1
The Library of
HE
UNIVERS!
COMMUNE VINCULUM
OMNIBUS ARTIBUS
OF
MINNESOTA
Class 820.9
Book W57-1
E. P. WHIPPLE'S WRITINGS.
LECTURES ON SUBJECTS CONNECTED WITH
LITERATURE AND LIFE.
1 vol. 16mo.
ESSAYS AND REVIEWS.
2 vols. 16mo.
CHARACTER AND CHARACTERISTIC MEN.
1 vol. 16mo.
FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO., Publishers.
THE
LITERATURE
OF
THE AGE OF ELIZABETH.
BY
EDWIN P. WHIPPLE.
UNIVERSITY OF
VLOSONNIW
LIBRARY
BOSTON:
FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.,
· SUCCESSORS TO TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
1869.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by
FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
UNIVERSITY PRESS: WELCH, BIGELOW, & Co.,
CAMBRIDGE.
JUN 28 '28
THESE essays on
"The Literature of the Age
of Elizabeth" were originally delivered as lec-
tures before the Lowell Institute, in the spring
of 1859, and were first printed in The Atlantic
Monthly during the years 1867 and 1868.
UNIVERSITY OF
MINNESOTA
LIBRARY
CONTENTS.
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.
MARLOWE
SHAKESPEARE. I. .
SHAKESPEARE. II.
BEN JONSON
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS. HEYWOOD, MIDDLETON,
MARSTON, DEKKAR, WEBSTER, AND CHAPMAN
•
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, MASSINGER, AND FORD
SPENSER
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. - PIIINEAS AND GILES FLETCH-
PAGE
1
32
57
85
119
157
189
ER, DANIEL, DRAYTON, WARNER, DONNE, DAVIES, HALL,
WOTTON, AND HERBERT.
221
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH
•
250
BACON. I.
•
278
L
BACON. II.
HOOKER
306
340
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE ELIZABETHAN
LITERATURE.
J
MARLOWE.
phrase "literature of the age of Elizabeth" is
The of in
THE
not confined to the literature produced in the reign
of Elizabeth, but is a general name for an era in litera-
ture, commencing about the middle of her reign, in
1580, reaching its maturity in the reign of James I.,
between 1603 and 1626, and perceptibly declining dur-
ing the reign of his son. It is called by the name of
Elizabeth, because it was produced in connection with
influences which originated or culminated in her time,
and which did not altogether cease to act after her
death; and these influences give to its great works,
whether published in her reign or in the reign of James,
certain mental and moral characteristics in common.
The most glorious of all the expressions of the English
mind, it is, like every other outburst of national genius,
essentially inexplicable in itself. It occurred, but why
it occurred we can answer but loosely. We can trace
some of the influences which operated on Spenser,
Shakespeare, Bacon, Hooker, and Raleigh, but the
!
1
A
2
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE
genesis of their genius is beyond our criticism. There
was abundant reason, in the circumstances around them,
why they should exercise creative power; but the pos-
session of the power is an ultimate fact, and defies
explanation. Still, the appearance of so many eminent.
minds in one period indicates something in the circum-
stances of the period which aided and stimulated, if it
did not cause, the marvel; and a consideration of these
circumstances, though it may not enable us to penetrate
the mystery of genius, may still shed some light on its
character and direction.
¥
The impulse given to the English mind in the age of
Elizabeth was but one effect of that great movement
of the European mind whose steps were marked by the
revival of letters, the invention of printing, the study
of the ancient classics, the rise of the middle class, the
discovery of America, the Reformation, the formation
of national literatures, and the general clash and con-
flict of the old with the new, the old existing in de-
caying institutions, the new in the ardent hopes and
organizing genius by which institutions are created. If
the mind was not always emancipated from error during
the stir and tumult of this movement, it was still stung
into activity, and compelled to think; for if authority,
whether secular or sacerdotal, is questioned, authority
no less than innovation instinctively frames reasons for
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.
со
its existence. If power was thus driven to use the
weapons of the brain, thought, in its attempt to become
fact, was no less driven to use the weapons of force.
Ideas and opinions were thus all the more directly per-
ceived and tenaciously held, from the fact that they
kindled strong passions, and frequently demanded, not
merely the assent of the intellect, but the hazard of for-
tune and life.
At the time Elizabeth ascended the English throne,
in 1558, the religious element of this movement had
nearly spent its first force. There was a comparatively
small band of intensely earnest Romanists, and perhaps
a larger band of even more intensely earnest Puritans ;
but the great majority of the people, though nominally
Roman Catholics, were willing to acquiesce in the form
given to the Protestant church by the Protestant state.
To Elizabeth belongs the proud distinction of having
been the head of the Protestant interest in Europe; but
the very word interest indicates a distinction between
Protestantism as a policy and Protestantism as a faith;
and she did not hesitate to put down with a strong hand
those of her subjects whose Protestantism most nearly
agreed with the Protestantism she aided in France and
Holland. (The Puritan Reformers, though they repre-
sented most thoroughly the doctrines and spirit of Lu-
ther and Calvin, were thus opposed by the English
4
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE
government, and were a minority of the English people.
Had they succeeded in reforming the national Church,
the national amusements, and the national taste, ac-
cording to their ideas of reform, the history and the
literature of the age of Elizabeth would have been
essentially different; but they would have broken the
continuity of the national life. English nature, with
its basis of strong sense and strong sensuality, was hos-
tile to their ascetic morality and to their practical
belief in the all-excluding importance of religious con-
cerns. Had they triumphed then, their very earnest-
ness might have made them greater, though nobler,
tyrants than the Tudors or the Stuarts; for they
would have used the arm of power to force evan-
gelical faith and austere morality on a reluctant and
resisting people. Sir Toby Belch would have had to
fight hard for his cakes and ale; and the nose of Bar-
dolph would have been deprived of the fuel that fed its
fire. (The Puritans were a great force in politics, as they
afterwards proved in the Parliaments of Charles and
the Commonwealth; but in the time of Elizabeth they
were politically but a faction, and a faction having at
one time for its head the greatest scoundrel in England,
the Earl of Leicester. They were a great force in lit-
erature, as they afterwards proved by Milton and Bun-
yan; but their position towards what is properly called
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.
5
10
the literature of the age of Elizabeth was strictly antag-
onistical. The spirit of that literature, in its poetry, its
drama, its philosophy, its divinity, was a spirit which
they disliked in some of its forms, and abhorred in
others. Their energies, though mighty, are therefore
to be deducted from the mass of energies by which that
literature was produced.
And this brings us to the first and most marked char-
acteristic of this literature, namely, that it is intensely
human. Human nature in its appetites, passions, im-
perfections, vices, virtues; in its thoughts, aspirations,
imaginations; in all the concrete forms of character in
which it finds expression, in all the heights of ecstasy
to which it soars, in all the depths of depravity to which
it sinks, this is what the Elizabethan literature rep-
resents or idealizes; and the total effect of this exhibi-
tion of human life and exposition of human capacities,
whether it be in the romance of Sidney, the poetry of
Spenser, the drama of Shakespeare, the philosophy of
Bacon, or the divinity of Hooker, is the wholesome and
inspiring effect of beauty and cheer. This belief in hu-
man nature, and tacit assumption of its right to expres-
sion, could only have arisen in an age which stimulated
human energies by affording fresh fields for their develop-
ment, and in an age whose activity was impelled by a
romantic and heroic, rather than a theological spirit.
6
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE
And the peculiar position of Elizabeth compelled her,
absolute as was her temper, to act in harmony with her
people, and to allow individual enterprise its largest scope.
Her revenue was altogether inadequate to carry on a war
with Spain and a war with Ireland, to assist the Protes-
tants of France and Holland, to inaugurate great schemes.
of American colonization, to fit out expeditions to harass
the colonies and plunder the commerce of Spain,
inadequate, in short, to make England a power of the
first class. But the patriotism of her people, coinciding
with their interests and love of adventure, urged them.
to undertake public objects as commercial speculations.
They made war on her enemies for the spoils to be ob-
tained from her enemies. Perhaps the most compre-
hensive type of the period, representing most vividly
the stimulants it presented to ambition and avarice, to
chivalrous sentiment and greed of gain, to action and to
thought, was Sir Walter Raleigh. Poet, historian,
courtier, statesman, military commander, naval com-
mander, colonizer, filibuster, he had no talent and no
accomplishment, no virtue and no vice, which the time
did not tempt into exercise. He participated in the
widely varying ambitions of Spenser and Jonson, of
Essex and Leicester, of Burleigh, Walsingham, and Sir
Nicholas Bacon, of Norris and Howard of Effingham,
of Drake, Hawkins, and Cumberland; and in all these
he was thoroughly human.
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.
7
The next characteristic of the higher literature of the
period is its breadth and preponderance of thought,
a quality which seemed native to the time, and which
was shared by the men of affairs. Indeed, no one could
serve Elizabeth well whose loyalty of heart was unac-
companied by largeness of brain. She was so sur-
rounded by foreign enemies and domestic factions, that
the sagacity which makes the fewest mistakes was her
only security against dethronement or assassination.
Her statesmen, however fixed might be their convictions
and energetic their wills, were, by the necessities of their
position, compelled to be wary, vigilant, politic, crafty,
comprehensive in their views, compromising in their
measures. The time required minds that could observe,
analyze, infer, combine, foresee, —vigorous in the grasp
of principles, exact in the scrutiny of facts. Such were
the complications of political affairs, that the difficulty,
with all but the most capacious intellects, was to decide
at all; and even they sometimes found it wise to follow
the drift of events which it was almost impossible to
shape or to guide. It might be supposed, that if, in any
person of the period, impetuosity of purpose or caprice.
of will would overbear all the restraints of prudence,
that person was Elizabeth herself; but she really was
as indecisive in conduct as she was furious in passion.
Proud, fierce, vain, haughty, vindictive; a virago and a
8
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE
coquette; ready enough to box the ears of one of her
courtiers, and threaten with an oath to unfrock one of
her bishops; despotic in her bearing towards all over
whom she had complete control; cursed, indeed, with
every internal impulse which leads to reckless action, —
she was still a thinker; and thought revealed insecuri-
ties in her position, in considering which even her impe-
rious will was puzzled into irresolution, and shrank from
the plain road of force to feel its way through the
crooked paths of hypocrisy and craft.
This comprehensiveness of thought did not, in the
men of letters, interfere with loftiness of thought; but it
connected thought with life, gave it body and form, and
made it fertile in those weighty maxims which, while
they bear directly on practical conduct, and harmonize.
with the experience of men, are also characterized by
that easy elevation of view and of tone which distin-
guishes philosophic wisdom from prudential moralizing.
The Elizabethan thinkers instinctively recognized the
truth that real thinking implies the action of the whole
nature, and not of a single isolated faculty. They were
men of large understandings; but their understandings
rarely acted apart from observation and imagination,
from sentiment, passion, and character. They not only
reasoned, but they had reason. They looked at things,
and round things, and into things, and through things.
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.
9
Though they were masters of the processes of logic,
their eminent merit was their broad grasp of the prem-
ises of logic, and their ready anticipation of the results of
logic. They could argue; but they preferred to flash
the conclusions of argument rather than to recite its
details, and their minds darted to results to which slower
intelligences creep. From the fact that they had reason
in abundance, they were somewhat chary of reasons.
Their thinking, indeed, gives us the solid, nutritious,
enriching substance of thought. While it comprehends
the outward facts of life, it connects them with those
great mental facts beheld by the inner eye of the
mind. It thus combines massive good sense with a
Platonic elevation of spiritual perception, and especially
avoids the thinness and juicelessness which are apt to
characterize the greatest efforts of the understanding,
when understanding is divorced from character.
This equipoise and interpenetration of the faculties
of the mind and the feelings of the heart, which give to
these writers their largeness, dignity, sweetness, and
power, are to be referred in a great degree to the imagi-
native element of their natures. They lived, indeed,
in an imaginative age, an age in which thought, feel-
ing, aspiration, character, whether low or exalted, aimed
to embody themselves in appropriate external forms,
and be made visible to the eye. In the great poets and
1 *
10
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE
as
philosophers this imagination existed both as ecstatic
insight of spiritual facts and as shaping power,
both the "vision and the faculty divine"; but all over the
Elizabethan society, — in dress, in manners, in speech,
in the badges of professions, in amusements, in pageants
and spectacles, — character, class, and condition, in all
their varieties, were directly imaged. Lamb calls all
this a visible poetry; and much which we now read as
poetry was simply the transference into language of the
common facts of the time.
This imaginative tendency of the national mind ap-
peared in a still higher form in that chivalrous cast of
feeling and of thought which we observe in all the
nobler men of the time. "High-erected thoughts seated
in a heart of courtesy," is Sir Philip Sidney's definition
of the gentleman; and this was the standard to which
many aspired, if few reached it. This chivalry was a
poetic reflection of the feudal age, which was departing
in its rougher and baser realities, but lingering in its
beautiful ideas and ideals, especially in the knightly love
of adventure and the knightly reverence for woman.
It gave an air of romance to acts, enterprises, and
amusements which sometimes had their vulgar side.
Raleigh tilted in silver armor before the Queen, but
the silver from which the armor was made had been
stolen from Spanish merchantmen. Sidney was eager
1
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.
11
to fight in single combat with the defamer of his uncle
Leicester, though his uncle richly deserved the gibbet.
Cumberland was a knight-errant of the seas, strangely
blending the love of glory with the love of gold, the
spirit of wild adventure with the spirit of commercial
thrift. Something imaginative, something which par-
took of the sentiment of the old time, was mingled
with the bustling practicalities of the present. If we
look at a man like Sir Francis Drake from the mere
understanding, we find it difficult to decide whether
his enterprises were private or national, whether the
patriot predominated over the pirate, or the pirate over
the patriot; but if we look at him from the Elizabethan
point of view, it is not difficult to discern an enthusi-
astic, chivalric, loyal, Protestant spirit as the presiding
element of his being and the source of his pecuniary
success. He did many things which, if done now,
would very properly send the perpetrator of them to
the gallows; yet, as a man, he was very much superior
to many a modern statesman and judge, who would
conscientiously order his execution. Vitally right, but
formally wrong, he in the Elizabethan age was im-
mensely honored.
This slight reference to a few of the Elizabethan men
of action shows that literature was but one out of many
expressions of the roused energies of the national heart
12
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE
:
we are at
and brain, and that those who performed actions which
poetry celebrates were as numerous as the poets. As
the external inducements to adopt literature as a profes-
sion were not so great as in our day, as there was no
reading public in our sense of the term,
first surprised that so much genius was diverted into
this path.
But both Elizabeth and James were learned
sovereigns; both were writers; and in the courts of
both literature and learning were the fashion, and often
the avenues to distinction in Church and State. It
was recognized that literary ability was but one phase
of general ability. Buckhurst was an eminent states-
man. Sidney and Spenser were men of affairs. Ra-
leigh could do anything. Bacon was a lawyer and
jurist. Hooker, Hall, Giles and Phineas Fletcher,
and Donne were in the Church. The patronage of
educated and accomplished nobles was extended to
numerous writers like Daniel and Drayton, who could
not have subsisted by the sale of their works. None
of these can be styled authors by profession: that sad
distinction was confined to the dramatists. In the time
of Elizabeth and James the theatre was almost the only
medium of communication between writers and the peo-
ple, and attracted to it all those who aimed to gain a
livelihood out of the products of their hearts and imagi-
nations. Its literature was the popular literature of
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.
13
C
the age. It was newspaper, magazine, novel, all in one.
the Elizabethan "Times," the Elizabethan
It was
"
"Blackwood," the Elizabethan Temple Bar : it
tempted into its arena equally the Elizabethan Thack-
erays and the Elizabethan Braddons; but the remuner-
ation it afforded to the most distinguished of the swarm
of playwrights who depended on it for bread was small.
All experienced the full bitterness of poverty, if we ex-
cept Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher. Shakespeare
was an excellent man of business, a part-proprietor of ‘a
theatre, and made his fortune. Jonson was patronized
by James, and was as much a court poet as a popular
poet. Fletcher, though the most fertile of the three in
the number of his plays, and the greatest master of
theatrical effect, did not, it is supposed, altogether de-
pend on the stage for his support. But Chapman, Dek-
kar, Field, Rowley, Massinger, and all the other pro-
fessional playwrights, were wretchedly poor. And it
must be said, that, though we are in the custom of
affirming that the circumstances of the age of Elizabeth
were pre-eminently favorable to literature, most of the
writers, including such men as Spenser and Jonson, were
in the habit of moaning or grumbling over its degeneracy,
and of wishing that they had been born in happier times.
There were, then, three centres for the literature
of the period, the Court, the Church, and the Theatre.
14
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE
Let us consider the drama first, as it was nearer the
popular heart, was the medium through which the
grandest as well as meanest minds found expression, and
was thoroughly national, or at least thoroughly nation-
alized.
England had a drama as early as the twelfth century,
a drama used by the priests as a mode of amusing
the people into a knowledge of religion. Its products
were called Miracle Plays. They were written, and
often acted, by ecclesiastics; they represented the per-
sons and events of the Scriptures, of the apocryphal
Gospels, and of the legends of saints and martyrs, and
were performed sometimes in the open air, on tempo-
rary stages and scaffolds, sometimes in churches and
chapels. The earliest play of this sort of which we
have any record was performed between the years 1100
and 1110. The general characteristic of these plays,
if we should speak after the ideas of our time, was
blasphemy, and blasphemy of the worst kind; for the
irreverent utterance of sacred names is venial compared
with the irreverent representation of sacred persons.
The object of the writers was to bring Christianity
within popular apprehension; and in the process they
burlesqued it. They belonged to a class of writers and
speakers, as common now as then, who vulgarize the
highest subjects in the attempt to popularize them,-
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.
15
who degrade religion in the attempt to make it efficient.
The writers of the Miracle Plays only appear worse
than their Protestant successors, from the greater rude-
ness in the minds and manners to which they appealed.
They did not aim to lift the people up, but to drag the
Divinity down; and, not being in any sense poets, they
could not make what was sacred familiarly apprehended,
and at the same time preserve that ideal remoteness
from ordinary life which is the condition of its being
reverently apprehended. Their religious dramas, accord-
ingly, were mostly monstrous farces, full of buffoonery
and indecency, though not without a certain coarse
humor and power of characterization. Thus, in the
play of the Deluge, Noah and his wife are close copies
of contemporary character and manners, projected on
the Bible narrative. Mrs. Noah is a shrew and a
vixen; refuses to leave her gossips and go into the ark;
scolds Noah, and is soundly whipped by him; then
wishes herself a widow, and thinks she but echoes the
feeling of all the wives in the audience, in hoping for
them the same good luck. Noah then takes occasion to
inform all the husbands present that their proper course
is to break in their wives after his fashion. By this
time the water is nearly up to his wife's neck, and she
is partly coaxed and partly forced into the ark by one?
of her sons. Again, in a play on the Adoration of the
16
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE
Shepherds, the shepherds are three English boors, who
meet with a variety of the most coarsely comical adven-
tures in their journey to Bethlehem; who, just before
the star in the east appears, get into a quarrel and fight,
after having feasted on Lancashire jammocks and Hal-
ton ale; and who, when they arrive at their destination,
present three gifts to the infant Saviour, namely, a bird,
a tennis-ball, and a bob of cherries.
The Miracle Plays were very popular, and did not
altogether die out before the reign of James. In some
of them personified abstractions came to be blended
with the persons of the drama; and in the fifteenth
century a new class of dramatic performances arose,
called Moral Plays, in which these personified abstrac-
tions pushed persons out of the piece, and ethics sup-
planted theology. There is, in some of these Moral
Plays, a great deal of ingenuity displayed in the
impersonation and allegorical representation of quali-
ties. They took strong hold of the English mind.
Pride, gluttony, sensuality, worldliness, meekness, tem-
perance, faith, in their single and in their blended
action, were often happily characterized; and, though
they were eventually banished from the drama, they
reappeared in the pageants of Elizabeth and in the
poetry of Spenser. But their popularity was doubtless
owing more to their fun than their ethics; and the two
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.
17
characters of the Devil and Vice, the laughable monster
and the laughable buffoon, were the darlings of the
multitude. In Ben Jonson's "Staple of News," Gossip
Tattle exclaims: "My husband, Timothy Tattle, God
rest his soul! was wont to say that there was no play
without a fool and a Devil in 't: he was for the Devil
still, God bless him! The Devil for his money, he
would say; I would fain see the Devil.”
Nearer to the modern Play than either the Miracle
or the Moral, was the Interlude, so called from its being
acted in the intervals of a banquet. It was a farce
in one act, and devoted to the humorous and satirical
representation of contemporary manners and charac-
ter, especially professional character. John Heywood,
the jester of Henry VIII., was the best maker of these
Interludes.
66
At the time that all of these three forms of the drama
were more or less in esteem, Nicholas Udall, a classical
scholar, produced, about the year 1540, the first English
comedy, Ralph Roister Doister," - very much supe-
rior, in incident and characterization, to "Gammer Gur-
ton's Needle," written twenty years afterwards, though
neither rises above the mere prosaic delineation, the
first of civic, the last of country life. The poetic ele-
ment, which was afterwards so conspicuous in the Eliza-
bethan drama, did not even appear in the first English
B
18
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE
tragedy, “Gorboduc," though it was written by Thomas
Sackville, the author of the Induction to the "Mirror
of Magistrates," and the only great poet that arose be-
tween Chaucer and Spenser. "Gorboduc" was acted
before Queen Elizabeth at Whitehall, by the Gentlemen
of the Inner Temple, in January, 1562. It was re-
ceived with great applause; but it appears, as read now,
singularly frigid and unimpassioned, with not even, as
Campbell says, "the unities of space and time to cir-
cumscribe its dulness." It has all the author's justness,
weight, and fertility of thought, but little of his imagi-
nation; and though celebrated as the first English play
written in blank verse, the measure, in Sackville's hands,
is wearisomely monotonous, and conveys no notion of
the elasticity and variety of which it was afterwards
found capable, when used by Marlowe and Shakespeare.
The tragedy is not deficient in terrible events, but even
its murders make us yawn.
It is probable that the fifty-two plays performed at
court between 1568 and 1580, and of which nothing is
preserved but the names, contained little to make us
regret their loss. Neither at the Royal Palace, nor the
Inns of Court, nor the Universities, at all of which
plays were performed, could a free and original national
drama be built up. This required a public theatre, and
an audience composed of all classes of the people. Ac-
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.
19
cordingly, the most important incident in the history of
the English stage was the patent granted by the crown,
in 1574, to James Burbage and his associates, players
under the protection of the Earl of Leicester, to per-
form in the City and Liberties of London, and in all
other parts of the kingdom; "as well," the phraseology
runs, "for the recreation of our loving subjects, as for
our own solace and pleasure, when we shall think fit to
see them."
But the Corporation of London, thorough Puritans,
were determined, as far as their power extended, to
prevent the Queen's subjects from having any such
"recreation," and her Majesty herself from enjoying
any such "solace and pleasure.” "Forasmuch as the
playing of interludes, and the resort to the same, are
very dangerous for the infection of the plague, whereby
infinite burdens and losses to the city may increase ; and
are very hurtful in corruption of youth with inconti-
nence and lewdness; and also great wasting both of the
time and thrift of many poor people; and great provok-
ing of the wrath of God, the ground of all plagues;
great withdrawing of the people from public prayer,
and from the service of God; and daily cried out against
by all preachers of the word of God; therefore," the
Corporation ordered, "all such interludes in public
places, and the resort to the same, shall wholly be pro-
20
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE
hibited as ungodly, and humble suit made to the Lords,
that like prohibitation be in places near the city."
The players, thus expelled the city, withdrew to the
nearest point outside the Lord Mayor's jurisdiction, and,
in 1576, erected their theatre in Blackfriars. Two thea-
tres, "The Curtain" and "The Theatre," were erected
by other companies in Shoreditch. Before the end of
the century there were at least eleven. To these round
wooden buildings, open to the sky, with only a thatched
roof over the stage, the people flocked daily for mental
excitement. There was no movable scenery; the female
characters were played by boys; and the lowest thea-
tres of our day are richer in appointments than were the
finest of the age of Elizabeth. "Such," says Malone,
66
was the poverty of the old stage, that the same person
played two or three parts; and battles on which the
fate of an empire was supposed to depend were decided
by three combatants on a side." It is difficult for us to
conceive of the popularity of the stage in those days.
One of the spies of Secretary Walsingham, writing to
his employer in 1586, thus groans over the taste of the
people: "The daily abuse of stage plays is such an
offence to the godly, and so great a hindrance to the
Gospel, as the Papists do exceedingly rejoice at the
blemish thereof, and not without cause; for every day
in the week the player's bills are set up in sundry places
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.
21
of the city;
so that, when the bells toll to the
lecturer, the trumpets sound to the stages. Whereat
the wicked faction of Rome laugheth for joy, while the
godly weep for sorrow. It is a woful sight to see
•
two hundred proud players jet in their silks, while five
hundred poor people starve in the streets.. Woe
is me! the play-houses are pestered when the churches
are naked. At the one, it is not possible to get a place;
at the other, void seats are plenty." It may here be
said, that the mutual hostility of the players and the
Puritans continued until the suppression of the theatres
under the Commonwealth; and for fifty or sixty years
the Puritans were only mentioned by the dramatists to
be mercilessly satirized. Even Shakespeare's catholic
mind was not broad enough to include them in the
range of its sympathies.
That this opposition to the stage by the staid and
sober citizens was not without cause, soon became mani-
fest. The characteristic of the drama, before Shake-
speare, was intellectual and moral lawlessness; and
most of the dramatists were men as destitute of eminent
genius as of common principle. Stephen Gosson, a
Puritan, in a tract published in 1581, attacks them on
grounds equally of taste and morals; and five years
afterwards Sir Philip Sidney speaks of the popular
plays as against all "rules of honest civility and skilful
22
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE
poetry." But Gosson indicates also the sources of their
plots. Painter's “Palace of Pleasure," a series of not
over-modest tales from the Italian; "The Golden Ass "
"The Ethiopian History"; "Amadis of France"; "The
Round Table ";- all the licentious comedies in Latin,
French, Italian, and Spanish were thoroughly ran-
sacked, he tells us, "to furnish the play-houses of Lon-
don." The result, of course, was a chaos; but a chaos
whose materials were wide and various, indicating that
the English mind was in contact with, and attempting
roughly to reproduce, the genius of Greece and Rome,
of France, Spain, and Italy, the chronicles and ro-
mances of the Middle Ages, and was hospitable to intel-
lectual influences from all quarters. What was needed
was the powerful personality and shaping imagination of
genius, to fuse these seemingly heterogeneous materials
into new and original forms. "The Faerie Queene"
of Spenser, and the drama of Shakespeare, evince.
the same assimilation of incongruous elements which
Gosson derides and denounces as it appeared in the
shapeless works of mediocrity. There was not merely
to be a new drama, but a new art, and new principles
of criticism to legitimate its creative audacities. The
materials were rich and various. The difficulty was,
that to combine them into original forms required genius,
and genius higher, broader, more energetic, more imagi-
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.
23
native, and more humane than had ever before been
directed to dramatic composition.
The immediate predecessors of Shakespeare-Greene,
Lodge, Kyd, Peele, Marlowe were all educated at
the Universities, and were naturally prejudiced in favor
of the classics. But they were, at the same time, wild
Bohemian youths, thrown upon the world of London to
turn their talents and accomplishments into the means
of livelihood or the means of debauch. They depended
principally on the popular theatres, and of course ad-
dressed the popular mind. Why, indeed, should they
write according to the rules of the classic drama? The
classic drama was a growth from the life of the times in
which it appeared. Its rules were simply generaliza-
tions from the practice of classic dramatists. A drama
suited to the tastes and wants of the people of Greece
or Rome was evidently not suited to the tastes and
wants of the people of England. The whole frame-
work of society, customs, manners, feelings, aspira-
tions, traditions, superstitions, religion, had changed;
and, as the drama is a reflection of life, either as actu-
ally existing or ideally existing, it is evident that both
the experience and the sentiments of the English audi-
ences demanded that it should be the reflection of a
new life. These dramatists, however, in emancipating
themselves from the literary jurisprudence of Greece
24
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE
and Rome, put little but individual caprice in its place.
Released from formal rules, they did not rise into the
artistic region of principles, but fell into the pit of anar-
chy and mere lawlessness. Lacking the higher imagi-
nation which conceives living ideas and organizes living
works, their dramas evince no coherence, no subordina-
tion of parts, no grasp of the subject as a whole. There
is a German play in which Adam is represented as pass-
ing across the stage," going to be created." The drama
of the age of Elizabeth, in the persons of Greene,
Peele, Kyd, and others, indicates, in some such rude
way, that it is "going to be created.”
That this dramatic shapelessness was not inconsistent
with single poetic conceptions of the greatest force and
fineness, might be proved by abundant quotations.
Lodge, for example, was a poor dramatist; but what
living poet would not be proud to own this exquisite
description, in his lyric of "Rosaline," of the person
and influence of beauty?
"Like to the clear in highest sphere,
Where all imperial glory shines,
Of selfsame color is her hair,
Whether unfolded or in twines.
"Her eyes are sapphires set in snow,
Refining heaven by every wink;
The gods do fear whenas they glow,
And I do tremble when I think.
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE.
25
"Her cheeks are like the blushing cloud
That beautifies Aurora's face;
Or like the silver-crimson shroud,
That Phoebus' smiling looks doth grace.
"Her lips are like two budded roses,
Whom ranks of lilies neighbor nigh,
Within which bounds she balm encloses,
Apt to entice a deity.
"Her neck like to a stately tower,
Where Love himself imprisoned lies,
To watch for glances every hour
From her divine and sacred eyes.
"With orient pearl, with ruby red,
With marble white, with sapphire blue,
Her body everyway is fed,
{
Yet soft in touch, and sweet in view.
"Nature herself her shape admires;
The gods are wounded in her sight;
And Love forsakes his heavenly fires,
And at her eyes his brand doth light."
But a more potent spirit than any we have men-
tioned, and the greatest of Shakespeare's predecessors,
was Christopher Marlowe, a man of humble parentage,
but with Norman blood in his brains, if not in his veins.
He was, indeed, the proudest and fiercest of intellectual
aristocrats. The son of a shoemaker, and born in 1564,
his unmistakable genius seems to have gained him
2
26
MARLOWE.
friends, who looked after his early education, and sent
him, at the age of seventeen, to the University of Cam-
bridge. He was intended for the Church, but the
Church had evidently no attractions for him. The study
of theology appears to have resulted in making him an
enemy of religion. There was, indeed, hardly a Chris-
tian element in his untamable nature; and, though he
was called a sceptic, infidelity in him took the form of
blasphemy rather than of denial. He was made up
of vehement passions, vivid imagination, and lawless
self-will; and what Hazlitt calls "a hunger and thirst
after unrighteousness" assumed the place of conscience
in his haughty and fiery spirit. Before the age of
twenty-three we find him in London, an actor and a
writer for the stage, and the author of the "great sensa-
tion work" of his time, the tragedy of "Tambur-
laine." This portentous melodrama, a strange com-
pound of inspiration and desperation, has the mark of
power equally on its absurdities and its sublimities. The
first play written in blank verse for the popular stage,
its verse has an elasticity, freedom, and variety of move-
ment which makes it as much the product of Marlowe's
mind as the thoughts and passions it conveys. It had
no precedent in the verse of preceding writers, and is
constructed, not on mechanical rules, but on vital prin-
ciples. It is the effort of a glowing mind, disdaining to
MARLOWE.
27
creep along paths previously made, and opening a new
path for itself. This scornful intellectual daring, the
source of Marlowe's originality, is also the source of his
defects. In the tragedy of "Tamburlaine" he selects
for his hero a character through whom he can express
his own extravagant impatience of physical obstacles
and moral restraints. No regard is paid to reality, even
in the dramatic sense of the word: a shaggy and savage
force dominates over everything. The writer seems to
say, with his truculent hero, "This is my mind, and I
will have it so." This self-asserting intellectual inso-
lence is accompanied by an unwearied energy, which
half redeems the bombast into which it runs, or rather
rushes; and strange gleams of the purest splendors of
poetry are continually transfiguring the bully into the
bard.
Thus, in the celebrated scene in which Tamburlaine
is represented in a chariot drawn by captive kings, and
berating them for their slowness in words which so cap-
tivated Ancient Pistol, there is a glorious stroke of
impassioned imagination, which makes us almost forgive
the swaggering fustian which precedes and follows it:
"Hallo! ye pampered jades of Asia!
What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?
The horse that guide the golden eye of heaven,
28
MARLOWE.
And blow the morning from their nostrils,
Making their fiery gait above the clouds,
Are not so honored in their governor
As you, ye slaves, in mighty Tamburlaine."
"Faustus, ""The Jew of Malta," "Edward the Sec-
ond," "The Massacre of Paris," "Dido, Queen of Car-
thage," are the names of Marlowe's remaining plays.
They all, more or less, exhibit the eager creativeness
of his mind, and the furious arrogance of his disposition.
"They abound,” says Hunt, "in wilful and self-worship-
ping speeches, and every one of them turns upon some
kind of ascendency at the expense of other people."
His "Edward the Second" is the best historical play
written before Shakespeare's, and exhibits more discrim-
ination in delineating character than any of Marlowe's
other efforts. His "Jew of Malta" is a powerful con-
ception, marred in the process of embodiment.
"Faustus" perhaps best reflects his whole genius and
experience. The subject must have taken strong hold
of his nature, for, like Faustus, he had himself doubt-
less held intimate business relations with the great
enemy of mankind, and was personally conscious of the
struggle in the soul between the diabolical and the di-
vine. The characters of Faustus and Mephistopheles
are both conceived with great depth and strength of
imagination; and the last scene of the play, exhibiting
His
MARLOWE.
29
the agony of supernatural terror in which Faustus
awaits the coming of the fiend who has bought and
paid for his soul, is not without touches of sublimity.
There is one line, especially, which is loaded with
meaning and suggestiveness, that in which harbor-
ing for a moment the possibility of salvation amid the
gathering horrors of his doom, Faustus exclaims, -
"See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!"
Marlowe's life, though short and reckless, was fertile in
works. Besides the plays we have mentioned, he prob-
ably wrote many which have been lost; and his trans-
lations from Ovid, and his unfinished poem of “Hero
and Leander," would alone give him a position among
the poets of his period. He was killed in a tavern
brawl, in the year 1593, at the early age of twenty-nine.*
*Beard, in his "Theatre of God's Judgments" (1597), makes his
death the occasion to point a ferocious moral. He speaks of him as
"by practice a play-maker and a poet of scurrilitie, who, by giuing
too large a swing to his owne wit, and suffering his lust to haue the
full reines," at last "denied God and his sonne Christ, and not onely
in word blasphemed the Trinitie, but also (as it is credibly reported)
wrote bookes against it, affirming our Sauiour to be but a deceiuer,
and Moses to be but a coniurer and seducer of the people, and the
Holy Bible to bee but vaine and idle stories, and all religion but a
deuice of policie. But see what a hooke the Lord put in the nostrils
of this barking dogge! So it fell out, that, as he purposed to stab
one whom he ought a grudge vnto, with his dagger, the other party
30
MARLOWE.
Though Marlowe's poetical contemporaries and follow-
ers could say little or nothing in defence of his life,
when it was mercilessly assailed by Puritan pamphlet-
eers, there was no lack of testimonials to his genius.
Ben Jonson celebrated "his mighty line"; Drayton de-
scribed his raptures as "all fire and air," and testified
to his possession of those "brave, sublunary things that
the first poets had "; and Chapman, with a yet closer
perception of his unwithholding self-committal to the
Muse, said that
"He stood
Up to the chin in the Pierian flood."
A still higher tribute to his eminence comes from
Shakespeare himself, who, in his "As You Like It,"
quotes with approval a line from Marlowe's poem óf
"Hero and Leander," the only case in which Shake-
speare has publicly recognized the genius of an Eliza-
bethan writer.
perceiuing so auoyded the stroke, that withall catching hold of his
wrist, hee stabbed his owne dagger into his owne head, in such sort
that, notwithstanding all the meanes of surgerie that could bee
wrought, hee shortly after died thereof; the manner of his death
being so terrible (for he euen cursed and blasphemed to his last gape,
and together with his breath an oath flew out of his mouth), that it
was not only a manifeste signe of God's judgement, but also an hor-
rible and fearefull terror to all that beheld him. But herein did the
justice of God most noteably appeare, in that hee compelled his owne
hand, which had written these blasphemies, to bee the instrument to
punish him, and that in his braine which had deuised the same.”
MARLOWE.
31
But this stormy, irregular genius, compound of Alsa-
tian ruffian and Arcadian singer, whose sudden death,
in the height of his glory and his pride, seemed to
threaten the early English drama with irreparable loss,
was to be succeeded in his own walk by the greatest
Englishman, by the greatest man, that ever made the
theatre or literature his medium of communication with
the world. To some thoughts on this man
need we
say it is Shakespeare?
we shall invite the attention
of the reader in the next chapter.
}
SHAKESPEARE.
I.
THE biography of Shakespeare, if we merely look at
the bulk of the books which assume to record it, is
both minute and extensive; but when we subject the
octavo or quarto to examination, we find a great deal
that is interesting about his times, and some shrewd and
some dull guessing about his probable actions and mo-
tives, but little about himself except a few dates. He
was born in Stratford-on-Avon, in April, 1564, and was
the son of John Shakespeare, tradesman, of that place.
In 1582, in his nineteenth year, he married Anne Hath-
away, aged twenty-six. About the year 1586 he went
to London and became a player. In 1589 he was one
of the proprietors of the Blackfriars Theatre, and in
1595 was a prominent shareholder in a larger theatre,
built by the same company, called the Globe. As a
playwright he seems to have served an apprenticeship;
for he altered, amended, and added to the dramas of
others before he produced any himself. Between the
year 1591, or thereabouts, and the year 1613, or
thereabouts, he wrote over thirty plays, the precise date
SHAKESPEARE.
33
of whose composition it is hardly possible to fix. He
seems to have made yearly visits to Stratford, where his
wife and children resided, and to have invested money
there as he increased in wealth. Mr. Emerson has
noted, that about the time he was writing Macbeth, per-
haps the greatest tragedy of ancient or modern times,
"he sued Philip Rogers, in the borough-court of Strat-
ford, for thirty-five shillings tenpence, for corn delivered
to him at various times." In 1608, Mr. Collier esti-
mates his income at four hundred pounds a year, which,
allowing for the decreased value of money, is equal to
eight or nine thousand dollars at the present time.
About the year 1610, he retired permanently to Strat-
ford, though he continued to write plays for the com-
pany with which he was connected. He died on the
23d of April, 1616.
Such is essentially the meagre result of a century of
research into the external life of Shakespeare. As
there is hardly a page in his writings which does not
shed more light upon the biography of his mind, and
bring us nearer to the individuality of the man, the an-
tiquaries in despair have been compelled to abandon
him to the psychologists; and the moment the transition
from external to internal facts is made, the most obscure
of men passes into the most notorious. For this person-
ality and soul we call Shakespeare, the recorded inci-
2*
C
34
SHAKESPEARE.
dents of whose outward career were so few and trifling,
lived a more various life a life more crowded with
ideas, passions, volitions, and events than any poten-
tate the world has ever seen. Compared with his ex-
perience, the experience of Alexander or Hannibal, of
Cæsar or Napoleon, was narrow and one-sided. He
had projected himself into almost all the varieties of
human character, and, in imagination, had intensely
realized and lived the life of each. From the throne
of the monarch to the bench of the village alehouse,
there were few positions in which he had not placed
himself, and which he had not for a time identified with
his own.
No other man had ever seen nature and hu-
man life from so many points of view; for he had looked
upon them through the eyes of Master Slender and
Hamlet, of Caliban and Othello, of Dogberry and Mark
Antony, of Ancient Pistol and Julius Cæsar, of Mistress
Tearsheet and Imogen, of Dame Quickly and Lady Mac-
beth, of Robin Goodfellow and Titania, of Hecate and
Ariel. No king or queen of his time had so completely
felt the cares and enjoyed the dignity of the regal state
as this playwright, who usurped it by his thought alone;
and the freshest and simplest maiden in Europe had no
innocent heart-experience which this man could not
share, escaping, in an instant, from the shattered brain
of Lear, or the hag-haunted imagination of Macbeth, in
SHAKESPEARE.
35
order to feel the tender flutter of her soul in his own.
And none of these forms, though mightier or more ex-
quisite than the ordinary forms of humanity, could hold
or imprison him a moment longer than he chose to abide
in it. He was on an excursion through the world of
thought and action, to seize the essence of all the ex-
citements of human nature, terrible, painful, criminal,
rapturous, or humorous; and to do this in a short
earthly career, he was compelled to condense ages into
days, and lives into minutes. He exhausts, in a short
time, all the glory and all the agony there is on the
throne or on the couch of Henry IV., and then, wearied
with royalty, is off to the Boar's Head to have a rouse
with Sir John. He feels all the flaming pride and scorn
of the aristocrat Coriolanus; his brain widens with the
imperial ideas, and his heart beats with the measureless
ambition, of the autocrat Cæsar; and anon he has
donned a greasy apron, plunged into the roaring Roman
mob, and is yelling against aristocrat and autocrat with
all the gusto of democratic rage. He is now a prattling
child, and in a second he is the murderer with the knife
at its throat. Capable of being all that he actually or
imaginatively sees, he enters into at will, and abandons
at will, the passions that brand or blast other natures.
Avarice, malice, envy, jealousy, hatred, revenge, remorse,
neither in their separate nor mutual action are strong
36
SHAKESPEARE.
•
enough to fasten him; and the same may be said of love
and pity and friendship and joy and ecstasy; for behind
and within this multiform personality is the person
Shakespeare, serene, self-conscious, vigilant, individ-
ualizing the facts of his consciousness, and pouring his
own soul into each creation, without ever parting with
the personal identity which is at the heart of all, which
disposes and co-ordinates all, and which dictates the
impression to be left by all.
And this fact conducts us to the question of Shake-
speare's individuality. We are prone to place him as a
man below other great men, because we make a distinc-
tion between the man and his genius. We gather our
notion of Shakespeare from the meagre details of his
biography, and in his biography he appears little and
commonplace, not by any means so striking a person
as Kit Marlowe or Ben Jonson. To this individuality
we tack on a universal genius, — which is about as rea-
sonable as it would be to take the controlling power of
gravity from the sun and attach it to one of the aste-
roids. Shakespeare's genius is not something distinct
from the man; it is the expression of the man, just as
the sun's attraction is the result of its immense mass.
The measure of a man's individuality is his creative
power; and all that Shakespeare created he individually
included. We must, therefore, if we desire to grasp his
SHAKESPEARE.
37
greatness, discard from our minds all associations con-
nected with the pet epithets which other authors have
condescended to shower upon him, such as "Sweet
Will," and "Gentle Shakespeare," and "Fancy's child,"
- fond but belittling phrases, as little appropriate as
would be the patronizing chatter of the planet Venus
about the dear, darling little Sun ; we must discard
all these from our conceptions, and consider him prima-
rily as a vast, comprehensive, personal soul and force,
that passed from eternity into time, with all the wide
aptitudes and affinities for the world he entered bound
up in his individual being from the beginning. These
aptitudes and affinities, these quick, deep, and varied
sympathies, were so many inlets of the world without
him; and facts pouring into such a nature were swiftly
organized into faculties. Nothing, indeed, amazes us so
much, in the biography of Shakespeare's mind, as the
preternatural rapidity with which he assimilated knowl-
edge into power, and experience into insight. The
might of his personality is indicated by its resistance to,
as much as its breadth is evinced by its receptivity of,
objects; for his force was never overwhelmed or sub-
merged by the multiplicity of impressions that unceas-
ingly rushed in upon it. His soul lay genially open to
the world of nature and human life, to receive the ob-
jects that went streaming into it, but never parted with
38
SHAKESPEARE.
the power of reacting upon all it received. This would
not be so marvellous had he merely taken in the forms
and outside appearances of things. All his perceptions,
however, were vital; and the life and force of the ob-
jects he drew into his consciousness tugged with his
own life and force for the mastery, and ended in simply
enriching the spirit they strove to subdue. This inde-
structible spiritual energy, which becomes mightier with
every exercise of might; which plucks out the heart
and absorbs the vitality of everything it touches; which
daringly commits itself to the fiercest, and joyously to
the softest passions, without losing its moral and mental
sanity; which in the most terrible excitements is as
"the blue dome of air" to the tempest that rages be-
neath it; which, aiming to include everything, refuses
to be included by anything, and in the sweep of its
creativeness acts with a confident audacity, as if in it
Nature were humanized and humanity individualized ;-
in short, this unexampled energy of blended sensibility,
intelligence, and will, is what constitutes the man Shake-
speare; and this man is no mere name for an impersonal,
unconscious genius, that did its marvels by instinct, no
name for a careless playwright who blundered into mir-
acles, but is essentially a person, creating strictly within
the limitations of his individuality, within those limi-
tations appearing to be impersonal only because he is
SHAKESPEARE.
39
comprehensive enough to cover a wide variety of special
natures, and, above all, a person individually as great,
at least, as the sum of his whole works.
His appear-
In regard to the real mystery of this man's power,
both criticism and philosophy are mute.
ance is simply a fact in the world's intellectual history,
which can be connected with no preceding fact nor with
the spirit of his age.
"It is the nature of poetry,"
says Emerson, "to spring, like the rainbow daughter of
Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and to
refuse all history." All that we know is, that the ca-
pacities and splendors of Shakespeare's mind existed
potentially in the vital germ of the spiritual nature born
with him into the world; and that his works are the
result of the unfolding of this. The glory of the Eliza-
bethan age, it is absurd to call him its product, for the
puzzle is not so much the peculiarities of what he assim-
ilated as his powers of assimiliation, and in any age
these powers would probably have worked equal, if
different effects. Take, for instance, single thoughts
and imaginations of his, such as the following, and see
if you can account for them by any knowledge you have
of the manners and customs of the England of Eliza-
beth:
"The morning steals upon the night,
Melting the darkness."
40
SHAKESPEARE.
"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!"
"The benediction of these covering heavens
Fall on their heads like dew."
Things evil" are our outward consciences."
A substitute shines brightly as a king,
Until a king be by; and then his state
Empties itself, as doth an inland brook
Into the main of waters."
O Westmoreland! thou art a summer bird,
Which ever in the haunch of winter sings
The lifting up of day.”
"Cheer your heart:
Be you not troubled with the time, which drives
O'er your content these strong necessities;
But let determined things to Destiny
Hold unbewailed their way."
But single passages like these, though they hint of
the inmost essence of the poet, and drop upon the mind,
as Carlyle says, "like a splendor out of heaven,"
though they demonstrate the independence of time and
place of the imagination whence they come, are still
no adequate measure of Shakespeare's power. If, how-
ever, we pass from these to what is a more decisive
test of his self-conscious, self-directed creative energy,
namely, to his mode of organizing a whole drama, we
shall find that his method, processes, and results are
SHAKESPEARE.
41
different from those of the dramatists of his own age or
of any other age. The materials he uses are as nothing
when compared with his transformation of them into
works of art. Let us, in illustration, glance at his
method of creation, as successfully exerted in any one
of his great dramas, say Hamlet, or King Lear, or Mac-
beth, or Othello.
He takes a story or a history, with which the people
are familiar, the whole interest of which is narrative.
He finds it a mere succession of incidents; he leaves it
a combination of events. He finds the persons named
in it mere commonplace sketches of humanity; he leaves
them self-subsisting, individual characters, more real to
the mind than the men and women we daily meet.
Now the first fact that strikes us when we compare
the original story with Shakespeare's magical transform-
ation of it is, that everything is raised from the actual
world into a Shakespearian world. He alters, enlarges,
expands, enriches, enlivens, informs, recreates every-
thing, lifting sentiment, passion, humor, thought, action,
to the level of his own nature. Through incidents and
through characters is shot Shakespeare's soul, a soul
that yields itself to every mould of being, from the
clown to the monarch, endows every class of character
it animates with the Shakespearian felicity and certainty
of speech, and, being in all as well as in each, so con-
42
SHAKESPEARE.
nects and relates the society he has called into life, that
they unite to form a whole, while existing with perfect
distinctness as parts. The characters are not developed
by isolation, but by sympathy or collision, and the closer
they come together the less they run together. They
are independent of each other, and yet necessitate each
other. None of them could appear in any other play
without exciting disorder; yet in this play their discord
conduces to the general harmony. And so tough is the
hold on existence of these beings that, though thousands
of millions of men and women have been born, have
died, and have been forgotten since they were created,
and though the actual world has strangely changed,
these men and women of Shakespeare's are still alive,
and Shakespeare's world still remains untouched by
time.
