Conceit you me: as having clasped a rose Within my palm, the rose being ta’en away, My hand retains a little breath of sweet, So may man’s trunk, his spirit slipped away, Hold still a faint perfume of his sweet guest. ’Tis so: for when discursive powers fly out, And roam in progress through the bounds of heaven, The soul itself gallops along with them As chieftain of this winged troop of thought, Whilst the dull lodge of spirit standeth waste Until the soul return.
Then follows a passage of sheer gibberish; then a dialogue of the noblest and most dramatic eloquence; then a chaotic alternation of sense and nonsense, bad Italian and mixed English, abject farce and dignified rhetoric, spirited simplicity and bombastic jargon. It would be more and less than just to take this act as a sample or a symbol of the author’s usual way of work; but I cannot imagine that a parallel to it, for evil and for good, could be found in the works of any other writer.
The Muse of this poet is no maiden of such pure and august beauty as enthralls us with admiration of Webster’s; she has not the gypsy-brightness and vagrant charm of Dekker’s, her wild soft glances and flashing smiles and fading traces of tears; she is no giddy girl, but a strong woman with fine irregular features, large and luminous eyes, broad intelligent forehead, eyebrows so thick and close together that detraction might call her beetle-browed, powerful mouth and chin, fine contralto voice (with an occasional stammer), expression alternately repellent and attractive, but always striking and sincere. No one has ever found her lovely; but there are times when she has a fascination of her own which fairer and more famous singers might envy her; and the friends she makes are as sure to be constant as she, for all her occasional roughness and coarseness, is sure to be loyal in the main to the nobler instincts of her kind and the loftier traditions of her sisterhood.
THOMAS MIDDLETON
If it be true, as we are told on high authority, that the greatest glory of England is her literature and the greatest glory of English literature is its poetry, it is not less true that the greatest glory of English poetry lies rather in its dramatic than its epic or its lyric triumphs. The name of Shakespeare is above the names even of Milton and Coleridge and Shelley: and the names of his comrades in art and their immediate successors are above all but the highest names in any other province of our song. There is such an overflowing life, such a superb exuberance of abounding and exulting strength, in the dramatic poetry of the half-century extending from 1590 to 1640, that all other epochs of English literature seem as it were but half awake and half alive by comparison with this generation of giants and of gods. There is more sap in this than in any other branch of the national bay-tree: it has an energy in fertility which reminds us rather of the forest than the garden or the park. It is true that the weeds and briers of the underwood are but too likely to embarrass and offend the feet of the rangers and the gardeners who trim the level flower-plots or preserve the domestic game of enclosed and ordered lowlands in the tamer demesnes of literature. The sun is strong and the wind sharp in the climate which reared the fellows and the followers of Shakespeare. The extreme inequality and roughness of the ground must also be taken into account when we are disposed, as I for one have often been disposed, to wonder beyond measure at the apathetic ignorance of average students in regard of the abundant treasure to be gathered from this wildest and most fruitful province in the poetic empire of England. And yet, since Charles Lamb threw open its gates to all comers in the ninth year of the nineteenth century, it cannot but seem strange that comparatively so few should have availed themselves of the entry to so rich and royal an estate. The subsequent labors of Mr. Dyce made the rough ways plain and the devious paths straight for all serious and worthy students. And now again Mr. Bullen has taken up a task than which none more arduous and important, none worthier of thanks and praise, can be undertaken by an English scholar. In his beautiful and valuable edition of Marlowe there are but two points to which exception may be taken. It was, I think, a fault of omission to exclude the apocryphal play of “Lust’s Dominion” from a place in the appendix: it was, I am certain, a fault of commission to admit instead of it the much bepuffed and very puffy rubbish of the late Mr. Home. That clever, versatile, and energetic writer never went so far out of his depth or floundered so pitifully in such perilous waters as when he ventured to put verses of his own into the mouth of Christopher Marlowe. These errors we must all hope to see rectified in a second issue of the text: and meantime we can but welcome with all possible gratitude and applause the magnificent series of old plays by unknown writers which we owe to the keen research and the fine appreciation of Marlowe’s latest editor. Of these I may find some future occasion to speak: my present business is with the admirable poet who has been promoted to the second place in Mr. Bullen’s collection of the English dramatists.
