Of the first order we may be sure that in any age or country the men that compose it must have been what they were, great as poets or artists, lyric or dramatic; of the second order we may well believe that in a different time or place the names which we find written in its catalogue might have been distinguished by other trophies than such as they now recall. And this, which may seem to imply a superiority of intellectual power, does actually imply the reverse. Those are not the greatest among men of whom we can reasonably conceive that circumstance might have made them as great in some different way from that in which they walked; those are not the highest poets or soldiers or statesmen whom it is possible or permissible to imagine as winning equal fame in some other field than their own, by the application to some other end of such energy and genius as made them great in the line which they were impelled to select at least as much by pressure of accident as by force of instinct, by the external necessity of chance as by the internal necessity of nature. Accident and occasion may be strongest with men of the second order; but with minds of the first rank that which we call the impulse of nature is yet more strong than they. I doubt not that Jonson might in another age have sought and won distinction from the active life of soldiership or of statecraft; I take leave to doubt whether Shakespeare, had he sought it, would have won. I am not disinclined to admit the supposition that Chapman might have applied his power of moral thought and his interest in historic action to other ends than they ever served in literature or in life. But neither for his sake nor for ours am I disposed to regret that circumstance or destiny should have impelled or induced him to take instead that way of work which has given his memory a right to live with that of men who could never have taken another way than they took; which has made it honourable and venerable to all who have any reverence for English poetry or regard for English fame; which has set him for ever in the highest place among the servants and interpreters of Homer, and allowed us to inscribe in our imagination, as on the pedestal of a statue reared in thought to the father of our tragic verse, the name of George Chapman not too discreditably far beneath the name of Christopher Marlowe.
APPENDIX
The following list of passages extracted from Chapman’s poems by the editor of the Elizabethan anthology published in 1600 under the name of England’s Parnassus; or, The Choicest Flowers of our Modern Poets, was drawn up from my own copy of the original edition before I was aware that a similar list had been compiled by Mr. J. P. Collier to accompany and illustrate a private reprint of the book. From this source I learn that one extract given at as from Chapman is in fact taken from the Albion’s England of Warner; as indeed, though acquainted only with fragmentary excerpts from that poem, I had already conjectured that it must be. This is preceded by another extract signed with the name of Chapman, which according to Mr. Collier is discoverable in Ovid’s Banquet of Sense but after a second and third search through every turn and recess of that dense and torrid jungle of bad and good verses I have failed to light on this particular weed or flower. Five other extracts have baffled alike my own researches and the far more capable inquisition of even Mr. Collier’s learning; nor have they proved traceable by the energy and enthusiasm of Chapman’s latest editor, who has properly included them in his text as authentic fragments of unknown poems by the writer to whom four of them have been assigned by Robert Allot, the editor of England’s Parnassus. The second of these five passages he ascribes to Spenser; Spenser’s it undoubtedly is not; and as it is followed by an excerpt from Chapman’s Hero and Leander, which is likewise bestowed on Spenser by the too hasty liberality of the old editor, we have some additional reason to rely on the unmistakable evidence of the style, which bears immediate witness to the peculiar handiwork of Chapman. The last excerpt but one seems familiar to me, and is rather in the manner of Greene or Peele and their fellows than of Chapman or any later poet; I cannot but think that a student more deeply read than I in the poems interspersed among the romances of Greene and Lodge might be able to trace both the two last passages of the five here fathered on Chapman to the hand of one or the other. They have the fluency or fluidity rather of the blank verse written by the smaller scholastic poets whom we may see grouped about the feet of Marlowe; the same facile profusion and effusion of classic imagery, the same equable elegance and graceful tenuity of style, crossed here and there by lines of really high and tender beauty. It may be thought that in that case they would have been as speedily and as surely tracked by Mr. Collier as were the verses transferred from Warner to Chapman; but the most learned and acute among scholars cannot always remember the right place for all things on which his eye must have lit in the course of a lifelong study; and I find in Mr. Collier’s list two passages, one given at of England’s Parnassus under the heading ‘Bliss,’ the other at under the heading ‘Gifts,’ marked as of unknown origin, of which the first occurs in the fifth sestiad of Chapman’s Hero and Leander, the second in his Shadow of Night. These in the list that follows are assigned to their proper places. The number of the page referred to on the left is that in England’s Parnassus; the number on the right refers to the page in which the same passage appears in the first edition of Chapman’s collected poems. List of Passages extracted from Chapman’s Poems in ‘England’s Parnassus; or, The Choicest Flowers of our Modern Poets.’ 1600.
There are thus in this anthology no less than eighty-one extracts ascribed to Chapman, besides two of which one is known and the other suspected to be the work of his hand; these are wrongly assigned to Spenser. At the time of this publication Chapman was in his forty-second year; he had published but two plays and three volumes of verse, the third being his continuation of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. Of the eighty-three passages numbered above, thirty-two are taken from this poem, twenty-five from Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, ten from The Shadow of Night, eight from The Contention of Phillis and Flora, a quaint and sometimes a graceful version into the Elizabethan dialect of a Latin or more probably a quasi-Latin poem ascribed by Ritson to one of the most famous among mediaeval masters; one is taken from the first scene of his first play, one is spurious, and six (including the passage wrongly referred in a former list to Ovid’s Banquet of Sense), whether spurious or genuine, have yet to be traced to their true source. In his critical memoir of Marlowe (Works, vol. i. vii, ed. 1850), Mr. Dyce observes that ‘the editor of England’s Parnassus appears never to have resorted to manuscript sources’; and if, as is of course most probable, the supposition of that great scholar and careful critic be well founded, we must conclude that these passages, as well as the more precious and exquisite fragment of a greater poet which called forth this remark from his editor, were extracted by Allot from some printed book or books long lost to human sight. One small but noticeable extract of two lines and a half descriptive of midnight is evidently, I think, from a lost play. The taste of the worthy person who compiled this first English anthology was remarkable apparently for its equal relish of good verse and bad; but we may be grateful that it was by no means confined to the more popular and dominant authors of his age, such as Spenser and Sidney; since his faculty of miscellaneous admiration has been the means of preserving many curious fragments of fine or quaint verse, and occasionally a jewel of such price as the fragment of Marlowe which alike for tone of verse and tune of thought so vividly recalls Shelley’s poem, The Question, written in the same metre and spirit, that one is tempted to dream that some particles of the ‘predestined plot of dust and soul’ which had once gone to make up the elder must have been used again in the composition of the younger poet, who in fiery freedom of thought and speech was like no other of our greatest men but Marlowe, and in that as in his choice of tragic motive was so singularly like this one.
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The Complete Poetical Works of George Chapman Page 238