The Complete Poetical Works of George Chapman

by George Chapman

  Marlowe was left for Chapman to work up into his sequel. This for instance, though somewhat overfantastic, has in it a sweet and genuine note of fancy:-

  Her fresh-heat blood cast figures in her eyes,

  And she supposed she saw in Neptune’s skies

  How her star wander’d, wash’d in smarting brine,

  For her love’s sake, that with immortal wine

  Should be embathed, and swim in more heart’s-ease

  Than there was water in the Sestian seas.

  Here again is a beautiful example of the short sweet interludes which relieve the general style of Chapman’s narrative or reflective verse:-

  For as proportion, white and crimson, meet

  In beauty’s mixture, all right clear and sweet,

  The eye responsible, the golden hair,

  And none is held without the other fair;

  All spring together, all together fade

  Such intermixed affections should invade

  Two perfect lovers.

  And this couplet has an exquisite touch of fanciful colour:-

  As two clear tapers mix in one their light,

  So did the lily and the hand their white.

  That at least might have been written by Marlowe himself. But the poem is largely deformed by excrescences and aberrations, by misplaced morals and mistimed conceits; and at the catastrophe, perhaps half consciously oppressed and overcome by the sense that now indeed he must put forth all his power to utter something not unworthy of what the ‘dead shepherd’ himself might have spoken over the two dead lovers, he puts forth all his powers for evil and for error, and gives such a narrative of their end as might have sufficed to raise from his grave the avenging ghost of the outraged poet who has been supposed-but unless it was said in some riotous humour of jesting irony, the supposition seems to me incredible-to have commended to Chapman, in case of his death, the task thus ill discharged of completing this deathless and half-accomplished work of a genius ‘that perished in its pride.’

  The faults and weaknesses of strong men seem usually an integral part of the character or the genius we admire for its strength; and the faults ingrained in the work of Chapman were probably indivisible from the powers which gave that work its worth. Those blemishes not less than those beauties of which the student is at almost every other step compelled perforce to take note seem inevitable by a poet’s mind of his peculiar bent and bias. There are superfluities which we would fain see removed, deformities which we would fain see straightened, in all but the greatest among poets or men; and these are doubtless in effect irremovable and incurable. Even the Atlantean shoulders of Jonson, fit to bear the weight of mightiest monarchies, have been hardly tasked to support and transmit to our own day the fame of his great genius, overburdened as it was with the twofold load of his theories on art and his pedantries of practice. And Chapman, though also a brother of the giant brood, had not the Herculean sinews of his younger friend and fellow-student. That weight which could but bend the back that carried the vast world of invention whose twin hemispheres are Valpone and The Alchemist was wellnigh enough to crush the staggering strength of the lesser Titan. His style reels and struggles under the pressure; he snorts and heaves as Typhoeus beneath Etna, sending up at each huge turn and convulsion of his uneasy bulk some shower of blinding sparkles or volume of stifling vapour. But for all the discords and contortions of his utterance the presence is always perceptible of a giant, and of one issued from the lineage of the early gods.

  He alone, as far as I can see, among all the great men of his great age, had anything in common with Jonson for good or evil. It would not be accurate to lay the heaviest faults of either poet to the account of his learning. A weight of learning at least equal to that which bowed and deformed the genius of Jonson and of Chapman served but to give new shape and splendour to the genius of Milton and of Landor. To these it was but as a staff to guide and a crown to glorify their labours; a lantern by whose light they might walk, a well-spring from whose water they might draw draughts of fresh strength and rest. But by this light the two elder poets too often failed to walk straight and sure, drank too often from this fountain a heady or a narcotic draught. One at least, and not he who had drunk deepest of the divine and dangerous spring, seems at times under its influence to move and speak as under some Circean transformation. The learning of Jonson, doubtless far wider and sounder than that of Chapman, never allowed or allured him to exchange for a turbid and tortuous jargon the vigorous purity of his own English spirit and style. Nevertheless, of these four illustrious men whom I suppose to have been the most deeply read in classical literature, with the exception probably of Gray and possibly of Coleridge, among all our poets of the past, the two great republicans as surely were not as the two distinguished royalists surely were pedants: and Chapman, being the lesser scholar, was naturally the greater pedant of the pair.

