beauty,’ as Heine said when lying at her feet stricken to death, ‘who has no hands, and cannot help us.’ For of narrative poets there were none in that generation of any note but Drayton and Daniel; and though these might have more of Marlowe’s limpid sweetness and purity of style, they lacked the force and weight of Chapman. Nor is the continuation by any means altogether such as we might have expected it to be- a sequel by Marsyas to the song of Apollo. Thanks, as we may suppose, to the high ambition of the poet’s aim, there are more beauties and fewer deformities than I have found in any of his other poems. There are passages indeed which at first sight may almost seem to support the otherwise unsupported tradition that a brief further fragment of verse from the hand of