Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  There is nothing incongruous in his appearance as a playwright in partnership with Middleton or with Chettle, with Haughton or with Day; but a stranger association than that of Massinger’s name with Dekker’s it would not be easy to conceive. Could either poet have lent the other something of his own best quality, could Massinger have caught from Dekker the freshness and spontaneity of his poetic inspiration, and Dekker have learned of Massinger the conscientious excellence and studious self-respect of his dramatic workmanship, the result must have been one of the noblest and completest masterpieces of the English stage. As it is, the famous and beautiful play which we owe to the alliance of their powers is a proverbial example of incongruous contrasts and combinations. The opening and the closing scenes were very properly and very fortunately consigned to the charge of the younger and sedater poet: so that, whatever discrepancy may disturb the intervening acts, the grave and sober harmonies of a temperate and serious artist begin and end the concert in perfect correspondence of consummate execution. “The first act of ‘The Virgin Martyr,’” said Coleridge, “is as fine an act as I remember in any play.” And certainly it would be impossible to find one in which the business of the scene is more skilfully and smoothly opened, with more happiness of arrangement, more dignity and dexterity of touch. But most lovers of poetry would give it all, and a dozen such triumphs of scenical and rhetorical composition, for the brief dialogue in the second act between the heroine and her attendant angel. Its simplicity is so childlike, its inspiration so pure in instinct and its expression so perfect in taste, its utterance and its abstinence, its effusion and its reserve, are so far beyond praise or question or any comment but thanksgiving, that these forty-two lines, homely and humble in manner as they are if compared with the refined rhetoric and the scrupulous culture of Massinger, would suffice to keep the name of Dekker sweet and safe forever among the most memorable if not among the most pre-eminent of his kindred and his age. The four scenes of rough and rank buffoonery which deface this act and the two following have given very reasonable offence to critics from whom they have provoked very unreasonable reflections. That they represent the coarser side of the genius whose finer aspect is shown in the sweetest passages of the poem has never been disputed by any one capable of learning the rudiments or the accidence of literary criticism. An admirable novelist and poet who had the misfortune to mistake himself for a theologian and a critic was unlucky enough to assert that he knew not on what ground these brutal buffooneries had been assigned to their unmistakable author; in other words, to acknowledge his ignorance of the first elements of the subject on which it pleased him to write in a tone of critical and spiritual authority. Not even when his unwary and unscrupulous audacity of self-confidence impelled Charles Kingsley to challenge John Henry Newman to the duel of which the upshot left him gasping so piteously on the ground selected for their tournament — not even then did the author of Hypatia display such a daring and immedicable capacity of misrepresentation based on misconception as when this most ingenuously disingenuous of all controversialists avowed himself “aware of no canons of internal criticism which would enable us to decide as boldly as Mr. Gifford does that all the indecency is Dekker’s and all the poetry Massinger’s.” Now the words of Gifford’s note on the dialogue of which I have already spoken, between the saint and the angel, are these: “What follows is exquisitely beautiful.... I am persuaded that this also was written by Dekker.” And seeing that no mortal critic but Kingsley ever dreamed of such absurdity as Kingsley rushes forward to refute, his controversial capacity will probably be regarded by all serious students of poetry or criticism as measurable by the level of his capacity for accurate report of fact or accurate citation of evidence.

  There are times when we are tempted to denounce the Muse of Dekker as the most shiftless and shameless of slovens or of sluts; but when we consider the quantity of work which she managed to struggle or shuffle through with such occasionally admirable and memorable results, we are once more inclined to reclaim for her a place of honor among her more generally respectable or reputable sisters. I am loath to believe what I see no reason to suppose, that she was responsible for the dismal drivel of a poem on the fall of Jerusalem, which is assigned, on the surely dangerous ground of initials subscribed under the dedication, to a writer who had the misfortune to share these initials with Thomas Deloney. The ballad-writing hack may have been capable of sinking so far below the level of a penny ballad as to perpetrate this monstrous outrage on human patience and on English verse; but the most conclusive evidence would be necessary to persuade a jury of competent readers that a poet must be found guilty of its authorship. And we know that a pamphlet or novelette of Deloney’s called “Thomas of Reading; or, the Six Worthy Yeomen of the West,” was ascribed to Dekker until the actual author was discovered. Dr. Grosart, to whom we owe the first collected edition of Dekker’s pamphlets, says in the introduction to the fifth of his beautiful volumes that he should have doubted the responsibility of Dekker for a poem with which it may perhaps be unfair to saddle even so humble a hackney on the poetic highway as the jaded Pegasus of Deloney, had he not been detected as the author of another religious book. But this latter is a book of the finest and rarest quality — one of its author’s most unquestionable claims to immortality in the affection and admiration of all but the most unworthy readers; and “Canaan’s Calamity” is one of the worst metrical samples extant of religious rubbish. As far as such inferential evidence can be allowed to attest anything, the fact of Dekker’s having written one of the most beautiful and simple of religious books in prose tends surely rather to disprove than to prove his authorship of one of the feeblest and most pretentious of semi-sacred rhapsodies in verse.