  As a dramatic poet he has assuredly never yet received his due meed of discerning praise; but assuredly no man of genius ever did so much, as though by perverse and prepense design, to insure a continuance of neglect and injustice. Had he allied himself with some enemy in a league against his own fame-had he backed himself against success for a wager, let his deserts be what they might-he could have done no more than he has done to make certain of the desired failure. With a fair share of comic spirit and invention, remarkable at least in a poet of such a grave and ambitious turn of genius, he has spiced and larded his very comedies with the thick insipid sauce of pedantic declamation. Their savourless interludes of false and forced humour may indeed be matched even in the greatest of Jonson’s works; there is here hardly anything heavier than the voluminous foolery of Scoto of Mantua and the dolorous long-winded doggerel drivelled forth by that dreary trinity of dwarf, eunuch, and hermaphrodite, whom any patron of less patience than Volpone, with a tithe of his wit and genius, would surely have scourged out of doors long before they were turned forth to play by Mosca. But when on a fresh reading we skip over these blocks laid as if on purpose in our way through so magnificent a gallery of comic and poetic inventions, the monument of a mind so mighty, the palace of so gigantic a genius as Ben Jonson’s, we are more than content to forget such passing and perishable impediments to our admiration of that sovereign intellect which has transported us across them into the royal presence of its ruling and informing power.

  The ‘shaping spirit of imagination’ proper to all great men, and varying in each case from all other, reforms of itself its own misshapen work, treads down and triumphs over its own faults and errors, renews its faltering forces and resumes its undiminished reign. But he who in so high a matter as the dramatic art can sin so heavily, and so triumphantly tread under the penalty of his transgression, must be great among the greatest of his fellows. Such, with all his excesses and shortcomings in the way of dramatic work, was Jonson; such certainly was not Chapman. The tragedy, for example, of Chabot, a noble and dignified poem in the main, and the otherwise lively and interesting comedy of Monsieur d’Olive, are seriously impaired by a worse than Jonsonian excess in the analysis and anatomy of ‘humours.’ The turncoat advocate and the mock ambassador bestride the action of the plays and oppress the attention of the reader with a more ‘importunate and heavy load’ than that of Sinbad’s old man of the sea. Another point of resemblance to Jonson on the wrong side is the absence or insignificance of feminine interest throughout his works. No poet ever showed less love or regard for women, less care to study or less power to paint them. With the exception of a couple of passages in his two best comedies, the wide field of Chapman’s writings will be found wellnigh barren of any tender or noble trace of passion or emotion kindled between man and woman.

  These two passages stand out in beautiful and brilliant contrast to the general tone of the poet’s mood; the praise of love has seldom been uttered with loftier and sweeter eloquence than in the well known verses which celebrate it as ‘nature’s second sun,’ informing and educing the latent virtue
s in man ‘as the sun doth colours’; the structure and cadence of the verse, the choice and fullness of the words, are alike memorable for the perfect power and purity, the strong simplicity and luminous completeness of workmanship which may be (too rarely) found and enjoyed in the poetry of Chapman. The passage in The Gentleman Usher (Act iv. Scene 3), which sets forth the excellence of perfect marriage, has less of poetic illustration and imaginative colour, but is a no less admirable model of clear and vigorous language applied to the fit and full expression of high thought and noble emotion. But as a rule we find the genius of Chapman at its best when furthest removed from female influence; as in the two plays of Biron and those nobler parts of the ‘Roman tragedy’ of Caesar and Pompey in which Cato discourses on life and death. The two leading heroines of his tragic drama, Tamyra and Caropia, are but a slippery couple of sententious harlots, who deliver themselves in eloquent and sometimes in exalted verse to such amorous or vindictive purpose as the action of the play may suggest. Whether the secret of this singular defect in a dramatic poet were to be sought in coldness of personal temperament, in narrowness of intellectual interest, or simply in the accidental circumstances which may have given a casual direction to his life and thought, we need not now think to conjecture. He was ready enough to read lectures on love or lust, to expatiate with a dry scholastic sensuality on the details and influences of form and colour, to apply the terms and subtleties of metaphysical definition to the physical anatomy of beauty; indeed, one at least of his poems may be described as a study in philosophic vivisection applied by a lover to his mistress, in which analysis and synthesis of material and spiritual qualities in action and reaction of cause and effect meet and confound each other-to say nothing of the reader. But of pure passion and instinctive simplicity of desire or delight there is little more trace than of higher emotion or deeper knowledge of such things as belong alike to mind and body, and hold equally of the spirit and the flesh.