The selection of Middleton for so distinguished a place of honor may probably not approve itself to the judgment of all experts in dramatic literature. Charles Lamb, as they will all remember, would have advised the editor “to begin with the collected plays of Heywood”: which as yet, like the plays of Dekker and of Chapman, remain unedited in any serious or scholarly sense of the term. The existing reprints merely reproduce, without adequate elucidation or correction, the corrupt and chaotic text of the worst early editions: while Middleton has for upward of half a century enjoyed the privilege denied to men who are usually accounted his equals if not his superiors in poetic if not in dramatic genius. Even for an editor of the ripest learning and the highest ability there is comparatively little to do where Mr. Dyce has been before him in the field. However, we must all give glad and grateful welcome to a new edition of a noble poet who has never yet received his full meed of praise and justice: though our gratitude and our gladness may be quickened and dilated by the proverbial sense of further favors to come.
The first word of modern tribute to the tragic genius of Thomas Middleton was not spoken by Charles Lamb. Four years before the appearance of the priceless volume which established his fame forever among all true lovers of English poetry by copious excerpts from five of his most characteristic works, Walter Scott, in a note on the fifty-sixth stanza of the second fytte of the metrical romance of “Sir Tristrem,” had given a passing word of recognition to the “horribly striking” power of “some passages” in Middleton’s masterpiece: which was first reprinted eleven years later, in the fourth volume of Dilke’s Old Plays. Lamb, surprisingly enough, has given not a single extract from that noble tragedy: it was reserved for Leigh Hunt, when speaking of its author, to remark that “there is one character of his (De Flores in ‘The Changeling’) which, for effect at once tragical, probable, and poetical, surpasses anything I know of in the drama of domestic life.” The praise is not a whit too high; the truth could not have been better said.
The play with which Mr. Bullen, altering the arrangement adopted by Mr. Dyce, opens his edition of Middleton, is a notable example of the best and the worst qualities which distinguish or disfigure the romantic comedy of the Shakespearean age. The rude and reckless composition, the rough intrusion of savorless farce, the bewildering combinations of incident and the far more bewildering fluctuations of character — all the inconsistencies, incongruities, incoherences of the piece are forgotten when the reader remembers and reverts to the passages of exquisite and fascinating beauty which relieve and redeem the utmost errors of negligence and haste. To find anything more delightful, more satisfying in its pure and simple perfection of loveliness, we must turn to the very best examples of Shakespeare’s youthful work. Nay, it must be allowed that in one or two of the master’s earliest plays — in “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” for instance — we shall find nothing comparable for charm and sincerity of sweet and passionate fancy with such enchanting verses as these:
O happy persecution, I embrace thee With an unfettered soul! So sweet a thing It is to sigh upon the rack of love, Where each calamity is groaning witness Of the poor martyr’s faith. I never heard Of any true affection, but ’twas nipt Wit
h care, that, like the caterpillar, eats The leaves off the spring’s sweetest book, the rose. Love, bred on earth, is often nursed in hell: By rote it reads woe, ere it learn to spell.
Again: the “secure tyrant, but unhappy lover,” whose prisoner and rival has thus expressed his triumphant resignation, is counselled by his friend to “go laugh and lie down,” as not having slept for three nights; but answers, in words even more delicious than his supplanter’s:
Alas, how can I? he that truly loves Burns out the day in idle fantasies; And when the lamb bleating doth bid good-night Unto the closing day, then tears begin To keep quick time unto the owl, whose voice Shrieks like the bellman in the lover’s ears: Love’s eye the jewel of sleep, O, seldom wears! The early lark is wakened from her bed, Being only by love’s plaints disquieted; And, singing in the morning’s ear, she weeps, Being deep in love, at lovers’ broken sleeps: But say a golden slumber chance to tie With silken strings the cover of love’s eye, Then dreams, magician-like, mocking present Pleasures, whose fading leaves more discontent.