  It would be a very notable addition to Dekker’s claims on our remembrance if he had indeed written the admirable narrative, worthy of Defoe at his very best, which describes with such impressive simplicity of tragic effect the presageful or premonitory anguish of a man on his unconscious way to a sudden and a secret death of unimaginable horror. Had Deloney done more such work as this, and abjured the ineffectual service of an inauspicious Muse, his name would now be famous among the founders and the masters of realistic fiction.

  Among his numerous pamphlets, satirical or declamatory, on the manners of his time and the observations of his experience, one alone stands out as distinct from the rest by right of such astonishing superiority in merit of style and interest of matter that I prefer to reserve it for separate and final consideration. But it would require more time and labor than I can afford to give an adequate account of so many effusions or improvisations as served for fuel to boil the scanty and precarious pot of his uncertain and uncomfortable sustenance. “The Wonderful Year” of the death of Elizabeth, the accession of James, and the devastation of London by pestilence, supplied him with matter enough for one of his quaintest and liveliest tracts: in which the historical part has no quality so valuable or remarkable as the grotesque mixture of horror and humor in the anecdotes appended “like a merry epilogue to a dull play, of purpose to shorten the lives of long winter’s nights that lie watching in the dark for us,” with touches of rude and vivid pleasantry not unworthy to remind us, I dare not say of the Decameron, but at least of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. In “The Seven Deadly Sins of London” — one of the milder but less brilliant Latter-day Pamphlets of a gentler if no less excitable Carlyle — there are touches of earnest eloquence as well as many quaint and fitful illustrations of social history; but there is less of humorous vigor and straightforward realism than in the preceding tract. And yet there are good things to be gathered out of this effusive and vehement lay sermon; this sentence, for example, is worth recollection: “He is not slothful that is only lazy, that only wastes his good hours and his silver in luxury and licentious ease: — no, he is the true slothful man, that does no good.” And there is genuine insight as well as honesty and courage in his remonstrance with the self-love and appeal against the self-deceit of his
countrymen, so prone to cry out on the cruelty of others, on the blood-thirstiness of Frenchmen and Spaniards, and to overlook the heavy-headed brutality of their own habitual indifference and neglect. Although the cruelty of penal laws be now abrogated, yet the condition of the poorest among us is assuredly not such that we can read without a sense of their present veracity the last words of this sentence: “Thou set’st up posts to whip them when they are alive: set up an hospital to comfort them being sick, or purchase ground for them to dwell in when they be well; and that is, when they be dead.” The next of Dekker’s tracts is more of a mere imitation than any of his others: the influence of a more famous pamphleteer and satirist, Tom Nash, is here not only manifest as that of a model, but has taken such possession of his disciple that he is hardly more than a somewhat servile copyist; not without a touch of his master’s more serious eloquence, but with less than little of his peculiar energy and humor. That rushing wind of satire, that storm of resonant invective, that inexhaustible volubility of contempt, which rages through the controversial writings of the lesser poet, has sunk to a comparative whisper; the roar of his Homeric or Rabelaisian laughter to a somewhat forced and artificial chuckle. This “News from Hell, brought by the Devil’s Carrier,” and containing “The Devil’s Answer to Pierce Penniless,” might have miscarried by the way without much more loss than that of such an additional proof as we could have been content to spare of Dekker’s incompetence to deal with a subject which he was curiously fond of handling in earnest and in jest. He seems indeed to have fancied himself, if not something of a Dante, something at least of a Quevedo; but his terrors are merely tedious, and his painted devils would not terrify a babe. In this tract, however, there are now and then some fugitive felicities of expression; and this is more than can be said for either the play or the poem in which he has gone, with feebler if not more uneasy steps than Milton’s Satan, over the same ground of burning marl. There is some spirit in the prodigal’s denunciation of his miserly father: but the best thing in the pamphlet is the description of the soul of a hero bound for paradise, whose name is given only in the revised and enlarged edition which appeared a year later under the title of “A Knight’s Conjuring; done in earnest; discovered in jest.” The narrative of “William Eps his death” is a fine example of that fiery sympathy with soldiers which glows in so many pages of Dekker’s verse, and flashes out by fits through the murky confusion of his worst and most formless plays; but the introduction of thil hero is as fine a passage of prose as he has left us:

  The foremost of them was a personage of so composed a presence, that Nature and Fortune had done him wrong, if they had not made him a soldier. In his countenance there was a kind of indignation, fighting with a kind of exalted joy, which by his very gesture were apparently decipherable; for he was jocund, that his soul went out of him in so glorious a triumph; but disdainfully angry, that she wrought her enlargement through no more dangers: yet were there bleeding witnesses enow on his breast, which testified, he did not yield till he was conquered, and was not conquered, till there was left nothing of a man in him to be overcome.