  Here again we find that Jonson and Chapman stand far apart from their fellow-men of genius. The most ambitious and the most laborious poets of their day, conscious of high aims and large capacities, they would be content with no crown that might be shared by others; they had each his own severe and haughty scheme of study and invention, and sought for no excellence which lay beyond or outside it; that any could lie above, past the reach of their strong arms and skilful hands, past the scope of their keen and studious eyes, they would probably have been unable to believe or to conceive. And yet there were whole regions of high poetic air, whole worlds of human passion and divine imagination, which might be seen by humbler eyes than theirs and trodden by feebler feet, where their robust lungs were powerless to breathe, and their strenuous song fell silent. Not greater spirits alone, such as Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s, but such lesser spirits as Dekker’s had the secret of ways unknown to them in the world of poetry, the key of chambers from which they were shut out. In Marlowe the passion of ideal love for the ultimate idea of beauty in art or nature found its perfect and supreme expression, faultless and unforced. The radiant ardour of his desire, the light and the flame of his aspiration, diffused and shed through all the forms of his thought and all the colours of his verse, gave them such shapeliness and strength of life as is given to the spirits of the greatest poets alone.

  He, far rather than Chaucer or Spenser, whose laurels were first fed by the dews and sunbeams of Italy and France, whose songs were full of sweet tradition from oversea, of memories and notes which ‘came mended from their tongues’-he alone was the true Apollo of our dawn, the bright and morning star of the full midsummer day of English poetry at its highest. Chaucer, Wyatt, and Spenser had left our language as melodious, as fluent, as flexible to all purposes of narrative or lyrical poetry as it could be made by the grace of genius; the supreme note of its possible music was reserved for another to strike. Of English blank verse, one of the few highest forms of verbal harmony or poetic expression, the genius of Marlowe was the absolute and divine creator. By mere dint of original and godlike instinct he discovered and called it into life; and at his untimely and unhappy death, more lamentable to us all than any other on record except Shelley’s, he left the marvellous instrument of his invention so nearly perfect that Shakespeare first and afterwards Milton came to learn of him before they could vary or improve on it. In the changes rung by them on the keys first tuned by Marlowe we trace a remembrance of the touches of his hand; in his own cadences we catch not a note of any other man’s. This poet, a poor scholar of humblest parentage, lived to perfect the exquisite metre invented for narrative by Chaucer, giving it (to my ear at least) more of weight and depth, of force and fullness, than its founder had to give; he invented the highest and hardest form of English verse, the only instrument since found possible for our tragic or epic poetry; he created the modern tragic drama; and at the age of thirty he went

  Where Orpheus and where Homer are.

  Surely there are not more than two or three names in any literature which can be set above the poet’s of whom this is the least that can in simple truth be said. There is no record extant of his living likeness; if his country should ever bear men worthy to raise a statue or a monument to his memory, he should stand before them with the head and eyes of an Apollo looking homeward from earth into the sun: a face and figure, in the poet’s own great phrase,

  Like his desire, lift upward and divine.