This drama, thus made self-existent in the free heaven
of art, implies, in its conception and execution, processes
analogous to those which are followed by Nature her-
self in the production of her works; and modern critics
have not hesitated to award to Shakespeare the distinc-
tion of being an organizer after her pattern. The
drama which we have been describing is, like her works,
not simple, but complex. It has unity, it has the widest
variety, it has unity in variety. The most diverse and
seemingly heterogeneous materials all aid to form a
SHAKESPEARE.
43
whole, "vital in every part"; and the organization is
strictly an addition to the world, with nothing in litera-
ture and nothing in nature which exactly matches it.
And it is alive, and refuses to die. Nature herself is
compelled to adopt it into her race,
"And give to it an equal date
With Andes and with Ararat."
You can gaze at it as you can gaze at a natural land-
scape, where hills, rocks, woods, stubble, grass, clouds,
sky, atmosphere, each separate, each related, combine to
form one impressive effect of beauty and power.
Perhaps, however, it would be more proper to call
this Shakespearian drama an approximation to an or-
ganic product, rather than a realization of one. The
processes of nature are followed, but the perfection of
nature is the ideal it aims at rather than reaches. Still,
if we allow for human defects and imperfections, and
take into view the fact that Shakespeare had to submit
to conditions imposed by his audience as well as condi-
tions imposed by his genius, his work measurably fulfils
the requirements of Kant's concise definition of an or-
ganic creation, namely, "that thing in which all the
parts are mutually ends and means."
Admitting, then, that the drama we are considering
has organic form, and not merely mechanical regularity,
the question arises, What is the inner law, the central
44
SHAKESPEARE.
idea, the principle of life, by which, and in obedience to
which, it was organized? Perhaps the new school of
philosophic critics have done almost as much injury to
Shakespeare's fame, in their attempt to answer this
question, as they have done good in rescuing his dramas
from the old school of sciolists and commentators, who
were pecking at him with their formal rules of taste.
The philosophic critics very properly insisted that he
should be judged by principles deduced from his own
method, and not by rules generalized from the method
of the Greek dramatists; that the laws by which he
should be tried were the laws which he acknowledged
and obeyed, the laws of his own creative imagination ;
and that the very originality of his dramas freed them
from tests which are applicable only to the products
of imitation. They thus raised Shakespeare from a
breaker of the laws into a lawgiver; and the brilliant
vagabond, whom every catchpole of criticism thought he
could hustle about and reprimand, was all at once lifted
into a dictator of law to the bench.
Having relieved Shakespeare from these policemen
of letters, and substituted some reach of human vision
for their rat's eyes, the new school of philosophic critics
proceeded to state what were the ideas which formed
the ground-plans and organizing principles of his works;
but in doing this, they brought Shakespeare down to
SHAKESPEARE.
45
their own level, and made him their spokesman. Intel-
lectual egotism supplanted intellectual interpretation.
Read Schlegel, Ulrici, even Gervinus, and you are de-
lighted as long as they confine themselves to the busi-
ness of exposing the folly of the critics they supplanted ;
but when they come to the real problem, and attempt to
state the meaning and purpose of Shakespeare in any
given play, you are apt to be as much surprised as was
that philanthropist, who was confidentially informed that
the ultimate object Napoleon had in view in his nu-
merous wars was the establishment of Sunday schools.
They find in Shakespeare's plays certain ethical, politi-
cal, or social generalities, which, it seems, they were
written to illustrate, or rather from which the plays
grow, as from so many roots. But causes are to be
measured by effects; the effects here are marvellous
structures of genius; and these do not shoot up from
the withered roots of barren truisms. A whole must be
greater than any of its parts; and yet the philosophic
idea of a Shakespearian drama, as eliminated by the
German professors, is less than the least of its parts.
A single magical word in Shakespeare is often greater,
and has more reach of application, than the professorial
bit of wisdom which they present as the grand total of
the play, and which is often too obvious in itself to make
a resort to Shakespeare necessary for a perception of
46
SHAKESPEARE.
its truth. Their "ground ideas" of the dramas are not
worth any minor Shakespearian ideas they are assumed
to include.
Indeed, before we claim to understand a Shake-
spearian whole, we must first see if we are competent
to take in one of its parts. It is evident that the most
important parts are the characters, and in respect to
these, and to Shakespeare's method of characterization,
there is much misconception. What are these charac-
ters? Are they copies of men and women, as we see
them in the world, — slightly idealized portraits of per-
sons, witty, passionate, thoughtful, or criminal? Are
they such people as Shakespeare might have seen in the
streets of London in the time of Elizabeth? No, for
they are plainly Shakespearian, and not merely Eliza-
bethan. Even the court-fools are endowed with the
Shakespearian quality, are perfect of their kind, and
are such court-fools as Shakespeare might have con-
ceived himself to be one of, if he had, in Mr. Weller's
phrase, "been born in that station of life."
Yet these characters are certainly not individualized
qualities and passions, for they are eminently natural.
If their naturalness does not come from their being por-
traits, slightly varied and heightened, of individuals, in
what does their naturalness consist?
In answer to this question, it is first to be said, that
SHAKESPEARE.
47
these characters prove that Shakespeare had a concep-
tion of human nature, abstracted from all individuals.
He not only looked at individuals, and into individuals,
but through individuals to their common basis in hu-
manity. But he did not rest here. This imaginative
analysis, this vital generalization, this glance into the
sources of things, evinces, of course, his possession of
the profoundest philososophical genius as the foundation
of his dramatic genius; but it is not the genius itself,
for he also surveyed human nature in action, human na-
ture as modified by human life, by manners, customs,
institutions, and beliefs, and by that primitive person-
ality which separates men, as humanity unites them.
These characters, then, are individual natures rooted
in human nature. The question then arises, Is their
individuality particular or representative? The least
observation shows, we think, that they stand for more
than individuals. We are continually saying that this
or that person of our acquaintance resembles one of
Shakespeare's characters; we may even learn much
about him by studying the character he resembles; but
we never thoroughly identify him with the character;
for the character is more powerful, more perfectly de-
veloped, acts out the law of his being with more free-
dom, than the actual person with whom he is compared.
Further than this, if we are accustomed to classify
48
SHAKESPEARE
the persons we know, so as to include many individuals
under one type, we shall find that we can include scores
of our acquaintances in one of Shakespeare's characters,
and then not exhaust its full application. It is not,
therefore, his mere variety of characterization, but some-
thing peculiar in each of the varieties, which makes him
pre-eminently the poet of human nature. Why, for
example, is not Charles Dickens as great a novelist as
Shakespeare is a dramatist? Dickens has delineated
as wide a variety of persons as Shakespeare, if by vari-
ety we mean the absence of repetition. There is no
reason but the shortness of life why he should not peo-
ple literature with new individuals, until his characters
are numbered by the thousand, all in a certain sense
original, all discriminated from each other, but few or
none representative. The single character of Hamlet
represents more individuals than do all the individuals
Dickens has delineated.
Again, Jane Austen is placed by Macaulay next to
Shakespeare for the felicity, certainty, and nicety of her
portraitures of character. The most evanescent lines
of distinction between persons who appear alike she seizes
with wonderful tact, and indicates these differences with-
out the least resort to caricature. If the best character-
ization means simply the best portrait-painting, there is
no reason why Elizabeth, in "Pride and Prejudice,"
SHAKESPEARE.
49.
should not be placed side by side with Juliet and Cor-
delia.
But everybody feels that neither Dickens, with his
range of observation, nor Jane Austen, with her sub-
tilty of observation, makes any approach to Shake-
speare. What is the reason?
The reason is, that Shakespeare does not paint indi-
viduals, but individualizes classes. In his great nature,
the processes of reason and imagination, of philosophic
insight and poetic insight, worked harmoniously together.
His observation of persons only supplied him with hints
for his creations. He did not take up at haphazard this
man and that woman, and, because of their oddity or
beauty, reproduce them in his story; but he distin-
guished in each actual person the signs of a class na-
ture, midway between his general nature and his indi-
vidual peculiarities.
He classified men as the naturalist
classifies the Animal Kingdom. Agassiz is not confused
by the perplexing spectacle of the myriads of animals
which form the materials of his science; for the moment
his eye lights upon them, they fall into certain great
natural divisions, distinguished by recognized marks
of structure. Under each of a few grand divisions he
includes innumerable individuals. Now the difference
between Agassiz and a mere observer and describer of
animals is the difference between Shakespeare and
3
D
50
SHAKESPEARE.
Dickens, only that Shakespeare works on phenomena
more complicated, and presenting more obstacles to
classification, than Agassiz deals with.
In his deep, wide, and searching observation of man-
kind, Shakespeare detects bodies of men who agree in
the general tendencies of their characters, who strive
after a common ideal of good or evil, and who all fail to
reach it. Through these indications and hints he seizes,
by his philosophical genius, the law of the class; by
his dramatic genius, he gathers up in one conception the
whole multitude of individuals comprehended in the
law, and embodies it in a character; and by his poet-
ical genius he lifts this character into an ideal region of
life, where all hindrances to the free and full develop-
ment of its nature are removed. The character seems
all the more natural because it is perfect of its kind,
whereas the actual persons included in the conception
are imperfect of their kind. Thus there are many men
of the type of Falstaff, but Shakespeare's Falstaff is not
an actual Falstaff. Falstaff is the ideal head of the fam-
ily, the possibility which they dimly strive to realize, the
person they would be if they could. Again, there are
many Tagoish men, but only one Iago, the ideal type of
them all; and by studying him we learn what they
would all become if circumstances were propitious, and
their loose malignant tendencies were firmly knit to-
SHAKESPEARE.
51
Com-
gether in positive will and diabolically alert intelligence.
And it is the same with the rest of Shakespeare's great
creations. The immense domain of human nature they
cover is due to the fact, not merely that they are not
repetitions of individuals, but that they are not repeti-
tions of the same types or classes of individuals.
The moment we analyze them, the moment we break
them up into their constituent elements, we are amazed
at the wealth of wisdom and knowledge which formed
the materials of each individual embodiment, and the
inexhaustible interest and fulness of meaning and appli-
cation revealed in the analytic scrutiny of each.
pare, for example, Shakespeare's Timon of Athens-
by no means one of Shakespeare's mightiest efforts of
characterization with Lord Byron, both as man and
poet, and we shall find that Timon is the highest logical
result of the Byronic tendency, and that in him, rather
than in Byron, the essential misanthrope is impersonated.
The number of poems which Byron wrote does not af-
fect the matter at all, because the poems are all expan-
sions and variations of one view of life, from which
Byron could not escape. Shakespeare, had he pleased,
might have filled volumes with Timon's poetic misan-
thropy; but, being a condenser, he was contented with
concentrating the idea of the whole class in one grand
character, and of putting into his mouth the truest, most
52
SHAKESPEARE.
splendid, most terrible things which have ever been
uttered from the misanthropic point of view; and then,
victoriously freeing himself from the dreadful mood of
mind he had imaginatively realized, he passed on to oc-
cupy other and different natures. Shakespeare is su-
perior to Byron on Byron's own ground, because Shake-
speare grasped misanthropy from its first faint begin-
nings in the soul to its final result on character,
clutched its inmost essence, discerned it as one out
of a hundred subjective conditions of mind, tried it
thoroughly, and found it was too weak and narrow to hold
him. Byron was in it, could not escape from it, and
never, therefore, thoroughly mastered the philosophy of
it. Here, then, in one corner of Shakespeare's mind,
we find more than ample space for so great a poet as
Byron to house himself.
But Shakespeare not only in one conception thus in-
dividualizes a whole class of men, but he communicates
to each character, be it little or colossal, good or evil,
that peculiar Shakespearian quality which distinguishes
it as his creation. This he does by being and living for
the time the person he conceives. What Macaulay says
of Bacon is more applicable to Shakespeare, namely,
that his mind resembles the tent which the fairy gave to
Prince Ahmed. "Fold it, and it seemed a toy for the
hand of a lady. Spread it, and the armies of powerful
SHAKESPEARE.
53
sultans might repose beneath its shade." Shakespeare
could run his sentiment, passion, reason, imagination,
into any mould of personality he was capable of shaping,
and think and speak from that. The result is that every
character is a denizen of the Shakespearian World;
every character, from Master Slender to Ariel, is in
some sense a poet, that is, is gifted with imagination to
express his whole nature, and make himself inwardly
known; yet we feel throughout that the "thousand-
souled" Shakespeare is still but one soul, capable of
shifting into a thousand forms, but leaving its peculiar
birth-mark on every individual it informs.
Now it is difficult, perhaps impossible, for a critic to
reproduce synthetically in his own consciousness, or
thoroughly to analyze into all its elements, any single
prominent character that Shakespeare has drawn. His
characters, however, are not represented apart from.
each other, but as acting on each other; and, great
as they separately are as conceptions, they are but in-
tegral portions of a still mightier conception, which in-
cludes the whole drama in which they appear. The
value of what we call the incidents of such a drama con-
sists in their being such incidents as would most nat-
urally spring from the mutual action of such persons, or
as would best develop their natures. The plot is of
small account as disconnected from the characters, but
54
SHAKESPEARE.
of great moment as vitally inwrought with them, and
giving coherence to the living organism which results
from the combination. It is for this reason that we pay
little heed to improbable incidents in the story, provided
the incidents serve to bring out the persons. It is very
improbable that a bond should have been given payable
in a pound of flesh, and still more so that any court in
Christendom could have recognized its validity; but
who thinks of this in the Shakespearian society of "The
Merchant of Venice " "?
Now it is doubtless true that a drama of Shakespeare
thus organized, with characters comprehending an im-
mense range of human character, and yielding to analy-
sis laws of human nature which radiate light into whole
departments of human life, produces on our minds, as
we read, the effect of unity in variety. We perceive it
as a whole, and think therefore we perceive the whole
of it. But is it true that we really receive the colossal
conception of Shakespeare himself? Shakespeare, it is
plain, can only convey to us what we are capable of
taking in; the mind that perceives reduces greatness
to its own mental stature; and persons, according to
their taste, culture, experience, height of intelligence,
capacity of approaching Shakespeare himself, obtain
different impressions, varying in depth and breadth, of
each of his great plays. Who, for instance, has stated
SHAKESPEARE.
55
the general conception of the play of "Hamlet"? The
idea of that drama, as given by different critics, is only
so much of the idea as could be got into the heads of
the critics. Their interpretation at best belongs to the
class of Mémoires pour servir ; — the rounded whole is
described by minds that are angular; and Shakespeare's
conception is measuring them, while they are felicitating
themselves that they are measuring it.
Even Goethe, the most comprehensive intelligence
since Shakespeare, failed to "pluck out the heart" of
Hamlet's mystery. Indeed, it is beginning to be con-
sidered, that his remarks on the character, thongh deli-
cate and profound in themselves, do not touch the es-
sential individuality of Hamlet; that his ingenuity was
exercised in the wrong direction; and that, in his criti-
cism, he resembled the sturdy and rapid walker, who
checked his pace to ask a boy how far it was to Taun-
ton. "If you go on in the way you 're now go-
ing," was the reply, "it's twenty-four thousand miles;
if you turn back, it's only five." But though some
critics since Goethe have not been so elaborately wrong
as he, Hamlet is still outside of the largest thought in
the right direction. A distinguished thinker has said
that there are moods of the mind in which Hamlet ap-
pears little, for what he suggests is infinitely more than
what he is. This is true as to Shakespeare, but not true
ལ།
56
SHAKESPEARE.
as to other minds; for until we have grasped the con-
ception that Shakespeare has embodied, we have no
right to suppose ourselves capable of going beyond it
into that vastness of contemplation of which, from
Shakespeare's height of vision, the character was an in-
adequate expression. Again, it is a common remark,
that the school of philosophic critics, especially in their
attempts to dive into the meaning of Hamlet, are con-
tinually giving Shakespeare the credit of their own
thoughts. Giving Shakespeare the credit! Well might
he reply, if such were the case, "Beggar that I am,
I am even poor in thanks!"
Shakespeare, then, as regards his most gigantic con-
ceptions, has probably never been adequately conceived.
He must be tried by his peers; and where are his
peers ? We know that he grows in mental stature as
our minds enlarge, and as we increase in our knowledge
of him; but he has never been included by criticism as
other poets have been included. The greatest and most
interpretative minds which have made him their study,
though they may have commenced with wielding the
rod, soon found themselves seduced into taking seats on
the benches, anxious to learn instead of impatient to
teach; and have been compelled to admit that the poet
who is the delight of the rudest urchin in the pit of the
playhouse, is also the poet whose works defy the highest
faculties of the philosopher thoroughly to comprehend.
SHAKESPEARE.
II.
IN the last chapter we spoke of Shakespeare's general
comprehensiveness and creativeness, of his method
of characterization, and of the identity of his genius with
his individuality. We purpose now to treat of some
particular topics included in the general theme; and, as
criticism on him is like coasting along a continent, we
shall make little pretension to system in the order of
taking them up.
The first of these topics is the succession of Shake-
speare's works, considered as steps in the growth and
development of his powers, a subject which has al-
ready been ably handled by Mr. Verplanck. The facts,
as far as they can be ascertained, are these. Shake-
speare went to London about the year 1586, in his
twenty-second year, and found some humble employ-
ment in one of the theatrical companies. Three years
afterwards, in 1589, he had risen to be one of the share-
holders of the Blackfriars Theatre. In 1592 he had ac-
quired sufficient reputation as a dramatist, or at least as
a recaster of the plays of others, to excite the jealousy
3*
58
SHAKESPEARE.
:
of the leading playwrights, whose crude dramas he
condescended to rewrite or retouch. That graceless
vagabond, Robert Greene, addressing from his penitent
death-bed his old friends Lodge, Peele, and Marlowe,
and trying to dissuade them from "spending their
wits" any longer in "making plays," spitefully asserts:
"There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers,
that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide,
supposes he is as able to bombast out a blank verse as
the best of you; and, being an absolute Johannes Fac-
totum, is, in his own conceit, the only Shake-scene in
the country." Doubtless this charge of adopting and
adapting the productions of others includes some dramas
which have not been preserved, as the company to
which Shakespeare was attached owned the manuscripts.
of a great number of plays which were never printed,
and it was a custom, when a play had popular elements
in it, for other dramatists to be employed in making
such additions as would give continual novelty to the
old favorite. But of the plays published in our editions.
of Shakespeare's writings, it is probable that the Com-
edy of Errors, and the three parts of King Henry VI.,
are only partially his, and should be classed among
his adaptations, and not among his early creations.
The play of Pericles bears no marks of his mind, ex-
cept in some scenes of transcendent power and beauty,
SHAKESPEARE.
59
which start up from the rest of the work like towers
of gold from a plain of sand; but these scenes are in
his latest manner. In regard to the tragedy of Titus
Andronicus, we are so constituted as to resist all the
external evidence by which such a shapeless mass of
horrors and absurdities is fastened on Shakespeare.
Mr. Verplanck thinks it one of Shakespeare's first at-
tempts at dramatic composition; but first attempts must
reflect the mental condition of the author at the time
they were made; and we know the mental condition
of Shakespeare in his early manhood by his poem of
Venus and Adonis, which he expressly styles "the
first heir of his invention." Now leaving out of view
the fact that Titus Andronicus stamps the impression,
not of youthful, but of matured depravity of taste, its
execrable enormities of feeling and incident could not
have proceeded from the sweet and comely nature in
which the poem had its birth. The best criticism on
Titus Andronicus was made by Robert Burns, when
he was nine years old. His schoolmaster was reading
the play aloud in his father's cottage, and when he came
to the scene where Lavinia enters with her hands cut
off and her tongue cut out, little Robert fell a-crying,
and threatened, in case the play was left in the cottage,
to burn it. It is hard to believe that what Burns de-
spised and detested at the age of nine could have been
60
SHAKESPEARE.
At
written by Shakespeare at the age of twenty-five.
Taking, then, Venus and Adonis as the point of de-
parture, we find Shakespeare at the age of twenty-two
endowed with all the faculties, but relatively deficient in
the passions, of the poet. The poem is a throng of
thoughts, fancies, and imaginations, somewhat cramped
in the utterance. Coleridge says that "in his poems
the creative power and the intellectual energy wrestle
as in a war embrace. Each in its excess of strength
seems to threaten the extinction of the other.
length in the drama they were reconciled, and fought
each with its shield before the breast of the other."
Fine as this is, it would perhaps be more exact to say
that in his earlier poems his intellect, acting in some
degree apart from his sensibility, and playing with its
own ingenuities of fancy and meditation, condensed its
thoughts in crystals. Afterwards, when his whole na-
ture became liquid, he gave us his thoughts in a state
of fusion, and his intellect flowed in streams of fire.
Take, for example, that passage in the poem where
Venus represents the loveliness of Adonis as sending
thrills of passion into the earth on which he treads, and
as making the bashful moon hide herself from the sight
of his bewildering beauty :-
"But if thou fall, O, then imagine this!
The earth, in love with thee, thy footing trips,
SHAKESPEARE.
61
And all is but to rob thee of a kiss.
Rich preys make true men thieves; so do thy lips
Make modest Dian cloudy and forlorn,
Lest she should steal a kiss and die forsworn.
"Now of this dark night I perceive the reason:
Cynthia for shame obscures her silver shrine,
Till forging Nature be condemned of treason,
For stealing moulds from heaven that were divine,
Wherein she framed thee, in high heaven's despite,
To shame the sun by day and her by night."
This is reflected and reflecting passion, or, at least,
imagination awakening passion, rather than passion
penetrating imagination.
Now mark, by contrast, the gush of the heart into
the brain, dissolving thought, imagination, and expres-
sion, so that they run molten, in the delirious ecstasy
of Pericles on recovering his long-lost child:
"O Helicanus! strike me, honour'd sir,
Give me a gash, put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys, rushing upon me,
O'erbear the shores of my mortality,
And drown me with their sweetness."
If, as is probable, Venus and Adonis was written
äs early as 1586, we may suppose that the plays which
represent the immaturity of his genius, and which are
strongly marked with the characteristics of that poem,
namely, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the first draft
62
SHAKESPEARE.
of Love's Labor's Lost, and the original Romeo and
Juliet, were produced before the year 1592. Following
these came King Richard III., King Richard II., A
Midsummer Night's Dream, King John, The Merchant
of Venice, and King Henry IV., all of which we know
were written before 1598, when Shakespeare was in
his thirty-fourth year. During the next eight years he
produced King Henry V., The Merry Wives of Wind-
sor, As You Like it, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure
for Measure, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear. In
this list are the four great tragedies in which his genius
culminated. Then came Troilus and Cressida, Timon
of Athens, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra, Cym-
beline, King Henry VIII., The Tempest, The Winter's
Tale, and Coriolanus. If heed be paid to this order
of the plays, it will be seen at once that a quotation
from Shakespeare carries with it a very different degree
of authority, according as it refers to the youth or the
maturity of his mind.
Indeed, when we reflect that between the production
of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and King Lear
there is only a space of fifteen years, we must admit
that the history of the human intellect presents no other
example of such marvellous progress; and if we note
the giant strides by which it was made, we shall find
that they all imply a progressive widening and deepen-
SHAKESPEARE.
63
ing of soul, a positive growth of the nature of the man,
until in Lear the power became supreme and became
amazing. Mr. Verplanck considers the period when he .
produced his four great tragedies to be the period of his
intellectual grandeur, as distinguished from an earlier
period which he thinks shows the perfection of his
merely poetic and imaginative power; but the fact
would seem to be that his increasing greatness as a phi-
losopher was fully matched by his increasing greatness
as a poet, and that, in the devouring swiftness of his
onward and upward movement, imagination kept abreast
of reason. His imagination was never more vivid, all-
informing, and creative, never penetrated with more
unerring certainty to the inmost spiritual essence of
whatever it touched, never forced words and rhythım
into more supple instruments of thought and feeling,
than when it miracled into form the terror and pity and
beauty of Lear.
Indeed, the coequal growth of his reason and imagi-
nation was owing to the wider scope and increased
energy of the great moving forces of his being. It
relates primarily to the heart rather than the head.
It is the immense fiery force behind his mental powers,
kindling them into white heat, and urging them to ef-
forts almost preternatural, it is this which impels the
daring thought beyond the limits of positive knowledge,
64
SHAKESPEARE.
and prompts the starts of ecstasy in whose unexpected
radiance nature and human life are transfigured, and for
an instant shine with celestial light. In truth he is,
relatively, more intellectual in his early than in his later
plays, for in his later plays his intellect is thoroughly
impassioned, and though it has really grown in strength
and massiveness, it is so fused with imagination and
emotion as to be less independently prominent.
The sources of individuality lie below the intellect;
and as Shakespeare went deeper into the soul of man, he
more and more represented the brain as the organ and
instrument of the heart, as the channel through which
sentiment, passion, and character found an intelligible
outlet. His own mind was singularly objective; that is,
he saw things as they are in themselves. The minds of
his prominent characters are all subjective, and see
things as they are modified by the peculiarities of their
individual moods and emotions. The very objectivity
of his own mind enables him to assume the subjective
conditions of less-emancipated natures. Macbeth peoples
the innocent air with menacing shapes, projected from
his own fiend-haunted imagination; but the same air is
sweet and wholesome to the poet who gave being to
Macbeth. The meridian of Shakespeare's power was
reached when he created Othello, Macbeth, and Lear,
-complex personalities, representing the conflict and
SHAKESPEARE.
65
complication of the mightiest passions in colossal forms
of human character, and whose understandings and im-
aginations, whose perceptions of nature and human life,
and whose weightiest utterances of moral wisdom, are
all thoroughly subjective and individualized. The
greatness of these characters, as compared with his ear-
lier creations, consists in the greater intensity and ampli-
tude of their natures, and the wider variety of faculties
and passions included in the strict unity of their natures.
Richard III., for example, is one of his earlier charac-
ters, and, though excellent of its kind, its excellence has
been approached by other dramatists, as, for instance,
Massinger, in Sir Giles Overreach. But no other
dramatist has been able to grasp and represent a char-
acter similar in kind to Macbeth, and the reason is that
Richard is comparatively a simple conception, while
Macbeth is a complex one. There is unity and versa-
tility in Richard; there is unity and variety in Macbeth.
Richard is capable of being developed with almost logi-
cal accuracy; for, though there is versatility in the play
of his intellect, there is little variety in the motives
which direct his intellect. His wickedness is not ex-
hibited in the making. He is so completely and glee-
fully a villain from the first, that he is not restrained
from convenient crime by any scruples or relentings.
The vigor of his will is due to his poverty of feeling and
E
66
SHAKESPEARE.
conscience. He is a brilliant and efficient criminal be-
cause he is shorn of the noblest attributes of man. Put,
if you could, Macbeth's heart and imagination into him,
and his will would be smitten with impotence, and
his wit be turned to wailing. The intellect of Macbeth
is richer and grander than Richard's, yet Richard is
relatively a more intellectual character; for the intellect
of Macbeth is rooted in his moral nature, and is second-
ary in our thoughts to the contending motives and
emotions it obeys and reveals. In crime, as in virtue,
what a man overcomes should enter into our estimate
of the power exhibited in what he does.
How,
The question now comes up,
and we suppose it
must be met, though we should like to evade it,
amid the individualities that Shakespeare has created,
are we to detect the individuality of Shakespeare him-
self? In answer it may be said, that, if we survey his
dramas in the mass, we find three degrees of unity;
first, the unity of the individual characters; second, the
unity of the separate plays in which they appear; and
third, the unity of Shakespeare's own nature, a na-
ture which, as it developed, deepened, expanded, and
increased in might, but did not essentially change, and
which is felt as a potent presence throughout his works,
binding them together as the product of one mind. He
did not literally go out of himself to inform other na-
SHAKESPEARE.
67
tures, but he included these natures in himself; and,
though he does not infuse his individuality into his
characters, he does infuse it into the general conceptions
which the characters illustrate. His opinions, purposes,
theory of life, are to be gathered, not from what his
characters say and do, but from the results of what they
say and do; and in each play he so combines and dis-
poses the events and persons that the cumulative im-
pression expresses his own judgment, indicates his own
design, and conveys his own feeling. His individu-
ality is so vast, so purified from eccentricity, and we
grasp it so imperfectly, that we are apt to deny it alto-
gether, and conceive his mind as impersonal. In view
of the multiplicity of his creations, and the range of
thought, emotion, and character they include, it is a com-
mon hyperbole of criticism to designate him as universal.
But, in truth, his mind was restricted, in its creative ac-
tion, like other minds, within the limits of its personal
sympathies, though these sympathies in him were
keener, quicker, and more general than in other men of
genius. He was a great-hearted, broad-brained person,
but still a person, and not what Coleridge calls him, an
omnipresent creativeness." Whatever he could sym-
pathize with he could embody and vitally represent;
but his sympathies, though wide, were far from being
universal, and, when he was indifferent or hostile, the
(6
68
SHAKESPEARE.
dramatist was partially suspended in the satirist and
caricaturist, and oversight took the place of insight.
Indeed, his limitations are more easily indicated than
his enlargements. We know what he has not done
more surely than we know what he has done; for if we
attempt to follow his genius in any of the numerous
lines of direction along which it sweeps with such vic-
torious ease, we soon come to the end of our tether, and
are confused with a throng of thoughts and imagina-
tions, which, as Emerson exquisitely says, "sweetly
torment us with invitations to their own inaccessible
homes." But there were some directions which his
genius did not take, not so much from lack of mental
power as from lack of disposition or from positive an-
tipathy. Let us consider some of these.
And first, Shakespeare's religious instincts and senti-
ments were comparatively weak, for they were not crea-
tive. He has exercised his genius in the creation of no
character in which religious sentiment or religious pas-
sion is dominant. He could not, of course, — he, the
poet of feudalism, overlook religion as an element of
the social organization of Europe, but he did not seize
Christian ideas in their essence, or look at the human
soul in its direct relations with God. And just think of
the field of humanity closed to him!
For sixteen hun-
dred years, remarkable men and women had appeared,
SHAKESPEARE.
69
representing all classes of religious character, from the
ecstasy of the saint to the gloom of the fanatic; yet his
intellectual curiosity was not enough excited to explore
and reproduce their experience. Do you say that the
subject was foreign to the purpose of an Elizabethan
playwright? The answer is, that Dekkar and Massin-
ger attempted it, for a popular audience, in "The Virgin
Martyr"; and though the tragedy of "The Virgin Mar-
tyr" is a huddled mass of beauties and deformities, its
materials of incident and characters, could Shakespeare
have been attracted to them, might have been organized
into as great a drama as Othello. Again, Marlowe, in
his play of "Doctor Faustus," has imperfectly treated a
subject which in Shakespeare's hands would have been
made into a tragedy sublimer than Lear, could he have
thrown himself into it with equal earnestness.
lowe, from the fact that he was a brawling atheist,
had evidently at some time directed his whole heart and
imagination to the consideration of religious questions,
and had resolutely faced facts from which Shakespeare
turned away.
Mar-
Shakespeare, also, in common with the other dram-
atists of the time, looked at the Puritans as objects of
satire, laughing at them instead of gazing into them.
They were doubtless grotesque enough in external ap-
pearance; but the poet of human nature should have
70
SHAKESPEARE.
penetrated through the appearance to the substance, and
recognized in them, not merely the possibility of Crom-
well, but of the ideal of character which Cromwell but
imperfectly represented. You may say that Shake-
speare's nature was too sunny and genial to admit the
Puritan. It was not too sunny or genial to admit Rich-
ards, and Iagos, and Gonerils, and "secret, black, and
midnight hags."
It may be doubted also if Shakespeare's affinities ex-
tended to those numerous classes of human character
that stand for the reforming and philanthropic senti-
ments of humanity. We doubt if he was hopeful for
the race. He was too profoundly impressed with its
disturbing passions to have faith in its continuous pro-
gress. Though immensely greater than Bacon, it may
be questioned if he could thoroughly have appreciated
Bacon's intellectual character. He could have deline-
ated him to perfection in everything but in that peculiar
philanthropy of the mind, that spiritual benignity, that
belief in man and confidence in his future, which both
atone and account for so many of Bacon's moral defects.
There is no character in his plays that covers the ele-
ments of such a man as Hildebrand or Luther, or either
of the two Williams of Orange, or Hampden, or How-
ard, or Clarkson, or scores of other representative men
whom history celebrates.. Though the broadest individ-
}
SHAKESPEARE.
71
ual nature which human nature has produced, human
nature is immensely broader than he.
It would be easy to quote passages from Shake-
speare's works which would seem to indicate that his
genius was not limited in any of the directions which
have been pointed out; but these passages are thoughts
and observations, not men and women. Hamlet's
soliloquy, and Portia's address to Shylock, might be ad-
duced as proofs that he comprehended the religious ele-
ment; but then who would take Hamlet or Portia as
representative of the religious character in any of its
numerous historical forms?
of his plays to this effect :
There is a remark in one
"It is an heretic that makes the fire,
Not she which burns in 't."
This might be taken as a beautiful expression of Chris-
tian toleration, and is certainly admirable as a general
thought; but it indicates Shakespeare's indifference to
religious passions in indicating his superiority to them.
It would have been a much greater achievement of
genius to have passed into the mind and heart of the
conscientious burner of heretics, seized the essence of
the bigot's character, and embodied in one great ideal
individual a class of men whom we now both execrate
and misconceive. If he could follow the dramatic pro-
cess of his genius for Sir Toby Welch, why could he not
do it for St. Dominic?
72
SHAKESPEARE.
Indeed, toleration, in the sense that Shakespeare has
given to the word, is not expressed in maxims directed
against intolerance, but in the exercise of charity towards
intolerant men; and it is thus necessary to indicate the
limitations of his sympathy with his race, in order to ap-
preciate its real quality and extent. His unapproached
greatness consists, not in including human nature, but
in taking the point of view of those large classes of hu-
man nature he did include. His sympathetic insight
was both serious and humorous; and he thus equally
escaped the intolerance of taste and the intolerance of
intelligence. What we would call the worst criminals
and the most stupid fools were, as mirrored in his mind,
fairly dealt with; every opportunity was afforded them
to justify their right to exist; their words, thoughts, and
acts were viewed in relation to their circumstances and
character, so that he made them inwardly known, as
well as outwardly perceived. The wonder of all this
would be increased, if we supposed, for the sake of illus-
tration, that the persons and events of all Shakespeare's
plays were historical, and that, instead of being repre-
sented by Shakespeare, they were criticised by Macau-
lay. The result would be that the impression received
from the historian of every incident and every person
would be different, and would be wrong. The external
facts might not be altered; but the falsehood would pro-
SHAKESPEARE.
73
ceed from the incapacity or indisposition of the historian
to pierce to the heart of the facts by sympathy and
imagination. There would be abundant information,
abundant eloquence, abundant invective against crime,
abundant scorn of stupidity and folly, perhaps much
sagacious reflection and judicial scrutiny of evidence;
but the inward and essential truth would be wanting.
What external statement of the acts and probable mo-
tives of Macbeth and Othello could convey the idea we
have of them from being witnesses of the conflict of
their thoughts and passions? How wicked and shallow
and feeble and foolish would Hamlet appear, if repre-
'sented, not in the light of Shakespeare's imagination,
but in the light of Macaulay's epigrams! How the his-
torian would display the dazzling fence of his rhetoric
on the indecision of the prince, his brutality to Ophelia,
his cowardice, his impotence between contending mo-
tives, and the chaos of blunders and crimes in which he
sinks from view! The subject would be even a better
one for him than that of James the Second; yet the
very supposition of such a mode of treatment makes us
feel the pathos of the real Hamlet's injunction to the
friend who strives to be his companion in death:
$
A
"Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.”
4
74
SHAKESPEARE.
If the historian would thus deal with the heroes,
such "small deer" as Bardolph and Master Slender
would of course be puffed out of existence with one hiss
of lordly contempt. Yet Macaulay has a more vivid.
historical imagination, more power of placing himself in
the age about which he writes, than historians like
Hume and Hallam, whose judgments of men are sum-
maries of qualities, and imply no inwardness of vision,
no discerning of spirits. In the whole class, the point
of view is the historian's, and not the point of view of
the persons the historian describes. The curse which
clings to celebrity is, that it commonly enters history
only to be puffed or lampooned.
Society,
The truth is, that most men, the intelligent and the
virtuous as well as the ignorant and the vicious, are in-
tolerant of other individualities. They are uncharitable
by defect of sympathy and defect of insight.
even the best, is apt to be made up of people who are
engaged in the agreeable occupation of despising each
other; for one association for mutual admiration there
are twenty for mutual contempt; yet while conversation
is thus mostly made up of strictures on individuals,
it rarely evinces any just perception of individualities.
James is indignant or jocose at the absence of James
in John, and John is horror-stricken at the impudence of
James in refusing to be John. Each person feels himself
SHAKESPEARE.
75
to be misunderstood, though he never questions his power
to understand his neighbor. Egotism, vanity, prejudice,
pride of opinion, conceit of excellence, a mean delight in
recognizing inferiority in others, a meaner delight in re-
fusing to recognize the superiority of others, all the hon-
est and all the base forms of self-assertion, cloud and
distort the vision when one mind directs its glance at
another. For one person who is mentally conscientious
there are thousands who are morally honest. The re-
sult is a vast massacre of character, which would move
the observer's compassion were it not that the victims
are also the culprits, and that pity at the spectacle of
the arrow quivering in the sufferer's breast is checked
by the sight of the bow bent in the sufferer's hands.
This depreciation of others is the most approved method
of exalting ourselves. It educates us in self-esteem, if
not in knowledge. The savage conceives that the
power of the enemy he kills is added to his own.
Shakespeare more justly conceived that the power of
the human being with whom he sympathized was added
to his own.
This toleration, without which an internal knowledge
of other natures is impossible, Shakespeare possessed
beyond any other man recorded in literature or history.
It is a moral as well as mental trait, and belongs to the
highest class of virtues. It is a virtue which, if gener-
76
SHAKESPEARE.
ally exercised, would remove mutual hostility by en-
lightening mutual ignorance. And in Shakespeare we
have, for once, a man great enough to be modest and
charitable; who has the giant's power, but, far from
using it like a giant, trampling on weaker creatures,
prefers to feel them in his arms rather than feel them
under his feet; and whose toleration of others is the
exercise of humility, veracity, beneficence, and justice,
as well as the exercise of reason, imagination, and hu-
mor. We shall never appreciate Shakespeare's genius
until we recognize in him the exercise of the most
difficult virtues, as well as the exercise of the most
wide-reaching intelligence.
It is, of course, not so wonderful that he should take
the point of view of characters in themselves beautiful
and noble, though even these might appear very differ-
ent under the glance of a less soul-searching eye. For
such aspects of life, however, all genius has a natural
affinity. But the marvel of his comprehensiveness is
his mode of dealing with the vulgar, the vicious, and
the low, with persons who are commonly spurned às
dolts and knaves. His serene benevolence, did not
pause at what are called "deserving objects of charity,"
but extended to the undeserving, who are, in truth, the
proper objects of charity. If we compare him, in this
respect, with poets like Dante and Milton, in whom
95.
SHAKESPEARE.
77
*
elevation is the predominant characteristic, we shall find
that they tolerate humanity only in its exceptional ex-
amples of beauty and might. They are aristocrats of
intellect and conscience, the noblest aristocracy, but
also the haughtiest and most exclusive. They can sym-
pathize with great energies, whether celestial or diabolic,
but their attitude towards the feeble and the low is apt
to be that of indifference or contempt. Milton can do
justice to the Devil, though not, like Shakespeare, to
"poor devils." But it may be doubted if the wise and
good have the right to cut the Providential bond which
connects them with the foolish and the bad, and set up
an aristocratic humanity of their own, ten times more
supercilious than the aristocracy of blood. Divorce the
loftiest qualities from humility and geniality, and they
quickly contract a pharisaic taint; and if there is any-
thing which makes the wretched more wretched, it is
the insolent condescension of patronizing benevolence,
if there is anything which makes the vicious more
vicious, it is the "I-am-better-than-thou " expression on
the face of conscious virtue. Now Shakespeare had
none of this pride of superiority, either in its noble or
ignoble form. Consider that, if his gigantic powers
had been directed by antipathies instead of sympathies,
he would have left few classes of human character un-
touched by his terrible scorn. Even if his antipathies
78
SHAKESPEARE.
had been those of taste and morals, he would have done
so much to make men hate and misunderstand each
other, so much to destroy the very sentiment of hu-
manity, that he would have earned the distinction
of being the greatest satirist and the worst man that
ever lived. But instead, how humanely he clings to the
most unpromising forms of human nature, insists on
their right to speak for themselves as much as if they
were passionate Romeos and high-aspiring Bucking-
hams, and does for them what he might have desired
should be done for himself had he been Dogberry, or
Bottom, or Abhorson, or Bardolph, or any of the rest!
The low characters, the clowns and vagabonds, of Ben
Jonson's plays, excite only contempt or disgust. Shake-
speare takes the same materials as Ben, passes them
through the medium of his imaginative humor, and
changes them into subjects of the most soul-enriching
mirth. Their actual prototypes would not be tolerated;
but when his genius shines on them, they "lie in light"
before our humorous vision. It must be admitted that
in his explorations of the lower levels of human nature
he sometimes touches the mud deposits; still, he never
hisses or jeers at the poor relations through Adam he
there discovers, but magnanimously gives them the wink
of consanguinity.
This is one extreme of his genius, the poetic com-
SHAKESPEARE.
79
prehension and embodiment of the low. What was the
other extreme? How high did he mount in the ideal
region, and what class of his characters represents his
loftiest flight? It is commonly asserted that his super-
natural beings, his ghosts, spectres, witches, fairies, and
the like, exhibiting his command of the dark side and
the bright side, the terror and the grace, of the super-
natural world, indicate his rarest quality; for in these,
it is said, he went out of human nature itself, and
created beings that never existed. Wonderful as these
are, we must recollect that in them he worked on a
basis of popular superstitions, on a mythology as definite
as that of Greece and Rome, and though he recreated
instead of copying his materials, though he Shakespear-
ianized them, he followed the same process of his
genius in delineating Hecate and Titania as in deline-
ating Dame Quickly and Anne Page. All his charac-
ters, from the rogue Autolycus to the heavenly Cordelia,
are in a certain sense ideal; but the question now. re-
lates to the rarity of the elements, and the height of the
mood, and not merely to the action of his mind; and
we think that the characters technically called super-
natural which appear in his works are much nearer the
earth than others which, though they lack the name,
have more of the spiritual quality of the thing. The
highest form of the supernatural is to be found in the
purest, highest, most beautiful souls.
80
SHAKESPEARE.
Did it never strike you, in reading The Tempest, that
Ariel is not so supernatural as Miranda? We may be
sure that Ferdinand so thought, in that rapture of
wonder when her soul first shone on him through her
innocent eyes; and afterwards, when he asks,
"I do beseech you
(Chiefly that I might set it in my prayers)
What is your name?"
And doubtless there was a more marvellous melody in
her voice than in the mysterious magical music
"That crept by him upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and his passion
With its sweet air."
Shakespeare, indeed, in his transcendently beautiful
embodiments of feminine excellence, the most exquisite
creations in literature, passed into a region of sentiment
and thought, of ideals and of ideas, altogether higher
and more supernatural than that region in which he
shaped his elicate Ariels and his fairy Titanias. The
question has been raised whether sex extends to soul.
However this may be decided, here is a soul, with its
records in literature, who is at once the manliest of men,
and the most womanly of women; who can not only
recognize the feminine element in existing individuals,
but discern the idea, the pattern, the radiant genius, of
SHAKESPEARE
81
sons.
womanhood itself, as it hovers, unseen by other eyes,
over the living representatives of the sex. Literature
boasts many eminent female poets and novelists; but
not one has ever approached Shakespeare in the purity,
the sweetness, the refinement, the elevation, of his per-
ceptions of feminine character, much less approached
him in the power of embodying these perceptions in per-
These characters are so thoroughly domesticated
on the earth, that we are tempted to forget the heaven
of invention from which he brought them. The most
beautiful of spirits, they are the most tender of daugh-
ters, lovers, and wives. They are "airy shapes,” but
they "syllable men's names." Rosalind, Juliet, Ophe-
lia, Viola, Perdita, Miranda, Desdemona, Hermione,
Portia, Isabella, Imogen, Cordelia, if their names do
not call up their natures, the most elaborate analysis
of criticism will be of no avail. Do you say that these
women are slightly idealized portraits of actual women?
Was Cordelia, for example, simply a good, affectionate
daughter of a foolish old king? To Shakespeare him-
self she evidently "partook of divineness"; and he hints
of the still ecstasy of contemplation in which her nature
first rose upon his imagination, when, speaking through
the lips of a witness of her tears, he hallows them as
they fall:
"She shook
The holy water from her heavenly eyes."
4米
​/
F
82
SHAKESPEARE.
And these Shakespearian women, though all radia-
tions from one great ideal of womanhood, are at the same
time intensely individualized. Each has a separate soul,
and the processes of intellect as well as emotion are
different in each. Each, for example, is endowed with
the faculty, and is steeped in the atmosphere, of imagi-
nation; but who could mistake the imagination of
Ophelia for the imagination of Imogen?-the loitering,
lingering movement of the one, softly consecrating
whatever it touches, for the irradiating, smiting efficiency,
the flash and the bolt, of the other? Imogen is perhaps
the most completely expressed of Shakespeare's women;
for in her every faculty and affection is fused with
imagination, and the most exquisite tenderness is com-
bined with vigor and velocity of nature. Her mind
darts in an instant to the ultimate of everything. After
she has parted with her husband, she does not merely
say that she will pray for him. Her affection is winged,
and in a moment she is enskied. She does not look up,
she goes up: she would have charged him, she says,
"At the sixth hour of morn, at noon, at midnight,
T'encounter me with orisons, for then
I am in heaven for him."
When she hears of her husband's inconstancy, the possi-
ble object of his sensual whim is at once consumed in
the fire that leaps from her impassioned lips: -
SHAKESPEARE.
83
"Some jay of Italy,
Whose mother is her painting, hath betrayed him.”
Mr. Collier, ludicrously misconceiving the instinctive ac-
tion of Imogen's mind, thinks the true reading is, "who
smothers her with painting." Now Imogen's wrath
first reduces the light woman to the most contemptible
of birds and the most infamous of symbols, the jay, and
then, not willing to leave her any substance at all, anni-
hilates her very being with the swift thought that the
paint on her cheeks is her mother, that she is nothing
but the mere creation of painting, a phantom born of a
color, without real body or soul. It would be easy to show
that the mental processes of all Shakespeare's women
are as individual as their dispositions.
And now think of the amplitude of this man's soul!
Within the immense space which stretches between Dog-
berry or Launcelot Gobbo and Imogen or Cordelia,
lies the Shakespearian world. No other man ever ex-
hibited such philosophic comprehensiveness; but philo-
sophic comprehensiveness is often displayed apart from
creative comprehensiveness, and along the whole vast
line of facts, laws, analogies, and relations over which
Shakespeare's intellect extended, his perceptions were
vital, his insight was creative, his thoughts flowed in
forms. And now, was he proud of his transcendent supe-
riorities? Did he think that he had exhausted all that
84
SHAKESPEARE.
can appear before the sight of the eye and the sight of
the soul? No. The immeasurable opulence of the undis-
covered and undiscerned regions of existence was never
felt with more reverent humility than by this discoverer,
who had seen in rapturous visions so many new worlds
open on his view. In the play which perhaps best ex-
hibits the ecstatic action of his mind, and which is alive
in every part with that fiery sense of unlimited power
which the mood of ecstasy gives, in the play of An-
tony and Cleopatra, he has put into the mouth of the
Soothsayer what seems to have been his own modest
judgment of the extent of his glance into the uni-
verse of matter and mind :
"In nature's infinite book of secrecy
A little I can read!
1
BEN JONSON.
AUTHORS are apt to be popularly considered as
physically a feeble folk, — as timid, nervous, dys-
peptic rhymers or prosers, unfitted to grapple with the
rough realities of life. We shall endeavor here to pre-
sent the image of one calculated to reverse this impres-
sion, the image of a stalwart man of letters, who
lived two centuries and a half ago, in the greatest age
of English literature, who undeniably had brawny
fists as well as forgetive faculties, who could handle
a club as readily as a pen, hit his mark with a
bullet as surely as with a word, and a sort of cross be-
tween the bully and the bard — could shoulder his way
through a crowd of prize-fighters to take his seat among
the tuneful company of immortal poets. This man,
Ben Jonson, commonly stands next to Shakespeare in a
consideration of the dramatic literature of the age of
Elizabeth; and certainly, if the "thousand-souled "
Shakespeare may be said to represent mankind, Ben as
unmistakably stands for English-kind. He is "Saxon "
England in epitome, John Bull passing from a name
a proud, strong, tough, solid, domineer-
into a man,
1
86
BEN JONSON.
ing individual, whose intellect and personality cannot be
severed, even in thought, from his body and personal
appearance. Ben's mind, indeed, was rooted in Ben's
character; and his character took symbolic form in his
physical frame. He seemed built up, mentally as well
as bodily, out of beef and sack, mutton and Canary; or,
to say the least, was a joint product of the English mind
and the English larder, of the fat as well as the thought of
the land, of the soil as well as the soul of England. The
moment we attempt to estimate his eminence as a dram-
atist, he disturbs the equanimity of our judgment by tum-
bling head-foremost into the imagination as a big, bluff,
burly, and quarrelsome man, with "a mountain belly and
a rocky face." He is a very pleasant boon companion
as long as we make our idea of his importance agree
with his own; but the instant we attempt to dissect his
intellectual pretensions, the living animal becomes a
dangerous subject, his countenance flames, his great
hands double up, his thick lips begin to twitch with im-
pending invective, and, while the critic's impression of
him is thus all the more vivid, he is checked in its ex-
pression by a very natural fear of the consequences.