Perfect in music, faultless in feeling, exquisite in refined simplicity of expression, this passage is hardly more beautiful and noble than one or two in the play which follows. “The Phoenix” is a quaint and homely compound of satirical realism in social studies with Utopian invention in the figure of an ideal prince, himself a compound of Harun-al-Rashid and “Albert the Good,” who wanders through the play as a detective in disguise, and appears in his own person at the close to discharge in full the general and particular claims of justice and philanthropy. The whole work is slight and sketchy, primitive if not puerile in parts, but easy and amusing to read; the confidence reposed by the worthy monarch in noblemen of such unequivocal nomenclature as Lord Proditor, Lussurioso, and Infesto, is one of the signs that we are here still on the debatable borderland between the old Morality and the new Comedy — a province where incarnate vices and virtues are seen figuring and posturing in what can scarcely be called masquerade. But the two fine soliloquies of Phoenix on the corruption of the purity of law (act i. scene iv.) and the profanation of the sanctity of marriage (act ii. scene ii.) are somewhat riper and graver in style, with less admixture of rhyme and more variety of cadence, than the lovely verses above quoted. Milton’s obligation to the latter passage is less direct than his earlier obligation to a later play of Middleton’s from which he transferred one of the most beautiful as well as most famous images in “Lycidas”: but his early and intimate acquaintance with Middleton had apparently (as Mr. Dyce seems to think) left in the ear of the blind old poet a more or less distinct echo from the noble opening verses of the dramatist’s address to “reverend and honorable matrimony.”
Mr. Dyce would no doubt have altered his opinion had he lived to see the evidence adduced by the Director of the New Meltun Society that the real author of “A Game at Chess” was none other than John Milton himself, whose earliest poems had appeared the year before the publication of that anti-papal satire. This discovery is only less curious and precious than a later revelation which we must accept on the same authority, that “Comus” was written by Sir John Suckling, “Paradise Regained” by Lord Rochester, and “Samson Agonistes” by Elkanah Settle: while on the other hand it may be affirmed with no less confidence that Milton — who never would allow his name to be spelled right on the title-page or under the dedication of any work published by him — owed his immunity from punishment after the Restoration to the admitted fact that he was the real author of Dryden’s “Astraea Redux.”
In “Michaelmas Term” the realism of Middleton’s comic style is no longer alloyed or flavored with poetry or fancy. It is an excellent Hogarthian comedy, full of rapid and vivid incident, of pleasant or indignant humor. Its successor, “A Trick to Catch the Old One,” is by far the best play Middleton had yet written, and one of the best he ever wrote. The merit of this and his other good comedies does not indeed consist in any new or subtle study of character, any Shakespearean creation or Jonsonian invention of humors or of men: the spendthrifts and the misers, the courtesans and the dotards, are figures borrowed from the common stock of stage tradition: it is the vivid variety of incident and intrigue, the freshness and ease and vigor of the style, the clear straightforward energy and vivacity of the action, that the reader finds most praiseworthy in the best comic work of such ready writers as Middleton and Dekker. The dialogue has sometimes touches of real humor and flashes of genuine wit: but its readable and enjoyable quality is generally independent of these. Very witty writing may be very dreary reading, for want of natural animation and true dramatic movement: and in these qualities at least the rough-and-ready work of our old dramatists is seldom if ever deficient.
It is, however, but too probable that the reader’s enjoyment may be crossed with a dash of exasperation when he finds a writer of real genius so reckless of fame and self-respect as the pressure of want or the weariness of overwork seems but too often and too naturally to have made too many of the great dramatic journeymen whose powers were half wasted or half worn out in the struggle for bare bread. No other excuse than this can be advanced for the demerit of Middleton’s next comedy. Had the author wished to show how well and how ill he could write at his worst and at his best, he could have given no fairer proof than by the publication of two plays issued under his name in the same year 1608. “The Family of Love” is, in my judgment, unquestionably and incomparably the worst of Middleton’s plays: very coarse, very dull, altogether distasteful and ineffectual. As a religious satire it is so utterly pointless as to leave no impression of any definite folly or distinctive knavery in the doctrine or the practice of the particular sect held up by name to ridicule: an obscure body of feather-headed fanatics, concerning whom we can only be certain that they were decent and inoffensive in comparison with the yelling Yahoos whom the scandalous and senseless license of our own day allows to run and roar about the country unmuzzled and unwhipped.
There is much more merit in the broad comedy of “Your Five Gallants,” a curious burlesque study of manners and morals not generally commendable for imitation. The ingenious and humorous invention which supplies a centre for the picture and a pivot for the action is most singularly identical with the device of a modern detective as recorded by the greatest English writer of his day. “The Butcher’s Story,” told to Dickens by the policeman who had played the part of the innocent young butcher, may be profitably compared by lovers of detective humor with the story of Fitsgrave — a “thrice worthy” gentleman who under the disguise of a young gull fresh from college succeeds in circumventing and unmasking the five associated swindlers of variously villanous professions by whom a fair and amiable heiress is beleaguered and befooled. The play is somewhat crude and hasty in construction, but full of life and fun and grotesque variety of humorous event.
Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series) Page 341