  To all things alike we find applied in turn this fervour of ideal passion; to the beauty of women, to the hunger after sway, to the thirst after knowledge, to the energy of friendship or ambition, to the energy of avarice or revenge. Sorrow and triumph and rapture and despair find in his poetry their most single and intense expression, extreme but not excessive ; the pleasures and the pains of each passion are clothed with the splendour and harmony of pure conceptions fitted with perfect words.

  There is the same simple and naked power of abstract outline in every stroke of every study which remains to us from his hand; in the strenuous greed and fantastic hate of Barabas, in the hysteric ardours and piteous agonies of Edward, in the illimitable appetite of Tamburlaine for material rule and of Faustus for spiritual empire, and in the highest and haughtiest aspirations of either towards that ultimate goal of possession where he may lay hands on power unattainable and touch lips with beauty inexpressible by man, we trace the same ideal quality of passion. In the most glorious verses ever fashioned by a poet to express with subtle and final truth the supreme aim and the supreme limit of his art, the glory and the joy of his labour, the satisfaction and the insufficience of its triumph in the partial and finite expression of an infinite delight and an indefinite desire, Marlowe has summed up all that can be said or thought on the office and the object, the means and the end of this highest form of spiritual ambition, which for him was as it were shadowed forth in all symbols and reflected in all shapes of human energy, in all exaltations of the spirit, in all aspirations of the will. Being a poet of the first order, he was content to know and to accept the knowledge that ideal beauty lies beyond the most beautiful forms and ideal perfection beyond the most perfect words that art can imbue with life or inflame with colour; an excellence that expression can never realise, that possession can never destroy.

  The nearer such an artist’s work comes to this abstract perfection of absolute beauty, the more clearly will he see and the more gladly will he admit that it never can come so near as to close with it and find, as in things of meaner life, a conclusion set in the act of fruition to the sense of enjoyment, a goal fixed at a point attainable where the delight of spiritual desire may be consummated, and consumed in the moment of its consummation. A man of the second order of genius is of his nature less quick to apprehend the truth that

  If all the pens that ever poets held

  Had fed the feeling of their masters’ thoughts,

  and if one single and supreme poem could embody in distilled expression the spirit and the sense of

  every sweetness that inspir
ed their hearts,

  Their minds, and muses on admired themes,

  there would remain behind all things attainable and expressible in sound or form or colour something that will not be expressed or attained, nor pass into the likeness of any perishable life; but though all were done that all poets could do,

  Yet should there hover in their restless heads

  One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,

  Which into words no virtue can digest.

  No poet ever came nearer than Marlowe to the expression of this inexpressible beauty, to the incarnation in actual form of ideal perfection, to the embodiment in mortal music of immortal harmony; and he it is who has left on record and on evidence to all time the truth that no poet can ever come nearer. The lesser artist, with less liberty of action, will be the likelier of the two to show less loyalty of submission to the eternal laws of thought which find their full and natural expression in the eternal canons of art. In him we shall find that intellectual energy has taken what it can of the place and done what it can of the work proper to ideal passion. This substitution of an intellectual for an ideal end, of energetic mental action for passionate spiritual emotion as the means towards that end, is as good a test as may be taken of the difference in kind rather than in degree between the first and the second order of imaginative artists. By the change of instrument alone a critic of the higher class may at once verify the change of object. In almost every page of Chapman’s noblest work we discern the struggle and the toil of a powerful mind convulsed and distended as by throes of travail in the effort to achieve something that lies beyond the proper aim and the possible scope of that form of art within which it has set itself to work. The hard effort of a strong will, the conscious purpose of an earnest ambition, the laborious obedience to a resolute design is as perceptible in Jonson and Chapman as in Shakespeare and in Marlowe is the instinct of spiritual harmony, the loyalty and the liberty of impulse and of work. The lesser poets are poets prepense; the greater are at once poets of their own making and of nature’s, equidistant in their line of life from the mere singing-bird and the mere student.