There is no safety but in taking this rowdy leviathan of
letters at his own valuation; and the relation of critics
towards him is as perilous as that of the jurymen to-
wards the Irish advocate, who had an unpleasant habit
BEN JONSON.
87
of sending them the challenge of the duellist whenever
they brought in a verdict against any of his clients.
There is, in fact, such a vast animal force in old Ben's
self-assertion, that he bullies posterity as he bullied his
contemporaries; and, while we admit his claim to rank
next to Shakespeare among the dramatists of his age,
we beg our readers to understand that we do it under
intimidation.
The qualities of this bold, racy, and brawny egotist
can be best conveyed in a biographical form. He was
born in 1574, the grandson of a gentleman who, for his
religion, lost his estate, and for a time his liberty, in
Queen Mary's reign, and the son of a clergyman in hum-
ble circumstances, who died about a month before his
"rare" offspring was born. His mother, shortly after
the death of her husband, married a master-bricklayer.
Ben, who as a boy doubtless exhibited brightness of in-
tellect and audacity of spirit, seems to have attracted the
attention of Camden, who placed him in Westminster
School, of which he was master. Ben there displayed
so warm a love of learning, and so much capacity in
rapidly acquiring it, that at the age of sixteen he is
said to have been removed to the University of Cam-
bridge, though he stated to Drummond, long after-
wards, that he was "master of arts in both the Uni-
versities, by their favor, not his studie." His ambition
88
BEN JONSON.
at this time, if we may believe some of his biographers,
was to be a clergyman; and had it been gratified, he
would probably have blustered his way to a bishopric,
and proved himself one of the most arrogant, learned,
and pugnacious disputants of the English Church Mili-
tant, perhaps have furnished the type of that pecu-
liar religionist, compounded of bully, pedant, and bigot,
whom Warburton was afterwards, from the lack of
models, compelled to originate. But after residing a few
months at the University, Ben, deserted by his friends.
and destitute of money, found it impossible to carry out.
his design; and he returned disappointed to his mother's
house. As she could not support him in idleness, the
stout-hearted student adopted the most obvious means
of earning his daily bread, and for a short time followed
the occupation of his father-in-law, going to the work of
bricklaying, according to the tradition, with a trowel in
one hand, but with a Horace in the other. His enemies
among the dramatists did not forget this when he be-
came famous, but meanly sneered at him as
"the
lime-and-mortar poet." When we reflect that in the
aristocratic age of good Queen Bess, play-writing, even
the writing of Hamlets and Alchymists, was, if we may
trust Dr. Farmer, hardly considered " a creditable em-
ploy," we may form some judgment of the position of
the working classes, when a mechanic was thus deemed
BEN JONSON.
89
to have no rights which a playwright
respect."
66
was bound to
We have no means of deciding whether or not Ben
was foolish enough to look upon his trade as degrading;
that it was distasteful we know from the fact that he
soon exchanged the trowel for the sword; and we hear
no more of his dealing with bricks, if we may except
his questionable habit of sometimes carrying too many
of them in his hat. At the age of eighteen he ran
away to the Continent, and enlisted as a volunteer in
the English army in Flanders, fully intending, doubt-
less, as fate seemed against his being a Homer or an
Aristotle, to try if fortune would not make him an
Alexander or a Hannibal. As ill-luck would have it,
however, his abundant vitality had little scope in mar-
tial exercise. He does not appear to have been in any
general engagement, though he signalized his personal
prowess in a manner which he was determined should
not be forgotten through any diffidence of his own.
Boastful as he was brave, he was never weary of brag-
ging how he had encountered one of the enemy, fought
with him in presence of both armies, killed him, and tri-
umphantly "taken opima spolia from him."
After serving one campaign, our Ajax-Thersites re-
turned, at the age of nineteen, to England, bringing with
him, according to Gifford, "the reputation of a brave
·90
BEN JONSON.
(6
man, a smattering of Dutch, and an empty purse." To
these efficiencies and deficiencies he probably added
the infirmity of drinking; for, as our army in
Flanders " ever drank terribly as well as swore
terribly," it may be supposed that Ben there laid,
deep and wide, the foundation of his bacchanalian
habits. Arrived in London, and thrown on his own
resources for support, he turned naturally to the stage,
and became an actor in a minor playhouse, called
the Green Curtain. Though he was through life
a good reader, and though at this time he was not
afflicted with the scurvy, which eventually so punched
his face as to make one of his satirists compare it, with
witty malice, to the cover of a warming-pan, he still
never rose to any eminence as an actor. He had not
been long at the Green Curtain when a quarrel with
one of his fellow-performers led to a duel, in which Jon-
son killed his antagonist, was arrested on a charge of
murder, and, in his own phrase, was brought "almost at
the gallowes," an unpleasant proximity, which he
hastened to increase by relieving the weariness of im-
prisonment in discussions on religion with a Popish
priest, also a prisoner, and by becoming a convert to
Romanism. As the zealous professors of the old faith
had passed, in Elizabeth's time, from persecutors into
martyrs, Ben, the descendant of one of Queen Mary's
BEN JONSON.
91.
ཟན་
victims, evinced more than his usual worldly prudence
in seizing this occasion to join their company, as he
could reasonably hope that, if he escaped hanging on
the charge of homicide, he still might contrive to be
beheaded and disembowelled on a charge of treason.
In regard, however, to the original cause of his impris-
onment, it would seem that, on investigation, it was
found the duel had been forced upon him, that his an-
tagonist had taken the precaution of bringing into the
field a sword ten inches longer than his own, and thus,
far from expecting to be the victim of murder, had not
unsagaciously counted on committing it. Jonson was
released; but, apparently vexed at this propitious turn
of his fortunes, instead of casting about for some means
of subsistence, he almost immediately married a woman
as poor as himself, a wife whom he afterwards curtly
described as a shrew, yet honest." A shrew, indeed!
As if Mrs. Jonson must not often have had just occasion
to use her tongue tartly! — as if her redoubtable Ben
did not often need its acrid admonitions! They seem
to have lived together until 1613, when they separated.
Absolute necessity drove Jonson again to the stage,
probably both as actor and writer. He began his dra-
matic career, as Shakespeare had begun his, by doing
job-work for the managers, that is, by altering, recast-
ing, and making additions to, old plays. At last, in
-
92
BEN JONSON.
1596, in his twenty-second year, he placed himself at a
bound among the famous dramatists of the time, by the
production, at the Rose Theatre, of his comedy of Ev-
ery Man in his Humor. Two years afterwards, having
in the mean time been altered and improved, it was,
through the influence of Shakespeare, accepted by the
players of the Blackfriars Theatre, Shakespeare him-
self acting the characterless part of the Elder Knowell.
Among the writers of the Elizabethan age,
an age
in which, for a wonder, there seemed to be a glut of
genius, Ben is prominent more for racy originality of
personal character, weight of understanding, and quick-
ness of fancy, than for creativeness of imagination.
His first play, Every Man in his Humor, indicates, to a
great extent, the quality and the kind of power with
which he was endowed. His prominent characteristic
was will, will carried to self-will, and sometimes to
self-exaggeration almost furious. His understanding
was solid, strong, penetrating, even broad, and it was
well furnished with matter derived both from experience
and books; but, dominated by a personality so fretful
and fierce, it was impelled to look at men and things,
not in their relations to each other, but in their relations
to Ben. He had reached that ideal of stormy conceit
in which, according to Emerson, the egotist declares,
"Difference from me is the measure of absurdity."
BEN JONSON.
93
Even the imaginary characters he delineated as a dram-
atist were all bound, as by tough cords, to the will that
gave them being, lacked that joyous freedom and care-
less grace of movement which rightfully belonged to
them as denizens of an ideal world, and had to obey
their master Ben, as puppets obey the showman. His
power of external observation was pitilessly keen and
searching, and it was accompanied by a rich, though
somewhat coarse and insolent vein of humor; but his
egotism commonly directed his observation to what was
below, rather than above himself, and gave to his humor
a scornful, rather than a genial tone. He huffs even in
his hilarity; his fun is never infectious; and his very
laughter is an assertion of superior wisdom. He has
none of that humanizing humor, which, in Shakespeare,
makes us like the vagabonds we laugh at, and which
insures for Dogberry and Nick Bottom, Autolychus and
Falstaff, warmer friends among readers than many great
historic dignities of the state and the camp can command.
In regard to the materials of the dramatist, Jonson,
in his vagrant career, had seen human nature under
many aspects; but he had surveyed it neither with the
eye of reason nor the eye of imagination. His mind
fastened on the hard actualities of observation, without
passing to what they implied or suggested. Deficient,
thus, in philosophic insight and poetic insight, his shrewd,
94
BEN JONSON.
contemptuous glance rarely penetrated beneath the man-
His attention was
ners and eccentricities of men.
(6
""
arrested, not by character, but by prominent peculiarities
of character, peculiarities which almost transformed
character into caricature. To use his own phrase, he
delineated “humors" rather than persons, that is, indi-
viduals under the influence of some dominant affectation,
or whim, or conceit, or passion, that drew into itself,
colored, and mastered the whole nature, an acorn,"
as Sir Thomas Browne phrases it, "in their young
brows, which grew to an oak in their old heads." He
thus inverts the true process of characterization. In-
stead of seeing the trait as an offshoot of the individual,
he individualizes the trait. Every man is in his humor,
instead of every humor being in its man. In order that
there should be no misconception of his purpose, he
named his chief characters after their predominant
qualities, as Morose, Surly, Sir Amorous La Fool, Sir
Politic Would Be, Sir Epicure Mammon, and the like;
and, apprehensive even then that his whole precious
meaning would not be taken in, he appended to his
dramatis personæ further explanations of their respective
natures.
This distrust of the power of language to lodge a
notion in another brain is especially English; but Ben,
of all writers, seems to have been most impressed with
BEN JONSON.
95
the necessity of pounding an idea into the perceptions
of his countrymen. His mode resembles the attempt
of that honest Briton who thus delivered his judgment
on the French nation: "I hate a Frenchman, sir.
Every Frenchman is either a puppy or a rascal, sir.”
And then, fearful that he had not been sufficiently
explicit, he added, "Do you take my idea?”
With all abatements, however, the comedy of Every
Man in his Humor is a remarkable effort, considered as
the production of a young man of twenty-two. The
two most striking characters are Kitely and Captain
Bobadil. Give Jonson, indeed, a peculiarity to start
with, and he worked it out with logical exactness. So
intense was his conception of it, that he clothed it in
flesh and blood, gave it a substantial existence, and
sometimes succeeded in forcing it into literature as a
permanent character.
Bobadil, especially, is one of Ben's masterpièces.
He is the most colossal coward and braggart of the
comic stage. He can swear by nothing less terrible
than "by the body of Cæsar," or "by the foot of Pha-
raoh," when his oath is not something more terrific still,
namely, "by my valor"! Every school-boy knows the
celebrated passage in which the boasting Captain offers to
settle the affairs of Europe by associating with himself
twenty other Bobadils, as "cunning i' the fence" as him-
96
BEN JONSON.
self, and challenging an army of forty thousand men,
twenty at a time, and killing the whole in a certain
number of days. Leaving out the cowardice, we may
say there was something of Bobadil in Jonson him-
self; and it may be shrewdly suspected that his con-
ceit of destroying an army in this fashion came into his
head in the exultation of feeling which followed his own
successful exploit, in the presence of both armies, when
he was a soldier in Flanders. Old John Dennis de-
scribed genius" as a furious joy and pride of soul at the
conception of an extraordinary hint." Ben had this
"furious joy and pride," not only in the conception of
extraordinary hints, but in the doing of extraordinary
things.
Jonson followed up his success by producing the
plays of Every Man out of his Humor and Cynthia's
Revels, — dramatic satires on the manners, follies, affec-
tations, and vices, of the city and the court. One good
result of Jonson's egotism was, that it made him afraid
of nothing. He openly appeared among the dramatists
of his day as a reformer, and, poor as he was, refused
to pander to popular tastes, whether those tastes took
the direction of ribaldry, or blasphemy, or bombast. He
had courage, morality, earnestness; but then his cour-
age was so blustering, his morality so irascible, and his
devotion to his own ideas of art so exclusive, that he
BEN JONSON.
97
was constantly defying and insulting the persons he pro-
posed to teach. Other dramatists said to the audience,
"Please to applaud this "; but Ben said, "Now, you
fools, we shall see if you have sense enough to applaud
this!" The stage, to be sure, was to be exalted and
improved, but it was to be done by his own works, and
the glory of literature was to be associated with the
glory of Master Benjamin. This conceit, by making
him insensible to Shakespeare's influence, made him,
next to Shakespeare, perhaps the most original dram-
atist of the time. He differed from his brother dram-
atists not in degree, but in kind. He felt it was not for
him to imitate, but to produce models for imitation,
for him to catch the spirit of the age, but to originate a
better. In short, he felt and taught belief in Ben; and,
high as posterity rates the literature of the age of Eliza-
beth, it would be supposed from his prologues and epi-
logues that he conceived his fat body to have fallen on
evil days.
not
In every Man out of his Humor and Cynthia's Revels,
he is in a raging passion throughout. His verse groans
with the weight of his wrath. "My soul," he exclaims,
"Was never ground into such oily colors
To flatter vice and daub iniquity.
But with an arméd and resolvéd hand
I'll strip the ragged follies of the time
Naked as at their birth,
5
G
98
BEN JONSON.
and with a whip of steel
Print wounding lashes on their iron ribs."
But though he exhausts the whole rhetoric of railing, in-
vective, contempt, and scorn, we yet find it difficult to feel
any of the indignation he labors to excite. Admiration,
however, cannot be refused to Jonson's prose style in
these as in his other plays. It is terse, sharp, swift,
biting, every word a die that stamps a definite
image. Occasionally the author's veins, to use his own
apt expression, seem to "run quicksilver," and "every
phrase comes forth steeped in the very brine of conceit,
and sparkles like salt in fire." Yet, though we have
scenes in which there is brightness in every sentence,
the result of the whole is something like dulness, as
the object of the whole is to exalt himself and de-
press others. But in these plays, in strange contrast
with their general character, we have a few specimens.
of that sweetness of sentiment, refinement of fancy, and
indefinite beauty of imagination, which, occupying somet
secluded corner of his large brain, seemed to exist apart
from his ordinary powers and passions. Among these, the
most exquisite is this Hymn to Diana, which partakes of
the serenity of the moonlight, whose goddess it invokes :-
"Queen and huntress chaste and fair,
Now the sun is laid to sleep,
Seated in thy silver chair,
BEN JONSON.
99
State in wonted manner keep.
Hesperus entreats thy light,
Goddess excellently bright!
"Earth, let not thy envious shade
Dare itself to interpose;
Cynthia's shining orb was made
"
Heaven-to clear when day did close.
Bless us, then, with wished sight,
Goddess excellently bright.
แ Lay thy bow of pearl apart
And thy crystal-gleaming quiver;
Give unto the flying hart
Space to breathe how short soever,
Thou that mak'st a day of night,
Goddess excellently bright."
If, as Jonson's adversaries maliciously asserted, " every
line of his poetry cost him a cup of sack," we must, even
in our more temperate days, pardon him the eighteen
cups which, in this melodious lyric, went into his mouth
as sack, but, by some precious chemistry, came out
through his pen as pearls.
It was inevitable that the imperious attitude Jonson
assumed, and the insolent pungency of his satire, should
rouse the wrath of the classes he lampooned and the
enmity of the poets he ridiculed and decried. Among
those who conceived themselves assailed, or who felt
insulted by his arrogant tone, were two dramatists,
100
BEN JONSON.
Thomas Dekkar and John Marston. They soon re-
criminated; and, as Ben was better fitted by nature to
dispense than to endure scorn and derision, he, in 1601,
produced The Poetaster, the object of which was to
silence forever, not only Dekkar and Marston, but all
other impudent doubters of his infallibility. The humor
of the thing is, that, in this elaborate attempt to convict
his adversaries of calumny in taxing him with self-love
and arrogance, he ostentatiously exhibits the very quali-
ties he disclaims. He keeps no terms with those who
profess disbelief in Ben. They are "play-dressers and
plagiaries," "fools or jerking pedants," "buffoon barking
wits," tickling "base vulgar ears with beggarly and
barren trash," while his are
"The high raptures of a happy Muse,
Borne on the wings of her immortal thought,
That kicks at earth with a disdainful heel,
And beats at heaven's gate with her bright hoofs."
Dekkar retorted in a play called Satiromastrix; or, the
Untrussing of the Humorous Poet; but, though the scur-
rility is brilliantly bitter, it is less efficient and "hearted"
than Jonson's. This literary controversy, conducted
in acted plays, had to the public of that day a zest
similar to that we should enjoy if the editors of two
opposing political newspapers should meet in a hall filled
with their subscribers, and fling their thundering edito-
BEN JONSON.
101
rials in person at each other's heads. The theatre-goers
seem to have declared for Dekkar and Marston; and
Ben, disgusted with such a proof of their incapacity of
right judgment, sulked and growled in his den, and for
two years gave nothing to the stage. He had, however,
found a patron, who enabled him to do this without under-
going the famine of insufficient meat, and the still more
dreadful drought of insufficient drink; for, in a gossip-
ing diary of the period, covering these two years, we
are informed, "B. J. now lives with one Townsend, and
scorns the world." While, however, pleasantly engaged
in this characteristic occupation, for which he had a nat-
ural genius, he was meditating a play which he thought
would demonstrate to all judging spirits his possession
equally of the acquirements of the scholar and the tal-
ents of the dramatist. In the conclusion of the Apolo-
getic Dialogue which accompanies The Poetaster, he
had hinted his purpose in these energetic lines :
"Once I'll say,
To strike the ears of Time in these fresh strains,
As shall, beside the cunning of their ground,
Give cause to some of wonder, some despite,
And more despair to imitate their sound.
I that spend half my nights and all my days
Here in a cell, to get a dark, pale face,
To come forth with the ivy and the bays,
And in this age can hope no better grace,-
102
BEN JONSON.
Leave me! There's something come into my thought,
That must and shall be sung high and aloof,
Safe from the wolf's black jaw, and the dull ass's hoof!"
Accordingly, in 1603, he produced his weighty trage-
dy of Sejanus, at Shakespeare's theatre, The Globe,
Shakespeare himself acting one of the inferior parts.
Think of Shakespeare laboriously committing to mem-
ory the blank verse of Jonson !
Though Sejanus failed of theatrical success, its wealth
of knowledge and solid thought made it the best of
all answers to his opponents. It was as if they had
questioned his capacity to build a ship, and he had
confuted them with a man-of-war. To be sure, they
might reiterate their old charge of "filching by transla-
tion," for the text of Sejanus is a mosaic; but it was
one of Jonson's maxims that he deserved as much
honor for what he reproduced from the classics as for
what he originated. Indeed, in his dealings with the
great poets and historians of Rome, whose language and
much of whose spirit he had patiently mastered, he acted
the part, not of the pickpocket, but of the conqueror.
He did not meanly crib and pilfer in the territories of
the ancients: he rather pillaged, or, in our American
phrase, “annexed ” them. "He has done his robberies
so openly," says Dryden,
to be taxed by any law.
"that one sees he fears not
He invades authors like a
BEN JONSON.
103
monarch, and what would be theft in any other poet is
only victory in him.”
One incident connected with the bringing out of Se-
janus should not be omitted. Jonson told Drummond
that the Earl of Northampton had a mortal enmity to
him "for beating, on a St. George's day, one of his at-
tenders"; and he adds, that Northampton had him
"called before the Councell for his Sejanus,” and ac-
cused him there both of "Poperie and treason."
Jonson's relations with Shakespeare seem always to
have been friendly; and about this time we hear of
them as associate members of the greatest of literary
and of convivial clubs, the club instituted by Sir
Walter Raleigh, and known to all after-times as the
"Mermaid," being so called from the tavern in which
the meetings were held. Various, however, as were the
genius and accomplishments it included, it lacked one
phase of ability which has deprived us of all participa-
tion in its wit and wisdom. It could boast of Shake-
speare, and Jonson, and Raleigh, and Camden, and
Beaumont, and Selden; but, alas! it had no Boswell to
record its words,
"So nimble, and so full of subtile flame.”
There are traditions of "wit-combats" between Shake-
speare and Jonson; and doubtless there was many a
discussion between them touching the different principles
104
BEN JONSON.
on which their dramas were composed; and then Ben,
astride his high horse of the classics, probably blustered
and harangued, and graciously informed the world's
greatest poet that he sometimes wanted art and some-
times sense, and candidly advised him to check the fatal
rapidity and perilous combinations of his imagination,-
while Shakespeare smilingly listened, and occasionally
put in an ironic word, deprecating such austere criticism
of a playwright like himself, who accommodated his art
to the humors of the mob that crowded the "round O"
of the Globe. There can be no question that Shake-
speare saw Ben through and through, but he was not a
man to be intolerant of foibles, and probably enjoyed
the hectoring egotism of his friend as much as he appre-
ciated his real merits. As for Ben, the transcendent
genius of his brother dramatist pierced through even
the thick hide of his self-sufficiency. "I did honor
him," he finely says, "this side of idolatry, as much as
any other man.”
On the accession of James of Scotland to the English
throne, Jonson was employed by the court and city to
design a splendid pageant for the monarch's reception;
and, with that absence of vindictiveness which some-
what atoned for his arrogance, he gave his recent
enemy, Dekkar, three fifths of the job. About the same
time he was reconciled to Marston; and in 1605 assisted
BEN JONSON.
105
him and Chapman in a comedy called "Eastward Hoe!”
One passage in this, reflecting on the Scotch, gave mor-
tal offence to James's greedy countrymen, who invaded
England in his train, and were ravenous and clamorous
for the spoils of office. Captain Seagul, in the play,
praises what was then the new settlement of Virginia,
as "a place without sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers,
or intelligencers, only a few industrious Scots perhaps,
who indeed are dispersed over the whole earth. But as
for them, there are no greater friends to Englishmen
and England, when they are out on 't, in the world, than
they are; and, for my own part, I would a hundred
thousand of them were there, for we are all one coun-
trymen now, ye know, and we should find ten times
more comfort of them there than we do here." This
bitter taunt, which probably made the theatre roar with
applause, was so represented to the king, that Marston
and Chapman were arrested and imprisoned. Jonson
nobly insisted on sharing their fate; and as he had
powerful friends at court, and was esteemed by James
himself, his course may have saved his friends from dis-
graceful mutilations. A report was circulated that the
noses and ears of all three were to be slit; and Jonson
tells us that, in an entertainment he gave to Camden,
Selden, and other friends, after his liberation, his old
mother exhibited a paper full of "lustie strong poison,"
5*
106
BEN JONSON.
which she said she had intended to mix in his drink,
in case the threat of such a shameful punishment
were officially announced. The phrase, "his drink," is
very characteristic; and, whatever liquid was meant,
we may be sure that it was not water, and that the good
lady would have daily had numerous opportunities to
mix the poison with it.
and also
The five years which succeeded his imprisonment
carried Jonson to the height of his prosperity and glory.
During this period he produced the three great come-
dies on which his fame as a dramatist rests, The Fox,
The Silent Woman, and The Alchymist,
many of the most beautiful of those Masques, performed
at court, in which the ingenuity, delicacy, richness, and
elevation of his fancy found fittest expression. His
social position was probably superior to Shakespeare's.
He was really the Court Poet long before 1616, when
he received the office, with a pension of a hundred
marks. We have Clarendon's testimony to the fact that
"his conversation was very good, and with men of the
best note." Among his friends occurs the great name
of Bacon.
In 1618, when "Ben Jonson" had come to be a
familiar name on the lips of all educated men in the
island, he made his celebrated journey on foot to Scot-
land, and was hospitably entertained by the nobility and
BEN JONSON.
107
gentry around Edinburgh. Taylor, the water poet, in
his "Pennylesse Pilgrimage" to Scotland, has this
amiable reference to him. "At Leith," he says, “I
found my long approved and assured good friend, Mas-
ter Benjamin Jonson, at one Master John Stuart's
house. I thank him for his great kindness; for, at my
taking leave of him, he gave me a piece of gold of
two-and-twenty shillings' value, to drink his health in
England." One object of Jonson's journey was to
visit the poet Drummond. He passed three or four
weeks with Drummond at Hawthornden, and poured
out his mind to him without reserve or stint. The fini-
cal and fastidious poet was somewhat startled at this
irruption of his burly guest into his dainty solitude,
took notes of his free conversation, especially when he
decried his contemporaries, and further performed the
rites of hospitality by adding a caustic, though keen,
summary of his qualities of character. Thus, accord-
ing to his dear friend's charitable analysis, Ben “ was a
great lover and praiser of himself; a contemner and
scorner of others; given rather to losse a friend than a
jest; jealous of every word and action of those about.
him (especiallie after drink, which is one of the ele-
ments in which he liveth); a dissembler of ill parts
which raigne in him, a bragger of some good that he
wanteth; thinketh nothing well bot what either he him-
108
BEN JONSON.
self or some of his friends and countrymen have said or
done; he is passionately kynde and angry; careless
either to gaine or keep; vindictive, but, if he be well
answered, at himself." It is not much to the credit of
Jonson's insight, that, after flooding his pensively taci-
turn host with his boisterous and dogmatic talk, he
parted with him under the impression that he was leav-
ing an assured friend. Ah! your demure listeners to
your unguarded conversation, they are the ones that
give the fatal stabs !
A literal transcript of Drummond's original notes
of Jonson's conversations, made by Sir Robert Sibbald
about the year 1710, has been published in the collec-
tions of the Shakespeare Society. This is a more ex-
tended report than that included in Drummond's works,
though still not so full as the reader might desire. The
stoutness of Ben's character is felt in every utterance.
Thus he tells Drummond that "he never esteemed of
a man for the name of a lord,” a sentiment which he
had expressed more impressively in his published epi-
gram on Burleigh
"Cecil, the grave, the wise, the great, the good,
What is there more that can ennoble blood?"
He had, it seems, 66 a minde to be a churchman, and, so
he might have favor to make one sermon to the King,
he careth not what thereafter sould befall him; for he
+1
BEN JONSON.
109
would not flatter though he saw Death." Queen Eliza-
beth is the mark of a most scandalous imputation, and
the mildest of Ben's remarks respecting her is that she
66
66
never saw herself, after she became old, in a true glass ;
they painted her, and sometymes would vermilion her
nose." "Of all styles,” he said, "he most loved to be
named Honest, and hath of that one hundred letters
so naming him." His judgments on other poets were
insolently magisterial. Spenser's stanzas pleased him
not, nor his matter"; Samuel Daniel was a good honest
man, but no poet; Donne, though "the first poet in the
world in some things," for "not keeping of accent, de-
served hanging"; Abram Fraunce, "in his English
hexameters, was a foole"; Sharpham, Day, and Dekkar
were all rogues; Francis Beaumont "loved too much
himself and his own verses." Some biographical items
in the record of these conversations are of interest. It
seems that the first day of every new year the Earl of
Pembroke sent him twenty pounds "to buy bookes."
By all his plays he never gained two hundred pounds.
"Sundry tymes he hath devoured his bookes," that is,
sold them.to supply himself with necessaries. When he
was imprisoned for killing his brother actor in a duel, in
the Queen's time, "his judges could get nothing of him
to all their demands but I and No. They placed two
damn'd villains, to catch advantage of him, with him,
110
BEN JONSON.
but he was advertised by his keeper”; and he added, as
if the revenge was as terrible as the offence, "of the
spies he hath ane epigrame." He told a few personal
stories to Drummond, calculated to moderate our won-
der that Mrs. Jonson was a shrew; and, as they were
boastingly told, we must suppose that his manners were
not so austere as his verse. But perhaps the most
characteristic image he has left of himself, through these
conversations, is this: "He hath consumed a whole
night in lying looking to his great toe, about which he
hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthagin-
ians, feight in his imagination."
Jonson's fortunes seem to have suffered little abate-
ment until the death of King James, in 1625. Then
declining popularity and declining health combined
their malice to break the veteran down; and the re-
maining twelve years of his life were passed in doing
battle with those relentless enemies of poets,
and disease. The orange or rather the lemon
want
was
squeezed, and both court and public seemed disposed to
throw away the peel. In the epilogue to his play of
The New Inn, brought out in 1630, the old tone of de-
fiance is gone. He touchingly appeals to the audience
as one who is "sick and sad"; but, with a noble hu-
mility, he begs they will refer none of the defects of the
work to mental decay.
BEN JONSON.
111
"All that his weak and faltering tongue doth crave
Is that you not refer it to his brain;
That's yet unhurt, although set round with pain."
The audience were insensible to this appeal. They
found the play dull, and hooted it from the stage. Per-
haps, after having been bullied so long, they took de-
light in having Ben "on the hip." Charles the First,
however, who up to this time seems to have neg-
lected his father's favorite, now generously sent him
a hundred pounds to cheer him in his misfortunes; and
shortly after he raised his salary, as Court Poet, from a
hundred marks to a hundred pounds, adding, in compli-
ment to Jonson's known tastes, a tierce of Canary, -
wine of which he was so fond as to be nicknamed, in
ironical reference to a corpulence which rather assimi-
lated him to the ox, "a Canary bird."
a Canary bird." It is to this
period, we suppose, we must refer his testimony to his
own obesity in his Epistle to my Lady Coventry.
"So you have gained a Servant and a Muse:
The first of which I fear you will refuse,
And you may justly; being a tardy, cold,
Unprofitable chattle, fat and old,
Laden with belly, and doth hardly approach
His friends, but to break chairs or crack a coach.
His weight is twenty stone, within two pound;
And that's made up, as doth the purse abound.”
a
As his life declined, it does not appear that his dispo-
112
BEN JONSON.
sition was essentially modified. There are two charac-
teristic references to him in his old age, which prove
that Ben, attacked by palsy and dropsy, with a reputa-
tion perceptibly waning, was Ben still.
John Suckling's pleasantly malicious
Poets":
One is from Sir
"Session of the
"The first that broke silence was good old Ben;
Prepared before with Canary wine,
(6
And he told them plainly he deserved the bays,
For his were called works where others were but plays.
Apollo stopped him there, and bade him not go on;
'T was merit, he said, and not presumption,
Must carry 't; at which Ben turned about,
And in great choler offered to go out."
That is a saucy touch,
that of Ben's rage when he is
told that presumption is not, before Apollo, to take the
place of merit, or even to back it!
The other notice is in a letter from Howell to
Sir Thomas Hawk, written the year before Jonson's
death:
"I was invited yesternight to a solemn supper by
B. J., where you were deeply remembered. There was
good company, excellent cheer, choice wines, and jovial
welcome. One thing intervened which almost spoiled
the relish of the rest, that B. began to engross all the
discourse, to vapor extremely by himself, and, by vilify-
BEN JONSON.
113
5
ing others, to magnify his own Muse. For my part, I
am content to dispense with the Roman infirmity of
Ben, now that time has snowed upon his pericranium."
But this snow of time, however it may have begun
to cover up the massive qualities of his mind, seems to
have left untouched his strictly poetic faculty. That
shone out in his last hours, with more than usual splen-
dor, in the beautiful pastoral drama of The Sad Shep-
herd; and it may be doubted if in the whole of his
works any other passage can be found so exquisite in
sentiment, fancy, and expression as the opening lines of
this charming product of his old age.
"Here she was wont to go! and here! and here!
Just where those daisies, pinks, and violets grow:
The world may find the Spring by following her;
For other print her airy steps ne'er left :
Her treading would not bend a blade of grass,
Or shake the downy blow-ball from his stalk!
But like the soft west-wind she shot along,
And where she went the flowers took thickest root,
As she had sowed them with her odorous foot!"
Before he could complete The Sad Shepherd he was
struck with mortal illness; and the brave old man pre-
pared to meet his last enemy, and, if possible, convert
him into a friend. As early as 1606 he had returned
to the English Church, after having been for twelve.
years a Romanist; and his penitent death-bed was
H
114
BEN JONSON.
attended by the Bishop of Winchester. He died in
August, 1637, in his sixty-fourth year, and was buried
in Westminster Abbey. The inscription on the com-
mon pavement stone which was laid over his grave,
"O RARE BEN JONSON!"
still expresses, after a lapse of two hundred years, the
feelings of all readers of the English race.
It must be admitted, however, that this epithet is
sufficiently indefinite to allow widely differing estimates
of the value of his works. In a critical view, the most
obvious characteristic of his mind is its bulk; but its
creativeness bears no proportion to its massiveness.
His faculties, ranged according to their relative strength,
would fall into this rank: first, BEN; next, under-
standing; next, memory; next, humor; next, fancy;
and last and least, imagination.
Thus, in the strictly
poetic action of his mind, his fancy and imagination
being subordinated to his other faculties, and not co-or-
dinated with them, his whole nature is not kindled, and
his best masques and sweetest lyrics give no idea of the
general largeness of the man. In them the burly giant
becomes gracefully petite; it is Fletcher's Omphale
"smiling the club" out of the hand of Hercules, and
making him, for the time, "spin her smocks." Now the
greatest poetical creations of Shakespeare are those in
•
BEN JONSON.
115
which he is greatest in reason, and greatest in passion,
and greatest in knowledge, as well as greatest in imagi-
nation, his poetic power being
"Like to the fabled Cytherea's zone,
Binding all things with beauty.'
His mind is "one entire and perfect chrysolite,” while
Jonson's rather suggests the pudding-stone. The poet
in Ben being thus but a comparatively small portion
of Ben, works by effort, rather than inspiration, and
leaves the impression of ingenuity rather than inven-
tiveness. But in his tragedies of Sejanus and Catiline,
and especially in his three great comedies of The Fox,
The Alchymist, and The Silent Woman, the whole man
is thrust forward, with his towering individuality, his
massive understanding, his wide knowledge of the baser
side of life, his relentless scorn of weakness and wicked-
ness, his vivid memory of facts and ideas derived from
books. They seem written with his fist. But, though
they convey a powerful impression of his collective
ability, they do not convey a poetic impression, and
hardly an agreeable one. His strongest characters, as
might be expected, are not heroes or martyrs, but cheats
or dupes. His most magnificent cheat is Volpone, in
The Fox; his most magnificent dupe is Sir Epicure
Mammon, in The Alchymist; but in their most gor-
geous mental rioting in imaginary objects of sense, the
116
BEN JONSON.
effect is produced by a dogged accumulation of suc-
cessive images, which are linked by no train of strictly
imaginative association, and are not fused into unity of
purpose by the fire of passion-penetrated imagination.
Indeed, it is a curious psychological study to watch
the laborious process by which Jonson drags his thoughts
and fancies from the reluctant and resisting soil of his
mind, and then lays them, one after the other, with a
deep-drawn breath, on his page. Each is forced into
form by main strength, as we sometimes see a pillar
of granite wearily drawn through the street by a score
of straining oxen. Take, for example, Sir Epicure
Mammon's detail of the luxuries he will revel in when
his possession of the philosopher's stone shall have
given him boundless wealth. The first cup of Canary
and the first tug of invention bring up this enormous
piece of humor : —
"My flatterers
Shall be the pure and gravest of divines
That I can get for money."
Then another wrench of the mind, and, it is to be feared,.
another swallow of the liquid, and we have this :
"My meat shall all come in in Indian shells,
Dishes of agate, set in gold, and studded
With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies."
Glue that on, and now for another tug:—
BEN JONSON.
117
"My shirts
I'll have of taffeta-sarsnet, soft and light
As cobwebs; and for all my other raiment,
It shall be such as might provoke the Persian,
Were he to teach the world riot anew."
And then, a little heated, his imagination is stung into
action, and this refinement of sensation flashes out:
'My gloves of fishes' and birds' skins perfumed
With gums of Paradise and Eastern air.”
And now we have an extravagance jerked violently out
from his logical fancy :—
"I will have all my beds blown up, not stuffed;
Down is too hard.”
But all this patient accumulation of particulars, each
costing a mighty effort of memory or analogy, produces
no cumulative effect. Certainly, the word "strains," as
employed to designate the effusions of poetry, has a
peculiar significance as applied to Jonson's verse. No
hewer of wood or drawer of water ever earned his
daily wages by a more conscientious putting forth of
daily labor. Critics and among the critics Ben is the
most clamorous call upon us to admire and praise the
construction of his plays. But his plots, admirable of
their kind, are still but elaborate contrivances of the
understanding, all distinctly thought out beforehand by
the method of logic, not the method of imagination;
118
BEN JONSON.
regular in external form, but animated by no living
internal principle; artful, but not artistic; ingenious
schemes, not organic growths; and conveying the same
kind of pleasure we experience in inspecting other
mechanical contrivances. His method
His method is neither the
method of nature nor the method of art, but the method
of artifice. A drama of Shakespeare may be compared.
to an oak; a drama by Jonson to a cunningly fashioned
box, made of oak-wood, with some living plants growing
in it. Jonson is big; Shakespeare is great.
Still we say, “O rare Ben Jonson!" A large, rude,
clumsy, English force, irritable, egotistic, dogmatic, and
quarrelsome, but brave, generous, and placable; with
no taint of a malignant vice in his boisterous foibles;
with a good deal of the bulldog in him, but nothing
of the spaniel, and one whose growl was ever worse
than his bite; - he, the bricklayer's apprentice, fighting
his way to eminence through the roughest obstacles,
capable of wrath, but incapable of falsehood, willing to
boast, but scorning to creep, still sturdily keeps his hard-
won position among the Elizabethan worthies as poet,
playwright, scholar, man of letters, man of muscle and
brawn; as friend of Beaumont and Fletcher and Chap-
man and Bacon and Shakespeare; and as ever ready,
in all places and at all times, to assert the manhood
of Ben by tongue and pen and sword.
IN
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
N the present chapter we propose to consider six
dramatists who were more immediately the contem-
poraries of Shakespeare and Jonson, and who have the
precedence in time, and three of them, if we may be-
lieve some critics, not altogether without claim to the
precedence in merit, of Beaumont and Fletcher, Mas-
singer, and Ford. These are Heywood, Middleton,
Marston, Dekkar, Webster, and Chapman.
They belong to the school of dramatists of which
Shakespeare was the head, and which is distinguished
from the school of Jonson by essential differences of
principle. Jonson constructed his plays on definite ex-
ternal rules, and could appeal confidently to the critical
understanding, in case the regularity of his plot and the
keeping of his characters were called in question.
Shakespeare constructed his, not according to any rules
which could be drawn from the practice of other dram-
atists, but according to those interior' laws which the
mind, in its creative action, instinctively divines and
spontaneously obeys. In his case, the appeal is not to
the understanding alone, but to the feelings and faculties
120
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
which were concerned in producing the work itself; and
the symmetry of the whole is felt by hundreds who
could not frame an argument to sustain it. The laws to
which his genius submitted were different from those to
which other dramatists had submitted, because the time,
the circumstances, the materials, the purpose aimed at,
were different. The time demanded a drama which
should represent human life in all its diversity, and in
which the tragic and comic, the high and the low, should
be in juxtaposition, if not in combination. The dram-
atists of whom we are about to speak represented them
in juxtaposition, and rarely succeeded in vitally com-
bining them so as to produce symmetrical works. Their
comedy and tragedy, their humor and passion, move in
parallel rather than in converging lines. They have di-
versity; but as their diversity neither springs from, nor
tends to, a central principle of organization or of order,
the result is often a splendid anarchy of detached scenes,
more effective as detached than as related. Shakespeare
alone had the comprehensive energy of impassioned
imagination to fuse into unity the almost unmanageable
materials of his drama, to organize this anarchy into a
new and most complex order, and to make a world-wide
variety of character and incident consistent with one-
ness of impression. Jonson, not pretending to give his
work this organic form, put forth his whole strength to
i
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
121
give it mechanical regularity, every line in his solidest
plays costing him, as the wits said, "a cup of sack."
But the force implied in a Shakespearian drama, a force
that crushes and dissolves the resisting materials into
their elements, and recombines or fuses them into a new
substance, is a force so different in kind from Jonson's,
that it would, of course, be idle to attempt an estimate of
its superiority in degree. And in regard to those minor
dramatists who will be the subjects of the present essay,
if they fall below Jonson in general ability, they nearly
all afford scenes and passages superior to his best in
depth of passion, vigor of imagination, and audacious
self-committal to the primitive instincts of the heart.
66
""
The most profuse, but perhaps the least poetic of
these dramatists, was Thomas Heywood, of whom little
is known, except that he was one of the most prolific
writers the world has ever seen. In 1598 he became
an actor, or, as Henslowe, who employed him, phrases
it, came and hired himself to me as a covenanted
servant for two years." The date of his first published
drama is 1601; that of his last published work, a Gen-
eral History of Women, is 1657. As early as 1633 he
represents himself as having had an "entire hand, or at
least a main finger," in two hundred and twenty plays,
of which only twenty-three were printed. True it is, he
says, "that my plays are not exposed to the world in
6
122
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
volumes, to bear the title of Works, as others: one rea-
son is, that many of them, by shifting and change of
companies, have been negligently lost; others of them
are still retained in the hands of some actors, 'who think it
against their peculiar profit to have them come in print;
and a third, that it was never any great ambition in me
to be in this kind voluminously read." It was said of
him, by a contemporary, that "he not only acted every
day, but also obliged himself to write a sheet every
day for several years; but many of his plays being com-
posed loosely in taverns, occasions them to be so mean."
Besides his labors as a playwright, he worked as trans-
lator, versifier, and general maker of books. Late in
life he conceived the design of writing the lives of all
the poets of the world, including his contemporaries.
Had this project been carried out, we should have known
something about the external life of Shakespeare; for
Heywood must have carried in his brain many of those
facts which we of this age are most curious to know.
Heywood's best plays evince large observation, con-
siderable dramatic skill, a sweet and humane spirit, and
an easy command of language. His style, indeed, is
singularly simple, pure, clear, and straightforward; but
it conveys the impression of a mind so diffused as
almost to be characterless, and incapable of flashing its
thoughts through the images of imaginative passion. He
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
123
is more prosaic, closer to ordinary life and character,
than his contemporaries. Two of his plays, and the
best of them all, A Woman Killed with Kindness, and
The English Traveller, are thoroughly domestic dramas,
the first, and not the worst, of their class. The plot of
The English Traveller is specially good; and in read-
ing few works of fiction do we receive a greater shock
of surprise than in Geraldine's discovery of the infidel-
ity of Wincott's wife, whom he loves with a Platonic
devotion. It is as unanticipated as the discovery, in
Jonson's Silent Woman, that Epicone is no woman at
all, while at the same time it has less the appearance
of artifice, and is more the result of natural causes.
With less fluency of diction, less skill in fastening the
reader's interest to his fable, harsher in versification,
and generally clumsier in construction, the best plays
of Thomas Middleton are still superior to Heywood's
in force of imagination, depth of passion, and fulness of
matter. It must, however, be admitted that the senti-
ments which direct his powers are not so fine as Hey-
wood's. He depresses the mind, rather than invigorates
it. The eye he cast on human life was not the eye of
a sympathizing poet, but rather that of a sagacious
cynic. His observation, though sharp, close, and vigi-
lant, is somewhat ironic and unfeeling. His penetrating,
incisive intellect cuts its way to the heart of a character
124
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
as with a knife; and if he lays bare its throbs of guilt
and weakness, and lets you into the secrets of its
organization, he conceives his whole work is performed.
This criticism applies even to his tragedy of Women
Beware Women, a drama which shows a deep study of
the sources of human frailty, considerable skill in ex-
hibiting the passions in their consecutive, if not in their
conflicting action, and a firm hold upon character; but
it lacks pathos, tenderness, and humanity; its power is
out of all proportion to its geniality; the characters,
while they stand definitely out to the eye, are seen
through no visionary medium of sentiment and fancy;
and the reader feels the force of Leantio's own agoniz-
ing complaint, that his affliction is
“Of greater weight than youth was made to bear,
As if a punishment of after-life
Were fall'n upon man here, so new it is
To flesh and blood, so strange, so insupportable."
There is, indeed, no atmosphere to Middleton's mind;
and the hard, bald caustic peculiarity of his genius,
which is unpleasingly felt in reading any one of his
plays, becomes a source of painful weariness as we plod
doggedly through the five thick volumes of his works.
Like the incantations of his own witches, it "casts a
thick scurf over life." It is most powerfully felt in his
tragedy of The Changeling, at once the most oppress-
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
125.
ive and impressive effort of his genius. The character
of De Flores in this play has in it a strangeness of
iniquity, such as we think is hardly paralleled in the
whole range of the Elizabethan drama. The passions
of this brute-imp are not human. They are such as
might be conceived of as springing from the union of
animal with fiendish impulses, in a nature which knew
no law outside of its own lust, and was as incapable of
a scruple as of a sympathy.
But of all the dramatists of the time, the most dis-
agreeable in disposition, though by no means the least
powerful in mind, was John Marston. The time of his
birth is not known; his name is entangled in contempo-
rary records with that of another John Marston; and
we may be sure that his mischief-loving spirit would
have been delighted could he have anticipated that the
antiquaries, a century after his death, would be driven to
despair by the difficulty of discriminating one from the
other. It is more than probable, however, that he was
the John Marston who was of a respectable family in
Shropshire, who took his bachelor's degree at Oxford in
1592, and who was afterwards married to a daughter
of a chaplain of James the First. Whatever may
have been Marston's antecedents, they were such as to
gratify his tastes as a cynical observer of the crimes and
follies of men,
an observer whose hatred of evil
126
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
sprang from no love of good, but to whom the sight of
depravity and baseness was welcome, inasmuch as it
afforded him the occasion to indulge his own scorn and
pride. His ambition was to be the English Juvenal;
and it must be conceded that he had the true Iago-like
disposition "to spy out abuses." Accordingly, in 1598,
he published a series of venomous satires called The
Scourge of Villanie, rough in versification, condensed
in thought, tainted in matter, evincing a cankered more
than a caustic spirit, and producing an effect at once
indecent and inhuman. To prove that this scourging
of villany, which would have put Mephistopheles to the
blush, was inspired by no respect for virtue, he soon
followed it up with a poem so licentious that, before it
was circulated to any extent, it was suppressed by order
of Archbishop Whitgift, and nearly all the copies de-
stroyed. A writer could not be thus dishonored without
being brought prominently into notice, and old Hens-
lowe, the manager, was after him at once to secure his
libellous ability for the Rose. Accordingly, we learn
from Henslowe's diary, under date of September 28,
1599, that he had lent to William Borne, "to lend unto
John Mastone," "the new poete," "the sum of forty
shillings,” in earnest of some work not named. There
is an undated letter of Marston to Henslowe, written
probably in reference to this matter, which is character-
istic in its disdainfully confident tone. Thus it runs :
•
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
127
“MR. HENSLOWE, at the Rose on the Bankside.
"If you like my playe of Columbus, it is verie well,
and you shall give me noe more than twentie poundes for
it, but If nott, lett me have it by the Bearer againe, as
I know the kinges men will freelie give me as much for
it, and the profitts of the third daye moreover.
"Soe I rest yours,
"JOHN MARSTON."
He seems not to have been popular among the band
of dramatists he now joined, and it is probable that his
insulting manners were not sustained by corresponding
courage. Ben Jonson had many quarrels with him,
both literary and personal, and mentions one occasion
on which he beat him and took away his pistol. His
temper was Italian, rather than English, and one would
conceive of him as quicker with the stiletto than the fist.
His connection with the stage ceased, in 1613, after he
had produced a number of dramas, of which nine have
been preserved. He died about twenty years after-
wards, in 1634, seemingly in comfortable circumstances.