  That the poet’s loyalty and devotion were at least as ardent when offered by his gratitude to sailors as to soldiers we may see by this description of “The Seaman” in his next work:

  A progress doth he take from realm to realm, With goodly water-pageants borne before him; The safety of the land sits at his helm, No danger here can touch, but what runs o’er him: But being in heaven’s eye still, it doth restore him To livelier spirts; to meet death with ease, If thou wouldst know thy maker, search the seas.

  The italics are here the author’s.

  These homely but hearty lines occur in a small and mainly metrical tract bearing a title so quaint that I am tempted to transcribe it at length: “The Double PP. A Papist in Arms. Bearing Ten several Shields. Encountered by the Protestant. At Ten several Weapons. A Jesuit Marching before them. Cominùs and Eminùs.” There are a few other vigorous and pointed verses in this little patriotic impromptu, but the greater part of it is merely curious and eccentric doggrel.

  The next of Dekker’s tracts or pamphlets was the comparatively well-known “Gull’s Hornbook.” This brilliant and vivid little satire is so rich in simple humor, and in life-like photography taken by the sunlight of an honest and kindly nature, that it stands second only to the author’s masterpiece in prose, “The Bachelor’s Banquet,” which has waited so much longer for even the limited recognition implied by a private reprint. There are so many witty or sensible or humorous or grotesque excerpts to be selected from this pamphlet — and not from the parts borrowed or copied from a foreign satire on the habits of slovenly Hollanders — that I take the first which comes under my notice on reopening the book; a study which sets before us in fascinating relief the professional poeticule of a period in which as yet clubs, coteries, and newspapers were not — or at the worst were nothing to speak of:

  If you be a Poet, and come into the Ordinary (though it can be no great glory to be an ordinary Poet) order yourself thus. Observe no man, doff not cap to that gentleman to-day at dinner, to whom, not two nights since, you were beholden for a supper; but, after a turn or two in the room, take occasion (pulling out your gloves) to have Epigram, or Satire, or Sonnet fastened in one of them, that may (as it were unwittingly to you) offer itself to the Gentlemen: they will presently desire it: but, without much conjuration from them, and a pretty kind of counterfeit lothness in yourself, do not read it; and, though it be none of your own, swear you made it.

  This coupling of injunction and prohibition is worthy of Shakespeare or of Sterne:

  Marry, if you chance to get into your hands any witty thing of another man’s, that is somewhat better, I would counsel you then, if demand be made who composed it, you may say: “‘Faith, a learned Gentleman, a very worthy friend.” And this seeming to lay it on another man will be counted either modesty in you, or a sign that you are not ambitious of praise, or else that you dare not take it upon you, for fear of the sharpness it carries with it.

  The modern poetaster by profession knows a trick worth any two of these: but it is curious to observe the community of baseness, and the comparative innocence of awkwardness and inexperience, which at once connote the species and denote the specimens of the later and the earlier animalcule.

  The “Jests to make you merry,” which in Dr. Grosart’s edition are placed after “The Gull’s Horn-book,” though dated two years earlier, will hardly give so much entertainment to any probable reader in our own time as “The Misery of a Prison, and a Prisoner,” will give him pain to read of in the closing pages of the same pamphlet, when he remembers how long — at the lowest computation — its author had endured the loathsome and hideous misery which he has described with such bitter and pathetic intensity and persistency in detail. Well may Dr. Grosart say that “it shocks us to-day, though so far off, to think of 1598 to 1616 onwards covering so sorrowful and humiliating trials for so finely touched a spirit as was Dekker’s”; but I think as well as hope that there is no sort of evidence to that surely rather improbable as well as deplorable effect. It may be “possible,” but it is barely possible, that some “seven years’ continuous imprisonment” is the explanation of an ambiguous phrase which is now incapable of any certain solution, and capable of many an interpretation far less deplorable than this. But in this professedly comic pamphlet there are passages as tragic, if not as powerful, as any in the immortal pages of Pickwick and Little Dorrit which deal with a later but a too similar phase of prison discipline and tradition:

  The thing that complained was a man:— “Thy days have gone over thee like the dreams of a fool, thy nights like the watchings of a madman. — Oh sacred liberty! with how little devotion do men come into thy temples, when they cannot bestow upon thee too much honor! Thy embracements are more delicate than those of a young bride with her lover, and to be divorced from thee is half to be damned! For what else is a prison but the very next door to hell? It is
a man’s grave, wherein he walks alive: it is a sea wherein he is always shipwrackt: it is a lodging built out of the world: it is a wilderness where all that wander up and down grow wild, and all that come into it are devoured.”