Marston's plays, whether comedies or tragedies, all
bear the mark of his bitter and misanthropic spirit,
a spirit that seemed cursed by the companionship of its
own thoughts, and forced them out through a well-
grounded fear that they would fester if left within. His
128
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
comedies of The Malcontent, The Fawn, and What
You Will, have no genuine mirth, though an abundance
of scornful wit,- of wit which, in his own words,
"stings, blisters, galls off the skin, with the acrimony
of its sharp quickness." The baser its objects, the
brighter its gleam. It is stimulated by the desire to
give pain, rather than the wish to communicate pleas-
ure. Marston is not without sprightliness, but his
sprightliness is never the sprightliness of the kid, though
it is sometimes that of the hyena, and sometimes that
of the polecat. In his Malcontent he probably drew a
flattering likeness of his inner self: yet the most com-
passionate reader of the play would experience little.
pity in seeing the Malcontent hanged. So much, in-
deed, of Marston's satire is directed at depravity, that
Ben Jonson used to say that “Marston wrote his father-
in-law's preachings, and his father-in-law his comedies."
It is to be hoped, however, that the spirit of the chap-
lain's tirades against sins was not, like his son-in-law's,
worse than the sins themselves.
If Marston's comic vein is thus, to use one of Dek-
kar's phrases, that of "a thorny-toothed rascal," it may
be supposed that his tragic is a still fiercer libel on
humanity. His tragedies, indeed, though not without
a gloomy power, are extravagant and horrible in con-
ception and conduct. Even when he copies, he makes
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
129
the thing his own by caricaturing it. Thus the plot
of Antonio's Revenge is plainly taken from Hamlet,
but it is Hamlet passed through Marston's intellect and
imagination, and so debased as to look original. Still,
the intellect in Marston's tragedies strikes the reader as
forcible in itself, and as capable of achieving excellence,
if it could only be divorced from the bad disposition and
deformed conscience which direct its exercise. He has
fancy, and he frequently stutters into imagination; but
the imp that controls his heart corrupts his taste and
taints his sense of beauty, and the result is that he has
a malicious satisfaction in deliberately choosing words
whose uncouthness finds no extenuation in their expres-
siveness, and in forging elaborate metaphors which dis-
gust rather than delight. His description of a storm at
sea is among the least unfavorable specimens of this
perversion of his poetical powers:
"The sea grew mad;
Strait swarthy darkness popt out Phœbus' eye,
And blurred the jocund face of bright-cheek'd day;
Whilst cruddled fogs masked even darkness' brow;
Heaven bade's good night, and the rocks groaned
At the intestine uproar of the main."
It must be allowed that both his tragedies and come-
dies are full of strong and striking thoughts, which
6*
I
130
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
show a searching inquisition into the worst parts of hu-
man nature. Occasionally he expresses a general truth
with great felicity, as when he says,
"Pygmy cares
Can shelter under patience' shield; but giant griefs
Will burst all covert.'
His imagination is sometimes stimulated into unusual
power in expressing the fiercer and darker passions; as,
for example, in this image: -
"O, my soul's enthroned
の
​In the triumphant chariot of revenge!"
And in this:
"Ghastly Amazement, with upstarted hair,
Shall hurry on before, and usher us,
Whilst trumpets clamor with a sound of death.”
He has three descriptions of morning, which seem to
have been written in emulation of Shakespeare's in
Hamlet; two of them being found in the tragedy which
Hamlet suggested.
"Is not yon gleam the shuddering morn that flakes
With silver tincture the east verge of heaven?
For see the dapple-gray coursers of the morn
Beat up the light with their bright silver hoofs,
And chase it through the sky.
Darkness is fled; look, infant morn hath drawn
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
131
Bright silver curtains 'bout the couch of night;
And now Aurora's horse trots azure rings,
Breathing fair light about the firmament."
These last two lines appear feeble enough as con-
trasted with the beautiful intensity of imagination in
Emerson's picturing of the same scene:
"O, tenderly the haughty Day
Fills his blue urn with fire.”
The most beautiful passage in Marston's plays is the
lament of a father over the dead body of his son, who
has been defamed. It is so apart from his usual style,
as to breed the suspicion that the worthy chaplain's
daughter, whom he made Mrs. Marston, must have
given it to him from her purer imagination :
"Look on those lips,
Those now lawn pillows, on whose tender softness
Chaste modest speech, stealing from out his breast,
Had wont to rest itself, as loath to post
From out so fair an inn: look, look, they seem
To stir,
And breathe defiance to black obloquy."
A
If among the dramatists of the period any person
could be selected who in disposition was the opposite of
Marston, it would be Thomas Dekkar, a man whose
inborn sweetness and gleefulness of soul carried him
through vexations and miseries which would have
132
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
!
crushed a spirit less hopeful, cheerful, and humane. He
was probably born about the year 1575; commenced
his career as player and playwright before 1598; and
for forty years was an author by profession, that is, was
occupied in fighting famine with his pen. The first
intelligence we have of him is characteristic of his
whole life. It is from Henslowe's diary, under date of
February, 1598: "Lent unto the company, to discharge
Mr. Decker out of the counter in the powltry, the sum
of 40 shillings." Oldys tells us that "he was in King's
Bench Prison from 1613 to 1616"; and the antiquary
adds ominously, "how much longer I know not." Indeed,
Dr. Johnson's celebrated enumeration of the scholar's
experiences would stand for a biography of Dekkar :-
"Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.”
This forced familiarity with poverty and distress does
not seem to have imbittered his feelings or weakened
the force and elasticity of his mind. He turned his
calamities into commodities. If indigence threw him
into the society of the ignorant, the wretched, and the
depraved, he made the knowledge of low life he thus
obtained, serve his purpose as dramatist or pamphleteer.
Whatever may have been the effect of his vagabond
habits on his principles, they did not stain the sweetness
and purity of his sentiments. There is an innocency in
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
133
his very coarseness, and a brisk, bright good-nature
chirps in his very scurrility. In the midst of distresses
of all kinds, he still seems, like his own Fortunatus,
"all felicity up to the brims"; but that his content with
Fortune is not owing to an unthinking ignorance of her
caprice and injustice is proved by the words he puts into
her mouth:
" This world is Fortune's ball wherewith she sports.
Sometimes I strike it up into the air,
And then create I emperors and kings;
Sometimes I spurn it, at which spurn crawls out
The wild beast multitude: curse on, you fools,
'Tis I that tumble princes from their thrones,
And gild false brows with glittering diadems;
'T is I that tread on necks of conquerors,
And when like semi-gods they have been drawn
In ivory chariots to the Capitol,
Circled about with wonder of all eyes,
The shouts of every tongue, love of all hearts,
Being swoln with their own greatness, I have pricked
The bladder of their pride, and made them die
As water-bubbles (without memory):
I thrust base cowards into honor's chair,
Whilst the true-spirited soldier stands by
Bareheaded, and all bare, whilst at his scars
They scoff, that ne'er durst view the face of wars.
I set an idiot's cap on virtue's head,
Turn learning out of doors, clothe wit in rags,
And paint ten thousand images of loam
In gaudy silken colors: on the backs
134
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
Of mules and asses I make asses ride,
Only for sport to see the apish world
Worship such beasts with sound idolatry.
This Fortune does, and when all this is done,
She sits and smiles to hear some curse her name,
And some with adoration crown her fame."
The boundless beneficence of Dekkar's heart is spe-
cially embodied in the character of the opulent lord, Ja-
como Gentili, in his play of The Wonder of a King-
dom. When Gentili's steward brings him the book in
which the amount of his charities is recorded, he ex-
claims impatiently :—
"Thou vain vainglorious fool, go burn that book;
No herald needs to blazon charity's arms.
I launch not forth a ship, with drums and guns
And trumpets, to proclaim my gallantry;
He that will read the wasting of my gold
Shall find it writ in ashes, which the wind
Will scatter ere he spells it."
He will have neither wife nor children. When, he
says,
"I shall have one hand in heaven,
To write my happiness in leaves of stars,
A wife would pluck me by the other down.
This bark has thus long sailed about the world,
My soul the pilot, and yet never listened
To such a mermaid's song.
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
135
i
My heirs shall be poor children fed on alms;
Soldiers that want limbs; scholars poor and scorned;
And these will be a sure inheritance
Not to decay; manors and towns will fall,
Lordships and parks, pastures and woods, be sold;
But this land still continues to the lord:
No tricks of law can me beguile of this.
But of the beggar's dish, I shall drink healths
To last forever; whilst I live, my roof
Shall cover naked wretches; when I die,
'T is dedicated to St. Charity."
We should not do justice to Dekkar's disposition,
even after these quotations, did we omit that enumer-
ation of positives and negatives which, in his view,
make
up the character of the happy man:
"He that in the sun is neither beam nor moat,
He that 's not mad after a petticoat,
He for whom poor men's curses dig no grave,
He that is neither lord's nor lawyer's slave,
He that makes This his sea and That his shore,
He that in 's coffin is richer than before,
He that counts Youth his sword and Age his staff,
He whose right hand carves his own epitaph,
He that upon his death-bed is a swan,
And dead no crow, he is a Happy Man."
A g
As Dekkar wrote under the constant goad of neces-
sity, he seems to have been indifferent to the require-
ments of art. That "wet-eyed wench, Care," was as
136
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
absent from his ink, as from his soul. Even his best
plays, Old Fortunatus, The Wonder of a Kingdom, and
another whose title cannot be mentioned, are good in
particular scenes and characters rather than good as
wholes. Occasionally, as in the character of Signior
Orlando Friscobaldo, he strikes off a fresh, original, and
masterly creation, consistently sustained throughout, and
charming us by its lovableness, as well as thrilling us by
its power; but generally his sentiment and imagination
break upon us in unexpected felicities, strangely better
than what surrounds them. These have been culled by
the affectionate admiration of Lamb, Hunt, and Hazlitt,
and made familiar to all English readers. To prove
how much finer, in its essence, his genius was than the
genius of so eminent a dramatist as Massinger, we only
need to compare Massinger's portions of the play of The
Virgin Martyr with Dekkar's. The scene between Doro-
thea and Angelo, in which she recounts her first meeting
with him as a "sweet-faced beggar-boy," and the scene in
which Angelo brings to Theophilus the basket of fruits
and flowers which Dorothea has plucked in Paradise,
are inexpressibly beautiful in their exquisite subtlety
of imagination and artless elevation of sentiment. It is
difficult to understand how a writer capable of such
refinements as these should have left no drama which is
a part of the classical literature of his country.
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
137
One of these scenes
that between Dorothea, the
Virgin Martyr, and Angelo, an angel who waits upon
her in the disguise of a page we cannot refrain from
quoting, familiar as it must be to many readers:
"Dor. My book and taper.
"Ang. Here, most holy mistress.
"Dor. Thy voice sends forth such music, that I never
Was ravished with a more celestial sound.
Were every servant in the world like thee,
So full of goodness, angels would come down
To dwell with us: thy name is Angelo,
And like that name thou art. Get thee to rest;
Thy youth with too much watching is oppressed.
((
Ang. No, my dear lady; I could weary stars,
And force the wakeful moon to lose her eyes,
By my late watching, but to wait on you.
When at your prayers you kneel before the altar,
Methinks I'm singing with some quire in heaven,
So blest I hold me in your company.
Therefore, my most loved mistress, do not bid
Your boy, so serviceable, to get hence,
For then you break his heart.
"Dor. Be nigh me still then.
In golden letters down I 'll set that day
Which gave thee to me. Little did I hope
To meet such worlds of comfort in thyself,
This little pretty body, when I, coming
Forth of the temple, heard my beggar-boy,
My sweet-faced, godly beggar boy, crave an alms,
Which with glad hand I gave, with lucky hand!
And when I took thee home, my most chaste bosom
· 138
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
Methought was filled with no hot wanton fire,
But with a holy flame, mounting since higher,
On wings of cherubim, than it did before.
te Ang. Proud am I that my lady's modest eye
So likes so poor a servant.
"Dor.
I have offered
Handfuls of gold but to behold thy parents.
I would leave kingdoms, were I queen of some,
To dwell with thy good father.
Be not ashamed.
“Ang.
•
Show me thy parents;
I am not: I did never
Know who my mother was; but by yon palace,
Filled with bright heavenly courtiers, I dare assure you,
And pawn these eyes upon it, and this hand,
My father is in heaven; and, pretty mistress,
If your illustrious hour-glass spend his sand,
No worse than yet it does, upon my life,
You and I both shall meet my father there,
And he shall bid you welcome.
"Dor.
O blessed day!
We all long to be there, but lose the way."
But the passage in all Dekkar's works which will be
most likely to immortalize his name is that often-quoted
one, taken from a play whose very name is unmention-
able to prudish ears:
Patience, my lord! why, 't is the soul of peace;
Of all the virtues, 't is nearest kin to heaven;
It makes men look like gods. The best of men
That e'er wore earth about him was a Sufferer,
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
139
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit;
The first true gentleman that ever breathed."
A more sombre genius than Dekkar, though a genius
more than once associated with his own in composition,
was John Webster, of whose biography nothing is cer-
tainly known, except that he was a member of the
Merchant Tailors' Company. His works have been
thrice republished within thirty years; but the perusal
of the whole does not add to the impression left on the
mind by his two great tragedies. His comic talent was
small; and for all the mirth in his comedies of West-
ward Hoe and Northward Hoe we are probably in-
debted to his associate, Dekkar. His play of Appius
and Virginia is far from being an adequate rendering of
one of the most beautiful and affecting fables that ever
crept into history. The Devil's Law Case, a tragi-
comedy, has not sufficient power to atone for the want
of probability in the plot and want of nature in the
characters. The historical play of Sir Thomas Wyatt
can only be fitly described by using the favorite word
in which Ben Jonson was wont to condense his critical
opinions, "It is naught." But The White Devil and
The Duchess of Malfy are tragedies which even so rich
and varied a literature as the English could not lose
without a sensible diminution of its treasures.
Webster was one of those writers whose genius con-
140
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
sists in the expression of special moods, and who, outside
of those moods, cannot force their creative faculties into
vigorous action. His mind by instinctive sentiment was
directed to the contemplation of the darker aspects of
life. He brooded over crime and misery until his
imagination was enveloped in their atmosphere, found a
fearful joy in probing their sources and tracing their
consequences, became strangely familiar with their
physiognomy and psychology, and felt a shuddering
sympathy with their "deep groans and terrible ghastly
looks." There was hardly a remote corner of the soul,
which hid a feeling capable of giving mental pain,
into which this artist in agony had not curiously peered;
and his meditations on the mysterious disorder pro-
duced in the human consciousness by the rebound of
thoughtless or criminal deeds might have found fit ex-
pression in the lines of a great poet of our own
times:
"Action is momentary,
The motion of a muscle, this way or that.
Suffering is long, obscure, and infinite.”
With this proclivity of his imagination, Webster's
power as a dramatist consists in confining the domain
of his tragedy within definite limits, in excluding all
variety of incident and character which could interfere
with his main design of awaking terror and pity, and in
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
141
the intensity with which he arrests, and the tenacity
with which he holds the attention, as he drags the mind
along the pathway which begins in misfortune or guilt,
and ends in death. He is such a spendthrift of his
stimulants, and accumulates horror on horror, and crime
on crime, with such fatal facility, that he would
render the mind callous to his terrors, were it not
that what is acted is still less than what is suggested,
and that the souls of his characters are greater than
their sufferings or more terrible than their deeds. The
crimes and the criminals belong to Italy as it was in the
sixteenth century, when poisoning and assassination
were almost in the fashion; the feelings with which
they are regarded are English; and the result of the
combination is to make the poisoners and assassins more
fiendishly malignant in spirit than they actually were.
Thus Ferdinand, in the Duchess of Malfy, is the concep-
tion formed by an honest, deep-thoughted Englishman
of an Italian duke and politician, who had been educated
in those maxims of policy which were generalized by
Machiavelli. Webster makes him a devil, but a devil
with a soul to be damned. The Duchess, his sister, is
discovered to be secretly married to her steward ; and in
connection with his brother, the Cardinal, the Duke not
only resolves on her death, but devises a series of pre-
liminary mental torments to madden and break down her
142
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
proud spirit. The first is an exhibition of wax figures,
representing her husband and children as they appeared
in death. Then comes a dance of madmen, with dismal
howls and songs and speeches. Then a tomb-maker
whose talk is of the charnel-house, and who taunts her
with her mortality. She interrupts his insulting homily
with the exclamation, "Am I not thy Duchess ? "
"Thou art," he scornfully replies, "some great woman
sure, for riot begins to sit on thy forehead (clad in gray
hairs) twenty years sooner than on a merry milkmaid's.
Thou sleepest worse than if a mouse should be forced
to take up her lodging in a cat's ear; a little infant that
breeds its teeth, should it lie with thee, would cry out,
as if thou wert the more unquiet bedfellow." This
mockery only brings from her firm spirit the proud
assertion, "I am Duchess of Malfy still." Indeed,
her mind becomes clearer and calmer as the tor-
tures proceed. At first she had imprecated curses
on her brothers, and cried,
แ
'Plagues that make lanes through largest families,
Consume them!"
But now, when the executioners appear, when her
dirge is sung, containing those tremendous lines,
"Of what is 't fools make such vain keeping?
Sin their conception, their birth weeping,
Their life a general mist of error,
Their death a hideous storm of terror,"
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
143
when all that malice could suggest for her torment has
been expended and the ruffians who have been sent to
murder her approach to do their office, her attitude is
that of quiet dignity, forgetful of her own sufferings,
solicitous for others. Her attendant, Cariola, screams
out,
Hence, villains, tyrants, murderers, alas!
What will you do with my lady? Call for help.
"Duchess. To whom,- to our next neighbors?
They are mad folks.
"Bosola.
"Duchess.
Remove that noise.
Farewell, Cariola.
In my last will I have not much to give:
A many hungry guests have fed upon me;
Thine will be a poor reversion.
"Cariola. I will die with her.
"Duchess. I pray thee, look thou giv'st my little boy
Some syrup for his cold, and let the girl
Say her prayers ere she sleep. Now what you please:
What death?
"Bosola. Strangling; here are your executioners.
"Duchess. Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength
Must pull down heaven upon me:
Yet stay, heaven-gates are not so highly arched
As princes' palaces; they that enter there
Must go upon their knees. Come, violent deatlı,
Serve for mandragora to make me sleep.
Go, tell my brothers; when I am laid out,
They then may feed in quiet."
144
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
The strange, unearthly stupor which precedes the
remorse of Ferdinand for her murder is true to nature,
and especially his nature. Bosola, pointing to the dead
body of the Duchess, says,
"Fix your eye here.
"Ferd. Constantly.
"Bosola.
Do you not weep?
Other sins only speak; murther shrieks out:
The element of water moistens the earth,
But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens.
"Ferd. Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle:
She died young.
"Bosola..
I think not so; her infelicity
Seemed to have years too many.
"Ferd.
She and I were twins:
And should I die this instant, I had lived
Her time to a minute.”
We have said that Webster's peculiarity is the te-
nacity of his hold on the mental and moral constitution
of his characters. We know of their appetites and pas-
sions only by the effects of these on their souls. He has
properly no sensuousness. Thus in The White Devil,
his other great tragedy, the events proceed from the
passion of Brachiano for Vittoria Corombona,
a pas-
sion so intense as to lead one to order the murder of
his wife, and the other the murder of her husband. If
either Fletcher or Ford had attempted the subject, the
sensual and emotional motives to the crime would have
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
145
been represented with overpowering force, and expressed
in the most alluring images, so that wickedness would
have been almost resolved into weakness; but Webster
lifts the wickedness at once from the region of the
senses into the region of the soul, exhibits its results in
spiritual depravity, and shows the satanic energy of pur-
pose which may spring from the ruins of the moral will.
There is nothing lovable in Vittoria; she seems, indeed,
almost without sensations; and the affection between
her and Brachiano is simply the magnetic attraction
which one evil spirit has for another evil spirit. Fran-
cisco, the brother of Brachiano's wife, says to him :—
"Thou hast a wife, our sister; would I had given
Both her white hands to death, bound and locked fast
In her last winding-sheet, when I gave thee
But one."
This is the language of the intensest passion, but as
applied to the adulterous lover of Vittoria it seems little
more than the utterance of reasonable regret; for devil
only can truly mate with devil, and Vittoria is Brachi-
ano's real" affinity."
The moral confusion they produce by their deeds is
traced with more than Webster's usual steadiness of
nerve and clearness of vision. The evil they inflict is
a cause of evil in others; the passion which leads to
murder rouses the fiercer passion which aches for ven-
7
J
146
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
geance; and at last, when the avengers of crime have`
become morally as bad as the criminals, they are all
involved in a common destruction. Vittoria is probably
Webster's most powerful delineation. Bold, bad, proud,
glittering in her baleful beauty, strong in that evil cour-
age which shrinks from crime as little as from danger,
she meets her murderers with the same self-reliant
scorn with which she met her judges. "Kill her attend-
ant first," exclaims one of them.
"Vittoria. You shall not kill her first; behold my breast:
I will be waited on in death; my servant
Shall never go before me.
"Gasparo.
Are you so brave?
"Vittoria. Yes, I shall welcome death,
As princes do some great ambassadors;
I'll meet thy weapon half-way.
"Lodovico.
With a joint motion.
"Vittoria..
Strike, strike,
'T was a manly blow;
The next thou giv'st, murder some sucking infant,
And then thou wilt be famous.”
Webster tells us, in the Preface to The White
Devil, that he does not "write with a goose-quill
winged with two feathers"; and also hints that the play
failed in representation through its being acted in win-
ter in "an open and black theatre," and because it
wanted "a full and understanding auditory."
"Since
that time," he sagely adds, "I have noted most of the
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
147
people that come to the playhouse resemble those ig-
norant asses who, visiting stationers' shops, their use is
not to inquire for good books, but new books." And
then comes the ever-recurring wail of the playwright,
Elizabethan as well as Georgian, respecting the taste
of audiences. "Should a man," he says, " present to
such an auditory the most sententious tragedy that ever
was written, observing all the critical laws, as height of
style and gravity of person, enrich it with the senten-
tious chorus, and, as it were, enliven death in the pas-
sionate and weighty Nuntius; yet after all this divine.
rapture, O dura messorum ilia, the breath that comes
from the uncapable multitude is able to poison it.”
Of all the contemporaries of Shakespeare, Webster is
the most Shakespearian. His genius was not only
influenced by its contact with one side of Shakespeare's
many-sided mind, but the tragedies we have been con-
sidering abound in expressions and situations either
suggested by or directly copied from the tragedies of
him he took for his model. Yet he seems to have had
no conception of the superiority of Shakespeare to all
other dramatists; and in his Preface to The White
Devil, after speaking of the "full and heightened style
of Master Chapman, the labored and understanding
works of Master Jonson, the no less worthy composures
of the both worthily excellent Master Beaumont and
148
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
Master Fletcher," he adds his approval, "without
wrong last to be named," of "the right happy and
copious industry of Master Shakespeare, Master Dek-
kar, and Master Heywood." This is not half so felici-
tous a classification as would be made by a critic of our
century, who should speak of the "right happy and
copious industry" of Master Goethe, Master Dickens,
and Master G. P. R. James.
Webster's reference, however, to "the full and
heightened style of Master Chapman" is more appro-
priate; for no writer of that age impresses us more by
a certain rude heroic height of character than George
Chapman. Born in 1559, and educated at the Univer-
sity of Oxford, he seems, on his first entrance into
London life, to have acquired the patronage of the
noble, and the friendship of all who valued genius and
scholarship. He was among the few men whom Ben
Jonson said he loved. His greatest performance, and it
was a gigantic one, was his translation of Homer, which,
in spite of obvious faults, excels all other translations in
the power to rouse and lift and inflame the mind.
Some eminent painter, we believe Barry, said that,
when he went into the street after reading it, men
seemed ten feet high. Pope averred that the transla-
tion of the Iliad might be supposed to have been written
by Homer before he arrived at years of discretion; and
►
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
149
Coleridge declares the version of the Odyssey to be as
truly an original poem as the Faery Queen. Chapman
himself evidently thought that he was the first transla-
tor who had been admitted into intimate relations with
Homer's soul, and who had caught by direct contact the
sacred fury of his inspiration. He says finely of those
who had attempted the work in other languages: -
(6 They failed to search his deep and treasurous heart.
The cause was, since they wanted the fit key
Of Nature, in their downright strength of art,
With Poesy to open Poesy."
Chapman was also a voluminous dramatist, and of his
many comedies and tragedies some sixteen were printed.
It is to be feared that the last twenty years of his long
and honorable life were passed in a desperate struggle
for the means of subsistence. But his ideas of the
dignity of his art were so inwoven into his character
that he probably met calamity bravely. Poesy he early
professed to prefer above all worldly wisdom, being
composed, in his own words, of the "sinews and souls.
of all learning, wisdom, and truth." "We have exam-
ple sacred enough," he said, "that true Poesy's humil-
ity, poverty, and contempt are badges of divinity, not
vanity. Bray then, and bark against it, ye wolf-faced
worldlings, that nothing but riches, honors, and magis-
tracy" can content. "I (for my part) shall ever
150
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
esteem it much more manly and sacred, in this harmless
and pious study, to sit until I sink into my grave, than
shine in your vainglorious bubbles and impieties; all
your poor policies, wisdoms, and their trappings, at no
more valuing than a musty nut." These sentiments
were probably fresh in his heart when, in 1634,
friendless and poor, at the age of seventy-five, he died.
Anthony Wood describes him as a person of most
reverend aspect, religious and temperate; qualities," he
spitefully adds, " rarely meeting in a poet."
66
(6
Chapman was a man with great elements in his
nature, which were so imperfectly harmonized that
what he was found but a stuttering expression in what
he wrote and did. There were gaps in his mind; or,
to use Victor Hugo's image, "his intellect was a
book with some leaves torn out." His force, great as it
was, was that of an Ajax, rather than that of an
Achilles. Few dramatists of the time afford nobler
passages of description and reflection. Few are wiser,
deeper, manlier in their strain of thinking. But when
we turn to the dramas from which these grand things
have been detached, we find extravagance, confusion,
huge thoughts lying in helpless heaps, sublimity in
parts conducing to no general effect of sublimity, the
movement lagging and unwieldy, and the plot urged on
to the catastrophe by incoherent expedients. His
-
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
151
imagination partook of the incompleteness of his in-
tellect. Strong enough to clothe the ideas and emotions
of a common poet, it was plainly inadequate to embody
the vast, half-formed conceptions which gasped for ex-
pression in his soul in its moments of poetic exaltation.
Often we feel his meaning, rather than apprehend it.
The imagery has the indefiniteness of distant objects
seen by moonlight. There are whole passages in his
works in which he seems engaged in expressing Chap-
man to Chapman, like the deaf egotist who only placed
his trumpet to his ear when he himself talked.
This criticism applies more particularly to his trage-
dies, and to his expression of great sentiments and
passions. His comedies, though over-informed with
thought, reveal him to us as a singularly sharp, shrewd,
and somewhat cynical observer, sparkling with worldly
wisdom, and not deficient in airiness any more than wit.
Hazlitt, we believe, was the first to notice that Monsieur
D'Olive, in the comedy of that name, is "the undoubted
prototype of that light, flippant, gay, and infinitely de-
lightful class of character, of the professed men of wit
and pleasure about town, which we have in such perfec-
tion in Wycherley and Congreve, such as Sparkish, Wit-
would, Petulant, &c., both in the sentiments and the
style of writing ; and Tharsalio in The Widow's
Tears, and Ludovico in May-Day, have the hard im-
""
152
MİNOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
pudence and cynical distrust of virtue, the arrogant and
glorying self-unrighteousness, that distinguish another
class of characters which the dramatists of the age of
Charles and Anne were unwearied in providing with
insolence and repartees. Occasionally we have a jest
which Falstaff would not disown. Thus in May-Day,
when Cuthbert, a barber, approaches Quintiliano, to
get, if possible, "certain odd crowns" the latter owes
him, Quintiliano says, "I think thou 'rt newly mar-
ried?" "I am indeed, sir," is the reply. "I thought
so; keep on thy hat, man, 't will be the less perceived."
Chapman, in his comedies generally, shows a kind of
philosophical contempt for woman, as a frailer and flim-
sier, if fairer, creature than man, and he sustains his
bad judgment with infinite ingenuity of wilful wit and
penetration of ungracious analysis. In The Widow's
Tears this unpoetic infidelity to the sex pervades the
whole plot and sentiments, as well as gives edge to many
an incisive sarcasm. "My sense," says Tharsalio, "tells
me how. short-lived widows' tears are, that their weep-
ing is in truth but laughing under a mask, that they
mourn in their gowns and laugh in their sleeves; all
of which I believe as a Delphian oracle, and am re-
solved to burn in that faith." "He," says Lodovico,
in May-Day, he "that holds religious and sacred
thought of a woman, he that holds so reverent a respect
!
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
153
to her that he will not touch her but with a kist hand
and a timorous heart, he that adores her like his god-
dess, let him be sure she will shun him like her slave.
Whereas nature made women "but half fools,
we make 'em all fool: and this is our palpable flattery
of them, where they had rather have plain dealing."
In all Chapman's comic writing there is something of
Ben Jonson's mental self-assertion and disdainful glee
in his own superiority to the weakness he satirizes.
In passing from a comedy like May-Day to a tragedy
like Bussy D'Ambois, we find some difficulty in recog-
nizing the features of the same nature. Bussy D'Am-
bois represents a mind not so much in creation as in
eruption, belching forth smoke, ashes, and stones, no
less than flame. Pope speaks of it as full of fustian ;
but fustian is rant in the words when there is no corre-
sponding rant in the soul, whilst Chapman's tragedy,
like Marlowe's Tamburlaine, indicates a greater swell
in the thoughts and passions of his characters than in
their expression. The poetry is to Shakespeare's what
gold ore is to gold. Veins and lumps of the precious
eye from the duller substance in
་
metal gleam on the
which it is imbedded.
Here are specimens:
“Man is a torch borne in the wind; a dream
But of a shadow, summed with all his substance;
And as great seamen, using all their wealth
7*
154
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
And skills in Neptune's deep invisible paths,
In tall ships richly built and ribbed with brass,
To put a girdle round about the world,
When they have done it (coming near their haven)
Are fain to give a warning piece, and call
A poor strayed fisherman, that never past
His country's sight, to waft and guide them in:
So when we wander furthest through the waves
Of glassy glory and the gulfs of state,
Topped with all titles, spreading all our reaches,
As if each private arm would sphere the earth,
We must to Virtue for her guide resort,
Or we shall shipwreck in our safest port."
"In a king
All places are contained. His words and looks
Are like the flashes and the bolts of Jove;
His deeds inimitable, like the sea
That shuts still as it opes, and leaves no tracks,
Nor prints of precedent for mean men's acts."
"His great heart will not down: 't is like the sea,
That partly by his own internal heat,
Partly the stars' daily and nightly motion,
Their heat and light, and partly of the place
The divers frames, but chiefly by the moon
Bristled with surges, never will be won,
`(No, not when th' hearts of all those powers are burst,)
To make retreat into his settled home,
Till he be crowned with his own quiet foam.'
"Now, all ye peaceful regents of the night,
Silently gliding exhalations,
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
155
Languishing winds, and murmuring falls of waters,
Sadness of heart, and ominous secureness,
Enchantments, dead sleeps, all the friends of rest
That ever wrought upon the life of man
Extend your utmost strengths; and this charmed hour
Fix like the centre."
*
"There is One
That wakes above, whose eye no sleep can bind:
He sees through doors and darkness and our thoughts."
"O, the dangerous siege
Sin lays about us! and the tyranny
He exercises when he hath expugned:
Like to the horror of a winter's thunder,
Mixed with a gushing storm, that suffer nothing
To stir abroad on earth but their own rages,
Is sin, when it hath gathered head above us.”
"Terror of darkness! O thou king of flames!
That with thy music-footed horse doth strike
The clear light out of crystal, on dark earth,
And hurl'st instinctive fire about the world,
Wake, wake, the drowsy and enchanted night,
That sleeps with dead eyes in this heavy riddle:
O thou great prince of shades, where never sun
Sticks his far-darted beams, whose eyes are made
To shine in darkness, and see ever best
Where men are blindest! open now the heart
Of thy abashed oracle, that for fear
Of some ill it includes would feign lie hid,
And rise thou with it in thy greater light."
It is hardly possible to read Chapman's serious verse
156
MINOR ELIZABETHAN DRAMATISTS.
without feeling that he had in him the elements of a
great nature, and that he was a magnificent specimen
of what is called "irregular genius." And one of his
poems, the dedication of his translation of the Iliad to
Prince Henry, is of so noble a strain, and from so high
a mood, that, while borne along with its rapture, we are
tempted to place him in the first rank of poets and of
men. You can feel and hear the throbs of the grand
old poet's heart in such lines as these:
"O, 't is wondrous much,
Though nothing prized, that the right virtuous touch
Of a well-written soul to virtue moves;
Nor have we souls to purpose, if their loves
Of fitting objects be not so inflamed.
How much were then this kingdom's main soul maimed,
To want this great inflamer of all powers
That move in human souls.
Through all the pomp of kingdoms still he shines,
And graceth all his gracers.
A prince's statue, or in marble carved,
Or steel, or gold, and shrined, to be preserved,
Aloft on pillars and pyramides,
Time into lowest ruins may depress;
But drawn with all his virtues in learned verse,
Fame shall resound them on oblivion's hearse,
Till graves gasp with their blasts, and dead men rise.”
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER, MASSIN-
WE
GER, AND FORD.
E have seen, in what has been already said of
the intellectual habits of the Elizabethan dram-
atists, that it was a common practice for two, three,
four, and sometimes five writers to co-operate in the
production of one play. Thus Dekkar and Webster
were partners in writing Northward Hoe! and West-
ward Hoe! Ben Jonson, Marston, and Chapman in
writing Eastward Hoe! Drayton, Middleton, Dekkar,
Webster, and Munday, in writing The Two Harpies.
In the case of Webster and Dekkar, this union was
evidently formed from a mutual belief that the som-
bre mind of the one was unsuited to the treatment
of certain scenes and characters which were exactly
in harmony with the sunny genius of the other;
but the alliance was often brought about by the de-
mand of theatre-managers for a new play at a short
notice, in which case the dramatist who had the job
hurriedly sketched the plan, and then applied to his
brother playwrights to take shares in the enterprise,
payable in daily or weekly instalments of mirth or
158
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
passion. But there were two writers of the period,
twins in genius, and bound together by more than
brotherly affection, whose literary union was so much
closer than the occasional combinations of other dram-
atists, that it is now difficult to dissociate, in the public
mind, Francis Beaumont from John Fletcher, or even
to change the order of their names, though it can easily
be proved that the firm of Beaumont and Fletcher owes
by far the greater portion of its capital to the teeming
brain of the second partner.
The materials for their biographies are scanty. Beau-
mont was the son of a judge, was born about the year
1586, resided a short period at Oxford, but left without
taking a degree, and, at the age of fifteen, was entered a
member of the Inner Temple. Fletcher, the son of
the "courtly and comely" Bishop Fletcher, was born
in December, 1579, and was educated at Cambridge, but
seems to have been designed for no profession. At what
time and under what circumstances the poets met we
have no record. The probability is, that, as both were
esteemed by Ben Jonson, it was he who brought them
together. It is more than probable that Fletcher, the
elder of the two, had written for the theatres before his
acquaintance with Beaumont began; and that in The
Woman-Hater and in Thierry and Theodoret he had
proved his ability both as a comic and as a tragic dra-
+*
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
159
matist before Beaumont had thought of dramatic compo-
sition. When they did meet, they found, in Aubrey's
words, a "wonderful consimility of phansy" between
them, which resulted in an exceeding "dearnesse of
friendship"; and the old antiquary adds: "They lived
together on the Banke side, not far from the playhouse,
both bachelors, lay together," and "had the same
cloths and cloak" between them.
between them. Their first joint
composition was the tragi-comedy of Philaster, pro-
duced about the year 1608; and we may suppose that
this community of goods as well as thoughts continued
until 1613, when Beaumont was married, and that the
friendship remained unbroken till it was broken in 1616
by Beaumont's death. Fletcher lived until August,
1625, at which time he was suddenly cut off by the
plague, in his forty-sixth year.
In regard to the question as to Beaumont's share in
the authorship of the fifty-two plays which go under
the name of Beaumont and Fletcher, let us first quote
the indignant doggerel which Sir Aston Cokaine ad-
dressed to the publisher of the first edition, in 1647:
Beaumont of those many writ in few:
And Massinger in other few: the main
Being sole issues of sweet Fletcher's brain.
But how came I, you ask, so much to know?
Fletcher's chief bosom-friend informed me so."
160
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
This gives no information touching the special plays
which Beaumont assisted in producing. None of
them were published as joint productions during his life,
and only three during the nine or ten years that
Fletcher survived him. Of the fifty-two dramas in the
collection, fifty were written in the eighteen years
which elapsed between 1607 and 1625. During the
first years of their partnership neither seemed to be
dependent on the stage for support; and it is almost cer-
tain that Beaumont's income continued to be adequate
to his wants, and that his pen was never spurred into
action by poverty. The result was that the earlier
dramas were composed more slowly and carefully than
the later. A year elapsed between the production of
their first joint play, Philaster, in 1608, and the Maid's
Tragedy, in 1609. In 1610 Fletcher alone brought out
The Faithful Shepherdess. In 1611, A King and No
King and the Knight of the Burning Pestle were acted.
These five dramas one exclusively by Fletcher, the
others joint productions
are commonly ranked as
their best works, and are considered to include all the
capacities of their genius. If we suppose that after
1611 they wrote two plays a year, we have fifteen as
the number produced up to the period of Beaumont's
death, leaving thirty-five which were written by
Fletcher alone in nine years. We do not think that
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
161
Beaumont's hand can be traced in more than fifteen of
the plays, or that it is predominant in more than six.
With individual differences as to mind and tempera-
ment, these dramatists had some general characteristics
in common. They agreed in being tainted with the
fashionable slavishness and fashionable immorality of
the court of James. They believed in the divine right
of kings as piously as any bishop, and they violated all
the decencies of life as recklessly as any courtier. The
impurity of Beaumont, however, seems the result of
elaborate thinking, that of Fletcher the running over
of heedless animal spirits. They agreed also in certain
leading dramatic conceptions and types of character;
and they agreed, in regard to the morality of their
plays, in subordinating their consciences to their au-
diences. But the mind of Beaumont was as slow, solid,
and painstaking as his associate's was rapid, mercurial,
and inventive. The tradition runs that his chief busi-
ness was to correct the overflowings of Fletcher's fancy,
and hold its volatile creativeness in check. Everybody
of that age commended his judgment, and even Ben
Jonson is said to have consulted him in regard to his
plots. The plays in which he had a main hand exhibit
a firmer hold upon character, a more orderly disposition
of the incidents, and greater symmetry in the construc-
tion, than the others. His verse is also simpler,
K
162
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
sweeter, more voluble, than Fletcher's, with few of the
latter's double and triple endings and harsh pauses.
Take, for example, the passage in which Philaster re-
counts his meeting with Bellario : —
"Hunting the buck,
I found him sitting by a fountain's side,
Of which he borrowed some to quench his thirst,
And paid the nymph again as much in tears.
A garland lay him by, made by himself
Of many several flowers bred in the vale,
Stuck in that mystic order that the rareness
Delighted me; but ever when he turned
His tender eyes upon 'em he would weep,
As if he meant to make 'em grow again."
Now contrast this with a characteristic passage from
Fletcher:
“All shall be right again; and. as a pine,
Rent from Oëta by a sweeping tempest,
Jointed again, and made a mast, defies
Those raging winds that split him; so will I
Pieced to my never-failing strength and fortune,
Steer through these swelling dangers, plough their prides up,
And bear like thunder through their loudest tempests."
Beaumont also, though his general temperament was
not so poetical as his partner's, had a vein of poetry
in him, which was superior in quality and depth to
Fletcher's, though sooner exhausted. Beaumont, we
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
163
think it was, who conceived that beautiful type of
womanhood of which Bellario in Philaster, Panthea in
A King and No King, and Viola in The Coxcomb, are
perhaps the most exquisite embodiments, and which also
appears, somewhat dissolved in sentimentality, in As-
pasia in The Maid's Tragedy. It is true that Shake-
speare had already represented this type of character
with even more force and purity in his Viola; but still
Beaumont's mind appears to have penetrated to its ideal
sources, and not to have copied from his greater con-
temporary. Beaumont could only repeat it under other
names, after its first embodiment in Bellario; but it was
too delicate and elusive for Fletcher even to repeat, and
it never appears in the dramas he wrote after Beau-
mont's death. Fletcher has given us many examples.
of womanly virtue, devotion, and heroism; but he had a
bad trick of disconnecting virtue from modesty, and the
talk of his best and noblest women is often such as
would scare womankind from any theatre of the present
day. Beaumont alone could combine feminine inno-
cence with feminine power, the most ethereal softness
and sweetness with martyr-like heroism, knowledge of
good with ignorance of evil, and invest the whole repre-
sentation with a visionary charm, so that it affects us as
Panthea did Arbaces:
164
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
"She is not fair
Nor beautiful; these words express her not;
They say her looks have something excellent,
That wants a name."
Fletcher could not, we think, have written Bellario's
account of her love for Philaster, as it runs in Beau-
mont's limpid verse :—
"My father oft would speak
Your worth and virtue; and as I did grow
More and more apprehensive, I did thirst
To see the man so praised. But yet all this
Was but a maiden-longing, to be lost
As soon as found; till, sitting in my window,
Printing my thoughts in lawn, I saw a god,
I thought, (but it was you,) enter our gates;
My blood flew out and back again, as fast
As I had puffed it forth and sucked it in
Like breath; then was I called away in haste
To entertain you. Never was a man,
Heaved from a sheep-cote to a sceptre, raised
So high in thoughts as I. You left a kiss
Upon these lips then, which I mean to keep
From you forever; I did hear you talk,
Far above singing. After you were gone,
I grew acquainted with my heart, and searched
What stirred it so: alas, I found it love!"
With this superior fineness of perception, Beaumont
also excelled his associate in solid humor. The chief
proof of this is to be found in his delineations, in
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
165
The Knight of the Burning Pestle, of the London citi-
zen and his wife. These have a geniality, richness, and
raciness, a closeness to nature and to fact, unexcelled by
any contemporary pictures of Elizabethan manners and
character, not excepting even Ben Jonson's. A more
extravagant, but hardly less delicious, example of Beau-
mont's humor is his character of Bessus, in A King and
No King, a braggart whose cowardice is sustained by
assurance so indomitable as to wear the aspect of cour-
age; one who is too base to feel insult, who cannot be
kicked out of his chirping self-esteem, but presents as
cheerful a countenance to infamy as to honor.
After, however, awarding to Beaumont all that he can
properly claim, he must still be placed below Fletcher,
not merely in fertility, but in force and variety of genius.
Of Fletcher, indeed, it is difficult to convey an adequate
idea, without running into some of his own extrava-
gance, and without quoting passages which would shock
all modern notions of decency. He most assuredly was
not a great man nor a great poet. He lacked serious-
ness, depth, purpose, principle, imaginative closeness of
conception, imaginative condensation of expression. He
saw everything at one remove from its soul and essence,
and must be ranked with poets of the second class.
But no other poet ever had such furious animal spirits,
a keener sense of enjoyment, a more perfect abandon-
166
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
ment to whatever was uppermost in his mind at the mo-
ment. There was no conscience in his rakish and disso-
lute nature. Nothing in him-wit, humor, fancy, appe-
tite, sentiment, passion, knowledge of life, knowledge of
books, all his good and all his bad thoughts met any
impediment of taste or principle when rushing into ex-
pression. His eyes flash, his cheeks glow, as he writes ;
his air is hurried and eager; the blood that tingles and
throbs in his veins flushes his words; and will and judg-
ment, taken captive, follow with reluctant steps and half-
averted faces the perilous lead of the passions they
should direct. As there was no reserve in him, there
was no reserved power. Rich as were the elements
of his nature, they were never thoroughly organized in
intellectual character; and as no presiding personality
regulated the activity of his mind, he seems hardly to
be morally responsible for the excesses into which he
was impelled. Composition, indeed, sets his brain in a
whirl. He sometimes writes as if inspired by a satyr;
he sometimes writes as if inspired by a seraph; but
neither satyr nor seraph had any hold on his individual-
ity, and neither could put fetters on his caprice. There
is the same gusto in his indecencies as in his refine-
ments. Though an Englishman, he has no morality,
except that morality which is connected with generous
instincts, or which is awakened by the sense of beauty.
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
167
A
Though the son of a bishop, he had no religion, except
that religion which consists in an alternate worship of
Venus, Bacchus, and Mars. An incurable mental and
moral levity is the characteristic of his writings, a
levity which has its source in an intoxication of the
soul through an excess of feeling and sensation, and
which is moral or immoral, sentimental or sensual, ac-
cording to the impulse or temptation of the moment.
This giddiness of soul, in which. decorum is ignored
rather than denied, is most brilliantly and buoyantly
exhibited in his comedies. In The Chances, The Span-
ish Curate, The Custom of the Country, Rule a Wife
and have a Wife, The Wild-Goose Chase, and especially
in Monsieur Thomas and The Little French Lawyer,
we see the comic muse emancipated from all restraint,
loose, free-spoken, sportive, sparkling, indeed almost
madly merry. It is not so much any quotable speci-
mens of wit and humor as it is the all-animating spirit
of frolic and mischief, which gives to these comedies.
their droll, equivocal power to please. In Fletcher's
serious plays the same levity is displayed in pushing
sentiment and passion altogether beyond the bounds of .
character; and the volatile fancy which, in his comedy,
riots in fun, in his tragedy riots in blood. What lifts
both into a poetic region is the tone of romantic heroism
by which they are almost equally characterized. His
168
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
coxcombs and profligates, as well as his conquerors and
heroes, are all intrepid. They do not rate their lives at
a pin's fee, — the first in comparison with the gratifica-
tion of a passing desire or caprice; the second, in com-
parison with glory and honor. The peculiar life, in-
deed, of Fletcher's characters consists in their being
careless of life. Wholly absorbed in the feeling or
object of the instant, their action is ecstatic action, and
flashes on us in a succession of poetic surprises. This
is the great charm of Fletcher's plays; this gilds their
grossness, and has kept them alive. You find it in his
Monsieur Thomas as well as in his delineation of Cæsar.
All the comic characters profess a sportive contempt for
consequences, and startle us with unexpected audacities.
Fear of disease, danger, or death never dissuades them
from the rollicking action or expression of eccentricity
and vice. Their concern is only for the free, wild, reck-
less whim of the moment. Thus, in the play of The
Sea Voyage, Julietta, enraged at the jeers of Tibalt and
the master of the ship, exclaims :
Why, slaves, 't is in our power to hang ye!"
"Very likely," retorts the jovial Master, -
'T is in our powers then to be hanged, and scorn ye!"
This heroism of the blood, when it passes from an
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
169
instinct into some semblance of a principle, adopts the
chivalrous guise of honor. Honor, in Fletcher's ethical
code, is the only possible and admissible restraint on
appetite and passion. Thus in the drama of The Cap-
tain, Julio, infatuated with the wicked Lelia, thinks of
marrying her, and confesses to his friend Angelo that
her bewitching and bewildering beauty has entirely
mastered him. When she speaks, he says:
แ Then music
(Such as old Orpheus made, that gave a soul
To aged mountains, and made rugged beasts
Lay by their rages; and tall trees, that knew
No sound but tempests, to bow down their branches,
And hear, and wonder; and the sea, whose surges
Shook their white heads in heaven, to be as midnight
Still and attentive) steals into our souls
So suddenly and strangely, that we are
From that time no more ours, but what she pleases!
Angelo admits the temptation, says he would be will-
ing himself to sacrifice all his possessions, even his soul,
to obtain her, but then adds:
"Yet methinks we should not dole away
That that is something more than ours, our honors;
I would not have thee marry her by no means."
Again: Curio, in Love's Cure, when threatened by
his mistress with the loss of her affection if he fights
with her brother, replies that he would willingly give
8
170
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
J
his life, "rip every vein," to please her, yet still insists
on his purpose.
"Life is but a word, a shadow, a melting dream,
Compared with essential and eternal honor."
་
In the plays of The Mad Lover, The Loyal Subject,
Bonduca, and The False One, Fletcher attempts to por-
tray this heroic element, not as a mere flash of cour-
ageous inspiration, but as a solid element of character.
He strains his mind to the utmost, but the strain is too
apparent. There is no calm, strong grasp of the theme.
His heroes are generally too fond of vaunting them-
selves, too declamatory, too screechy, too much like
embodied speeches. In his own words, they carry
(6 a
drum in their mouths"; and what they say of them-
selves would more properly and naturally come from
others. Thus Memnon, in The Mad Lover, tells his
prince, in apology for his roughness of behavior:-
"I know no court but martial,
No oily language but the shock of arms,
No dalliance but with death, no lofty measures
But weary and sad marches, cold and hunger,
'Larums at midnight Valor's self would shake at;
Yet I ne'er shrunk. Balls of consuming wildfire,
That licked men up like lightning, have I laughed at,
And tossed 'em back again, like children's trifles.
Upon the edges of my enemies' swords
I have marched like whirlwinds, Fury at this hand waiting,
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
171
Death at my right, Fortune my forlorn hope:
When I have grappled with Destruction,
And tugged with pale-faced Ruin, Night and Mischief
Frighted to see a new day break in blood.”
This is talk on stilts; but it is still resounding talk,
full of ardor and the impatient consciousness of personal
prowess. In the characterization of Cæsar in The
False One, the same feeling of individual supremacy
is combined with a haughtier self-possession, as befits
a mightier and more imperial soul. We feel, through-
out this play, that there is power in the mere presence
of Cæsar, and that his words derive their force from his
character. The very minds and hearts of the Egyp-
tians crouch before him. He sways by disdaining them;
even his clemency is allied to scorn. "You have
found," he says,
"You have found me merciful in arguing with ye;
Swords, hungers, fires, destruction of all natures,
Demolishment of kingdoms, and whole ruins,
Are wont to be my orators."
When they bring him the head of Pompey, whom
they have slain for the purpose of propitiating him, his
contempt for them breaks out in a noble tribute to his
great enemy.
"Egyptians, dare ye think your highest pyramids,
Built to out-durt the sun, as you suppose,
172
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
Where your unworthy kings lie raked in ashes,
Are monuments fit for him? No, brood of Nilus,
Nothing can cover his high fame but heaven,
No pyramids set off his memories,
But the eternal substance of his greatness;
To which I leave him."
When he is besieged in the palace by the whole
Egyptian army, he prepares, with his few followers, to
cut his way to his ships. Septimius, a wretch who has
been false to all parties, offers to show him safe means
both of vengeance and escape. Cæsar's reply is one
of the finest things in Fletcher.
"Cæsar scorns
To find his safety or revenge his wrongs
So base a way, or owe the means of life
To such a leprous traitor! I have towered
For victory like a falcon in the clouds,
Not digged for 't like a mole. Our swords and cause
Make way for us: and that it may appear
We took a noble course, and hate base treason,
Some soldiers that would merit Cæsar's favor
Hang him on yonder turret, and then follow
The lane this sword makes for you."
But perhaps the play in which the heroic and martial
spirit is most dominant is the tragedy of Bonduca; and
the address of Suetonius, the Roman general, to his
troops, as they prepare to close in battle with the Brit-
ons, is in Fletcher's noblest vein of manliness and imagi-
nation.
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER,
173
And, gentlemen, to you now:
To bid you fight is needless; ye are Romans,
The name will fight itself.
Go on in full assurance: draw your swords
As daring and as confident as justice;
The gods of Rome fight for ye; loud Fame calls ye,
Pitched on the topless Apennine, and blows
To all the under-world, all nations, the seas,
And unfrequented deserts where the snow dwells;
Wakens the ruined monuments; and there,
Where nothing but eternal death and sleep is,
Informs again the dead bones with your virtues.
Go on, I say; valiant and wise rule heaven,
And all the great aspects attend 'em. Do but blow
Upon this enemy, who, but that we want foes,
Cannot deserve that name; and like a mist,
A lazy fog, before your burning valors
You'll find him fly to nothing. This is all.
We have swords, and are the sons of ancient Romans,
Heirs to their endless valors: fight and conquer!”
The maxim here laid down, that "Valiant and wise
rule heaven," is much better, or worse, than Napoleon's,
that "Providence is always on the side of the heaviest
battalions."
It might be supposed that the extreme susceptibility of
Fletcher the openness of his nature to all impressions,
ludicrous, romantic, heroic, or indecent would have
made him a great delineator of the varieties of life and
character. But the truth is, it made him versatile with-
174
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
out making him universal. He wrote a greater num-
ber of plays than Shakespeare, and he has between five
and six hundred names of characters; but two or three
plays of Shakespeare cover a wider extent of human
life than all of Fletcher's. To compare them is like
comparing a planet with a comet, a comet whose
nucleus is only a few hundred miles in diameter, though
its nebulous appendage flames millions of leagues be-
hind. Fletcher's susceptibility to the surfaces of things
was almost unlimited; his vital sympathy and inward
vision were confined to a few kinds of character and a
few aspects of life. His variety is not variety of char-
acter, but variety of incident and circumstance. He
contrives rather than creates; and his contrivances,
ingenious and exhilarating as they are, cannot hide his
constant repetition of a few types of human nature.
These types he conceived by a process essentially differ-
ent from Shakespeare's. Shakespeare individualized
classes; Fletcher generalized individuals. One of
Shakespeare's characters includes a whole body of per-
sons; one of Fletcher's is simply an idealized individ-
ual, and that often an exceptional individual. This
individual, repeated in play after play, never covers so
large a portion of humanity as Shakespeare's individual-
ized class, which he disdains to repeat. But, more than
this, the very faculties of Fletcher, his wit, humor,
-
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
175
understanding, fancy, imagination, though we call
them by the same words we use in naming Shake-
speare's, differ from Shakespeare's both in kind and
degree. Shakespeare was a great and comprehensive
man, whose faculties all partook of his general greatness.
The man Fletcher was so much smaller and narrower,
and the materials on which his faculties worked so much
more limited, that we are fooled by words if, following
the example of his contemporaries, we place any one
of his qualities or faculties above or on a level with
Shakespeare's.
Keeping, then, in view the fact that the man is the
measure of the poet, let us glance for a moment at
Fletcher's poetic faculty as distinguished from his dra-
matic.
As a poet he is best judged, perhaps, by his pastoral
tragi-comedy of The Faithful Shepherdess, the most
elaborate and one of the earliest of his works. It
failed on the stage, being, in his own phrase, "hissed to
ashes"; but the merits which the many-headed mon-
ster of the pit could not discern so enchanted Milton
that they were vividly in his memory when he wrote
Comus, The melody, the romantic sweetness of fan-
cy, the luxuriant and luxurious descriptions of nature,
and the true lyric inspiration, of large portions of this
drama, are not more striking than the deliberate desecra-
176
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
tion of its beauty by the introduction of impure senti-
ments and images. The hoof-prints of unclean beasts
are visible all over Fletcher's pastoral paradise; and
they are there by design. Why they are there is a
question which can be answered only by pointing out
the primal defect of Fletcher's mind, which was an
incapacity to conceive or represent goodness and inno-
cence except as the ideal opposites of evil and depravity.
He took depravity as the positive fact of life, and then
framed from fancy a kind of goodness out of its nega-
tion. The result is, that, in the case of The Faithful
Shepherdess, Chloe and the Sullen Shepherd, the de-
praved characters of the play, are the most natural and
lifelike, while there is a sickliness and unreality in the
very virtue of Amoret. It is not, therefore, as some
critics suppose, the mere admission of vicious charac-
ters into the play that gives it its taint. Milton, whose
conceptions both of good and evil were positive, and who
represented them in their right spiritual relations, en-
tirely avoided this error in Comus, while he availed
himself of much in The Faithful Shepherdess that is
excellent. In Comus it is virtue which seems most real
and permanent, and the vice and wickedness represented
in it do not mar the general impression of moral beauty
left by the whole poem. But Fletcher, having no posi-
tive imaginative conception of the good, and feeling for
BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
177
depravity neither mental nor moral disgust, reverses
this order. His vice is robust and prominent; his vir-
tue is vague, characterless, and fantastic; and though his
play has a formal moral, it has an essential impurity.
But, if the general effect of the pastoral is not beauti-
ful, none can deny its beauty in parts, especially in the
lyrical portions. What Milton condescended to copy
everybody must be delighted to applaud. But not
merely in The Faithful Shepherdess is this lyric genius
displayed. Scattered all over his plays are exquisite
songs and short poems, representing almost every vari-
ety of the poet's mood, and each perfect of its kind.
As an example of the softness, sweetness, and melody
of these we will quote the hymn to Venus from The
Mad Lover:
"O divinest star of heaven,
Thou, in power above the seven;
Thou, sweet kindler of desires,
Till they grow to mutual fires;
Thou, O gentle queen, that art
Curer of each wounded heart;
Thou, the fuel and the flame;
Thou, in heaven, here, the same;
Thou, the wooer and the wooed;
Thou, the hunger and the food;
Thou, the prayer and the prayed;
Thou, what is or shall be said;
Thou, still young and golden tresséd,
Make me by thy answer blesséd! "
8*
L
178
MASSINGER.
Fletcher died in 1625, and the dramatist who suc-
ceeded him in popular esteem was a less fiery and
ebullient spirit, PHILIP MASSINGER. Massinger, the
son of a gentleman in the service of the Earl of Pem-
broke, was born in 1584, was educated at Oxford, left
the University without taking a degree, and about the
year 1606 went to London to seek his fortune as a
dramatist. Here he worked obscurely for some sixteen
years; the only thing we know about him being this,
that in 1614, in connection with Field and Daborne, he
was a suppliant to old Manager Henslowe for five
pounds to relieve him and them from the most pinching
pecuniary distress. In 1622 The Virgin Martyr, a play
written in connection with Dekkar, was published, and
from this period to his death, in 1640, his most cele-
brated dramas were produced. He wrote thirty-seven
plays, twenty of which have perished. Eleven of them,
in manuscript, were in the possession of a Mr. Warbur
ton, whose cook, desirous of saving what she considered
better paper, used them in the kindling of fires and the
basting of turkeys, and would doubtless have treated
the manuscript of the Faery Queene and the Novum
Organum in the same way had Providence seen fit to
commit them to her master's custody.
Massinger's life seems to have been one long struggle
with want. The price for a play in his time ranged
MASSINGER.
179
from ten to twenty pounds; if published, the copyright
brought from six to ten pounds more; and the dedication
fee was forty shillings. The income of a successful dram-
atist, who wrote two or three plays a year, was about
fifty pounds, equivalent to some twelve hundred dollars
at the present time. But it is doubtful if even Fletcher
could count on so large an income as this, as some of
his plays failed in representation, great master of the-
atrical effect as he undoubtedly was. Massinger was
always poor, and, by his own admission in one of his
dedications, depended at times on the casual charity of
patrons. When poverty was not present, it seems to
have been always in prospect. He had a morbid vision
of approaching calamities, as -
"Creeping billows
Not got to shore yet."
It is difficult to determine how far his popular principles
in politics interfered with his success at the theatre.
Fletcher's slavish political doctrines were perfectly
suited to the court of James and Charles.
says one of his characters,
"We are but subjects, Maximus. Obedience
To what is done, and grief for what is ill done,
Is all we can call ours."
We are,
Massinger, on the contrary, was as strong a Liberal
180
MASSINGER.
as Hampden or Pym. The political and social abuses
of his time found in him an uncompromising satirist.
Oppression in every form, whether of the poor by the
rich, or the subject by the king, provoked his amiable
nature into unwonted passion. In his plays he fre-
quently violates the keeping of character in order to in-
trude his own manly political sentiments and ideas.
There are allusions in his dramas which, if they were
taken by the audience, must have raised a storm of min-
gled applause and hisses. Though more liberty seems
to have been allowed to playwrights than to members
of Parliament, Massinger sometimes found it difficult to
get his plays licensed. In 1631 the Master of the
Revels refused to license one of his pieces, on the
ground that it contained "dangerous matter"; and
the dramatist had to pay the fee, while he lost all the
results of his labor. In 1638, in the height of the dis-
pute about ship-money, he wrote a drama, now lost,
called The King and the Subject. On looking it over,
the Master of the Revels was startled at coming upon
the following passage:-
"Moneys? we 'll raise supplies which way we please,
And force you to subscribe to blanks, in which
We 'll mulct you as we shall think fit. The Cæsars
In Rome were wise, acknowledging no laws
But what their swords did ratify; the wives
And daughters of the senators bowing to
Their wills as deities."
MASSINGER.
181
The play was shown to King Charles, and he, mark-
ing the obnoxious passage, wrote with his own hand :
"This is too insolent, and to be changed." It is, how-
ever, to be mentioned to his honor, that he allowed the
piece to be acted after the daring lines had been ex-
punged.
Massinger's spirit, though sufficiently independent and
self-respectful, was as modest as Addison's. He chid
his friends when they placed him as a dramatist by the
side of Beaumont and Fletcher. All the commendatory
poems prefixed to his plays evince affection for the man
as well as admiration for the genius. But there is a
strange absence of distinct memorials of his career; and
his death and burial were in harmony with the loneli-
ness of his life. We are told that, on the 16th of March,
1640, he went to bed, seemingly in good health, and was
found dead in the morning. In the parish register of the
Church of St. Saviour's, under the date of March 20, we
read : "Buried, Philip Massinger, a stranger." No
stone indicates where in the churchyard he was laid.
"His sepulchre," says Hartley Coleridge,
(C was like
his life, obscure; like the nightingale he sung darkling,
-it is to be feared like the nightingale of the fable,
with his breast against a thorn."
Massinger possessed a large though not especially
poetic mind, and a temperament equable rather than
182
MASSINGER.
66
energetic. He lacked strong passions, vivid conceptions,
creative imagination. In reading him we feel that the
exulting, vigorous life of the drama of the age has
begun to decay. But though he has been excelled by
obscurer writers in special qualities of genius, he still
attaches us by the harmony of his powers, and the uni-
formity of his excellence. The plot, style, and char-
acters of one of his dramas all conduce to a common
interest. His plays, indeed, are novels in dialogue.
They rarely thrill, startle, or kindle us, but, as Lamb
says, are read with composure and placid delight.”
The Bondman, The Picture, The Bashful Lover, The
Renegado, A Very Woman, The Emperor of the East,
interest us specially as stories. The Duke of Milan,
The Unnatural Combat, and The Fatal Dowry are his
nearest approaches to the representation of passion, as
distinguished from its description. The leading charac-
ters in The City Madam and A New Way to pay Old
Debts are delineated with more than common power,
for they are embodiments of the author's hatred as
well as of his genius. Massinger's life was such as to
make him look with little favor on the creditor portion of
the British people; and when creditors were also op-
pressors, he was roused to a pitch of indignation which in-
spired his conceptions of Luke and Sir Giles Overreach.
Massinger's style, though it does not evince a single
MASSINGER.
183
great quality of the poet, has always charmed English
readers by its dignity, flexibility, elegance, clearness,
and ease.
His metre and rhythm Coleridge pronounces
incomparably good. Still his verse, with all its merits,
is smooth rather than melodious; the thoughts are not
born in music, but mechanically set to a tune; and even
its majestic flow is frequently purchased at the expense
of dramatic closeness to character and passion.
Though there is nothing in Massinger's plays, as
there is in Fletcher's, indicating profligacy of mind and
morals, they are even coarser in scenes; for as Massin-
ger had none of Fletcher's wit and humor, he made his
low and inferior characters, whether men or women,
little better than beasts. As even his serious personages
use words and allusions which are now banished from
all respectable books, we must suppose that decorum, as
we understand it, was almost unknown in the time of
James and Charles. Thus The Guardian, one of the
most mellifluous in diction and licentious in incident of
all Massinger's works, was acted at the court of Charles
I., and acted, too, by order of the king, on Sunday,
January 12, 1633. This coarseness is a deplorable blot
on Massinger's plays; but that it is to be referred to the
manners of his time, and not to his own immorality,
is proved by the fact that his vital sympathies were
for virtue and justice, and that his genius never dis-
184
MASSINGER.
played itself in his representations of coarse depravity.
As a man he seems to have had not merely elevated
sentiments, but strong religious feelings. If his unim-
passioned spirit ever rose to fervor, the fervor was
moral; his best things are ethically, as well as poetically
the best; and in reading him we often find passages
like the following, which leap up from the prosaic level
of his diction as by an impulse of ecstasy :-
"When good men pursue
The path marked out by virtue, the blest saints
With joy look on it, and seraphic angels
Clap their celestial wings in heavenly plaudits."
" Honor is
Virtue's allowed ascent; honor, that clasps
All perfect justice in her arms, that craves
No more respect than what she gives, that does
Nothing but what she 'll suffer."
"As you have
A soul moulded from heaven, and do desire
To have it made a star there, make the means
Of your ascent to that celestial height
Virtue winged with brave action: they draw near
The nature and the essence of the gods
Who imitate their goodness."
By these blessed feet
That pace the paths of equity, and tread boldly
On the stiff neck of tyrannous oppression,
FORD.
185
By these tears by which I bathe them, I conjure you
With pity to look on me."
We now come to a very different dramatist, JOHN
FORD, whose genius and personal appearance are
shrewdly indicated in a rugged couplet from a contem-
porary satire :
"Deep in a dump, John Ford by himself sat,
With folded arms and melancholy hat."
In that somewhat dainty mental loneliness, and under
that melancholy hat, the mind of the poet was absorbed
in the intensest meditation of the ideal possibilities of
grief and guilt, and the strange aberrations of the pas-
sions. Massinger has little sway over the heart; but
Ford was not merely the poet of the heart, but of the
broken heart, -the heart bending under burdens, or
torn by emotions, almost too great for mortality to bear.
In reading his tragedies, as in reading Webster's, we are
fretfully conscious of being shut up in the sultry atmos-
phere of one morbid mind, deprived of all companion-
ship with healthy nature and genial human life, and
forced into a shuddering or sickly sympathy with the
extremes of crime and suffering. But the power of
Webster lies in terror; the power of Ford, in tender-
ness. Out of his peculiar walk, Ford is the feeblest of
finical fine writers. His attempts at liveliness and
186
FORD.
humor excite, not laughter, but rather a dismal feeling
of pitying contempt. His great gift is displayed in
the tragedy of The Broken Heart, and in two or
three thrilling scenes of the tragedy of Love's Sacri-
fice. In The Broken Heart, the noblest of his works,
our sympathies are on the whole rightly directed; and
the death of Calantha, after enduring the most soul-
crushing calamities, concealed from others under a show
of mirth, is exquisitely pathetic:-
66
0
my lords,
I but deceived your eyes with antick gesture,
When one news straight came huddling on another,
Of death, and death, and death, still I danced forward;
But it struck home, and here, and in an instant.
They are the silent griefs which cut the heartstrings;
Let me die smiling."
Of another of Ford's tragedies, which can hardly
be named here, Campbell justly remarks: "Better that
poetry should cease to exist than have to do with such
subjects.". But it is characteristic of Ford, that his
power and tenderness are seldom so great as in their
worst perversions. Without any austerity of soul, dis-
eased in his sympathies, a sentimentalist rather than a
man of sentiment, he brooded over guilt until all sense
of its wickedness was lost in a morbid pity for its afflic-
FORD.
187
tions, and the tears he compels us to shed are rarely the
tears of honest and manly feeling.
Ford died, or disappeared, about the year 1640, and
with him died the last original dramatist of the Eliza-
bethan age; for Shirley, though his plays fill six thick
volumes, was but a faint echo of Fletcher. Thus, in
a short period of fifty years, from 1590 to 1640, we
have the names of thirteen dramatists, varying in power
and variety of power and perversion of power, but each
individual in his genius, and one the greatest genius of
the world, the names of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben
Jonson, Heywood, Middleton, Marston, Dekkar, Web-
ster, Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, and
Ford. Though little is known of their lives, it is
through them we learn the life of their time, the
manners, customs, character, ideas, habits, sentiments,
and passions, the form and the spirit, of the Elizabethan
age. And they are all intensely and audaciously human.
Taking them in the mass, they have much to offend our
artistic and shock our moral sense; but still the dra-
matic literature of the world would be searched in vain
for another instance of so broad and bold a representa-
tion of the varieties of human nature, one in which
the conventional restraints both on depravity and excel-
lence are so resolutely set aside, one in which the
many-charactered soul of man is so vividly depicted, in
188
FORD.
its weakness and in its strength, in its mirth and in its
passion, in the appetites which sink it below the beasts
that perish, in the aspirations which lift it to regions
of existence of which the visible heavens are but the
veil.
IN
SPENSER.
•
N the last chapter we closed our remarks on the
Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. In
the present we propose to treat of Spenser, with some
introductory observations on the miscellaneous poets
who preceded him. And it is necessary to bear in mind
that, in the age of which we treat, as in all ages, the
versifiers far exceeded the seers, and the poetasters the
poets. It has been common to exercise a charity to-
wards the early English poets which we refuse to extend
to those of later times; but mediocrity has identical
characteristics in all periods, and there was no charm
in the circumstances of the Elizabethan age to convert
a rhymer into a genius. Indeed, leaving out the drama-
tists, the poetry produced in the reigns of Elizabeth
and James can hardly compare in originality, richness,
and variety, with the English poetry of the nineteenth
century. Spenser is a great name; but he is the only
undramatic poet of his time who could be placed above,
or on a level with, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Cole-
ridge, or Tennyson. There is a list, somewhere, of two
hundred names of poets who belonged to the Eliza-
190
SPENSER.
bethan age, mostly mere nebulous appearances, which
it requires a telescope of the greatest power to resolve
into individual stars. Few of them can be made to
shine with as steady a lustre as the ordinary versemen
who contribute to our magazines. Take England's
Helicon and the Paradise of Dainty Devices, — two
collections of the miscellaneous poetry written during
the last forty or fifty years of the sixteenth century,
-and, if we except a few pieces by Raleigh, Sidney,
Marlowe, Greene, Lodge, Breton, Watson, Nash, and
Hunnis, these collections have little to dazzle us into
admiration or afflict us with a sense of inferiority.
Reading them is a task, in which an occasional elegance
of thought, or quaintness of fancy, or sweetness of sen-
timent does not compensate for the languor induced
by tiresome repetitions of moral commonplaces, varied
by repetitions, as tiresome, of amatory commonplaces.
In the great body of the poetry of the time there is
more that is bad than tolerable, more that is tolerable
than readable, and more that is readable than excellent.
One person, however, stands out from this mob of
versifiers the most noticeable elevation in English po-
etry from Chaucer to Spenser, namely, Thomas Sack-
ville, afterwards Lord Buckhurst, and, still later, Earl
of Dorset. Born in 1536, and educated at both univer-
sities, his poetic genius was but one phase of his general
SPENSER.
191
ability. In 1561 his tragedy of Gorboduc was acted
with great applause before the Queen. Previously to
this, in 1559, at the age of twenty-three, he had joined
two dreary poetasters - Baldwyne and Ferrers-in the
production of a work called The Mirrour for Magis-
trates, the design of which was to exhibit, in a series
of metrical narratives and soliloquies, the calamities of
men prominent in the history of England. The work
passed to a third edition in 1571, and received such
constant additions from other writers, in the fourth, fifth,
and sixth editions, that its bulk finally became enor-
mous. Its poetical value is altogether in the compar-
atively meagre contributions of Sackville, consisting of
the Induction, and the complaint of the Duke of Buck-
ingham. The Induction, especially, is a masterpiece
of meditative imagination, working under the impulse
of sternly serious sentiment. Misery and sorrow seem
the dark inspirers of Sackville's Muse; and his alle-
goric pictures of Revenge, Remorse, Old Age, Dread,
Care, Sleep, Famine, Strife, War, and Death exhibit
such a combination of reflective and analytic with im-
aginative power, of melody of verse with compact, mas-
sive strength and certainty of verbal expression, that
our wonder is awakened that a man with such a con-
scious mastery of the resources of thought and language
should have written so little. If political ambition
192
SPENSER.
the ambition that puts thoughts into facts instead of
putting them into words was the cause of his with-
drawal from the Muse, if Burleigh tempted him from
Dante, it must be admitted that his choice, in a worldly
sense, was justified by the event, for he became an emi-
nent statesman; and in 1598 was made Lord High
Treasurer of England. He held that great office at the
time of his death, in 1608.
But it is probable that
Sackville ceased to cultivate poetry because he failed
His genius had no joy in
to reap its internal rewards.
it, and its exercise probably gave him little poetic
delight. With great force of imagination, his was still
a somewhat dogged force. He could discern clearly,
and shape truly, but no sudden ecstasy of emotion gave
a "precious seeing" to his eye or unexpected felicity
to his hand. There is something bleak in his noblest
The poet, we must ever remember, is paid, not
by external praise, or fortune, or fame, but by the deep
bliss of those inward moods from which his creations
spring. The pleasure they give to others is as nothing
compared with the rapture they give to him.
verse.
But Sackville was to be succeeded by a man who,
though he did not exhibit at so early an age equal
power of shaping imagination, had that perception of
the loveliness of things, and that joy in the perception,
which make continuous poetic creation a necessity of
SPENSER.
193
existence. In the meagre memorials of the external
career of this man, Edmund Spenser, there is little
that stands in intelligible connection with the wondrous
inner life embodied in the enchantments of The Faery
Queene. He was born in London in 1552, and was
the son of parents who, though in humble circum-
stances, were of gentle birth. We first hear of him,
at the age of seventeen, as a sizar, or charity student,
in Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. While there he made
acquaintance and formed a lasting friendship with Ga-
briel Harvey, a man of large acquirements, irritable
temper, and pedantic taste, who rendered himself the
object of the sarcastic invectives of the wits of the
time, and to be associated with whom was to run the
risk of sharing the ridicule he provoked. One of the
most beautiful traits of Spenser's character was his con-
stancy to his friends; to their persons when alive, to
their memory when dead. It is difficult to discover
what intellectual benefits Spenser derived from Har-
vey's companionship, though we know what the world
has gained by his refusal to follow his advice. It was
Harvey who tried to persuade Spenser into writing
hexameter verse, and dissuade him from writing the
Faery Queene. After seven years' residence at the
university, Spenser took his degree, and went to reside
with some friends of his family in the North of Eng-
9
M
194
SPENSER.
land. Here he fell in love with a beautiful girl, whose
real name he has concealed under the anagrammatic
one of Rosalind, and who, after having tempted and
balked the curiosity of English critics, has, by an Amer-
ican writer, who has raised guessing into a science,
been satisfactorily proved to be Rose Daniel, a sister
of the poet Daniel. It is mortifying to record that she
rejected the great exalter of her sex, the creator of
some of the most exquisite embodiments of female ex-
cellence, the man who had the high honor of saying
of women,
"For demigods they be, and first did spring
From heaven, though graft in frailness feminine,"
she rejected him, we say, for a ridiculous and irascible
pedant, John Florio, and one so prominent in his folly
that Shakespeare condescended to lampoon him in
Love's Labor Lost.
But the graces of soul and person which had no effect
on the heart of Rosalind were not lost on the mind of
Sir Philip Sidney. Introduced to Spenser, it is sup-
posed by Gabriel Harvey, Sidney recognized his
genius, and warmly recommended him to his uncle, the
Earl of Leicester, who, in 1579, took him into his ser-
vice. In December of that year he published his
* In the Atlantic Monthly for November, 1858.
SPENSER.
195
Shepherd's Calendar, a series of twelve pastorals,
one for every month. In these, avoiding the affectation
of refinement, he falls into the opposite affectation of
rusticity; and, by a profusion of obsolete and uncouth
expressions, hinders the free movement of his fancy.
It may be absurd for shepherds to talk in the style of
courtiers, as they do in many pastoral poets; but it is
also absurd to give them the sentiments and ideas of
priests and philosophers. Campbell, who is a sceptic
in regard to all English pastorals, is especially severe on
the Shepherd's Calendar. Spenser's shepherds, he
says, are parsons in disguise, who converse about
heathen divinities and points of Christian theology.
Palinode defends the luxuries of the Catholic clergy,
and Piers extols the purity of Archbishop Grindal, con-
cluding with the story of a fox who came to the house
of a goat in the character of a pedler, and obtained ad-
mittance by pretending to be a sheep. This may be
burlesquing sop, but certainly it is not imitating
Theocritus." These eclogues are, however, important,
considered in reference to their position in the history of
English poetry, and to their connection with the history
of the poet's heart. No descriptions of external nature
since Chaucer's had equalled those in the Shepherd's
Calendar in the combination of various excellences,
though the excellences were still second-rate, exhibiting
196
SPENSER.
-
the beautiful genius of the author struggling with the
pedantries and affectations of his time, and the pedantries
and affectations which overlaid his own mind. Even in
his prime, it was difficult for him to grasp a thing in it-
self, after the manner of the greatest poets, and flash its
form and spirit upon the mind in a few vivid words,
vital with suggestive meaning. In the Shepherd's Cal-
endar this defect is especially prominent, his imagina-
tion playing round objects, illustrating and adorning
them, rather than penetrating at once to their essence.
Even in those portions where, as Colin Clout, he cele-
brates the beauty and bewails the coldness of Rosalind,
we have a conventional discourse about love, rather than
the direct utterance of the passion.
j
Spenser's ambition was to obtain some office which,
- by placing him above want, would enable him to follow
his true vocation of poet, and he seems to have looked
to Leicester as a magnificent patron through whom his
wish could be realized. The great design of the Faery
Queene had already dawned upon his mind; he
"By that vision splendid
Was on his way attended";
and he ached for leisure and competence to enable him
to embody his gorgeous and noble dreams. All that
Leicester did for him was to get him appointed secretary
!
SPENSER.
197
to Lord Grey of Wilton, who, in 1580, went over to
Ireland as lord deputy. Here he passed the largest
remaining portion of his life; and, though moaning over
the hard fortune which banished him from England, he
appears to have exhibited sufficient talent for affairs, and
to have performed services of sufficient note, to deserve.
the attention of the government. In 1586 he received
a grant of three thousand and twenty-eight acres of
land, a portion of the confiscated estates of the Earl
of Desmond. The manor and the castle of Kilcolman,
situated amidst the most beautiful scenery, constituted a
portion of this grant. In 1589 the restless and chiv-
alrous Raleigh, transiently out of favor with the haughty
coquette who ruled England, came over to Ireland for
the purpose of looking after his own immense estates in
that country, wrung, like Spenser's, from the native pro-
prietors. He visited the lone poet at Kilcolman; and
to him,
Amongst the coolly shade
Of the green alders by the Mullaes shore,"
Spenser read the first three books of The Faery
Queene. Campbell finely says: "When we conceive
Spenser reciting his compositions to Raleigh in a scene
so beautifully appropriate, the mind casts pleasing retro-
spect over that influence which the enterprise of the dis-
coverer of Virginia and the genius of the author of the
198
SPENSER.
Faery Queene have respectively produced in the fortune
and language of England. The fancy might easily be
pardoned for a momentary superstition, that the genius of
their country hovered, unseen, over their meeting, cast-
ing her first look of regard on the poet that was destined
to inspire her future Milton, and the other on her mari-
time hero, who paved the way for colonizing distant
regions of the earth, where the language of England
was to be spoken, and the poetry of Spenser to be ad-
mired."
Raleigh, his imagination kindled by the enchantments
of Spenser's verse, and feeling that he had discovered
in an Irish wilderness the greatest of living poets, pre-
vailed on the too-happy author to accompany him to
England. Spenser was graciously received by Eliza-
beth, and was smitten with a courtier's hopes in receiv-
ing a poet's welcome.
In the early part of 1590 the first three books of The
Faery Queene were published. Who that has read it
can ever forget the thrill that went through him as he
completed the first stanza?
"Lo, I the man whose Muse whilom did mask,
As Time her taught, in lowly shepherd's weeds,
Am now enforced, a far unfitter task, -
For trumpets stern to change my oaten reeds;
And sing of knights' and ladies' gentle deeds,
Whose praises, having slept in silence long,
SPENSER.
199
Me, all too mean, the sacred muse areeds,
To blazon broad amongst her learned throng:
Fierce wars and faithful loves shall moralize my song."
« The admiration," says Hallam, "of this great poem
was unanimous and enthusiastic. No academy had
been trained to carp at his genius with minute cavilling;
no recent popularity, no traditional fame, interfered
with the immediate recognition of his supremacy. The
Faery Queene became at once the delight of every ac-
complished gentleman, the model of every poet, the
solace of every scholar."
But if the aspirations of the poet were thus gratified,
those of the courtier and politician were cruelly disap-
pointed. Burleigh, the Lord Treasurer, to whom Spen-
ser was merely a successful maker of ballads, and one
pushed forward by the faction which was constantly in-
triguing for his lordship's overthrow, contrived to inter-
cept, delay, or divert the favor which the queen was
willing to bestow on her melodious flatterer. The
irritated bard, in a few memorable couplets, has re-
corded, for the warning of all office-seekers and suppli-
cants for the patronage of the great, his wretched ex-
perience during the year and a half he danced attend-
ance on the court. Rage is a great condenser; and
the most diffuse of poets became the most concentrated
when wrath brooded over the memory of wrong.
200
SPENSER.
"To fret thy soul with crosses and with cares;
To eat thy heart through comfortless despairs;
To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run,
To spend, to give, to want, to be undone,"
this was the harsh experience of the laurelled minstrel,
fresh from the glories of fairy-land. But it is only
charitable to allow for the different points of view from
which different minds survey the poet. To Burleigh,
Spenser was a rhyming suitor, clamorous for the queen's
favor, and meditating designs on her treasury. To a
Mr. Beeston, according to Aubrey, "he was a little
man, who wore short hair, little band, and little cuffs."
Did not the sullen Burleigh have a more profound ap-
preciation of Spenser than the great world of common-
place gossips, represented by friend Beeston? At last,
in February, 1591, Spenser succeeded in obtaining a
pension of fifty pounds, and returned, but half satisfied,
to Ireland. In a graceful poem, called Colin Clout's
Come Home Again, full of gratitude to Raleigh and
adulation of Elizabeth, he described the glories and the
vanities he had witnessed at the English Court.
A deeper passion than that which inspired the amo-
rous plaints of the Shepherd's Calendar, and one des-
tined to a happier end, he now recorded in a series of
exquisitely thoughtful and tender sonnets, under the
general name of Amoretti; and he celebrated its long-
SPENSER.
201
deferred consummation in a rapturous Epithalamion.
We have no means of judging' of Elizabeth, the Irish
maiden who prompted these wonderful poems, except
from her transfigured image as seen reflected in Spen-
ser's verse,
verse which has made her perfect and has
made her immortal. The Epithalamion is the grandest
and purest marriage-song in literature. Even Hallam,
the least enthusiastic of critics, and one who too often
writes as if judgment consisted, not in the inclusion, but
exclusion of sympathy, cannot speak of this poem with-
out an unwonted touch of ecstasy in the words which
convey his magisterial decision. And John Wilson grows.
wild in its praise. "Joy," he says, "Joy, Love,
Desire, Passion, Gratitude, Religion, rejoice, in pres-
ence of Heaven, to take possession of Affection, Beauty,
and Innocence. Faith and Hope are bridesmaids, and
holiest incense is burning on the altar." But the rap-
tures of critics can convey no adequate idea of the
deep, thoughtful, satisfying delight that breathes through
the Epithalamion, and harmonizes its occasional starts
of ecstasy into unity with its pervading spirit of tran-
quil bliss. How simple and tender; and yet how in-
tensely imaginative, is this exquisite picture of the
bride!
رمة
Behold, whiles she before the altar stands,
Hearing the holy priest that to her speaks
•
9*
202
SPENSER.
And blesseth her with his two happy hands,
How the red roses flush up in her cheeks,
And the pure snow with goodly vermeil stain
Like crimson dyed in grain:
That even the angels, which continually
About the sacred altar do remain,
Forget their service and about her fly,
Oft peeping in her face, that seems more fair
The more they on it stare.
But her sad eyes, still fastened on the ground,
Are governed with goodly modesty,
That suffers not one look to glance awry,
Which may let in a little thought unsound.
Why blush ye, Love, to give to me your hand,
The pledge of all our band?
Sing, ye sweet angels, Allelujah sing,
}
That all the woods may answer, and your echoes ring!"
Nothing can be more delicately poetic than the line in
which the hands of the priest, lifted over the head of
the bride in the act of benediction, receive a reflected
joy from the beauty they bless:
"And blesseth her with his two happy hands."
At the time of his marriage, in 1594, Spenser had
completed three more books of The Faery Queene, and
in 1595 he visited England for the purpose of publish-
ing them. They appeared in 1596. During this visit
he presented to the queen his View of the State of Ire-
land, a prose tract, displaying the sagacity of an
SPENSER.
203
English statesman, but a spirit towards the poor native
Irish as ruthless as Cromwell's. He felt, in respect to
the population of the country in which he was forced
to make his home, as a Puritan New-Englander might
have felt in regard to the wild Indians who were skulk-
ing round his rude cabin, peering for a chance at the
scalps of his children. Returning to Ireland, with the
queen's recommendation for the office of Sheriff of Cork,
his worldly fortunes seemed now to be assured. But in
1598 the Insurrection of Munster broke out. Spenser,
who appears, not unnaturally, to have been especially
hated by the Irish, lost everything. His house was
assailed, pillaged, and burned; and in the hurry of his
departure from his burning dwelling, it is said that his
youngest child was left to perish in the flames. He
succeeded, with the remaining portion of his family, in
escaping to London, where, in a common inn, overcome
by his misfortunes, and broken in heart and brain, on
the 16th of January, 1599, he died. The saddest thing
of all remains to be recorded. Soon after his death
such is the curt statement "his widow married one
Roger Seckerstone." Did Edmund Spenser, then, after
all, appear to his wife Elizabeth as he appeared to
Mr. Beeston, simply as a little man, who wore
short hair, little band, and little cuffs"? One would
suppose that the memory of so much genius and glory
(6
204
SPENSER.
and calamity would have been better than the presence
of "one Roger Seckerstone"! Among the thousands
of millions of men born on the planet, it was her for-
tune to be the companion of Edmund Spenser, and
"soon after his death she married one Roger Secker-
stone"! It required two years of assiduous courtship,
illustrated by sonnets which have made her name im-
mortal, before the adoring poet could hymn, in a trans-
port of gratitude, her acceptance of his hand; but for-
tunate Mr. Seckerstone did not have to wait! She saw
her husband laid in Westminster Abbey, mourned by
all that was noble in rank or high in genius, and then,
as in the case of another too-celebrated marriage,
"The funeral baked meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables! "
"(
The work to which Spenser devoted the largest por-
tion of his meditative life was The Faery Queene; and
in this poem the whole nature and scope of his genius
may be discerned. Its object, as he tells us, was to
fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and
gentle discipline"; and, as doctrine embodied in persons
is more efficient than doctrine embodied in maxims, he
proposed to do this by means of a historical fiction, in
which duty should be infused into the mind by the pro-
cess of delight, and Virtue, reunited to the Beauty from
SPENSER.
205
which she had unwisely been severed, should be pre-
sented as an object to be passionately loved as well as
reverently obeyed. He chose for his subject the history
of Arthur, the fabulous hero and king of England, as
familiar to readers of romance then as the heroes of
Scott's novels are to the readers of our time; and he
purposed "to portray in him, before he was king, the
image of a brave knight, perfected in the twelve private
moral virtues." This plan was to be comprised in
twelve books; and then he proposed, in case his plan
succeeded, "to frame the other part of politic virtues
in his person, after he came to be king." As only one
half of the first portion of this vast design was com-
pleted, as this half makes one of the longest poems in
the world, and as all but the poet's resolute admirers
profess their incapacity to read without weariness more
than the first three books, it must be admitted that
Spenser's conception of the abstract capabilities of hu-
man patience was truly heroic, and that his confidence
in his own longevity was founded on a reminiscence of
Methuselah rather than on a study of vital statistics.
The
But the poem was also intended by the author to be
"one long-continued allegory or dark conceit."
story and the characters are symbolic as well as repre-
sentative. The pictures that please the eye, the melody
that charms the ear, the beauty that would seem its
206
SPENSER.
own excuse for being," cover a latent meaning, not per-
ceptible to the senses they delight, but to be interpreted
by the mind. Philosophical ideas, ethical truths, his-
torical events, compliments to contemporaries, satire on
contemporaries, are veiled and sometimes hidden in
these beautiful forms and heroic incidents. Much of
this covert sense is easily detected; but to explain all
would require a commentator who could not only think
from Spenser's mind, but recall from oblivion all the
gossip of Elizabeth's court. The general intention of
the allegorical design is given by the poet himself, in
his letter to Raleigh. He supposes Prince Arthur, after
his long education by Timon, "to have seen in a dream
or vision the Faery Queene, with whose excellent
beauty ravished, he, awaking, resolved to seek her out ";
and, armed by the magician Merlin, Arthur went to
seek her in fairy-land. Spenser is careful to inform us
that by the Faery Queene he means Glory in his gen-
eral intention, but in his particular," the excellent and
glorious person of our sovereign the queen, and her
kingdom in fairy-land." And considering that she bears
two persons, "the one of a most royal queen or em-
press, the other of a virtuous and beautiful lady, the
latter part in some places I do express in Belphoebe."
Arthur he intends to be the embodiment of the virtue
of Magnificence, or Magnanimity, as this contains all
SPENSER.
207
....
the other virtues, and is the perfection of them all; but
of the twelve separate virtues he takes twelve different
knights the patrons, making the adventures of each
the subject of a whole book, though the magnificent.
Arthur appears in all, exercising with ease the special
virtue, whether it be temperance, or holiness, or chas-
tity, or courtesy, or justice, which is included in the
rounded perfection of his moral being. The explana-
tion of the causes of these several adventures was, in
the poem, to be reserved to the twelfth book, of which
the rude Irish kerns unwittingly deprived us, in depriv-
ing us of the brain in which alone it had existence; but
we know that the poet's plan was, in that book, to rep-
resent the Faery Queene as keeping her annual feast
twelve days, "upon which the occasions of the twelve
separate adventures happened, which, being undertaken
by twelve separate knights," were in the twelve books
of the poem to be severally described. Spenser defends
his course in thus putting what might be deemed the
beginning at the end, by discriminating between the
poet historical and the historiographer. A historiog-
rapher, he says, "discourseth of affairs orderly, as they
were done, accounting as well the times as the actions:
but a poet thrusteth into the middest, ever where it
most concerneth him, and there recoursing to things fore-
past, and divining of things to come, maketh a pleasing
analysis of all.”
208
SPENSER.
In judging of the plan of the Faery Queene, we
must remember that it is a fragment. Spenser only
completed six books, of twelve cantos each, and a por-
tion of another. The tradition that three unpublished
books were destroyed by the fire which consumed his
dwelling has, by the latest and ablest editor of his
works, Professor F. J. Child, been rejected as un-
founded and untenable. But, though the poem was never
completed, we know the poet's design; and, much as
this design has been censured, it seems to us that the
radical defect was not in what Spenser proposed to do,
but in the way he did it, not in the plan of the poem,
but in the limitations of the poet. He conceived the
separate details the individual objects, persons, and
incidents imaginatively; but he conceived the whole
plan logically. He could give, and did give, elaborate
reasons for the conduct of his story,
-better reasons,
perhaps, than Homer, or Shakespeare, or Cervantes,
or Goethe could have given to justify the designs of his
works; but do you suppose that he could have given
reasons for Una, or Florimel, or Amoret? The truth is,
that his design was too large and complicated for his im-
agination to grasp as a whole. The parts, each organ-
ically conceived, are not organically related. The result
is a series of organisms connected by a logical bond,
an endless procession of beautiful forms, but no such
SPENSER.
209
vital combination of them as would convey unity of im-
pression. The cumbrousness and confusion and diffusion
which critics have recognized in the poem are to be re-
ferred to the fact that the processes of the understanding,
coldly contemplating the general plan, are in hopeless
antagonism to the processes of the imagination, raptur-
ously beholding and bodying forth the separate facts.
The moment the poet abandons himself to his genius he
forgets, and makes us forget, the purpose he had in view
at the start; and he and we are only recalled from the
delicious dream in order that he may moralize, and that
we may yawn. A dozen lines might be selected from
any
canto which are of more value than his statement of the
idea of the whole poem. In truth, the combining, co-
ordinating, centralizing, fusing imagination of the highest
order of genius, an imagination competent to seize and
hold such a complex design as our poet contemplated, and
to flash in brief and burning words details over which his
description lovingly lingers, — this was a power denied
to Spenser. He has auroral lights in profusion, but no
lightning. It is not that he lacks power. The Cave
of Despair, the description of Mammon and of Jealousy,
the Binding of Furor, not to mention other examples,
are full of power; but it is not condensed into that di-
rect executive efficiency which, in the same instant,
irradiates, smites, and is gone. He has not so much of
N
210
SPENSER.
this power as Byron, though he greatly exceeds him
in fulness of matter and depth and elevation of thought.
The poem has another defect which also answers to a
limitation of Spenser's character. His disposition was
soft and yielding; and, to honor a friend or propitiate
a patron, he did not hesitate to make his verse a vehicle
of flattery as well as of truth. If by Prince Arthur he
intended any real person, it was probably Sir Philip
Sidney; but in the sixth book he allows himself to asso-
ciate the name of Arthur with the ignominious campaign
of Leicester in the Netherlands, Leicester who repre-
sented the seven deadly sins rather than the twelve
moral virtues. Sir Arthegall, again, stands for Lord
Grey of Wilton, the Irish lord deputy, whom Spenser
served as secretary; but Grey was the exponent of
ruthlessness rather than of justice. The flattery of
Queen Elizabeth is so gross, that the wonder is that she
did not behead him for irony instead of pensioning him
for panegyric. The queen's hair was red, or, as some
still chivalrously insist, auburn; and Spenser, like the
other poets of the day, is too loyal to permit the ideal
head of beauty to wear any locks but those which are
golden. In the first book, the Red-Cross Knight, who
is the personification of Holiness, after being married to
Una, who is the personification of Truth or True Re-
ligion, leaves her at the end of the twelfth canto to go to
SPENSER.
211
the court of Gloriana, the Faery Queene. Now if
Gloriana means Glory, Holiness very improperly leaves
True Religion to seek it; if Gloriana means Queen
Elizabeth, it is probable that Holiness never arrived at
his destination.
We have thus a poet ungifted with the smiting direct-
ness of power, the soaring and darting imagination, of
the very highest order of minds; a man sensitive, ten-
der, grateful, dependent; reverential to the unseen
realities of the spiritual world, deferential to the crowned
and coroneted celebrities of the world of fact; but
we still have not yet touched the peculiarities of his
special genius. If we pass into the inner world of the
poet's spirit, where he really lived and brooded, we forget
criticism in the loving wonder and admiration evoked
by the sight of that "paradise of devices," both "dain-
ty" and divine. We are in communion with a nature
in which the most delicate, the most voluptuous, sense
of beauty is in exquisite harmony with the austerest
recognition of the paramount obligations of goodness
and rectitude. The beauty of material objects never
obscures to him the transcendent beauty of holiness.
In his Bowers of Bliss and his Houses of Pride he sur-
prises even voluptuaries by the luxuriousness of his
descriptions, and dazzles even the arrogant by the
towering bravery of his style; but his Bowers of Bliss
212
SPENSER.
repose on caverns of bale, and the glories of his House
of Pride are built over human carcasses.
This great mind ripened late; for it was cumulative
before it was creative, and inventiveness brooded over
memory. With great subtlety and strength of reason,
disciplined, exalted, and connected with imagination by
deep study of the philosophy of Plato, his intellect,
under the guidance of fixed spiritual ideas, roamed over
the field of history and fiction, selecting from every
quarter fit nutriment to feed and increase its energies.
The mythology of Greece and Rome, the creeds and
martyrologies of Christendom, the romance and super-
stitions of the Middle Ages, the ideals and facts of chiv-
alry, the literatures of every civilized nation, were all
received into his hospitable intelligence, and more or
less assimilated with its substance. Gradually his
imagination, working on these multifarious materials,
gave them form and life. Divinities, fairies, magicians,
goblins, embodied passions, became real objects to his
inward vision. He had
and heard
"Sight of Proteus coming from the sea,"
"Old Triton blow his wreathéd horn."
He began to believe, with more than the usual faith
of the poet, in the beautiful or terrible or fantastic
shapes with which his fancy was peopled. As they had
SPENSER.
213
been modified, re-created, associated with his own sym-
pathies and antipathies,-Spenserized,-in the imagina-
tive process they had gone through, he felt spiritually at
home in their company. Even when they were falsified
by actual facts, he knew they were still the appropriate
images of essential truths, having a validity indepen-
dent of experience. And it was this wondrous and
various troop of ideal shapes, palpable to his own eye
and domesticated in his own heart, that he sent forth, in
an endless succession of pictures, through the magical
pages of the Faery Queene.
It was the necessary condition of a poem, thus socia-
bly blending Christian and Pagan beliefs, Platonic ideas,
and barbaric superstitions, that its action should occur
in what Coleridge happily calls "mental space." Truth
of scenery, truth of climate, truth of locality, truth
of costume, could have no binding authority in the
everywhere and nowhere of Fairy-Land. Spenser's
life was too inward to allow his observation of external
nature to be close and exact. He had not, of course,
the pert pretension of the artist who said that nature
put him out, or of the French abstractionist who,
when told that his theory did not agree with facts,
blandly replied, "So much the worse for the facts";
but his fault, if fault it was, arose from a predominance
of his reflective and imaginative powers over his
214
SPENSER.
powers of observation,
subordinating, in Bacon's phrase, "the shows of things
to the desires of the mind"; and, as the scene of his
poem is mental and not material space, his lack of local
truth is hardly a real defect. It is objected, for example,
that, in his enumeration of the trees in one of his forests,
he associates trees which in nature do not coexist; but
his forest is in Fairy-Land. Again, the following stanza,
from his instinctive habit of
one of the most beautiful in the poem, describing the
melody which arose from the Bower of Bliss, has
been repeatedly criticised:
}
"The joyous birds, shrouded in cheerful shade,
Their notes unto the voice attempered sweet;
The angelical, soft, trembling voices made
To th' instruments divine respondence meet;
The silver-sounding instruments did meet
With the base murmur of the water's fall;
The water's fall, with difference discreet,
Now soft, now loud, unto the wind did call;
The gentle warbling wind low answered to all."
It is objected that the result of such a combination of
sounds, voices, and instruments would be discord, and
not melody. We may be sure it made music to Spen-
ser's soul, though he admits that it was not the music of
earth.
Right hard it was for wight who did it hear
To read what manner music that mote be;
SPENSER.
215
For all that pleasing is to living ear
Was there consorted in one harmony;
Birds, voices, instruments, winds, waters, all agree."
Again, Hallam says that the image conjured up by the
description of Una riding
"Upon a lowly ass more white than snow,
But she much whiter,"
is a hideous image; but it is evident he does not follow
the thought of the poet, who, rapidly passing from snow
as a material fact to snow as an emblem of innocence,
intends to say that the white purity of Una's soul, shin-
ing in her face and transfiguring its expression, cannot
The
be expressed by the purest material symbol.
image of a woman's face ghastly white passed before
Hallam's eye; we may be sure that no such uncomely
image was in Spenser's mind. The real meaning is
so obvious, that its perversion by so distinguished a
critic proves that acuteness has no irreconcilable feud
with imaginative insensibility, and can be spiritually
dull when it prides itself most on being intellectually
keen.
To this inwardness
ity of Spenser's soul we must add its melodiousness.
His best thoughts were born in music. The spirit of
poetry is not only felt in his sentiments and made visi-
this ideal and idealizing qual-
216
SPENSER.
ble in his imagery, but it steals out in the recurring
chimes of his complicated stanza. Accordingly, Spen-
ser, rather than Shakespeare and Milton,-who, as Cole-
ridge has remarked, had "deeper and more inwoven
harmonies," — is commonly adduced in support of the
accredited dogma, that verse is as much an essential
constituent of poetry as passion and imagination. But
it seems to us that poetry is not necessarily opposed to
prose, but to what is prosaic. It doubtless finds in the
verse of the greatest poets its happiest and most vital
expression; but sometimes verse is a clog, and its man-
agement a mechanical exercise. Much of Spenser's,
especially in the last three books of The Faery Queene,
is mere ingenuity in rhythm and rhyme; and even in
the first three books we continually light on passages
which are essentially prosaic. Take, for example, the
following stanza, descriptive of Immodest Mirth, and it
will readily be seen that only the first four lines are
poetic :-
www..
"And therein sat a lady fresh and fair,
Making sweet solace to herself alone:
Sometimes she sang as loud as lark in air,
Sometimes she laughed, that nigh her breath was gone;
Yet was there not with her else any one,
That to her might move cause of merriment;
Matter of mirth enough, though there were none,
She could devise, and thousand ways invent
To feed her foolish humor and vain jolliment."
SPENSER.
217
In Shakespeare's line,
"How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!”
the poetry is in the single epithet "sleeps"; substitute
"lies," and though the rhythm would be as perfect, the
poetry would be gone. The soul of poetry, indeed, is
impassioned imagination, using words, but not neces-
sarily verse, in its expression. Bacon wrote verse, and
execrable verse it is; but was not Bacon a poet? Is
not Milton a poet in his prose? Are not the prose
translations of the Psalms of David poetic? The
poetic faculty, which is vital, cannot be made to depend
on a form which, even in undisputed poets, is so apt to
be mechanical. Even should we admit that verse is the
body of which poetry is the soul, cannot a soul mani-
fest itself in a body which does not in all respects
correspond to it? Cannot the essential spirit of poetry
transfigure the rudest, unrhythmic expression, as the
soul of Socrates glorified his homely face? It is not,
of course, mere imagination which makes a poet; for
Aristotle and Newton were men of great imagination,
scientifically directed to the discovery of new truth,
not to the creation of new beauty. But imagination
directed by poetic sentiment and passion to poetic ends.
does make the poet. And that these conditions are
often fulfilled in prose, and a purely poetic impression.
10
218
SPENSER.
produced, cannot be denied without resisting the evi-
dence of ordinary experience.
And, though there is a delicious charm in Spenser's
sweetest verse, the finest and rarest elements of his
genius were independent of music. That celestial light
which occasionally touches his page with an ineffable
beauty, and which gave to him in his own time the
name of "the heavenly Spenser," is a more wonderful
emanation from his mind than its subtlest melodies.
We especially feel this in his ideal delineations of
woman, in which he has only been exceeded by Shake-
speare. He has been called the poet's poet; he should
also be called the woman's poet, for the feminine ele-
ment in his genius is its loftiest, deepest, most angelic
element. The tenderness, the ethereal softness and
grace, the moral purity, the sentiment untainted by
sentimentality, which characterize his impersonations of
feminine excellence, show, too, that the poet's brain had
been fed from his heart, and that reverence for woman
was the instinct of his sensibility before it was con-
firmed by the insight of his imagination.
The inwardness of Spenser's genius, the constant
reference of his creative faculty to internal ideals rather
than to objective facts, has given his poem a special
character of remoteness. It is often objected to his
female characters that they are not sufficiently individ-
SPENSER.
219
ualized, and are too far removed from ordinary life to
awaken human sympathy. It is to be hoped that the
latter part of this charge is not true; for a person who
can have no sympathy with Una, and Belphœbe, and
Florimel, and Amoret, can have no sympathy with the
woman in women. But it must be conceded, that though
Shakespeare, like Spenser, draws his women from ideal
regions of existence, he has succeeded better in natural-
izing them on the planet. The creations of both are
characterized by remoteness; but Shakespeare's are
direct perceptions of objects ideally remote, and strike
us both by their naturalness and their distance from
common nature; Spenser really sees the objects as
distant, and sees them through a visionary medium.
The strong-winged Shakespeare penetrates to the region
of spiritual facts which he embodies; Spenser surveys
them wonderingly from below. Shakespeare goes up;
Spenser looks up; and our poet therefore lacks the
great dramatist's "familiar grasp of things divine.”
It remains to be said, that though Spenser's outward
life was vexed with discontent, and fretted by his resent-
ment of the indifference with which he supposed his
claims were treated by the great and powerful, his po-
etry breathes the very soul of contentment and cheer.
This cheer has no connection with mirth, either in the
form of wit or humor, but springs from his perception
220
SPENSER.
of an ideal of life, which has become a reality to his
heart and imagination. The Faery Queene proves that
the perception of the Beautiful can make the heart
moré abidingly glad than the perception of the ludi-
crous. In the soul of this seer and singer, who shaped
the first vague dreams and unquiet aspirations of the
youth into beautiful forms to solace the man, there is a
serene depth of tender joy, ay, "a sober certainty of
waking bliss"; and, as he has not locked up in his own
breast this precious delight, but sent it in vital currents
through the marvels and moralities of The Faery
Queene to refresh the world, let no defects which criti-
cism can discern hinder the reader from participating
in the deep satisfaction of that happy spirit and the
visionary glories of that celestialized imagination.
IN
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
the present chapter we propose to speak of a few
of Spenser's contemporaries and successors, who
were rated as poets in their own generation, how-
ever neglected they may be in ours. We shall select
those who have some pretensions to originality of
character as well as mind; and, though we shall not
mention all who claim the attention of students of
literary history, we fear we shall gain the gratitude
of the reader for those omitted, rather than for those
included, in the survey. Sins of omission are some-
times exalted by circumstances into a high rank among
the negative virtues.
Among the minor poets of this era were two imita-
tors of Spenser,- Phineas and Giles Fletcher. They
were cousins of Fletcher the dramatist, but with none
of his wild blood in their veins, and none of his flashing
creativeness in their souls, to give evidence of the rela-
tionship. The Purple Island, a poem in twelve cantos,
by Phineas, is a long allegorical description of the body
and soul of man, perverse in design, melodious in ver-
sification, occasionally felicitous in the personification
222
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
of abstract qualities, but on the whole to be considered
as an exercise of boundless ingenuity to produce insuf-
ferable tediousness. Not in the dissecting-room itself is
anatomy less poetical than in the harmonious stanzas
of The Purple Island. Giles, the brother of Phineas,
was the more potent spirit of the two, but his power is
often directed by a taste even more elaborately bad.
His poem of Christ's Victory and Triumph, in parts
almost sublime, in parts almost puerile, is a proof that
imaginative fertility may exist in a mind with little
imaginative grasp. Campbell, however, considers him
a connecting link between Spenser and Milton.
Samuel Daniel, another poet of this period, was the
son of a music-master, and was born in 1562. Fuller
says of him, that "he carried, in his Christian and sur-
name, two holy prophets, his monitors, so to qualify his
raptures that he abhorred all profaneness." Amiable
in character, gentle in disposition, and with a genius
meditative rather than energetic, he appears to have
possessed that combination of qualities which makes men
personally pleasing if it does not make them perma-
nently famous. He was patronized both by Elizabeth
and James, was the friend of Shakespeare and Cam-
den, and was highly esteemed by the most accomplished
women of his time. A most voluminous writer in prose
and verse, he was distinguished in both for the purity,
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
223
simplicity, and elegance of his diction. Browne calls
him "the well-languaged Daniel." But if he avoided
the pedantry and quaintness which were too apt to viti-
ate the style of the period, and wrote what might be
called modern English, it has still been found that mod-
ern Englishmen cannot be coaxed into reading what is
so lucidly written. His longest work, a versified His-
tory of the Civil Wars, dispassionate as a chronicle and
unimpassioned as a poem, is now only read by those
critics in whom the sense of duty is victorious over the
disposition to doze. The best expressions of his pen-
sive, tender, and thoughtful nature are his epistles and
his sonnets. Among the epistles, that to the Countess
of Cumberland is the best. It is a model for all adula-
tory addresses to women; indeed, a masterpiece of
subtile compliment; for it assumes in its object a sym-
pathy with whatever is noblest in sentiment, and an
understanding of whatever is most elevated in thought.
The sonnets, first published in 1592, in his thirtieth
year, record the strength and the disappointment of a
youthful passion. The lady, whom he addresses under
the name of Delia, refused him, it is said, for a wealth-
ier lover, and the pang of this baffled affection made
him wretched for years, and sent him
"Haunting untrodden paths to wail apart."
Echo, he tells us, while he was aiming to overcome
the indifference of the maiden, -
224
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
แ Echo, daughter of the air,
Babbling guest of rocks and rills,
Knows the name of my fierce fair,
And sounds the accents of my ills."
Throughout the sonnets, the matchless perfection of
this Delia is ever connected with her disdain of the
poet who celebrates it:
Fair is my love, and cruel as she 's fair;
Her brow shades frowns, although her eyes are sunny;
Her smiles are lightning, though her pride despair;
And her disdains are gall, her favors honey.
A modest maid, decked with a blush of honor,
Who treads along green paths of youth and love,
The wonder of all eyes that gaze upon her,
Sacred on earth, designed a saint above.”
This picture of the "modest maid, decked with a
blush of honor," is exquisite; but it is still a picture,
and not a living presence. Shakespeare, touching the
same beautiful object with his life-imparting imagination,
suffuses at once the sense and soul with a feeling of the
vital reality, when he describes the French princess as
a "maiden rosed over with the virgin crimson of mod-
esty."
The richest and most elaborately fanciful of these
sonnets is that in which the poet calls upon his mistress
to give back her perfections to the objects from which
she derived them:
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
225
"Restore thy tresses to the golden ore;
Yield Cytherea's son those arcs of love;
Bequeath the heavens the stars that I adore;
And to the orient do thy pearls remove.
Yield thy hand's pride unto the ivory white;
To Arabian odors give thy breathing sweet;
Restore thy blush unto Aurora bright;
To Thetis give the honor of thy feet.
Let Venus have thy graces, her resigned;
And thy sweet voice give back unto the spheres;
But yet restore thy fierce and cruel mind
To Hyrcan tigers and to ruthless bears;
Yield to the marble thy hard heart again;
So shalt thou cease to plague and I to pain."
There is a fate in love. This man, who could not
conquer the insensibility of one country girl, was the
honored friend of the noblest and most celebrated wo-
man of his age. Eventually, at the age of forty, he
was married to a sister of John Florio, to whom his
own sister, the Rosalind who jilted Spenser, is supposed
to have been previously united. He died in retirement,
in 1619, in his fifty-eighth year.
A more powerful and a more prolific poet than Daniel
was Michael Drayton, who rhymed steadily for some
forty years, and produced nearly a hundred thousand
lines. The son of a butcher, and born about the year
1563, he early exhibited an innocent desire to be a poet,
and his first request to his tutor at college was to make
10*
226
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
him one. Like Daniel, he enjoyed the friendship and
patronage of the noble favorers of learning and genius.
His character seems to have been irreproachable. Meres,
in his Wit's Treasury, says of him, that among all sorts
of people "he is held as a man of virtuous disposition,
honest conversation, and well-governed carriage, which
is almost miraculous among good wits in these declin-
ing and corrupt times, when there is nothing but roguery
in villanous man, and when cheating and craftiness is
counted the cleanest wit and soundest wisdom." But
the market-value, both of his poetry and virtue, was
small, and he seems to have been always on bad terms
with the booksellers. His poems, we believe, were the
first which arrived at second editions by the simple
process of merely reprinting, with additions, the title-
pages of the first, a fact which is ominous of his bad
success with the public. The defect of his mind was
not the lack of materials, but the lack of taste to select,
and imagination to fuse, his materials. His poem of
The Barons' Wars is a metrical chronicle; his Poly-
Olbion is an enormous piece of metrical topography,
extending to thirty thousand twelve-syllabled lines. In
neither poem does he view his subject from an emi-
nence, but doggedly follows the course of events and
the succession of objects. As a description of Eng-
land, the Poly-Olbion is in general so accurate that it is
·
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
227
quoted as authority by such antiquaries as Hearne and
Wood and Nicholson. Campbell has felicitously touched
its fatal defect in saying that Drayton "chained his po-
etry to the map." The only modern critic who seems
to have followed all its wearisome details with loving
enthusiasm is Charles Lamb, who speaks of Drayton as
that "panegyrist of my native earth who has gone over
her soil with the fidelity of a herald and the painful
love of a son; who has not left a rivulet (so narrow
that it may be stepped over) without honorable men-
tion; and has animated hills and streams with life and
passion above the dreams of old mythology." But, in
spite of this warm commendation, the essential difficulty
with the Poly-Olbion is, that, with all its merits, it is
unreadable. The poetic feeling, the grace, the fresh-
ness, the pure, bright, and vigorous diction, which char-
acterize it, appear to more advantage in the poet's minor
pieces, where his subjects are less unwieldy, and the
vivacity of his fancy makes us forget his lack of high
imagination. His fairy poem of Nymphidia, for in-
stance, is one of the most deliciously fanciful creations
in the language; and many of his smaller pieces have
the point and sparkle of Carew's and Suckling's. In
his longer poems, too, we frequently light upon passages
as perfect of their kind as this description of Queen
Isabella's hand:
228
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
"She laid her fingers on his manly cheek,
The God's pure sceptres and the darts of love,
That with their touch might make a tiger meek,
Or might great Atlas from his seat remove,
So white, so soft, so delicate, so sleek,
As she had worn a lily for a glove."
A more popular poet than Daniel, or Drayton, or the
Fletchers, was William Warner, an attorney of the Court
of Common Pleas, who was born about the year 1558,
and who died in 1609. His Albion's England, a poem
of some ten thousand verses, was published in 1586,
ran through six editions in sixteen years, and died
out of the memory of mankind with the last, in 1612.
After having conscientiously waded through immense
masses of uninteresting rhyme, as we have been com-
pelled to do in the preparation of these notices, we
confess, with a not unmalicious exultation, that we
know Warner's poem only by description and extracts.
Albion is an ancient name for Great Britain; and Al-
bion's England is a metrical history-"not barren," in
the author's own words, "of inventive intermixtures
— of the southern portion of the island, beginning at
the deluge, and ending with the reign of James I. As
James might have said, "After me the deluge," Warner's
poem may be considered as ending in some such catas-
trophe as that with which it begins. The merit of
Warner is that of a story-teller, and he reached classes
">
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
229
&
of readers to whom Spenser was hardly known by
name. The work is a strange mixture of comic and
tragic fact and fable, exceedingly gross in parts,
with little power of imagination or grace of language,
but possessing the great popular excellence of de-
scribing persons and incidents in the fewest and sim-
plest words. The best story is that of Argentile and
Curan, and it is told as briefly as though it were
intended for transmission by telegraph at the cost of
a dollar a word. Warner has some occasional touches
of nature and pathos which almost rival the old ballads
for directness and intensity of feeling. The most re-
markable of these, condensed in two of his long four-
teen-syllabled lines, is worth all the rest of his poems.
It occurs in his description of Queen Eleanor striking
the Fair Rosamond.
"With that she dashed her on the lips, so dyéd double red:
Hard was the heart that gave the blow, soft were those lips that
bled."
It is a rapid transition from Warner, the poet of
the populace, to Donne, the poet of the metaphysicians,
but the range of the Elizabethan literature is full
of contrasts. In the words of the satirist, Donne is a
poet
"Whose muse on dromedary trots,
Wreathes iron pokers into true-love-knots;
230
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clew,
Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw.
See lewdness with theology combined, -
A cynic and a sycophantic mind,
A fancy shared party per pale between
Death's-heads and skeletons and Aretine!
Not his peculiar defect and crime,
But the true current mintage of the time.
Such were the established signs and tokens given
To mark a loyal churchman, sound and even,
Free from papistic and fanatic leaven."
John Donne, the heterogeneous qualities of whose intel-
lect and character are thus maliciously sketched, was.
one of the strangest of versifiers, sermonizers, and men.
He was the son of a wealthy London merchant, and
was born in 1573. One of those youthful prodigies
who have an appetite for learning as other boys have
for cakes and plums, he was, at the age of eleven,
sufficiently advanced in his studies to enter the Uni-
versity of Oxford, where he remained three years.
He was then transferred to Cambridge. His classical
and mathematical education being thus completed, he,
at the age of seventeen, was admitted into Lincoln's Inn
to study the law. His relations being Roman Catholics,
he abandoned the law at the age of nineteen, in order
to make an elaborate examination of the points in dis-
pute between the Romanists and the Reformers. Hav-
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
231
ing in a year's time exhausted this controversy, he
spent several years in travelling in Italy and Spain.
On his return to England he became chief secretary
of Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, and held the office
five years.
It was probably during the period be-
tween his twentieth and thirtieth years that most of
his secular poetry was written, and that his nature took
its decided eccentric twist. An insatiable intellectual
curiosity seems, up to this time, to have been his leading
characteristic; and as this led him to all kinds of liter-
ature for mental nutriment, his faculties, in their forma-
tion, were inlaid with the oddest varieties of opinions and
crotchets. With vast learning, with a subtile and pene-
trating intellect, with a fancy singularly fruitful and
ingenious, he still contrived to disconnect, more or less,
his learning from what was worth learning, his intellect
from what was reasonable, his fancy from what was
beautiful. His poems, or rather his metrical problems,
are obscure in thought, rugged in versification, and full
of conceits which are intended to surprise rather than to
please; but they still exhibit a power of intellect, both
analytical and analogical, competent at once to separate
the minutest and connect the remotest ideas. This
power, while it might not have given his poems grace,
sweetness, freshness, and melody, would still, if properly
directed, have made them valuable for their thoughts;
232
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
but in the case of Donne it is perverted to the production
of what is bizarre or unnatural, and his muse is thus as
hostile to use as to beauty. The intention is, not to
idealize what is true, but to display the writer's skill
and wit in giving a show of reason to what is false.
The effect of this on the moral character of Donne was
pernicious. A subtile intellectual scepticism, which
weakened will, divorced thought from action and liter-
ature from life, and made existence a puzzle and a
dream, resulted from this perversion of his intellect.
He found that he could wittily justify what was vicious
as well as what was unnatural; and his amatory poems,
accordingly, are characterized by a cold, hard, labored,
intellectualized sensuality, worse than the worst im-
purity of his contemporaries, because it has no excuse
of passion for its violations of decency.
But now happened an event which proved how little
the talents and accomplishments of this voluptuary of
intellectual conceits were competent to serve him in a
grapple with the realities of life. Lady Ellesmere
had a niece, the daughter of Sir George Moore,
with whom Donne fell in love; and as, according
to Izaak Walton, his behavior, when it would entice,
had a strange kind of elegant, irresistible art," he in-
duced her to consent to a private marriage, without the
knowledge of her father. Izaak accounts for this on
"
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
233
the perhaps tenable ground, "that love is a flattering
mischief, that hath denied aged and wise men a foresight
of those evils that too often prove to be children of that
blind father; a passion that carries us to commit errors
with as much ease as whirlwinds move feathers, and be-
gets in us an unwearied industry to the attainment of
what we desire." But Sir George Moore, the father of
the lady, an arrogant, avaricious, and passionate brute,
was so enraged at the match, that he did not rest until
he had induced Lord Ellesmere to dismiss Donne from
his service, and until he had placed his son-in-law in
prison. Although Sir George, compelled to submit to
what was inevitable, became at last reconciled to Donne,
he refused to contribute anything towards his daughter's
maintenance. As Donne's own fortune had been by
this time all expended in travel, books, and other intel-
lectual dissipations, and as he had been deprived of his
office, he was now stripped of everything but his power
of framing conceits; and, accordingly, in a dismal letter
to his wife, recounting his miseries, he has nothing but
this quibble to support her under affliction: "John
Donne, Ann Donne, Undone." A charitable kinsman
of the Ellesmeres, however, Sir Francis Wolly, see-
ing the helplessness of this man of brain, took him
and his wife into his own house. Here they resided
until the death of their benefactor, Donne occupying
234
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
his time in studying the civil and canon laws, and
probably also in composing his Thesis on Self-Homicide,
a work in which his ingenuity is thought to have de-
vised some excuses for suicide, but the reading of which,
according to Hallam, would induce no man to kill him-
self unless he were threatened with another volume.
During his residence with Sir Francis Wolly, Donne,
whose acquirements in theology were immense, was
offered a benefice by Dr. Morton, then Dean of Glou-
cester; but he declined to enter the Church, from a
feeling of spiritual unfitness. It is probable that his
habits of intellectual self-indulgence, while they really
weakened his conscience, made it morbidly acute. He
would not adopt the profession of law or divinity for a
subsistence, though he was willing to depend for sub-
sistence on the charity of others. Izaak Walton praises
his humility; but Donne's humility was only another
name for indisposition to practical labor, a humility
which makes self-depreciation an excuse for moral lazi-
ness, and shrinks as nervously from duty as from pride.
Both law and divinity, therefore, he continued to make
the luxuries of his existence.
In good time this selfish intellectuality resulted in
that worst of intellectual diseases, mental disgust. After
the death of his patron, his father-in-law allowed him
eighty pounds a year to support his family. Sickness
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
235
66
and affliction and comparative poverty came to wake
him from his dream and reveal him to himself. In some
affecting letters, which have been preserved, he moans
over his moral inefficiency, and confesses to an over-
earnest desire for the next life," to escape from the per-
plexities of this. "I grow older,” he says, "and not
better; my strength diminisheth, and my load grows
heavier; and yet I would fain be or do something; but
that I cannot tell what, is no wonder in this time of my
sadness; for to choose is to do; but to be no part of any
body is as to be nothing: and so I am, and shall so
judge myself, unless I could be so incorporated into a
part of the world as by business to contribute some sus-
tenation to the whole. This I made account; I began
early, when I undertook the study of our laws; but was
diverted by leaving that, and embracing the worst
voluptuousness, an hydroptic immoderate desire of hu-
man learning and languages.
Now I am become
so little, or such a nothing, that I am not a subject good
enough for one of my own letters. . . . I am rather a
sickness or disease of the world than any part of it, and
therefore neither love it nor life." And he closes with
the words, "Your poor friend and God's poor patient,
John Donne."
And this was the mental state to which Donne was
reduced by thirty years of incessant study, of study
236
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
that sought only the gratification of intellectual caprice
and of intellectual curiosity, of study without a practi-
cal object. From this wretched mood of self-disgust
and disgust with existence, this fret of thought at the
impotence of will, we may date Donne's gradual eman-
cipation from his besetting sins; for life, at such a point
of spiritual experience, is only possible under the form
of a new life. His theological studies and meditations
were now probably directed more to the building-up of
character, and less to the pandering to his gluttonous.
intellectuality. His recovery was a work of years; and
it is doubtful if he would ever have chosen a profession,
if King James, delighted with his views regarding the
questions of supremacy and allegiance, and amazed at
his opulence in what was then called learning, had not
insisted on his entering the Church. After much hesi-
tation and long preparation, Donne yielded to the royal
command. He was successively made Chaplain in Or-
dinary, Lecturer at Lincoln's Inn, and Dean of St.
Paul's, was soon recognized as one of the ablest and
most eloquent preachers of his time, and impressed those
who sat under his ministrations, not merely with admi-
ration for his genius, but with reverence for his holy life
and almost ascetic self-denial. The profession he had
adopted with so much self-distrust he came to love with
such fervor that his expressed wish was, to die in the
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
237
pulpit, or in consequence of his labors therein. This
last wish was granted in 1631, in his fifty-eighth year;
"and that body," says Walton with quaint pathos,
"which once was a temple of the Holy Ghost" now
became "but a small quantity of Christian dust."
Donne's published sermons are in form nearly as
grotesque as his poems, though they are characterized
by profounder qualities of heart and mind. It was his
misfortune to know thoroughly the works of fourteen
hundred writers, most of them necessarily worthless;
and he could not help displaying his erudition in his
discourses. Of what is now called taste he was ab-
solutely destitute. His sermons are a curious mosaic of
quaintness, quotation, wisdom, puerility, subtilty, and
ecstasy. The pedant and the seer possess him by turns,
and in reading no other divine are our transitions from
yawning to rapture so swift and unexpected. He has
passages of transcendent merit, passages which evince a
spiritual vision so piercing, and a feeling of divine
things so intense, that for the time we seem to be com-
muning with a religious genius of the most exalted and
exalting order; but soon he involves us in a maze of
quotations and references, and our minds are hustled by
what Hallam calls "the rabble of bad authors that
this saint and sage has always at his skirts, even when
he ascends to the highest heaven of contemplation.
238
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
Doubtless what displeases this age added to his reputa-
tion in his own. Donne was more pedantic than his
clerical contemporaries only because he had more of
that thought-suffocating learning which all of them re-
garded with irrational respect. One of the signs of
Bacon's superiority to his age was the cool audacity
with which he assailed sophists, simpletons, bigots, and
liars, even though they wrote in Latin and Greek.
!
A poet as intellectual as Donne, but whose intelligence
was united to more manliness and efficiency, was Sir
John Davies. He was born in 1570, and was educated
for the law. The first we hear of him, after he had
been called to the bar, was his expulsion from the So-
ciety of the Middle Temple, for quarrelling with one
Richard Martin and giving him a sound beating. This
was in 1598. The next recorded fact of his biography
was the publication, a year afterwards, of his poem on
the Immortality of the Soul. A man who thus com-
bined so much pugilistic with so much philosophic
power could not be long kept down in a country so full
of fight and thought as England. He was soon re-
stored to his profession, won the esteem both of Eliza-
beth and James, held high offices in Ireland, and in
1626 was appointed Chief Justice of England, but died
of apoplexy before he was sworn in.
The two works on which his fame as a poet rests are
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
239
on the widely different themes of Dancing, and the Im-
mortality of the Soul. The first is in the form of a
dialogue between Penelope and one of her wooers, and
most melodiously expresses "the antiquity and excel-
lence of dancing." Only in the Elizabethan age could
such a great effort of intellect, learning, and fancy have
arisen from the trifling incident of asking a lady to
dance. It was left unfinished; and, indeed, as it is the
object of the wooer to prove to Penelope that dancing
is the law of nature and life, the poem could only be
brought to an end by the exhaustion of the writer's in-
genuity in devising subtile analogies for the wooer and
answers as subtile from Penelope, who aids
"The music of her tongue
With the sweet speech of her alluring eyes."
To think logically from his premises was the necessity
of Davies's mind. In the poem on Dancing the pre-
mises are fanciful; in the poem on the Immortality of
the Soul the premises are real; but the reasoning in
both is equally exact. It is usual among critics, even
such critics as Hallam and Campbell, to decide that the
imaginative power of the poem on the Immortality of
the Soul consists in the illustration of the arguments
rather than in the perception of the premises. But the
truth would seem to be that the author exhibits his
imagination more in his insight than in his imagery.
240
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
The poetic excellence of the work comes from the
power of clear, steady beholding of spiritual facts with
the spiritual eye, — of beholding them so clearly that
the task of stating, illustrating, and reasoning from them
is performed with masterly ease. In truth, the great
writers of the time believed in the soul's immortality, be-
cause they were conscious of having souls; the height
of their thinking was due to the fact that the soul
was always in the premises; and thought, with them,
included imaginative vision as well as dialectic skill.
From a lower order of minds than Shakespeare, Hooker,
and Bacon, than Chapman, Sidney, and Davies, proceed
the theories of materialism, for no thinking from the
soul can deny the soul's existence. It is curious to ob-
serve the advantage which Davies holds over his ma-
terialistic opponents, through the circumstance that, while
his logical understanding is as well furnished as theirs, it
reposes on central ideas and deep experiences which they
either want or ignore. No adequate idea of the general
gravity and grandeur of his thinking can be conveyed
by short extracts; yet, opening the poem at the fourth
section, devoted to the demonstration that the soul is a
spirit, we will quote a few of his resounding quatrains
in illustration of his manner:
"For she all natures under heaven doth pass,
Being like those spirits which God's face do see,
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
241
Or like himself, whose image once she was,
Though now, alas! she scarce his shadow be.
"Were she a body, how could she remain
Within the body which is less than she?
Or how could she the world's great shape contain,
And in our narrow breasts containéd be?
"All bodies are confined within some place,
But she all place within herself confines;
All bodies have their measure and their space;
But who can draw the soul's dimensive lines?"
The next poet we shall mention was a link of con-
nection between the age of Elizabeth and Cromwell;
a contemporary equally of Shakespeare and Milton;
a man whose first work was published ten years before
Shakespeare had produced his greatest tragedies, and
who, later in life, defended Episcopacy against Milton.
We refer of course to Joseph Hall. He was born in
1574, was educated at Cambridge, and in 1597, at the
age of twenty-three, published his satires. Originally
intended for the Church, he was now presented with a
living by Sir Robert Drury, who was also a munificent
patron of Donne. He rose gradually to preferment,
was made Bishop of Exeter in 1627, and translated to
the see of Norwich in 1641. In 1643 he was deprived
of his place and revenue by the Parliamentary Com-
mittee of Sequestration, and died in 1656, in his eighty-
11
P
242
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
second year. As a churchman, he was in favor of
moderate measures, and he had the rare good fortune
to oppose Archbishop Laud, and to suffer under Oliver
Cromwell.
As a satirist, if we reject the claim of Gascoigne to
precedence, he was the earliest that English literature
can boast. In his own words,
"I first adventure: follow me who list,
And be the second English satirist.”
pene-
He had two qualifications for his chosen task,
trating observation and unshrinking courage. The fol-
lies and vices, the manners, prejudices, delusions, and
crimes of his time, form the materials of his satires;
and these he lashes, or laughs at, according as the sub-
ject-matter provokes his indignation or his contempt.
"Sith," he says in his Preface, "faults loathe nothing
more than the light, and men love nothing more than
their faults,” it follows that, "what with the nature of
the faults and the faults of the persons," it is impossible
"that so violent an appeachment should be quietly
brooked." But to those who are offended he vouchsafes
but this curt and cutting defence of his plain-speaking:
"Art thou guilty? Complain not, thou art not wronged.
Art thou guiltless? Complain not, thou art not touched."
These satires, however, striking as they are for their
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
243
compactness of language and vigor of characterization,
convey but an inadequate idea of the depth, devoutness,
and largeness of soul displayed in Hall's theological
writings. His Meditations, especially, have been read
by thousands who never heard of him as a tart and
caustic wit. But the one characteristic of sententious-
ness marks equally the sarcasm of the youthful satirist
and the raptures of the aged saint.
The next writer we shall consider, Sir Henry Wotton,
possessed one of the most accomplished and enlightened
minds of the age, though, unhappily for us, he has left
few records of it in literature. He was born in 1568,
educated at Oxford, and, leaving the university in his
twenty-second year, passed nine years in travelling in
Germany and Italy. On his return his conversation
showed such wit and information that it was said to be
66
one of the delights of mankind." He entered the
service of the Earl of Essex, and, on the discovery
of the Earl's treason, prudently escaped to the Conti-
neut. While in Italy he rendered a great service to
the Scottish King; and James, on his accession to the
English throne, knighted him, and sent him as ambas-
sador to Venice. He remained abroad over twenty
years. On his return he was made provost of Eton
College. He died in 1639, in his seventy-first year.
Wotton is one of the few Englishmen who have suc-
244
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
ceeded in divesting themselves of English prejudices
without at the same time divesting themselves of Eng-
lish virtues. He was a man of the world of the kind
described by Bacon, a man "whose heart was not
cut off from other men's lands, but a continent that
joined to them.” One of the ablest and most sagacious
diplomatists that England ever sent abroad to match
Italian craft with Saxon sense, he was at the same time
chivalrous, loyal, and true. Though the author of the
satirical definition of an ambassador, as
66 an honest
man sent to lie abroad for the commonwealth," his own
course was the opposite of falsehood. Indeed, he laid
this down as an infallible aphorism to guide an English
ambassador, that he should always tell the truth: first,
because he will secure himself if called to account; sec-
ond, because he will never be believed, and he will thus
"put his adversaries, who will ever hunt counter, at a
loss." One of his many accomplishments was the art
of saying pointed things in pithy language. At Rome,
a priest asked him, "Where was your religion be-
fore Luther?" To which Wotton answered, "My
religion was to be found then where yours is not to
be found now,
in the written Word of God." He
then put to the priest this question: "Do you be-
lieve all those many thousands of poor Christians
were damned, that were excommunicated because the
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
245
Pope and the Duke of Venice could not agree about
their temporal power, even those poor Christians
that knew not why they quarrelled? Speak your con-
science." The priest's reply was, "Monsieur, excuse
me." Wotton's own Protestantism, however, did not
consist, like that of too many others of his time and
of ours, in hating Romanists. He was once asked
whether a papist may be saved. His answer was:
"You may be saved without knowing that. Look to
yourself." The spirit of this reply is of the inmost
essence of toleration.
Cowley, in his elegy on Wotton, has touched wittily
on those felicities of his nature and culture which made
him so admired by his contemporaries :
"What shall we say ? since silent now is he,
Who when he spoke, all things would silent be;
Who had so many languages in store,
That only fame shall speak of him in more;
Whom England now no more returned must see:
He's gone to heaven on his fourth embassy.
So well he understood the most and best
Of tongues that Babel sent into the west,
Spoke them so truly, that he had, you'd swear,
Not only lived but been born everywhere.
Nor ought the language of that man be less,
Who in his breast had all things to express."
246
*
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
As a poet Sir Henry Wotton is universally known by
one exquisite little poem, The Character of a Happy
Life, which is in all hymn-books. The general drift
of his poetry is, to expose the hollowness of all the ob-
jects to which as a statesman and courtier the greater
portion of his own life was devoted. His verses are
texts for discourses, uniting economy of words with ful-
ness of thought and sentiment. His celebrated epitaph
on a married couple is condensed to the point of con-
verting feeling into wit.
"He first deceased. She, for a little, tried
To do without him, liked it not, and died."
In one of his hymns he has this startling image: —
"No hallowed oils, no gums I need,
No new-born drams of purging fire;
One rosy drop from David's seed
Was worlds of seas to quench their ire."
Excellent, however, of its kind as Wotton's poetry is,
it is not equal to that living poem, his life. He was
one of those men who are not so much makers of poems
as subjects for poems.
The last poet of whom we shall speak, George Her-
bert, was one in whom the quaintness of the time found
its most fantastic embodiment. He began life as a cour-
tier; and on the disappointment of his hopes, or on his
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
247
conviction of the vanity of his ambitions, he suddenly
changed his whole course of thought and life, became a
clergyman, and is known to posterity only as "holy
George Herbert." His poetry is the bizarre expression
of a deeply religious and intensely thoughtful nature,
sincere at heart, but strange, far-fetched, and serenely
crotchety in utterance. Nothing can be more frigid
than the conceits in which he clothes the great majority
of his pious ejaculations and heavenly ecstasies. Yet
every reader feels that his fancy, quaint as it often is,
is a part of the organism of his character; and that his
quaintness, his uncouth metaphors and comparisons, his
squalid phraseology, his holy charades and pious riddles,
his inspirations crystallized into ingenuities, and his
general disposition to represent the divine through the
exterior guise of the odd, are vitally connected with
that essential beauty and sweetness of soul which give
his
poems their wild flavor and fragrance. Amateurs in
sanctity, and men of fine religious taste, will tell you
that genuine emotion can never find an outlet in such
an elaborately fantastic form; and the proposition, ac-
cording, as it does, with the rules of Blair and Kames
and Whately, commands your immediate assent; but
still you feel that genuine emotion is there, and, if you
watch sharply, you will find that Taste, entering holy
George Herbert's "Temple," after a preliminary sniff
248
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
of imbecile contempt, somehow slinks away abashed
after the first verse at the "Church-porch :"
"Thou whose sweet youth and early hopes enhance
Thy rate and price, and mark thee for a treasure,
Hearken unto a verser, who may chance
Rhyme thee to good, and make a bait of pleasure:
A verse may find him whom a sermon flies,
And turn delight into a sacrifice.",
And that fine gentleman, Taste, having relieved us
of his sweetly-scented presence, redolent with the "balm
of a thousand flowers," let us, in closing, quote one
of the profoundest utterances of the Elizabethan age,
George Herbert's lines on Man:-
"Man is all symmetrie,
Full of proportions, one limbe to another,
And all to all the world besides:
Each part may call the farthest, brother;
For head with foot hath private amitie,
And both with moon and tides.
"L
Nothing hath got so farre
But man hath caught and kept it, as his prey.
His eyes dismount the highest starre:
He is in little all the sphere.
Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they
Finde their acquaintance there.
MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS.
249
"The starres have us to bed;
Night draws the curtain, which the sun withdraws:
Musick and light attend our head.
All things unto our flesh are kinde
In their descent and being; to our minde
In their ascent and cause.
"More servants wait on Man
Than he'll take notice of; in every path
He treads down that which doth befriend him
When sickness makes him pale and wan.
O mightie love! Man is one world, and hath
Another to attend him.
"Since then, my God, thou hast
So brave a Palace built; O dwell in it,
That it may dwell with thee at last!
Till then afford us so much wit,
That as the world serves us we may serve thee,
And both thy servants be."
11*
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
HE characteristic of a good prose style is, that,
THE
while it mirrors or embodies the mind that uses it,
it also gives pleasure in itself. The quality which de-
cides on its fulfilment of these conditions is commonly
called taste.
Though taste is properly under law, and should, if
pressed, give reasons for its decisions, many of its most
authoritative judgments come directly from its instinct
or insight, without regard to rules. Indeed, a fine
feeling of the beauty, melody, fitness, and vitality of
words is often wanting in men who are dexterous in
the application of the principles of style; and some
of the most philosophic treatises on æsthetics betray
a lack of that deep internal sense which directly per-
ceives the objects and qualities whose validity it is
the office of the understanding laboriously to demon-
strate.
But whether we judge of style by our perceptions or
by principles, we all feel that there is a distinction be-
tween persons who write books and writers whose books
belong to literature. There is something in the mere
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
251
wording of a description of a triviality of dress or man-
ner, by Addison or Steele, which gives greater mental de-
light than the description of a campaign or a revolution
by Alison. The principle that style is thus a vital ele-
ment in the expression of thought and emotion, that it
not only measures the quality and quantity of the mind
it conveys, but has a charm in itself, makes the task of
an historian of literature less difficult than it at first
appears. Among the prose-writers of the age of Eliza-
beth we do not, accordingly, include all who wrote in
prose, but those in whom prose composition was labor-
ing to fulfil the conditions of art. In many cases this
endeavor resulted in the substitution of artifice for art;
and the bond which connects the invisible thought with
the visible word, and through which the word is sur-
charged with the life of the thought, being thus severed,
the effect was to produce a factitious dignity, sweetness,
and elegance by mental sleight of hand and tricks of
modulation and antithesis.
In one of the earliest prose-writers of the reign of
Elizabeth, John Lyly, we perceive how easily the de-
mand in the cultivated classes for what is fine in diction
may degenerate into admiration of what is superfine,
how elegant imbecility may pass itself off for elegance,
and how hypocrisy and grimace may become a fashion
in that high society which constitutes itself the arbiter
252
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
of taste. Lyly, a scholar of some beauty, and more in-
genuity, of fancy, was especially fitted to corrupt a
language whose rude masculine vigor was beginning
to be softened into harmony and elegance; for he was
one of those effeminate spirits whose felicity it is to be
born affected, and who can violate general nature with-
out doing injustice to their own. The court of Eliza-
beth, full of highly educated men and women, was
greatly pleased with the fopperies of diction and senti-
ment, the dainty verbal confectionery, of his so-called
classic plays, and seems to have been entirely car-
ried away by his prose romance of Euphues and his
England, first published in 1579. In this persons of
fashion might congratulate themselves that they could
find a language which was not spoken by the vulgar.
The nation, Sir Henry Blunt tells us, was in debt to
him for a new English which he taught it; “all our
ladies were his scholars"; and that beauty in court was
disregarded "who could not parley Euphuism, that is to
say, who was unable to converse in that pure and re-
formed English." Those who have studied the jargon
of Holofernes in Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost,
of Fastidious Brisk in Ben Jonson's Every Man out
of his Humour, and, later still, of Sir Piercie Shafton,
in Scott's novel of The Monastery, can form some idea
of this "pure and reformed English," the peculiarities
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
253
of which have been happily characterized to consist in
"pedantic and far-fetched allusion, elaborate indirect-
ness, a cloying smoothness and monotony of diction,"
and great fertility in "alliteration and punning." Even
when Lyly seems really sweet, elegant, and eloquent,
he evinces a natural suspicion of the graces of nature,
and contrives to divorce his rhetoric from all sincerity
of utterance. There is something pretty and puerile
even in his expression of heroism; and to say a good
thing in a way it ought not to be said was to realize his
highest idea of art. His attitude towards what was
natural had a touch of that condescending commisera-
tion which Colman's perfumed, embroidered, and man-
nered coxcomb extended to the blooming country girl
he stooped to admire: "Ah, my dear! Nature is very
well, for she made you; but then Nature could not
have made me!"
This infection of the superfine in composition was felt
even by writers for the multitude; and in the romances
of Greene and Lodge we have euphuism as an affecta-
tion of an affectation. Even their habits of vulgar
dissipation could not altogether keep them loyal to the
comparative purity of the vulgar language. The fashion
subtly affected even the style of Sidney, conscious as he
was of its more obvious fooleries; and to this day every
man who has anything of the coxcomb in his brain, who
254
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
desires a dress for his thought more splendid than his
thought, slides unconsciously into euphuism.
The name of Sir Philip Sidney stands in the English
imagination for more than his writings, more than his
actions, more than his character, for more, we had
almost said, than the qualities of his soul. The English
race, compound of Saxon and Norman, has been fertile
in great generals, great statesmen, great poets, great
heroes, saints, and martyrs, but it has not been fertile in
great gentlemen; and Mr. Bull, plethoric with power
but scant in courtesy, recognizes, with mingled feelings
of surprise and delight, his great ornamental production
in Sidney. He does not read the Sonnets or the Arca-
dia of his cherished darling; he long left to an accom-
plished American lady the grateful task of writing an
adequate biography of the phenomenon; but he gazes
with a certain pathetic wonder on the one renowned
gentleman of his illustrious house, speculates curiously
how he came into the family, and would perhaps rather
part with Shakespeare and Milton, with Bacon and
Locke, with Burleigh and Somers, with Marlborough
and Wellington, with Latimer and Ridley, than with
this chivalrous youth, whose "high-erected thoughts
were "seated in a heart of courtesy." It is not for
superior moral or mental qualities that he especially
prizes his favorite, for he has had children who have
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
255
exceeded Sidney in both; but he feels that in Sidney
alone bas equal genius and goodness been expressed in
behavior.
Sidney was born on the 29th of November, 1554.
His father was Sir Henry Sidney, a statesman of ability
and integrity. His mother was Mary, sister of Robert
Dudley, afterwards Earl of Leicester. No pains were
spared in the harmonious development of his powers,
physical, mental, and moral; and his instructors were
fortunate in a pupil blessed, not only with the love of
knowledge, but with the love of that virtue which he
considered the proper end of knowledge. He was in-
tended for public life; and, leaving the university at the
age of seventeen, he was shortly after sent abroad to
study the languages, observe the manners, and mingle.
in the society of the Continent. He went nowhere with-
out winning the hearts of those with whom he asso-
ciated. Scholars, philosophers, artists, and men of let-
ters, all were charmed with the ingenuous and high-
spirited English youth, who visited foreign countries,
not like the majority of his young countrymen, to par-
take of their dissipations and become initiated in their
vices, but to fill and enlarge his understanding, and en-
noble his soul. Hubert Languet, a scholar of whom
it is recorded "that he lived as the best of men should
die," was especially captivated by Philip, became through
256
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
life his adviser and friend, and said, "That day on which
I first beheld him with my eyes shone propitious to
me!"
After about three years' absence Sidney returned to
England variously accomplished almost beyond any man
of his years; brave, honorable, and just; ambitious of
political, of military, of literary distinction, and having
powerful connections, competent, it might be supposed,
to aid him in any public career on which his energies
should be concentrated. But his very perfections seem
to have stood in the way of his advancement. Such a
combination of the scholar, the poet, and the knight-
errant, one so full of learning, of lofty imagination, of
chivalrous sentiment, was too precious as a courtier to
be employed as a man of affairs; and Elizabeth ad-
mired, petted, praised, but hesitated to employ him.
So fine an ornament of the nation could not be spared
for its defence. Even his uncle Leicester, all-powerful
as he seemed, failed in his attempts to aid the kinsman
who was perhaps the only man that could rouse in his
dark and scheming soul the feeling of affection. Sid-
ney, who did not lack the knowledge- we had almost
said the conceit of his own merits, and whose temper
was naturally impetuous, was far from being contented.
with the lot which was to make him the "mirror of
courtesy," the observed and loved of all beholders, the
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
257
Beau Brummel of the Age of Elizabeth, but which was
to shut him out from the nobler ambitions of his manly
and ardent nature, and prevent his taking that part
which, both as a Protestant and as a patriot, he ached to
'perform in the stirring contests and enterprises of the
time. Still, he submitted and waited; and the result is,
that the incidents of the career of this man, born a hero
and educated a statesman, were ludicrously dispropor-
tioned to his own expectations and to his fame. In
1576 he was sent on an ornamental embassy to the
Emperor of Germany. Soon after his return he suc-
cessfully vindicated his father, who was Governor of
Ireland, from some aspersions which had excited the
anger of Elizabeth, and threatened his father's secre-
tary, whom he suspected of opening his own letters to
Sir Henry, that he would thrust his dagger into him
if the treachery was repeated; "and trust to it," he
adds, "I speak it in earnest." He wrote a bold letter
to the Queen, against her projected matrimonial alliance
with the little French duke, on whose villanous person,
and still more villanous soul, this "imperial votaress,"
so long walking the earth
"In maiden meditation, fancy-free,”
had pretended to fix her "virgin" affections. He was
shortly after, while playing at tennis, called a puppy by
258
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
the Earl of Oxford; and it is a curious illustration of
the aristocratic temper of the times, that our Philip,
who saw no reasons to prevent him from thrusting his
dagger, without heeding the usual forms of the duel,
into the suspected heart of his father's secretary, could
not force this haughty and insolent Earl to accept his
challenge; and the Queen put an end to the quarrel by
informing him that there was a great difference in de-
gree between earls and private gentlemen, and that
princes were bound to support the nobility, and to insist
on their being treated with proper respect.
Wearied with court life, he now retired to Wilton,
the seat of his famous sister, the Countess of Pem-
broke, and there embodied in his Arcadia the thoughts,
sentiments, and aspirations he could not realize in
practice. Campbell has said that Sidney's life "was
poetry expressed in action"; but up to this time it had
been poetry expressed in character, and denied an out-
let in action. It now found an outlet in literature.
From day to day he wrote under the eye of his beloved
sister, with no thought of publication, page after page of
this goodly folio. The form of the Arcadia, it must be
confessed, is somewhat fantastic, and the story tedious;
but the work is still so sound at the core, so pure, strong,
and vital in the soul that animates it, and so much in-
ward freshness and beauty are revealed the moment we
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
259
pierce its outward crust of affectation, that no changes in
the fashions of literature have ever been able to dislodge
There we may still learn
and love; there we may
it from its eminence of place.
the sweet lore of friendship
still feed the heart's hunger, equally for scenes of pas-
toral innocence and heroic daring. A ray of
"The light that never was on sea or land"
gleams here and there over its descriptions, and pro-
claims the poet. The style of the book, in its good ele-
ments, was the best prose style which had, as yet, ap-
peared in English literature, vigorous, harmonious,
figurative, and condensed. In the characterizations of
feminine beauty and excellence Spenser and Shake-
speare are anticipated, if not sometimes rivalled. But
all these merits are apt to be lost on the modern reader,
owing to the fact that, though Sidney's thoughts were
noble and his feelings genuine, his fancy was artificial,
and incessantly labored to lift his rhetoric on stilts. It
will not trust Nature in her "homely russet brown," but
bedizens her in court trappings, belaces and embroiders
her, is sceptical of everything in sentiment and passion
which is easily great, and sometimes so elaborates all life
out of expression, that language is converted from the
temple of thought into its stately mausoleum. It cannot,
we fear, be doubted that Sidney's court life had made
260
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
him a little affected and conceited on the surface of his
fine nature, if not in its substance. The Arcadia is rich
in imagery, but in the same sentence we often find images
that glitter like dew-drops, followed by images that glitter
like icicles; and there is every evidence that to his taste
the icicles were finer than the dew-drops.
It may not here be out of place to say, that, though we
commonly think of Sidney as beautiful in face no less.
than in behavior, he was not in fact a comely gentleman.
Ben Jonson told Drummond that he " was no pleasant
man in countenance, his face being spoiled with pimples,
of high blood, and long."
In 1581 we find Sidney in Parliament. Shortly after,
he wrote his Defence of Poesy, in which, assuming that
the object of knowledge is right action, he attempted to
prove the superiority of poetry to all other branches of
knowledge, on the ground that, while the other branches
merely coldly pointed the way to virtue, poetry enticed,
animated, inspired the soul to pursue it. Fine as this
defence of poetry is, the best defence of poetry is to
write that which is good. In 1583 he was married to
the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham. As his whole
heart and imagination were at this time absorbed by the
Stella of his sonnets, the beautiful Penelope Devereux,
sister of the Earl of Essex, and as his passion does not
appear to have abated after her marriage with Lord
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
261
Rich, Sidney must be considered to have failed in love
as in ambition, marrying the woman he respected, and
losing the woman he adored. And it is curious that the
woman he did marry, soon after his death, married the
Earl of Essex, brother of the woman he so much de-
sired to marry.
In 1585 the Queen, having decided to assist the
United Provinces, in their war against Philip of Spain,
with an English army, under the command of Leicester,
gratified Sidney's long thirst for honorable action by ap-
pointing him Governor of Flushing. In this post, and
as general of cavalry, he did all that valor and sagacity
could do to repair the blunders and mischiefs which
resulted from the cowardice, arrogance, knavery, and
military impotence of Leicester. On the 22d of Sep-
tember, 1586, in a desperate engagement near Zut-
phen, he was dangerously wounded in attempting to
rescue a friend hemmed in by the enemy; and as he
was carried bleeding from the field, he performed the
crowning act of his life. The cup of water, which his
lips ached to touch, but which he passed to the dying
soldier with the words, "Thy necessity is greater than
mine," this beautiful Deed, worth a thousand Defences
of Poetry, will consecrate his memory in the hearts of
millions who will never read the Arcadia
Sidney lingered many days in great agony. The
262
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
prospect of his death stirred Leicester with unwonted
emotion. "This young man," he writes, "he was my
greatest comfort, next her Majesty, of all the world;
and if I could buy his life with all I have, to my shirt,
I would give it." The account of his death, by his
chaplain, is inexpressibly affecting. When the good
man, to use his own words, "proved to him out of the
Scriptures, that, though his understanding and senses
should fail, yet that faith which he had now could not
fail, he did, with a cheerful and smiling countenance,
put forth his hand, and slapped me softly on the cheeks.
Not long after, he lifted up his eyes and hands, uttering
these words, 'I would not change my joy for the em-
pire of the world.' Having made a comparison
of God's grace now in him, his former virtues seemed to
be nothing; for he wholly condemned his former life.
'All things in it,' he said, 'have been vain, vain,
vain.'
•
His sufferings were brought to a close on the 17th of
October, 1586. Among the throng of testimonials to
his excellence, called forth by his death, only two were
worthy of the occasion. The first was the simple re-
mark of Lord Buckhurst, that "he hath had as great
love in this life, and as many tears for his death, as ever
any had."
The second is a stanza from an anony-
mous poem, usually printed with the elaborate, but cold
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
263
and pedantic, eulogy of Spenser, whose tears for his
friend and patron seemed to freeze in their passage into
words. The stanza has been often quoted, but rarely in
connection with the person it celebrates.
"A sweet, attractive kind of grace,
A full assurance given by looks,
Continual comfort in a face,
The lineaments of Gospel Books."
In passing from Sidney to Raleigh, we pass to a less
beautiful and engaging, but far more potent and compre-
hensive spirit. We despair of doing justice to the va
rious efficiency of this most splendid of adventurers, all
of whose talents were abilities, and all of whose abilities
were accomplishments; whose vigorous and elastic na-
ture could adapt itself to all occasions and all pur-
suits; and who, as soldier, sailor, courtier, colonizer,
statesman, historian, and poet, seemed specially gifted to
do the thing which absorbed him at moment. Born
in 1552, and the son of a Devonshire gentleman of an-
cient family, straitened income, and numerous children,
fortune denied him wealth, only to lavish on him all the
powers by which wealth is acquired. In his case, one
of the most happily constituted of human in

was
lodged in a physical frame of perfect soundness and
strength, so that at all periods of his life, in the phrase
of the spiteful and sickly Cecil, he could "toil terribly.”
264
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
Action, adventure, was the necessity of his being.
Imaginative and thoughtful as he was, the vision of
imagination, the suggestion of thought, went equally to
enlighten and energize his will. Whatever appeared
possible to his brain he ached to make actual with his
hand. Though distinguished at the university, he left it
at the first opportunity for active life presented to him,
and at the age of seventeen joined the band of gentle-
men volunteers who went to France to fight on the
Protestant side in the civil war by which that kingdom
was convulsed. In this rough work he passed five
years. Shortly after his return in 1580, an Irish re-
bellion broke out; and Raleigh, as captain of a com-
pany of English troops, engaged in the ruthless business.
of putting it down. A dispute having occurred between
him and the Lord Deputy, Grey, it was referred to the
Council Board in England. Raleigh, determined, if
possible, to escape from the squalid, cruel, and disgust-
ing drudgery of an Irish war, exerted every resource of
his pliant genius to ingratiate himself with Elizabeth,
and urged his own views with such consummate art that
he got, says the chronicler, "the Queen's ear in a trice."
His graces of person took her fancy, as much as his
ready intelligence, his plausible elocution, and his avail-
able union of the large conceptions of the statesman
with the intrepidity of the soldier, impressed her dis-
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
265
cerning mind. The tradition that he first attracted her
regard by casting his rich cloak into a puddle to save the
royal feet from contaminating mud, though characteris-
tic, is probably one of those stories which are too good to
be true. His promotion was as rapid as Sidney's was
slow; for he had a mind which, on all occasions, darted
at once to the best thing to be done; and, not content
with deserving to be advanced, he outwitted all who in-
trigued against his advancement. He was knighted,
made Captain of the Guard, Seneschal of the County
of Cornwall, Lord Warden of the Stannaries, and re-
ceived a large grant of land in Ireland, in less than
three years after his victorious appearance at the Coun-
cil Board. Though now enabled to gratify those lux-
urious tastes which poverty had heretofore mortified, and
though so susceptible to all that can charm the senses
through the imagination that his friend Spenser de-
scribed him as a man
"In whose high thoughts Pleasure had built her bower,"
still pleasure, though intensely enjoyed, had no allure-
ments to weaken the insatiable activity of his spirit or
moderate the audacity of his ambition. Patriot as well
as courtier, and statesman as well as adventurer, with
an intelligence so flexible that it could grasp great
designs as easily as it could manage petty intrigues, and
12
266
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
impelled by an impatient feeling that he was the ablest
man of the nation, in virtue of individualizing most
thoroughly the spirit and aspirations of the people and
the time, he now engaged in those great maritime enter-
prises which are inseparably associated with his name,
to found a colonial empire for England, and to break
down the power and humble the pride of Spain. In
1585 he obtained a patent from the Queen "to appro-
priate, plant, and govern any territorial possessions he
might acquire in the unoccupied portions of North
America." The result was the first settlement of Vir-
ginia, which failed from the misconduct of the colonists
and the hostility of the Indians. He then engaged
extensively in those privateering those somewhat
buccaneering expeditions against the commerce and
colonies of Spain which can be justified on no general
principles, but which the instinct of the English people,
hating Spaniards, hating Popery, and conscious that
real war existed under formal peace, both stimulated
and sanctioned. Spain, to Raleigh, was a nation to be
detested and warred against by every honest English-
man for "her bloody and injurious designs, purposed
and practised against Christian princes, over all of
whom she seeks unlawful and ungodly rule and em-
piry."
In the height of Raleigh's favor with the Queen the
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
267
#
discovery of his intrigue and subsequent private mar-
riage with one of her maids of honor brought down
on his head the full storm of the royal virago's wrath.
He was deprived of all the offices which gave him ad-
mission to her august presence, and imprisoned with his
wife in the Tower. Any other man would have been
hopelessly ruined; but, by counterfeiting the most ro-
mantic despair at the Queen's displeasure, and by repre-
senting his whole misery to proceed from being deprived
of the sight of her red hair and painted face, he was, in
two or three weeks, released from imprisonment. When
free, he performed such important parliamentary ser-
vices that he partially regained her favor, and he man-
aged so well as to induce her to grant him the manor
of Sherborne. As this was church property, and as Ra-
leigh was accused by his enemies of being an atheist,
the grant occasioned great scandal. His disgrace and
imprisonment had filled his rivals with hope. They
naturally thought that his offence, which mortified the
coquette's vanity as well as the sovereign's pride, was
of such a nature that even Raleigh's management could
not gloss it over; but now they trembled with appre-
hensions of his complete restoration to favor. One of
them writes: "It is feared of all honest men, that Sir
Walter Raleigh shall presently come to court; and yet
it is well withstood. God grant him some further resist-
268
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
ance, and that place he better deserveth if he had his
right."
Raleigh, unsuccessful in regaining the affection and
esteem of his royal mistress, now thought to dazzle her
imagination with a shining enterprise. He believed,
with millions of others, in the fable of El Dorado, and
conceived the place to lie somewhere in Guiana, in the
region between the Orinoco and the Amazon. His im-
agination was fired with the thought of penetrating to
the capital city, where the houses were roofed with gold,
where the common sand glistened, and the very rocks
shone, with the precious deposit. Should he succeed,
the consequences would be immense wealth and fame
for himself, and immense addition to the power and
glory of England; and as he purposed to induce the
native chiefs to swear allegiance to the Queen, and
eventually to establish an English colony in the country,
he flattered himself, in Mr. Napier's words, "that he
would be able, by the acquisition of Guiana, vastly to
extend the sphere of English industry and commerce,
to render London the mart of the choicest productions
of the New World, and to annex to the Crown a region
which, besides its great colonial recommendations, would
enable it to command the chief possessions of its great-
est enemy, and from which his principal resources were
derived." Possessed by these kindling ideas, and with
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
269
the personal magnetism to make them infectious, Ra-
leigh does not seem to have found any difficulty in
obtaining money and men to carry them out; and in
February, 1595, with a fleet of five ships, he set out for
the land of gold. The enterprise was, of course, un-
successful, for no El Dorado existed; but on his return,
at the close of the summer, he published his account of
"The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Em-
pire of Guiana," in which the failure of the expedition
is recorded in connection with a profession of undis-
turbed faith in the reality of its object, and some as-
tounding stories are told, concerning which it is now
difficult to decide whether Raleigh unconsciously exag-
gerated or deliberately lied. It was his professed inten-
tion to renew the search at once; but, the Queen
having by this time nearly forgiven his offence, his
ambition was stimulated by objects nearer home, and
the quest of El Dorado was postponed to a more con-
venient season.
In 1596 he won great fame for his intrepidity and
skill as Rear Admiral of the fleet which took Cadiz ;
and in 1597 he further distinguished himself by the
capture of Fayal. Restored to his office of Captain
of the Guard, he was again seen by envious rivals in
personal attendance on the Queen. Between the court
factions of Essex and Cecil he first tried to mediate;
270
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
but, being hated by Essex, he joined Cecil for the pur-
pose of crushing the enemy of both. The intention
of Cecil was, to use Raleigh to depress Essex, and then
to betray his own instrument. Essex fell; but, as long
as Elizabeth lived, Raleigh was safe. Cecil, however,
took care to poison in advance the mind of her succes-
sor with suspicions of Raleigh; and, on James's acces-
sion to the throne, Raleigh discovered that he was
distrusted, and would probably be disgraced. Such a
man was not likely to give up his offices and abdicate
his power without a struggle; and, as he could hope for
no favor, he tried the desperate expedient of making
himself powerful by making himself feared. In our
time he would have "gone into opposition": in the
time of James the First "His Majesty's Opposition
did not exist; and he became connected with a myste-
rious plot to raise Arabella Stuart to the English throne,
trusting, as we cannot but think, in his own sagacity
to avoid the appearance and evidence of treason, and to
use the folly of the real conspirators as a means of
forcing his claims on the attention of James. In this
game, however, Cecil proved himself a more astute and
unscrupulous politician than his late accomplice. The
plot was discovered; Raleigh was tried on a charge of
treason; the jury, being managed by the government,
found him guilty, and he was sentenced to death. The
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
271
sentence, however, was so palpably against the law and
the evidence that it was not executed. By the exceed-
ing grace of the good King, Raleigh was only plundered
of his estate, sent to the Tower, and confined there for
thirteen years.
The restless activity of his mind now found a vent in
experimental science and in literature; and, taking a
theme as large as the scope of his own mind, he set
himself resolutely to work to write the History of the
World. Meanwhile he spared no arts of influence,
bribery, and flattery to get his liberty; and at last,
in March, 1615, was released, without being par-
doned, on his tempting the cupidity of James with cir
cumstantial details of the mineral wealth of Guiana,
and by offering to conduct an expedition there to open a
gold-mine. With a fleet of thirteen ships he set sail,
arrived on the coast in November, and sent a large par-
ty up the Orinoco, who, after having attacked and burnt
the Spanish town of St. Thomas, an engagement in
which Raleigh's eldest son lost his life, — returned to
their sick and mortified commander with the intelligence
that they had failed to discover the mine. The accounts
of what afterwards occurred in this ill-fated expedition
are so confused and contradictory that it is difficult to
obtain a clear idea of the facts. It is sufficient to
say that Raleigh returned to England, laboring under
272
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
imputations of falsehood, treachery, and contemplated
treason and piracy, and that he there found the Spanish
ambassador clamoring in the court of James for his life.
His ruin was resolved upon; and, as he never had been
pardoned, it was thought more convenient to execute
him on the old sentence than to run the risk of a new
trial for his alleged offences since. In other words, it
was resolved to use the technicalities of law to violate
its essence, and to employ certain legal refinements as
instruments of murder. On the 29th of October, 1618,
he was accordingly beheaded. His behavior on the
scaffold was what might have been expected from the
dauntless spirit which, in its experience of nearly the
whole circle of human emotions, had never felt the sen-
sation of fear. After vindicating his conduct in a manly
and dignified speech to the spectators, he desired the
headsman to show him the axe, which not being done
at once, he said, "I pray thee, let me see it. Dost thou
think that I am afraid of it?" After he had taken it
in his hand, he felt curiously along the edge, and then
smilingly remarked to the sheriff, "This is a sharp
medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases." After
he had laid his head on the block, he was requested to
turn it on the other side. "So the heart be right," he
replied, "it is no matter which way the head lieth."
After his forgiving the headsman, and praying a few
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
273
66
moments, the signal was made, which not being immedi-
ately followed by the stroke, Raleigh said to the exe-
cutioner: Why dost thou not strike? Strike, man!”
Two strokes of the axe, under which his frame did not
shrink or move, severed his head from his body. The
immense effusion of blood, in a man of sixty-six, amazed
everybody that saw it. "Who would have thought,"
King James might have said, with another distinguished
ornament of the royal house of Scotland, "that the old
man had so much blood in him!" Yes, blood enough
in his veins, and thought enough in his head, and hero-
ism enough in his soul, to have served England for
twenty years more, had folly and baseness not other-
wise willed it!
The superabundant physical and mental vitality of
this extraordinary man is seen almost equally in his ac-
tions and his writings. A courtier, riding abroad with
the Queen in his suit of silver armor, or in attendance
at her court, dressed, as the antiquary tells us, in "a
white satin doublet all embroidered with white pearls,
and a mighty rich chain of great pearls about his neck,”
he was still not imprisoned by these magnificent vanities,
but could abandon them joyfully to encounter pestilen-
tial climates and lead desperate maritime enterprises.
As an orator he was not only powerful in the Commons,
but persuasive with individuals. Nobody could resist
12*
R
274
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
his tongue. The Queen, we are told,
66 was much taken
with his elocution, loved to hear his reasons, and took
him for a kind of oracle." To his counsel, more than
to any other man's, England was indebted for the de-
struction of the Spanish Armada. He spoke and wrote
wisely and vigorously on policy and government, on
naval architecture and naval tactics. Among his public
services we may rank his claim to be considered the in-
troducer into Europe of tobacco and the potato. In
political economy, he anticipated the modern doctrine of
free trade and freedom of industry; he first stated also
the theory regarding population which is associated
with the name of Malthus; and, though himself a gold-
seeker, he saw clearly that gold had no peculiar pre-
ciousness beyond any other commodity, and that it was
the value of what a nation derived from its colonies,
and not the kind of value, which made colonies impor-
tant. In intellectual philosophy Dugald Stewart admits
that he anticipated his own leading doctrine in respect
to "the fundamental laws of human belief." His cu-
rious and practical intellect, stung by all secrets, showed
also an aptitude for the experimental investigation of
natural phenomena.
And he was likewise a poet. It was one of his inten-
tions to write an English epic; but his busy life only.
allowed him leisure for some miscellaneous pieces.
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
275
Among these, his sonnet on his friend Spenser's Faery
Queene would alone be sufficient to demonstrate the
depth of his sentiment and the strength of his imagina-
tion.
Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay,
Within that Temple where the vestal flame
Was wont to burn; and, passing by that way
To see that buried dust of living fame,
Whose tomb fair Love and fairer Virtue kept,
All suddenly I saw the Faery Queen:
At whose approach the soul of Petrarch wept,
And from thenceforth those Graces were not seen
(For they this Queen attended), in whose stead
Oblivion laid him down on Laura's hearse;
Hereat the hardest stones were seen to bleed,
And groans of buried ghosts the heavens did perse:
Where Homer's spright did tremble all for grief,
And cursed the access of that celestial thief.'
""
But his great literary work was his History of the
World, written during his imprisonment in the Tower.
As might be supposed, his restless, insatiable, capacious,
and audacious mind could not be content with the mod-
ern practice, even as followed by philosophical histo-
rians, of narrating events and elucidating laws. He
began with the Creator and the creation, pressing into
his service all the theology, the philosophy, and the
metaphysics of his time, and boldly grappling with the
most insoluble problems, even that of the Divine Es-
276
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
sence.
Nearly half of the immense folio is devoted
to sacred history; and though the remaining portions,
devoted to the Assyrians, the Persians, the Greeks, and
the Romans, are commonly considered the most reada-
ble, inasmuch as they exhibit Raleigh, the statesman and
warrior, sociably treating of statesmen and warriors, -
Raleigh, who had lived history, penetrating into the life
of historical events, we must confess to having been
more attracted by the earlier portions, which show us
Raleigh the scholar, philosopher, and divine, in his at-
tempts to probe the deepest secrets of existence, his brain
crowded with all the foolish and all the wise sayings of
Pagan philosophers and Christian fathers and schoolmen,
and throwing his own judgments, with a quaint simplic-
ity and a quaint audacity, into the general mass of theo-
logical and philosophical guessing he has accumulated.
The style of the history is excellent,
flexible, straightforward and business-like, discussing the
question of the locality of Paradise as Raleigh would
have discussed the question of an expedition against
Spain at the council-table of Elizabeth. There is an
apocryphal story that he completed another volume of
the History of the World, but, on learning that his pub-
lisher had lost money by the first, burnt the manuscript,
not willing that so good a man should suffer any further
harm through him. But the story must be false; for
L
clear, sweet,
SIDNEY AND RALEIGH.
277
such tenderness to a publisher is equally against human
nature and author-nature.
The defect of Raleigh's character, even when his
ends were patriotic and noble, was unscrupulousness,
a flashing impatience with all moral obstacles obtruded
in the path of his designs. IIe had a too confident be-
lief in the resources of his wit and courage, in the in-
fallibility of his insight, foresight, and power of combi-
nation, in the unflagging vigor by which he had so often
made his will march abreast of his swiftest thought;
and in carrying out his projects he sometimes risked
his conscience with almost the same joyous reckless-
ness with which he risked his life. The noblest passage
in his History of the World, that in which he condenses
in the bold and striking image of a majestic tree the
power of Rome, has some application to his own splen-
did rise and terrible fall. "We have left Rome," he
says, "flourishing in the middle of the field, having
rooted up or cut down all that kept it from the eyes and
admiration of the world. But, after some continuance,
it shall begin to lose the beauty it had; the storms of
ambition shall beat her great boughs and branches one
against another; her leaves shall fall off, her limbs
wither, and a rabble of barbarous nations enter the
field and cut her down."
NE
BACON.
I.
EXT to Shakespeare, the greatest name of the
Elizabethan age is that of Bacon. His life has
been written by his chaplain, Dr. Rawley, by Basil
Montagu, by Lord Campbell, and by Macaulay; yet
none of these biographies reconciles the external facts
of the man's life with the internal facts of the man's
nature.
•
Macaulay's vivid sketch of Bacon's career is the
most acute, the most merciless, and for popular effect
the most efficient, of all; but it deals simply with ex-
ternal events, evinces in their interpretation no deep and
detecting glance into character, and urges the evidence.
for the baseness of Bacon with the acrimonious zeal
of a prosecuting attorney, eager for a verdict, rather
than weighs it with the candor of a judge deciding on
the nature of a great benefactor of the race, who in his
will had solemnly left his memory to "men's charitable
speeches." When he comes to treat of Bacon as a phi-
losopher, he passes to the opposite extreme of panegyric.
The impression left by the whole representation is not
BACON.
279
the impression of a man, but of a monstrous huddling
together of two men, one infamous, the other glorious,
which he calls by the name of Bacon.
The question therefore arises, Is it possible to har-
monize, in one individuality, Bacon the courtier, Bacon
the lawyer, Bacon the statesman, Bacon the judge, with
Bacon the thinker, philosopher, and philanthropist?
The antithesis commonly instituted between these is
rather a play of epigram than an exercise of character-
ization. The "meanest of mankind" could not have
written The Advancement of Learning; yet everybody
feels that some connection there must be between the
meditative life which produced The Advancement of
Learning, and the practical life devoted to the advance-
ment of Bacon. Who, then, was the man who is so
execrated for selling justice, and so exalted for writing
the Novum Organum?
This question can never be intelligently answered,
unless we establish some points of connection between
the spirit which animates his works and the external
events which constituted what is called his life. As a
general principle, it is well for us to obtain some concep-
tion of a great man from his writings, before we give
much heed to the recorded incidents of his career; for
these incidents, as historically narrated, are likely to be
false, are sure to be one-sided, and almost always need
280
BACON.
to be interpreted in order to convey real knowledge to
the mind. It is ever for the interest or the malice of
some contemporary, that every famous politician, who
by necessity passes into history, should pass into it
stained in character; and it is fortunate that, in the case
of Bacon, we are not confined to the outside records of
his career, but possess means of information which con-
duct us into the heart of his nature. Indeed, Bacon
the man is most clearly seen and intimately known in
Bacon the thinker. Bacon thinking, Bacon observing,
Bacon inventing,
as Bacon intriguing for power and place. "I account,"
he has said, "my ordinary course of study and medita-
tion more painful than most parts of action are." But
his works do not merely contain his thoughts and obser-
vations; they are all informed with the inmost life of
his mind and the real quality of his nature; and, if he
was base, servile, treacherous, and venal, it will not re-
quire any great expenditure of sagacity to detect the
taint of servility, baseness, treachery, and venality in
his writings. For what was Bacon's intellect but Ba-
con's nature in its intellectual expression? Everybody
remembers the noble commencement of the Novum Or-
ganum: "Francis of Verulam thought thus." Ay! it is
not merely the understanding of Francis of Verulam,
but Francis himself that thinks; and we may be sure
these were as much acts of Bacon
BACON.
281
that the thought will give us the spirit and average
moral quality of the man; for it is not faculties, but
persons using faculties, persons behind faculties and
within faculties, that invent, combine, discover, create;
and in the whole history of the human intellect, in the
department of literature, there has been no exercise of
live creative faculty without an escape of character.
The new thoughts, the novel combinations, the fresh
images, are all enveloped in an atmosphere, or borne on
a stream, which conveys into the recipient mind the fine
essence of individual life and individual disposition. It
is more difficult to detect this in comprehensive individ-
ualities like Bacon and Shakespeare than in narrow
individualities like Ben Jonson and Marlowe; but still,
if we sharply scrutinize the impression which Bacon
and Shakespeare have left on our minds, we shall find
that they have not merely enlarged our reason with new
truth, and charmed our imagination with new beauty,
but that they have stamped on our consciousness the
image of their natures, and touched the finest sensi-
bilities of our souls with the subtile but potent influence
of their characters.
Now if we discern and feel this image and this life
of Bacon, derived from his works, we shall find that his
individuality capacious, flexible, fertile, far-reaching
as it was -was still deficient in heat, and that this de-
282
BACON.
ficiency was in the very centre of his nature and sources
of his moral being. Leaving out of view the lack of
stamina in his bodily constitution, and his consequent
want of those rude, rough energies and that peculiar
Teutonic pluck which seem the birthright of every Eng-
lishman of robust health, we find in the works as in
the life of the man no evidence of strong appetites or
fierce passions or kindling sentiments. Neither in his
blood nor in his soul can we discover any of the coarse
or any of the fine impulses which impart intensity to
character. He is without the vices of passion,-
voluptuousness, hatred, envy, malice, revenge; but he is
also without the virtues of passion, - deep love, warm
gratitude, capacity of unwithholding self-committal to a
great sentiment or a great cause. This defect of inten-
sity is the source of that weakness in the actions of his
life which his satirists have stigmatized as baseness;
and, viewing it altogether apart from the vast intellec-
tual nature modifying and modified by it, they have tied
the faculties of an angel to the soul of a sneak. While
narrating the events of his career, and making epi-
grams out of his frailties, they have lost all vision of
that noble brow, on which, it might be said, "Shame is
Shame may be there, but it is shame
aghast at its position, not glorying in
ashamed to sit."
shamefaced,
it!
BACON.
283
With this view of the intellectual character of Bacon,
let us pass to the events of his life. He was born in
London on the 22d of January, 1561, and was the
youngest son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Keeper of the
Great Seal. His mother, sister to the wife of Lord
Treasurer Burleigh, possessed uncommon accomplish-
ments even in that age of learned women. "Such be-
ing his parents," quaintly says Dr. Rawley, "you may
easily imagine what the issue was likely to be; having
had whatsoever nature or breeding could put into him."
Sir Nicholas was a capable, sagacious, long-headed,
cold-blooded, and not especially scrupulous man of the
world, who, like all the eminent statesmen of Eliza-
beth's reign, acted for the public interest without pre-
judicing his own. Lady Bacon had, among other
works, translated from the Italian some sermons on Pre-
destination and Election, written by Ochinus, a divine
of that Socinian sect which Orthodox religionists, who
hated each other, could still unite in stigmatizing as pre-
eminently wicked; and, if we may judge from this cir-
cumstance, she must have had a daring and discursive
as well as learned spirit. The mind of the son, if it de-
rived its weight, moderation, and strong practical bent
from the father, derived no less its intellectual self-reli-
ance and audacity from the mother; and, as Francis was
the favorite child, we may presume that the parents
284
BACON.
>
(6
saw in him their different qualities exquisitely combined.
As a boy, he was weak in health, indifferent to the
sports of youth, of great quickness, curiosity, and flexi-
bility of intellect, and with a sweet sobriety in his de-
portment which made the Queen call him "the young
Lord Keeper." He was a courtier, too, at an age when
most boys care as little for queens as they do for
nursery-maids. Being asked by Elizabeth how old he
was, he replied that he was two years younger than
her Majesty's happy reign," with which answer, says the
honest chronicler, "the Queen was much taken." Re-
ceiving his early education under his mother's eye, and
freely mixing with the wise and great people who visited
his father's house, he was uncommonly mature in mind
when, at the age of thirteen, he was sent to the Univer-
sity of Cambridge. With his swiftness and facility of
acquisition, it was but natural that he should easily
master his studies; but he did more, he subjected them
to his own tests of value and utility, and despised them.
Before he had been two years at college, this smooth,
decorous stripling, who bowed so low to Dr. Whitgift,
and was outwardly so respectful to the solemn trumpery
about him, but was still inwardly unawed by the au-
thority of traditions and accredited forms, coolly re-
moved the mask from the body of learning, to find, as
he thought, nothing but ignorance and emptiness within.
BACON.
285
The intellectual dictator of forty. generations, Aristotle
himself, was called up before the judgment-seat of this
young brain, the pretensions of his philosophy silently
sifted, and then dismissed and disowned, not, he con-
descended to say, "for the worthlessness of the author,
to whom he would ever ascribe all high attributes,” but
for the barrenness of the method, "the unfruitfulness of
the way." By profound and self-reliant meditation, he
had already caught bright glimpses of a new path for the
human intellect to pursue, leading to a more fertile and
fruitful domain, its process experience, not dogma-
tism; its results discoveries, not disputations; its object
"the glory of God and the relief of man's estate."
This aspiring idea was the constant companion of his
mind through all the vicissitudes of his career,
forgotten in poverty, in business, in glory, in humiliation,
never
the last word on his lip, and alive in the last beat of
his heart; and it is this which lends to his large reason
and rich imagination that sweet and pervasive benefi-
cence, which is felt to be the culminating charm of his
matchless compositions, and which refuses to allow his
character to be deprived of benignity, even after its
pliancy to circumstances may have deprived it of its
title to respect.
Before he was sixteen, he left the university, without
taking a degree; and his father, who evidently intended
286
BACON.
him for public life, sent him to France, in the train of the
English ambassador, in order that he might learn the
arts of statecraft. Here he resided for about two years
and a half, enjoying rare opportunities for observing men
and affairs, and of mingling in the society of statesmen,
philosophers, and men of letters, who were pleased
equally by the originality of his mind and the amenity
of his manners. He purposed to stay some years
abroad, and was studying assiduously at Poitiers, when,
in February, 1579, an accident occurred which ruined
his hopes of an early entrance upon a brilliant career,
converted him from a scholar into an adventurer, and, in
his own phrase, made it incumbent on him "to think
how to live, instead of living only to think." A barber
it was who thus decided the fate of a philosopher.
father, while undergoing the process of shaving, hap-
pened to fall asleep; and, so deep was the reverence of
the barber for the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, that
he did not presume to shake into consciousness so august
a personage, but stood gazing at him in wondering ad-
miration. Unfortunately a draft of air from an open win-
dow was blowing all the while on
"the second prop of
the kingdom," and murdering him by inches. Sir Nich-
olas awoke shivering; and, on being informed by the
barber that respect for his dignity was the cause
of his not having been roused, he quietly said, "Your
His
BACON.
287
politeness has cost me my life." In two days after he
died. A considerable sum of money, which he had laid
by in order to purchase a landed estate for Francis, was
left unappropriated to that purpose; and Francis, on
his return from France, found that he had to share with
four others the amount which his father had intended for
him alone. Thus left comparatively poor, he solicited
his uncle, the Lord Treasurer, for some political office,
and, had his abilities been less splendid, he would
doubtless have succeeded in his suit; but Burleigh's
penetrating eye recognized in him talents in compari-
son with which the talents of his own favorite son, Rob-
ert Cecil, were dwarfed ; and, as his heart was set on
Cecil's succeeding to his own great offices, he is sus-
pected to have systematically "suppressed" the nephew
in order that the nephew should not have the opportu-
nity of making himself a powerful rival of the son.
Bacon, therefore, had no other resource but the pro-
fession of the law; and for six years, between 1580 and
1586, he bent his powerful mind to its study. He then
again applied to Burleigh, hoping, through the latter's
influence, to be "called within bars," and to be able at
once to practise. He was testily denied. Two years
afterwards, however, he was made "counsel learned ex-
traordinary" to the Queen. This was an office of honor
rather than profit; but, as it gave him access to
288
BACON.
Elizabeth, it might have led to his political advance-
ment, had not his good cousin Cecil, ever at her ear,
represented him as a speculative man, "indulging in
philosophic reveries, and calculated more to perplex
than promote public business." Probably he obtained
this idea from a letter written by Bacon to Burleigh, in
1591, in which wearied with waiting on fortune,
troubled with poverty, and haunted by the rebuking vis-
ion of his grand philosophical scheme - he solicits him
for some employment adequate for his support, and which
will, at the same time, leave him leisure to become a
"pioneer in the deep mines of truth." "Not being
born," he says, "under Sol, that loveth honor, nor under
Jupiter, that loveth business, but being wholly carried
away by the contemplative planet," he proceeds to fol-
low up this modest disclaimer of being influenced by the
ambitions which engrossed the Cecils, with the proud,
the imperial declaration, that he has "vast contemplative
ends, though moderate civil ends," and "has taken all
knowledge for his province." This appeal had no effect;
and as the reversion he held of the registrarship of the
Star Chamber, worth £1,600 a year, did not fall in
until twenty years afterwards, he was still fretted with
poverty, and had to give to law and politics the precious
hours to which philosophy would have asserted an ex-
clusive claim.
BACON.
289
But politics, and law as connected with politics, were,
in Bacon's time, occupations by which Bacon could suc-
ceed only at the expense of discrediting himself with
posterity. Whatever may have been his motives for de-
siring power,
and they were doubtless neither wholly
selfish nor wholly noble, power could be obtained
only by submitting to the conditions by which power
was then hampered. In submitting to these conditions,
Bacon the politician may be said to have agreed with
Bacon the philosopher; as the same objectivity of mind.
which, as a philosopher, led him to seek the law of phe-
nomena in nature, and not in the intelligence, led him
as a politician to seek the law of political action in cir-
cumstances, and not in conscience. "Nature is com-
manded by obeying her," is his great philosophical
maxim. Events are commanded by obeying them, was
probably his guiding maxim of civil prudence. In each
case the principle was derived from without, and not from
within; and he doubtless thought that, as in the one
case it led to power over nature, so in the other it would
lead to power over states. As his political life must be
considered an immense mistake; as the result of his
theory in civil affairs was, to make him the servant, and
not the master, of his intended instruments; as he was
constantly inferior in power to persons inferior to him in
mind; as he had to do the bidding of masters who would
13
290
BACON.
not profit by his advice; and as his wisdom was no
match, in the real tug of affairs, for men who acted either
from good or from bad impulses and instincts, it is
well to trace his failure to its source. The fault was
partly in Bacon, partly in his times, and partly inherent
in politics. He thought he possessed the genius of
action, because, in addition to his universality of mind.
and universality of acquirement, he was the deepest ob-
server of men, had the broadest comprehension of
affairs, and could give the wisest counsel, of any states-
man of his time. He was practically sagacious beyond
even the Cecils; for if they could, better than he, see
an inch before the nose, he could see the continuation
of that inch along a line of a thousand miles. Still his
was not specially the genius of action, but the genius
which tells how to act wisely. In the genius of action,
the mind is passionately concentrated in the will; in the
genius which tells how to act wisely, the force of the
will is somewhat expended in enlarging the area over
which the mind sends its glance. In the genius of ac-
tion, there is commonly more or less effrontery, wilful-
ness, cunning, narrowing of the mind to the mere busi-
ness of the moment, with little foresight of consequences;
in the genius which tells how to act wisely there is true
practical wisdom. Unhappily, principles are, in politics,
so complicated with passions, and power is so often the
BACON.
291
prize of insolent demerit, that the two have rarely been
combined in one statesman; and history exhibits scores of
sterile and stunted intellects, pushed by rough force into
ruling positions, for one instance of comprehensive in-
telligence impelled by audacious will.
line";
As a politician, Bacon had a difficult game to play.
Entering the House of Commons in 1593, he at once
showed himself the ablest speaker and debater of his
time. It is said that Lord Eldon, the stanchest of Tories,
declared in his old age, that, if he could recommence his
political career, he would begin "in the sedition line "; 2-
and Bacon at first tried the expedient of attacking a
government measure, in order to force his abilities on
the notice of Burleigh, and perhaps obtain by fear what
he could not obtain by favor. But the reign of the
haughty and almost absolute Elizabeth was not the
period for such tactics, and he narrowly escaped arrest
and punishment. IIe then recurred to a design, formed
three years before, of opposing the Lord Treasurer by
means of a rival; for at the court and in the councils
of the Queen there were two factions, one devoted to
Burleigh, the counsellor of Elizabeth, the other to the
Earl of Essex, her lover. These factions were divided
by no principle; the question was not, how should. the
government be carried on, but by whom should the gov-
ernment be carried on; and the object of each was to
292
BACON.
-
engross the favor of Elizabeth, in order to engross the
power and patronage of office. Bacon, judging that
Essex, who held the Queen's affections, would be suc-
cessful over Burleigh, who only held her judgment, had
already attached himself to the fortunes of Essex. It
may be added that, as his grand philosophical scheme
for the interpretation of nature depended on the patron-
age of government for its complete success, he saw that,
if Essex triumphed, he might be able to gratify his
philosophic as well as political ambition; for the Earl,
with every fault that can coexist with valor, generosity,
and frankness, fierce, proud, wilful, licentious, and
headstrong, had still a soul sensitive to literary as to
military glory, while Burleigh was indifferent to both.
It may be doubted if Bacon was capable of intense, all-
sacrificing friendship for anybody, especially for a man
like Essex. It is probable that what his sagacity de-
tected as the rule which governed the political friend-
ships of Cæsar may to some extent apply to his own.
"Cæsar," he says, "made choice of such friends as a man
might easily see that he chose them rather to be instru-
ments to his ends than for any good-will to them." But
it is still certain that for ten years he was the wisest
counsellor of Essex, by his admirable management kept.
the Earl's haughty and headlong spirit under some con-
trol of wisdom, and never allowed him to take a false,
BACON.
293
step without honestly pointing out its folly. He was the
Philippe de Commines to this Charles the Rash.
Essex, on his part, urged the claims of Bacon with
the same impetuosity with which he threw himself into
everything he undertook. But he constantly failed. In
1594 he tried to get Bacon appointed Attorney-General,
and he failed. He then tried to get Bacon appointed
Solicitor-General, and failed, failed not because the
Queen was hostile to Bacon, but because she desired to
show that she was not enslaved by Essex. He then
urged Bacon's suit to Lady Hatton, whom Bacon de-
sired to marry, not for her temper, which was that of an
eccentric termagant, but for her fortune; and here, for-
tunately for Bacon, he again failed. He then gave
Bacon a landed estate, which Bacon sold for £1,800;
and soon afterwards Bacon was in such pecuniary dis-
tress as to be arrested and sent to a sponging-house, for
a debt of £500. Such were the obligations of Bacon
to Essex. What were the obligations of Essex to
Bacon? Ten years of faithful service, ten years of the
"time and talents" of the best head for large affairs in
Europe. At last the Queen and Essex quarrelled.
Bacon, himself serenely superior to passion, but adroit
in calming the passions of others, exerted infinite skill
and address to reconcile them; but the temper of each
was too haughty to yield. The occasion of the final
1
294
BACON.
and deadly feud between them looks ludicrous as the
decisive event in the life of a hero. Essex held a
monopoly of sweet wines; that is, the Queen had
granted to him, for a certain period, the exclusive privi-
lege of plundering all her subjects who drank sweet
wines. He asked for a renewal of his patent, and was
refused. Taking this refusal as a proof that his enemies
were triumphant at court, he then organized a for-
midable conspiracy against the government, and, for a
purely personal object, without the pretence of any pub-
lic aim, attempted to seize the Queen's person, over-
turn her government, and convulse the kingdom with
civil war.
He was arrested, tried, and executed. Ba-
con, as Queen's counsel, appeared against him on his
trial, and, by the Queen's command, wrote a narrative
of the facts which justified the government in its course.
For this most of his biographers represent him as guilty
of the foulest treachery, ingratitude, and baseness. Let
us see how it probably appeared to Bacon. The asso-
ciation of politicians of which Essex was the head, and
to which Bacon belonged, was an association to obtain
power and office by legal means; treason and insurrec-
tion were not in the "platform"; and the rule of honor
which applies to such a body is plain. It is treacherous
for any of the followers to betray the leader, but it is
also treacherous for the leader to betray any of the fol-
BACON.
295
lowers. Nobody pretends that Bacon betrayed Essex,
but it is very evident that Essex betrayed Bacon; for
Bacon, the confidant, as he supposed, of the most secret
thoughts and designs of Essex, liable to be compromised
by his acts, and already lying under the suspicion and
displeasure of Elizabeth on account of his strenuous
advocacy of the Earl's claims to her continued favor,
suddenly discovers that Essex had given way to passions
as selfish as they were furious; that he had committed
high-treason, and recklessly risked the fortunes of his
political friends, as well as personal confederates, on the
hazard of an enterprise as wicked as it was mad.
Henry Wotton, who was private secretary to Essex,
but not engaged in the conspiracy, still thought it pru-
dent to escape to the Continent, and not trust to the
chances of a trial; and Bacon was more in the confi-
dence of Essex than Wotton. If Essex had no con-
science in extricating himself from his difficulties by
treason, why blame Bacon for extricating himself from
complicity with Essex by censuring his treason? To
the indignation that Bacon must have felt in finding
himself duped and betrayed by the man whose interests
he had identified with his own must be added his indig-
nation at the treason itself; for the politician had not
so completely absorbed the patriot but that he may have
felt genuine horror at the idea of compassing personal
296
BACON,
ends by civil war. In the case of Essex, the crime was
really aggravated by the ingratitude which Bacon's
critics charge on himself. Bacon, it seems, was a mean-
spirited wretch, because he did not see the friend who
had given him £ 1,800 in the public enemy. But is it
to be supposed that a friend will be more constant than
a lover? And Essex, the lover of the Queen, made
war upon her, upon her who, frugal as she was in
dispensing honors and money, had lavished both on him.
She had given him in all what would now be equivalent
to £300,000; and then, on her refusal to allow him to
continue cheating those of her subjects who drank sweet
wines, the exasperated hero attempted to overthrow her
government. But Essex acted from his passions,
and passions, it seems, atone for more sins than even
charity can cover. History itself has here sided against
reason; and the fame of Bacon, the intellectual bene-
factor of the world, will probably, through all time, be
sacrificed to that of this hot-blooded, arrogant, self-
willed, and greedy noble. Intellect is often selfish; but
nothing is more frightfully selfish, after all, than passion.
It would be well if the character of Bacon were
justly open to no severer charge than that founded on
his connection with Essex. But " worse remains be-
hind." In 1603 Elizabeth died, and James, King of
Scotland, succeeded to the English throne. Bacon at
BACON.
297
once detected in him the characteristic defect of all the
66
Stuarts. Methought," he wrote to a friend, "his
Majesty rather asked counsel of the time past than of
the time to come." Yet he paid assiduous court to
James, and especially won his favor by advocating in
Parliament the union of England and Scotland. By a
combination of hard work and soft compliances he grad-
ually obtained the commanding positions, though not
the commanding influence, of his political ambition. In
1609 he was made Solicitor-General; in 1613, Attor-
ney-General; in 1616, Privy Councillor; in 1617, Lord
Keeper; in 1618, Lord Chancellor and Baron Veru-
lam; in 1621, Viscount St. Albans. These eighteen
years of his life exhibit an almost unparalleled activity
and fertility of mind in law, politics, literature, and phi-
losophy; but in the reign of James I. no man could
rise to the positions which Bacon reached without com-
promises with conscience and compromises with intelli-
gence which it is doubtless provoking that Bacon did not
scorn. Even if we could pardon these compromises on
the principle that events must be obeyed in order to be
commanded, it is still plain that his obedience did not
lead to real command. He unquestionably expected
that his position would enable him to draw the gov-
ernment into his philosophical scheme of waging a
systematic war on Nature, with an army of investi-
13*
298
BACON.
gators, to force her to deliver up her secrets; but the
Solomon who was then king of England preferred to
spend his money on quite different objects; and Bacon's
compliances, therefore, gave him as little real power
over Nature as real power in the direction of affairs.
let
As it is our purpose not to excuse, but to explain,
Bacon's conduct, to identify the Bacon who during
this period wrote The Advancement of Learning, The
Wisdom of the Ancients, and the Novum Organum,
with the Bacon who within the same period was con-
nected with the abuses of James's administration,
us survey his character in relation to his times. He
lived in an epoch when the elements of the English
Constitution were in a state of anarchy. The King
was following that executive instinct which brought the
head of his son to the block. The House of Commons
was following that legislative instinct which eventually
gave it the control of the executive administration.
James talked, and feebly acted, in the spirit of an abso-
lute monarch, looked upon the House of Commons as
only an instrument for getting at the money of his sub-
jects, and when it occupied itself in presenting griev-
ances, instead of voting subsidies, either dissolved it in a
pet or yielded to it in a fright. Had Bacon's nature
been as intense as it was sagacious, had he been a reso-
lute statesman of the good or bad type, this was the
BACON.
299
time for him to have anticipated Hampden in the Com-
mons, or Strafford in the Council, and given himself,
body and soul, to the cause of freedom or the cause of
despotism. He did neither; and there is nothing in his
writings which would lead us to suppose that he could
have done either. The written advice he gave James
and Buckingham on the improvement of the law, on
church affairs, and on affairs of state, would, if it had
been followed, have saved England from the necessity
for the Long Parliament, Oliver Cromwell, and William
of Orange. As it was, he probably prevented more evil
than he was made the instrument of committing. But,
after counselling wisely, he, like other statesmen of his
time, consented to act against his own advice. He lent
the aid of his professional skill to the court, yet rather
as a lawyer who obeys a client than as a statesman re-
sponsible to his country. And the mischief was, that his
mind, like all comprehensive minds, was so fertile in
those reasons which convert what is abstractly wrong
into what is relatively right, that he could easily find
maxims of state to justify the attorney-general in doing
what the statesman in the attorney-general condemned,
especially as the practice of these maxims enabled the
attorney-general to keep his office and to hope for a
higher one. This was largely the custom with all Eng-
lish public men down to the time when "parliamentary
300
BACON.
government" was thoroughly established. Besides, Ba-
con's attention was scattered over too many objects to
allow of an all-excluding devotion to one. He could not
be a Hampden or a Strafford, because he was Bacon.
Accomplished as a courtier, politician, orator, lawyer, ju-
rist, statesman, man of letters, philosopher, with a wide-
wandering mind that swept over the domain of positive
knowledge only to turn dissatisfied into those vast and
lonely tracts of meditation where future sciences and
inventions slept in their undiscovered principles, it was
impossible that a man thus hundred-eyed should be
single-handed. IIe also lacked two elements of strength
which in that day lent vigor to action by contracting
thought and inflaming passion. He was without politi-
cal and theological prejudice, and he was without
political and theological malignity.
But, it may be asked, if he was too broad for the
passions of politics, why did he become a politician
at all? First, because he was an Englishman, the
son of the Keeper of the Great Seal, and had
breathed an atmosphere of politics and of not very
scrupulous politics from his cradle; second, because,
well as he thought he understood nature, he under-
stood human nature far better, and was tempted into
affairs by conscious talent; and third, because he was
poor, dependent, had immense needs, and saw that poli-
BACON.
301
tics had led his father and uncle to wealth and power.
And, coming to the heart of the matter, if it be asked
why a mind of such grandeur and comprehensiveness
should sacrifice its integrity for such wealth as office
could give, and such titles as James could bestow, we
can answer the question intelligently only by looking at
wealth and titles through Bacon's eyes. His conscience
was weakened by that which gives such splendor
and attractiveness to his writings, his imagination.
Ile was a philosopher, but a philosopher in whose char-
acter imagination was co-ordinated with reason. This
imagination was not merely a quality of his intellect,
but an element of his nature: and as, through its in-
stinctive workings, he was not content to send out his
thoughts stoically bare of adornment, or limping and
ragged in cynic squalor, but clothed them in purple and
gold, and made them move in majestic cadences: so also,
through his imagination, he saw, in external pomp and
affluence and high place, something that corresponded
to his own inward opulence and autocracy of intellect;
recognized in them the superb and fitting adjuncts and
symbols of his internal greatness; and, investing them
with a glory not their own, felt that in them the great
Bacon was clothed in outward circumstance, that the in-
visible person was made palpable to the senses, embod-
ied and expressed to all eyes as the man
302
BACON.
Whom a wise king and Nature chose
Lord Chancellor of both their Laws."
So strong was this illusion, that, when hurled from
power and hunted by creditors, he refused to raise money
by cutting down the woods of his estate. "I will not," he
said, "be stripped of my fine feathers." He had so
completely ensouled the accompaniments and "compli-
ment extern" of greatness, that he felt, in losing them,
as if portions of the outgrowth of his being had been
rudely lopped.
But a day of reckoning was at hand, which was to
dissipate all this visionary splendor, and show the hol-
lowness of all accomplishments when unaccompanied by
simple integrity. Bacon had idly drifted with the
stream of abuses, until at last he partook of them. It is
to his credit, that, in 1621, he strenuously advised the
calling of the Parliament by which he was impeached.
The representatives of the people met in a furious mood,
and exhibited a menacing attitude towards the court;
and the King, thoroughly cowed, made haste to give up
to their vengeful justice the culprits at whom they
aimed. Bacon was impeached for corruption in his
high office, and, in indescribable agony and abasement
of spirit, was compelled by the King to plead guilty to
the charges, of a large portion of which he was certainly
innocent. The great Chancellor has ever since been
BACON.
303
imaged to the honest English imagination as a man with
his head high up in the heaven of contemplation,
seemingly absorbed in sublime meditations, while his
hand is held stealthily out to receive a bribe! On the
degree of his moral guilt it is difficult at this time to
decide. The probability seems to be that, in accord-
ance with a general custom, he and his dependents re-
ceived presents from the suitors in his court.
The pres-
ents were given to influence his decision of cases.
He
at once profuse and poor took presents from both
parties, and then decided according to the law. He
was exposed by those who, having given money, were
exasperated at receiving "killing decrees" in return,-
who found that Bacon did not sell injustice, but justice.
He was sentenced to pay a fine of £ 40,000; to be im-
prisoned in the Tower during the King's pleasure;
to be forever incapable of holding any public office,
place, or employment; and forbidden to sit in Par-
liament or come within the verge of the Court. Bacon
seems himself to have considered that a notorious
abuse, in which other chancellors had participated,
was reformed in his punishment. He is reported to
have said, afterwards, in conversation, "I was the just-
est judge that was in England these fifty years; but it
was the justest censure in Parliament that was these
two hundred years." The courts of Russia are now
304
BACON.
notoriously corrupt; in some future time, when the na-
tion imperatively demands a reformation of the judicial
tribunals, some great Russian, famous as a thinker and
man of letters as well as judge, will, though compara-
tively innocent, be selected as a victim, and the whole
system be rendered infamous in his condemnation.
Bacon lived five years after his disgrace; and, during
these years, though plagued by creditors and vexed by
domestic disquiet, he prosecuted his literary and scien-
tific labors with singular vigor and success. In revising
old works, in producing new, and in projecting even
greater ones than he produced, he displayed an energy
and opulence of mind wonderful even in him. IIe died
on the 9th of April, 1626, in consequence of a cold
caught in trying an experiment to ascertain if flesh
might not be preserved in snow as well as salt; and
his consolation in his last hours was, that the "ex-
periment succeeded excellently well." There are two
testimonials to him, after he was hurled from power and
place, which convey a vivid idea of the benignant stateli-
ness of his personal presence, of the impression he
made on those contemporaries who were at once his
intimates and subordinates, and who, in the most famil-
iar intercourse, felt and honored the easy dignity with
which his greatness was worn. "My conceit of his
person," says Ben Jonson," was never increased towards
BACON.
305
him by his place or honors; but I have and do rever-
ence him for the greatness that was only proper to him-
self; in that he seemed to me ever, by his work, one
of the greatest men, and most worthy of admiration,
that had been in many ages. In his adversity, I ever
prayed that God would give him strength; for greatness
he could not want." And Dr. Rawley, his domestic
chaplain, who saw him as he appeared in the most
familiar relations of his home, remarks, with quaint
veneration, "I have been induced to think that, if ever
there were a beam of knowledge derived from God upon
any man in these modern times, it was upon him.”
H
BACON.
II.
WE propose in this chapter to give some account of
Bacon's writings; and the first place in such an
account belongs to his philosophical works relating to
the interpretation of nature.
As Bacon, from his boyhood, was a thinker living in
the thick of affairs, with a discursive reason held in
check by the pressure of palpable facts, he equally
escaped the narrowness of the secluded student and the
narrowness of the practical man of the world. It was
therefore but natural that, early in his collegiate life, he
should feel a contempt for the objects and the methods
of the philosophy current among the scholars of his
time. The true object of philosophy must be either to
increase our knowledge or add to our power. The an-
cient and scholastic systems seemed to him to have
failed in both. They had not discovered truths, they
had not invented arts. Admitting that the highest use
of knowledge was the pure joy it afforded the intellect,
and that its lowest use was its ministration to the practi-
cal wants of man, it seemed to him evident that their
BACON.
307
method led as little to knowledge that enriched the mind
as to knowledge that gave cunning to the hands. Aim-
ing at self-culture by self-inspection, rather than by in-
spection of nature, they had neglected, he thought, the
great world of God for the little world of man; so that
at last it seemed as if the peculiar distinction of knowl-
edge consisted in knowing that nothing could be known.
But the question might arise, Was not the barrenness
of their results due to the selfish littleness, rather than
the disinterested elevation, of their aim? Introduce into
philosophy a philanthropic motive, make man the thinker
aid man the laborer, unite contemplation with a prac-
tical purpose, and discard the idea that knowledge was
intended for the exclusive gratification of a few selected
spirits, and philosophy would then increase in largeness.
and elevation as much as it would increase in useful-
ness; for if such a revolution in its spirit, object, and
method could be made, it would continually furnish new
truths for the intellect to contemplate, from the impetus
given to the discovery of new truths by the perception
that they could be applied to relieve human necessities..
If it were objected that philosophy could not stoop from
her ethical and spiritual heights to the drudgery of in-
vestigating natural laws, it might be answered, that what
God had condescended to create it surely was not ig-
noble in man to examine; "for that which is deserving
308
BACON.
of existence is deserving of knowledge, the image of
existence." If philosophers had a higher notion of their
dignity, Francis Bacon did not share it; and, accord-
ingly, early in life he occupied his mind in devising a
method of investigating the secrets of nature in order
to wield her powers.
The conception was one of the noblest that ever en-
tered the mind of man; but was it accomplished? As
Bacon's name seems to be stereotyped in popular and
scientific speech as the "Father of the Inductive Sci-
ences," and as all the charity refused to his life has been
heaped upon his philosophical labors, it may seem pre-
sumptuous to answer this question in the negative; yet
nothing is more certain than that the inductive sciences
have not followed the method which he invented, and
have not arrived at the results which he proposed to
accomplish.
The mistake, as it regards Bacon, has risen princi-
pally from confounding induction with the Baconian
method of induction. If we were to tell our readers
that there were great undiscovered laws in nature, and
should strongly advise them to examine particular facts
with great care, in order through them to reach the
knowledge of those laws, we should recommend the
practice of induction; but even if they should heed and
follow the advice, we much doubt if any scientific dis-
BACON.
309
coveries would ensue. Indeed, if Bacon himself could
hear the recommendation made, and could adopt the
modern mode of spiritual communication, there would
be a succession of indignant raps on the editorial table,
which, being interpreted, would run thus: "Ladies and
gentlemen, the mode of induction recommended to you
is radically vicious and incompetent. Truth cannot be
discovered in that way; but if you will select any given
matter which requires investigation, and will follow the
mechanical mode of procedure laid down in my method
of induction (Novum Organum, Book II.), you will be
able, without any special scientific genius, to hunt the
very form and essence of the nature you seek to its last
hiding-place, and compel it to yield up its innermost
secret. All that is required is common capacity, united
with persevering labor and combination of purpose."
This is not exactly Bacon's rhetoric; but, as spirits, when
they leave the body, seem somehow to acquire a certain
pinched and poverty-stricken mode of expression, it will
do to convey his idea.
Bacon, the philosopher, is therefore to be considered,
not as a man who invented and recommended induction,
for induction is as old as human nature, was, in fact,
invented by Adam, and, as practised in Bacon's time,
-
was the mark of his especial scorn; but he is to be con-
sidered as one who invented and recommended a new
い
​310
BACON.
method of induction, a system of precise rules to guide
induction, a new logic, or organ, which was to supersede
the Aristotelian logic. He proudly called it his art of
inventing sciences. A method of investigation presup-
poses, of course, some conception of the objects to be
investigated; and of the infinite variety and complexity
of nature Bacon had no idea. His method proceeds on
the notion that all the phenomena of nature are capable
of being referred to combinations of certain abstract
qualities of matter, simple natures, which are limited
in number if difficult of access. Such are density, rarity,
heat, cold, color, levity, tenuity, weight, and the like.
These are the alphabet of nature; and, as all words
result from the combination of a few letters, so all phe-
nomena result from the combination of a few elements.
What is gold, for example, but the co-ordination of cer-
tain qualities, such as greatness of weight, closeness
of parts, fixation, softness, etc.? Now, if the causes
of these simple natures were known, they might be
combined by man into the same or a similar substance;
"for," he says,
"if anybody can make a metal which
has all these properties, let meu dispute whether it be
gold or no." But these qualities are not ultimate; they
are the effects of causes, and a knowledge of the causes
will enable us to superinduce the effects. The connec-
tion between philosophy and practice is this, that what
BACON.
311
in contemplation stands for cause, in operation stands.
for means or instrument; for we know by causes and
operate by means." The object of philosophy, there-
fore, is the investigation of the formal causes of the
primary qualities of matter, of those causes which are
always present when the qualities are present, always
absent when the qualities are absent, increase with their
increase, and decrease with their decrease. Facts, then,
are the stairs by which we mount into the region of
essences; and, grasping and directing these, we can
compel nature to create new facts, as truly natural as
those she spontaneously produces, for art simply gives
its own direction to her working.
From this exposition it will be seen how little founda-
tion there is for Dugald Stewart's remark, that Bacon
avoided the fundamental error of the ancients, according
to whom "philosophy is the science of causes"; and
also for the assertion of Comte and his school, that
Bacon was the father of positive science. There is
nothing more repugnant to a positivist than the introduc-
tion into science of causes and essences; yet it was after
these that Bacon aimed. "The spirit of man,” he says,
"is as the lamp of God, wherewith he searcheth the
inwardness of all secrets." The word he uses is
"Form," but Form with him is both cause and essence,
an immanent cause, a cause that creates a permanent
312
BACON.
а
quality. If he sometimes uses Form as synonymous
with Law, the sense in which he understands Law is not
merely the mode in which a force operates, but the
force itself. Indeed, there is reason to suppose that,
much as he decries Plato, he was still willing to use
Form as identical with Idea, in the Platonic sense of
Idea; for in an aphorism in which he severely condemns
the projection of human conceits upon natural objects,
he remarks that "there is no small difference between
the idols of the human mind and the ideas of the Di-
vine Mind, that is to say, between certain idle dogmas
and the real stamp and impression of created objects as
they are found in Nature." Coleridge had perhaps
this aphorism in mind when he called Bacon the British
Plato.
The object of Bacon's philosophy, then, is the inves-
tigation of the forms of simple natures; his method is
the path the understanding must pursue in order to
arrive at this object. This method is a most ingenious
but cumbrous machinery for collecting, tabling, sifting,
testing, and rejecting facts of observation and experi-
ment which have any relation to the nature sought. It
begins with inclusion and proceeds by exclusion. It has
affirmative tables, negative tables, tables of comparison,
tables of exclusion, tables of prerogative instances.
From the mass of individual facts originally collected
BACON.
313
everything is eliminated, until nothing is left but the
form or cause which is sought. The field of induction
is confined, as it were, within a triangular space, at the
base of which are the facts obtained by observation and
experiment. From these the investigator proceeds in-
wards, by comparison and exclusion, constantly narrow-
ing the field as he advances, until at last, all non-essen-
tials being rejected, nothing is left but the pure form.
Nobody can read the details of this method, as given
at length in the second book of the Novum Organum,
without admiration for the prodigious constructive power
of Bacon's mind. The twenty-seven tables of preroga-
tive instances, or "the comparative value of facts as
means of investigation," would alone be sufficient to prove
the comprehensiveness of his intellect and its capacity
of ideal classification. But still the method is a splendid,
unrealized, and we may add, incompleted, dream. He
never himself discovered anything by its use. Nobody
since his time has discovered anything by its use. And
the reason is plain. Apart from its positive defects, there
is this general criticism to be made, that a true method
must be a generalization from the mental processes
which have been followed in discovery and invention; it
cannot precede them. If Bacon really had devised the
method which succeeding men of science slavishly fol-
lowed, he would deserve more than the most extrava-
14
314
BACON.
.
· gant panegyrics he has received. Aristotle is famous as
a critic for generalizing the rules of epic and dramatic
poetry from the practice of Homer and the Greek trage-
dians; what fame would not be his, if his rules had
preceded Homer and the Greek dramatists? Yet Ma-
caulay, and many others who have criticised Bacon,
while pretending to depreciate all rules as useless, still
say that Bacon's analysis of the inductive method is a
true and good analysis, and that the method has since
his time been instinctively followed by all successful in-
vestigators of nature, as if Bacon had not constructed
his inductive rules from a deep-rooted distrust of men's
inductive instincts. But it is plain to everybody who
has read Comte and Mill and Whewell, that the method
of discovery is still a debatable question; and, with all
our immense superiority to the age of Bacon in the pos-
session of facts on which to build a method, we have
settled as yet on no philosophy of the objects or the
processes of science. There are many disputed meth-
ods, but no accepted method; the anarchy of opinions
here corresponds to the anarchy in metaphysics; and
the establishment of a philosophy of discovery and in-
vention must wait the establishment of a philosophy
of the mind which discovers and invents.
But we know enough to give the reasons of Bacon's
failure. The defects of his method can be demonstrated
BACON.
315
from the separate judgments of his warmest eulogists.
First, Bacon was no mathematician, and Playfair admits
that "in all physical inquiries where mathematical rea-
soning has been employed, after a few principles have
been established by experience, a vast multitude of
truths, equally certain with the principles themselves,
have been deduced from them by the mere application
of geometry and algebra." Bacon's prevision, then, did
not extend to the foresight of the great part that mathe-
matical science was to perform in the interpretation of na-
ture. Second, Sir John Herschel, who follows Playfair
in making Bacon the father of experimental philosophy,
still gives a deadly blow to Bacon's celebrated tables
of prerogative instances, considered as real aids to the
understanding, when he admits that the same sagacity
which enables an inquirer to assign an instance or ob-
servation to its proper class, enables him, without that
3 process, to recognize its proper value. Third, Sir James
Mackintosh, who claims for Bacon, that, if he did not.
himself make discoveries, he taught mankind the method
by which discoveries are made, and who asserts that the
physical sciences owe all that they are or ever will be to
Bacon's method and spirit, refers to the 104th aphorism
of the first book of the Novum Organum, as containing.
the condensed essence of his philosophy. This aphorism
affirms that the path to the most general truths is a
316
BACON.
series of ascending inductive steps; that the lowest gen-
eralizations must first be established, then the middle
principles, then the highest. It is curious that Mackin-
tosh should praise a philosopher of facts for announcing
a theory which facts have disproved. The merest glance
at the history of the sciences shows that the opposite
principle is rather the true one; that the most general
principles have been first reached. Mill can excuse
Bacon for this blunder only by saying that he could not
have fallen into it if there had existed in his time a
single deductive science, such as mechanics, astronomy,
optics, acoustics, etc., now are. Of course he could not;
but the fact remains that he did not foresee the course,
or prescribe the true method, of science, and that he did
not even appreciate the way in which his contempo-
raries, Kepler and Galileo, were building up sciences by
processes different from his own. It is amazing, how-
ever, that Mackintosh
with his knowledge of the
discovery of the law of gravitation, the most univer-
sal of all natural laws, as an obvious contradiction of
the theory should have adopted Bacon's error.
Fourth, Bacon's method of exclusion, the one element
of his system which gave it originality, proceeds, as
John Stuart Mill has pointed out, on the assumption
that a phenomenon can have but one cause; and is there-
fore not applicable to coexistences, as to successions, of
phenomena.
BACON.
317
Fifth, Bacon's method, though it proceeds on a con-
ception of nature which is an hypothesis exploded, and
though it is itself an hypothesis which has proved
sterile, still does not admit of hypotheses as guides to
investigation. The last and ablest editor of his philo-
sophical works, Mr. Ellis, concedes the practical in-
utility of his method on this ground, that the process by
which scientific truths have been established "involves
an element to which nothing corresponds in Bacon's
tables of comparison and exclusion; namely, the appli-
cation to the facts of observation of a principle of
arrangement, an idea, existing in the mind of the dis-
coverer antecedently to the act of induction."
Indeed, Bacon's method was disproved by his own
contemporaries. Kepler tried twenty guesses on the
orbit of Mars, and the last fitted the facts. Galileo de-
duced important principles from assumptions, and then
brought them to the test of experiment. Gilbert's hy-
pothesis, that "the earth is a great natural magnet with
two poles," is now more than an hypothesis. The
Novum Organum contains a fling at the argument from
final causes; and, the very year it was published, Har-
vey, the friend and physician of Bacon, by reasoning on
the final cause of the valves in the veins, discovered the
circulation of the blood. All these men had the scien-
tific instinct and scientific genius that Bacon lacked.
318
BACON.
They made no antithesis between the anticipation of na-
ture and the interpretation of nature, but they antici-
pated in order to interpret. It is not the disuse of hy-
potheses, but the testing of hypotheses by facts, and the
willingness to give them up when experience decides
against them, which characterizes the scientific mind.
Sixth, Bacon, though he aimed to institute a philoso-
phy of observation, and gave rules for observing, was
not himself a sharp and accurate observer of nature,
did not possess, as has often been remarked, acuteness
in proportion to his comprehensiveness. His Natural
History, his History of Life and Death, of Density and
Rarity, and the like, all prove a mental defect disquali-
fying him for the business. His eye roved when it
should have been patiently fixed. He caught at resem-
blances by the instinct of his wide-ranging intellect,
and this peculiarity, constantly indulged, impaired his
power of distinguishing differences. He spread his
mind over a space so large that its full strength was
not concentrated on anything. He could not check the
discursive action of his intellect and hold it down to
the sharp, penetrating, dissecting analysis of single ap-
pearances; and his brain was teeming with too many
schemes to allow of that mental fanaticism, that fury of
mind, which impelled Kepler to his repeated assaults on
the tough problem of the planetary orbits. The same
BACON.
319
bewildering multiplicity of objects which prevented
him from throwing his full force into affairs and taking
a decided stand as a statesman, operated likewise to dis-
sipate his energies as an explorer of nature. The
analogies, relations, likenesses of things occupied his
attention, to the exclusion of a searching examination of
the things themselves. As a courtier, lawyer, jurist, poli-
tician, statesman, man of science, student of universal
knowledge, he has been practically excelled in each de-
partment by special men, because his intellect was one
which refused to be arrested and fixed.
And, in conclusion, the essential defect of the Baco-
nian method consists in its being an invention of genius
to dispense with the necessity of genius. It was, as Mr.
Ellis has well remarked, "a mechanical mode of pro-
cedure, pretending to lead to absolute certainty of
result." It levelled capacities, because the virtue was in
the instrument used, and not in the person using it.
Bacon illustrates the importance of his method by say-
ing that a man of ordinary ability with a pair of com-
passes can describe a better circle than a man of the
greatest genius without such help; that the lame, in the
path, outstrip the swift who wander from it; indeed, the
very skill and swiftness of him who runs not in the
right direction only increases his aberration. With his
view of philosophy,
as the investigation of the forms of
320
BACON.
1
a limited number of simple natures, he thought that,
with "the purse of a prince and the assistance of a peo-
ple," a sufficiently copious natural history might be
formed, within a comparatively short period, to furnish
the materials for the working of his method; and then
the grand instauration of the sciences would be rapidly
completed. In this scheme there could, of course, be
only one great name, the name of Bacon. Those
who collected the materials, those who applied the
method, would be only his clerks. His office was that
of Secretary of State for the interpretation of nature;
Lord Chancellor of the laws of existence, and Legislator
of science; Lord Treasurer of the riches of the uni-
verse; the Intellectual Potentate equally of science and
art, with no aristocracy round his throne, but with a
bureaucracy in its stead, taken from the middle class of
intellect and character. There was no place for Har-
vey and Newton and Halley and Dalton and La Place
and Cuvier and Agassiz; for genius was unnecessary:
the new logic, the Novum Organum, Bacon him-
self, mentally alive in the brains which applied his
method, — was all in all. Splendid discoveries would be
made, those discoveries would be beneficently applied, but
they would be made by clerks and applied by clerks. All
these discoveries were latent in the Baconian method, and
over all the completed intellectual globe of science, as in
BACON.
321
the commencement of the Novum Organum, would be
written, "Francis of Verulam thought thus!" And if
Bacon's method had been really followed by succeeding
men of science, this magnificent autocracy of under-
standing and imagination would have been justified;
and round the necks of each of them would be a collar,
on which would be written, "This person is so and so,
'born thrall' of Francis of Verulam." That this serene
feeling of spiritual superiority, and consciousness of
being the founder of a new empire in the world of
mind, was in Bacon, we know by the general tone of
his writings, and the politic contempt with which he
speaks of the old autocrats, Aristotle and Plato; and
Harvey, who knew him well, probably intended to hit
this imperial loftiness, when he described him as "writ-
ing philosophy like a Lord Chancellor." "The guillo-
tine governs!" said Barrère, gayly, when some friend
compassionated his perplexities as a practical statesman
during the Reign of Terror. "The Method governs !"
would have been the reply of a Baconian underling,
had the difficulties of his attempts to penetrate the in-
most mysteries of nature been suggested to him.
Thus, by the use of Bacon's own method of exclusion
we exclude him from the position due of right to Gali-
leo and Kepler. In the inquiry respecting the father
of the inductive sciences, he is not "the nature sought."
14*
U
322
BACON.
What, then, is the cause of his fame among the scien-
tific men of England and France? They certainly
have not spent their time in investigating the forms
of simple natures; they certainly have not used his
method why have they used his name?
In answer to this question, it may be said that Bacon,
participating in the intellectual movement of the higher
minds of his age, recognized the paramount importance
of observation and experiment in the investigation of na-
ture; and it has since been found convenient to adopt,
as the father and founder of the physical sciences, one
whose name lends to them so much literary prestige, and
who was undoubtedly one of the broadest, richest, and
most imperial of human intellects, if he was not one of
the most scientific. Then he is the most eloquent of all
discoursers on the philosophy of science, and the general
greatness of his mind is evident even in the demonstra-
ble errors of his system. No other writer on the sub-
ject is a classic, and Bacon is thus a link connecting
men of science with men of letters and men of the
world. Whewell, Comte, Mill, Herschel
abundant material, with the advantage of generalizing
the philosophy of the sciences from their history — are
instinctively felt by every reader to be smaller men
than Bacon. As thinkers, they appear thin and un-
fruitful when we consider his fulness of suggestive
with more
BACON.
323
thought; as writers, they have no pretension to the
massiveness, splendor, condensation, and regal dignity
of his rhetoric. The Advancement of Learning, and
the first book of the Novum Organum, are full of
quotable sentences, in which solid wisdom is clothed in
the aptest, most vivid, most imaginative, and most
executive expression. If a man of science at the pres-
ent day wishes for a compact statement in which to em-
body his scorn of bigotry, of dogmatism, of intellectual
conceit, of any of the idols of the human understanding
which obstruct its perception of natural truth, it is to
Bacon that he goes for an aphorism.
And it is doubtless true that the spirit which animates
Bacon's philosophical works is a spirit which inspires
effort and infuses cheer. It is impossible to say how far
this spirit has animated inventors and discoverers. But
we know, from the enthusiastic admiration expressed for
him by men of science who could not have been blind
to the impotence of his method, that all minds his spirit
touched it must have influenced. One principle stands
plainly out in his writings, that the intellect of man,
purified from its idols, is competent for the conquest
of nature; and to this glorious task he, above all other
men, gave an epical dignity and loftiness. His superb
rhetoric is the poetry of physical science. The hum-
blest laborer in that field feels, in reading Bacon, that he
324
BACON.
himself is one of a band of heroes, wielding weapons
mightier than those of Achilles and Agamemnon, engaged
in a siege nobler than that of Troy; for, in so far as he is
honest and capable, he is "Man, the minister and inter-
preter of Nature," concerned, "not in the amplification
of the power of one man over his country, nor in the
amplification of the power of that country over other
countries, but in the amplification of the power and
kingdom of mankind over the universe." And, while
Bacon has thus given an ideal elevation to the pursuit
of science, he has at the same time pointed out most
distinctly those diseases of the mind which check or
mislead it in the task of interpretation. As a student
of nature, his fame is greater than his deserts; as a stu-
dent of human nature, he is hardly yet appreciated;
and it is to the greater part of the first book of the No-
vum Organum — where he deals in general reflections on
those mental habits and dispositions which interfere with
pure intellectual conscientiousness, and where his benefi-
cent spirit and rich imagination lend sweetness and beau-
ty to the homeliest practical wisdom that the reader
impatiently returns, after being wearied with the details
of his method given in the second book. His method
was antiquated in his own lifetime; but it is to be feared
that centuries hence his analysis of the idols of the
human understanding will be as fresh as human vanity
and pride.
BACON.
325
It was not, then, in the knowledge of nature, but in
the knowledge of human nature, that Bacon pre-emi-
nently excelled. By this it is not meant that he was a
metaphysician in the usual sense of the term, though
his works contain as valuable hints to metaphysicians as
to naturalists, for these hints are on matters at one
remove from the central problems of metaphysics. In-
deed, for all those questions which relate to the nature
of the mind and the mode by which it obtains its ideas,
for all questions which are addressed to our speculative
reason alone, he seems to have felt an aversion almost
irrational. They appeared to him to minister to the
delight and vain-glory of the thinker without yielding
any fruit of wisdom which could be applied to human
affairs. "Pragmatical man," he says, "should not go
away with an opinion that learning is like a lark, that
can mount, and sing, and please herself, and nothing
else; but may know that she holdeth as well of the
hawk, that can soar aloft, and can also descend and
strike upon the prey." Not, then, the abstract qualities
and powers of the human mind, considered as special
objects of investigation independent of individuals, but
the combination of these into concrete character, in-
terested Bacon. He regarded the machinery in motion;
the human being as he thinks, feels, and lives; men in
their relations with men and the phenomena presented
326
BACON.
in history and life he aimed to investigate as he would
investigate the phenomena of the natural world. This
practical science of human nature, in which the dis-
covery of general laws seems hopeless to every mind
not ample enough to escape being overwhelmed by the
confusion, complication, and immense variety of the de-
tails, and which it will probably take ages to complete,
this science Bacon palpably advanced. His emi-
nence here is evident from his undisputed superior-
ity to other prominent thinkers in the same depart-
ment. Hallam justly remarks, that, "if we compare
what may be found in the sixth, seventh, and eighth
books De Augmentis; in the Essays, the History of
Henry VII., and the various short treatises contained in
his" [Bacon's] "works on moral and political wisdom,
and on human nature (from experience of which all such
wisdom is drawn); — if we compare these works of Ba-
con with the rhetoric, ethics, and politics of Aristotle, or
with the histories most celebrated for their deep insight
into civil society and human character, with Thucydi-
des, Tacitus, Philippe de Commines, Machiavel, Davila,
Hume,
we shall, I think, find that one man may be
compared with all these together.".
The most valuable peculiarity of this wisdom is, that
it not merely points out what should be done, but it
points out how it can be done. This is especially true
BACON.
327
of all his directions for the culture of the individual
mind; the mode by which the passions may be disci-
plined, and the intellect enriched, enlarged, and strength-
ened. So with the relations of the individual to his
household, to society, to government: he indicates the
method by which these relations may be known and the
duties they imply performed. In his larger specula-
tions, regarding the philosophy of law, the principles of
universal justice, and the organic character of national
institutions, he anticipates, by the sweep of his intellect,
the ideas of the jurists and historians of the present
century. Volumes have been written which are merely
expansions of this statement of Bacon, that "there are in
nature certain fountains of justice, whence all civil laws
are derived but as streams; and like as waters do take
tinctures and tastes from the soils through which they
run, so do civil laws vary according to the regions and
governments where they are planted, though they pro-
ceed from the same fountain." The Advancement of
Learning, afterwards translated and expanded into the
Latin treatise De Augmentis, is an inexhaustible store-
house of such thoughts, thoughts which have consti-
tuted the capital of later thinkers, but which never
appear to so much advantage as in the compact imagi-
native form in which they were originally expressed.
·
It is important, however, that, in admitting to the full
328.
BACON.
Bacon's just claims as a philosopher of human nature,
we should avoid the mistake of supposing him to have
possessed acuteness in the same degree in which he
possessed comprehensiveness. Mackintosh says that he
is "probably a single instance of a mind which in
philosophizing always reaches the point of elevation
whence the whole prospect is commanded, without ever
rising to that distance which prevents a distinct percep-
tion of every part of it." This judgment is accurate as
far as it regards parts as elements of a general view;
but in the special view of single parts Bacon has been
repeatedly excelled by men whom it would be absurd
to compare to him in general wisdom. His mind was
contracted to details by effort; it dilated by instinct.
It was telescopic rather than microscopic: its observa-
tion of men was extensive rather than minute.
"Were
it not better," he asks, "for a man in a fair room to set
up one great light, or branching candlestick of lights,
than to go about with a small watch-candle into every
corner?" Certainly; but the small watch-candle, in
some investigations, is better than the great central
lamp; and his genius accordingly does not include the
special genius of such observers as La Bruyère, Roche-
foucauld, Saint-Simon, Balzac, and Shaftesbury, the
detective police of society, politics, and letters,
•
men
whose intellects were contracted to a sharp, sure,
BACON.
329
cat-like peering into the darkest crevices of individual
natures, whose eyes dissected what they looked upon,
and for whom the slightest circumstance was a key
that opened the whole character to their glance. For
example: Saint-Simon sees a lady whose seemingly
ingenuous diffidence makes her charming to everybody.
He peers into her soul, and declares, as the result of
his vision, that "modesty is one of her arts." Again,
after the death of the son of Louis XIV., the court was
of course overwhelmed with decorous grief; the new
dauphin and dauphiness were especially inconsolable for
the loss, and, to all witnesses but one,. were weeping
copiously. Saint-Simon simply says, "Their eyes were
wonderfully dry, but well managed." Bacon might have
inferred hypocrisy ; but he would not have observed
the lack of moisture in the eyes amid all the convulsive
sobbing and the agonized dips and waves of the handker-
chiefs. Take another instance. The Duke of Orleans
amazed the court by the diabolical recklessness of his
conduct. Saint-Simon alone saw that ordinary vices had
no pungency for the Duke; that he must spice licentious-
ness with atheism, blasphemy, and incest, in order to de-
rive any pleasure from it; and solves the problem by say-
ing that he was "born blasé," that he took up vice at
the point at which his ancestors had left it, and had
no choice but to carry it to new heights of impudence
330
BACON.
or to reject it altogether. Again, to take an example
from a practical politician: Shaftesbury, who played
the game of faction with such exquisite subtlety in the
reign of Charles II., detected the fact of the secret mar-
riage between the king's brother and Anne Hyde by
noticing at dinner that her mother, Lady Clarendon,
could not avoid expressing a faint deference in her man-
ner when she helped her daughter to the meat; and on
this slight indication he acted as confidently as if he had
learned the fact by being present at the wedding.
Now neither in his life nor in his writings does Bacon
indicate that he had studied individuals with this keen
attentiveness. His knowledge of human nature was the
result of the tranquil deposit, year after year, into his
receptive and capacious intellect, of the facts of history
and of his own wide experience of various kinds of life.
These he pondered, classified, reduced to principles, and
embodied in sentences which have ever since been
quotable texts for jurists, moralists, historians, and
statesmen; and all the while his own servants wère de-
ceiving and plundering him, and his subordinates enrich-
ing themselves with bribes taken in his name. The
"small watch-candle" would have been valuable to him
here.
The work by which his wisdom has reached the popu-
lar mind is his collection of Essays. As originally
BACON.
331
Yet
published in 1597, it contained only ten; in the last edi-
tion published in his lifetime, the number was increased to
fifty-seven. As they were the sifted result of much obser-
vation and meditation on public and private life, he truly
could say of their matter, that “it could not be found in
books." Their originality can hardly be appreciated at
present, for most of their thoughts have been incorpor-
ated with the minds which have fed on them, and have
been continually reproduced in other volumes.
it is probable that these short treatises are rarely
thoroughly mastered, even by the most careful reader.
Dugald Stewart testifies that after reading them for the
twentieth time he observed something which had es-
caped his attention on the nineteenth. They combine
the greatest brevity with the greatest beauty of expres-
sion. The thoughts follow each other with such rapid
ease; each thought is so truly an addition, and not an
expansion of the preceding; the point of view is so con-
tinually changed, in order that in one little essay the
subject may be considered on all its sides and in all its
bearings; and each sentence is so capable of being de-
veloped into an essay, that the work requires long
pauses of reflection, and frequent re-perusal, to be esti-
mated at its full worth. It not merely enriches the
mind; it enlarges it, and teaches it comprehensive habits
of reflection. The disease of mental narrowness and
332
BACON.
fanaticism, it insensibly cures, by showing that every
subject can be completely apprehended only by viewing
it from various points; and a reader of Bacon instinc-
tively meets the fussy or furious declaimer with the
objection, "But, sir, there is another side to this mat-
ter."
66
It was one of Bacon's mistakes to believe that he
would outlive the English language. Those of his
works, therefore, which were not written in Latin he
was eager to have translated into that tongue. The
Essays," coming home as they did to "men's business
and bosoms," he was persuaded would "last as long as
books should last"; and as he thought to use his own
words "that these modern languages would at some
time or other play the bankrupt with books," he em-
ployed Ben Jonson and others to translate the Essays
into Latin. A Dr. Willmott published, in 1720, a trans-
lation of this Latin edition into what he called reformed
and fashionable English. We will give a specimen.
Bacon, in his Essay on Adversity, says: "Prosperity
is the blessing of the Old Testament, adversity is the
blessing of the New.
Yet even in the Old Testa-
ment, if you listen to David's harp, you shall hear as
many hearse-like airs as carols.” Dr. Willmott Eng-
lishes the Latin in this wise: "Prosperity belongs to
the blessings of the Old Testament, adversity to the
BACON.
333
beatitudes of the New..
Yet even in the Old
Testament, if you listen to David's harp, you'll find
more lamentable airs than triumphant ones." This is
translation with a vengeance!
Next to the Essays and the Advancement of Learn-
ing, the most attractive of Bacon's works is his Wisdom
of the Ancients. Here his reason and imagination,
intermingling or interchanging their processes, work
conjointly, and produce a magnificent series of poems,
while remorselessly analyzing imaginations into ideas.
He supposes that, anterior to the Greeks, there were
thinkers as wise as Bacon; that the heathen fables are
poetical embodiments of secrets and mysteries of policy,
philosophy, and religion; truths folded up in mythologi-
cal personifications; "sacred relics," indeed, or "ab-
stracted, rarefied airs of better times, which by tradi-
tion from more ancient nations fell into the trumpets
and flutes of the Grecians." He, of course, finds in
these fables what he brings to them, the inductive phi-
losophy and all. The book is a marvel of ingenuity,
and exhibits the astounding analogical power of his
mind, both as respects analogies of reason and analogies
of fancy. Had Bacon lived in the age of Plato and
Aristotle, and written this work, he would have fairly
triumphed over those philosophers; for he would have
reconciled ancient philosophy with ancient religion,
334
BACON.
and made faith in Jupiter and Pan consistent with
reason.
But the work in which Bacon is most pleasingly ex-
hibited is his philosophical romance, The New Atlantis.
This happy island is a Baconian Utopia, a philosopher's
paradise, where the Novum Organum is, in imagina-
tion, realized, and utility is carried to its loftiest idealiza-
tion. In this country the king is good, and the people
are good, because everything, even commerce, is sub-
ordinated to knowledge. "Truth" here "prints good-
ness." All sensual and malignant passions, all the ugly
deformities of actual life, are sedately expelled from this
glorious dream of a kingdom where men live in har-
mony with each other and with nature, and where ob-
servers, discoverers, and inventors are invested with an
external pomp and dignity and high place corresponding
to their intellectual elevation. Here is a college worthy
of the name, Solomon's House, "the end of whose foun-
dation is the knowledge of causes and the secret motions
of things, and the enlarging the bounds of human em-
pire to the effecting of all things possible"; and in
Solomon's House Bacon's ideas are carried out, and man
is in the process of "being restored to the sovereignty
of nature." In this fiction, too, the peculiar benevolence
of Bacon's spirit is displayed; and perhaps the finest
sentence in his writings, certainly the one which best
BACON.
335
indicates the essential feeling of his soul as he regarded
human misery and ignorance, occurs in his descrip-
tion of one of the fathers of Solomon's House.
"His
countenance," he says, was as the countenance of one
who pities men."
But, it may still be asked, how was it that a man of
such large wisdom, with a soul of such pervasive be-
neficence, was so comparatively weak and pliant in his
life? This question touches his intellect no less than
his character; and it must be said that, both in the ac-
tion of his mind and the actions of his life, there is ob-
servable a lack of emotional as well as of moral intensity.
He is never impassioned, never borne away by an over-
mastering feeling or purpose. There is no rush of ideas
and passions in his writings, no direct contact and close.
hug of thought and thing. Serenity, not speed, is his
characteristic. Majestic as is the movement of his in-
tellect, and far-reaching its glance, it still includes, ad-
justs, feels into the objects it contemplates, rather than
darts at them like Shakespeare's or pierces them like
Chaucer's. And this intelligence, so wise and so worldly-
wise, so broad, bright, confident, and calm, with the
moral element pervading it as an element of insight
rather than as a motive of action, this was the instru-
ment on which he equally relied to advance learning
and to advance Bacon. As a practical politician, he felt
336
BACON.
assured of his power to comprehend as a whole, and
nicely to discern the separate parts of, the most compli-
cated matter which pressed for judgment and for voli-
tion. Exercising insight and foresight on a multitude
of facts and contingencies all present to his mind at
once, he aimed to evoke order from confusion, to read
events in their principles, to seize the salient point which
properly determines the judgment, and then to act de-
cisively for his purpose, safely for his reputation and
fortune. Marvellous as this process of intelligence is, it
is liable both to corrupt and mislead unless the moral
sentiment be strong and controlling. The man trans-
-forms himself into a sort of earthly Providence, and by
intelligence believes himself emancipated from strict in-
tegrity. But the intellectual eye, even when capable, like
Bacon's, of being dilated at will, is no substitute for con-
science, and no device has ever been invented which
would do away with the usefulness of simple honesty and
blind moral instinct. In the most comprehensive view in
politics, something is sure to be left out, and that some-
thing is apt to vitiate the sagacity of the whole combi-
nation.
Indeed, there is such a thing as being over-wise, in
dealing with practical affairs, and the defect of Bacon's
intellect is seen the moment we compare it with an in-
tellect like that of Luther. Bacon, with his serene
BACON.
337
superiority to impulse, and his power of giving his
mind at pleasure its close compactness or fan-like
spread, could hardly have failed to feel for Luther that
compassionate contempt with which men possessing
many ideas survey men who are possessed by one; yet
it is certain that Luther never could have got entangled
in Bacon's errors, for his habit was to cut knots which
Bacon labored to untie. Men of Luther's stamp never
aim to be wise by reach, but by intensity, of intelligence.
They catch a vivid glimpse of some awful spiritual fact,
in whose light the world dwindles and pales, and then
follow its inspiration headlong, paying no heed to the
insinuating whispers of prudence, and crashing through
the glassy expediencies which obstruct their path.
Such natures, in the short run, are the most .visionary;
in the long run, the most practical. Bacon has been
praised by the most pertinacious revilers of his character
for his indifference to the metaphysical and theological
controversies which raged around him. They seem
not to see that this indifference came from his de-
ficiency in the intense moral and religious feelings out
of which those controversies arose. It would have been
better for himself had he been more of a fanatic; for
such a stretch of intelligence as he possessed could be
purchased only at the expense of diffusing the forces
of his personality in meditative expansiveness, and of
15
V
338
BACON.
weakening his power of dealing direct blows on the in-
stinct or intuition of the moment.
reason.
But, while this man was without the austerer virtues
of humanity, we must not forget that he was also with-
out its sour and malignant vices; and he stands almost
alone in literature, as a vast, dispassionate intellect, in
which the sentiment of philanthropy has been refined
and purified into the subtile essence of thought. With-
out this philanthropy or goodness, he tells us, "man is
but a better kind of vermin "; and love of mankind, with
Bacon, is not merely the noblest feeling but the highest
This beneficence, thus transformed into intelli-
gence, is not a hard opinion, but a rich and mellow
spirit of humanity, which communicates the life of the
quality it embodies; and we cannot more fitly conclude
than by quoting the noble sentence in which Bacon, after
pointing out the common mistakes regarding the true end
of knowledge, closes by divorcing it from all selfish ego-
tism and ambition. 66
Men," he says, "have entered
into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon
a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes
to entertain their minds with variety and delight; some-
times for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to
enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and
most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sin-
cerely, to give a true account of their gift of reason, to
BACON.
339
the benefit and use of man: as if there were sought
in knowledge a couch whereupon to rest a searching and
restless spirit; or a terrace for a wandering and varia-
ble mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a
tower of state, for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or
a fort or commanding-ground for strife or contention ;
or a shop for profit and sale; and not a rich storehouse,
for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's
estate."
Y
HOOKER.
THE life of the "learned and judicious" Mr. Rich-
ard Hooker, by Izaak Walton, is one of the most
perfect biographies of its kind in literature. But it is
biography on its knees; and though it contains some
exquisite touches of characterization, it does not, per-
haps, convey an adequate impression of the energy and
enlargement of the soul whose meekness it so tenderly
and reverentially portrays. The individuality of the
writer is blended with that of his subject, and much of
his representation of Hooker is an unconscious ideali-
zation of himself. The intellectual limitations of Wal-
ton are felt even while we are most charmed by the
sweetness of his spirit, and the mind of the greatest
thinker the Church of England has produced is not re-
flected on the page which celebrates his virtues.
Hooker's life is the record of the upward growth of a
human nature into that region of sentiments and ideas
where sagacity and sanctity, intelligence and goodness,
are but different names for one vital fact. His soul,
and the character his soul had organized, the invisi-
ble but intensely and immortally alive part of him, ----
HOOKER.
341
was domesticated away up in the heavens, even while
the weak visible frame, which seemed to contain it,
walked the earth; and though in this world thrown
controversially, at least, into the Church Militant, the
Church Militant caught, through him, a gleam of the
consecrating radiance, and a glimpse of the heaven-
wide ideas, of the Church Triumphant. There is much
careless talk, in our day, of" spiritual" communication;
but it must never be forgotten that the condition of real
spiritual communication is height of soul; and that the
true" mediums" are those rare persons through whom,
as through Hooker, spiritual communications stream, in
the conceptions of purified, spiritualized, celestialized
reason.
Hooker was born in 1553, and was the son of poor
parents, better qualified to rejoice in his early piety than
to appreciate his early intelligence. The schoolmaster
to whom the boy was sent, happy in a pupil whose in-
quisitive and acquisitive intellect was accompanied with
docility of temper, believed him, in the words of Wal-
ton, "to be blessed with an inward divine light"; thought
him a little wonder; and when his parents expressed
their intention to bind him apprentice to some trade, the
good man spared no efforts until he succeeded in inter-
esting Bishop Jewell in the stripling genius. Hooker,
at the age of fourteen, was sent by Jewell to the Uni-
342
HOOKER.
versity of Oxford; and after Jewell's death Dr. Sandys,
the Bishop of London, became his patron. He partly
supported himself at the university by taking pupils;
and though these pupils were of his own age, they seem
to have regarded their young instructor with as much
reverence as they gave to the venerable professors,
and a great deal more love. Two of these pupils, Ed-
win Sandys and George Cranmer, rose to distinction.
As a teacher, Hooker communicated not merely the re-
sults of study, but the spirit of study; some radiations
from his own soul fell upon the minds he informed; and
the youth fortunate enough to be his pupil might have
echoed the grateful eulogy of the poet:
"For he was like the sun, giving me light,
Pouring into the caves of my young brain
Knowledge from his bright fountains.”
No one, perhaps, was better prepared to enter holy
orders than Hooker, when, after fourteen years of the
profoundest meditation and the most exhaustive study,
he, in his twenty-eighth year, was made deacon and
priest. And now came the most unfortunate event of
He
his life; and it came in consequence of an honor.
was appointed to preach at St. Paul's Cross, a pulpit cross
erected in the churchyard of St. Paul's Cathedral, and
from which a sermon was preached every Sunday by
some eminent divine, before an assemblage composed of
HOOKER.
343
the Court, the city magistracy, and a great crowd of peo-
ple. When Hooker arrived in London on Thursday,
he was afflicted with so severe a cold that he despaired
of being able to use his voice on Sunday. His host
was a linen-draper by the name of Churchman; and the
wife of this man took such care of her clerical guest,
that his cold was sufficiently cured to enable him to
preach his sermon. Before he could sufficiently express
his gratitude, she proposed further to increase her claim
upon it. Mrs. Churchman unlike the rest of her sex
was a match-maker; and she represented to him that
he, being of a weak constitution, ought to have a wife
who would prove a nurse to him, and thus, by affection-
ate care, prolong his existence, and make it comfortable.
Her benevolence not stopping here, she offered to pro-
vide such a one for him herself, if he thought fit to
marry. The good man, who had, in his sermon, deemed
himself capable of arguing the question of two wills in
God, "an antecedent and a consequent will, his first
will, that all men should be saved; his second, that those
only should be saved who had lived answerable to the
degree of grace afforded them," a subject large
. enough to convulse the theological world, the good
man listened to Mrs. Churchman with a more serene trust-
fulness than he would have listened to an Archbishop,
and gave her power to select such a nurse-wife for him :
-
344
HOOKER.
he, the thinker and scholar, - who, in the sweep of his
mind through human learning, had probably never en-
countered an intelligence capable of deceiving his own, -
falling blandly into the toils of an ignorant, cunning, and
low-minded match-maker! This benevolent lady had a
daughter, whose manners were vulgar, whose face was
unprepossessing, whose temper was irritable and exact-
ing, but who had youth, and romance enough to discrimi-
nate between being married and going out to service;
and this was the wife Mrs. Churchman selected, and this
was the wife gratefully and guilelessly received from
her hands by the "judicious Mr. Hooker." Izaak Wal-
ton moralizes sweetly and sedately over this transaction,
taking the ground that it was providential, and that
affliction is a divine diet imposed by God on souls that
he loves. Is this the right way to look at it? Every-
thing is providential after it has happened; but retribu-
tion is in the events of providence, as well as chastening.
Hooker, in truth, had unconsciously slipped into a sin;
for he had intended a marriage of convenience, and that
of the worst sort. He had violated all the providential
conditions implied in the sacred relation of marriage.
It was a marriage in which there was no mutual affec-
tion, no assurance of mutual help, no union of souls;
and as he took his wife to be his nurse, what won-
der that she preferred the more natural office of
HOOKER.
345
vixen? And though every man and woman who reads
the account of the manner in which she tormented him
thinks she deserved to have had some mechanical con-
trivance attached to her shoulders which should box
her ears at every scolding word she uttered, it seems to
be overlooked that great original injustice was done to
her. We take much delight in being the first who has
ever said a humane word for the injudicious Mrs.
Hooker. Married, but not mated, to that angelic intel-
lect and that meek spirit, - taken as a servant more
than as a wife, she felt the degradation of her position.
keenly; and, there being no possibility of equality be-
tween them, she, in spiritual self-defence, established in
the household the despotism of caprice and the tyranny
of the tongue.
His marriage compelled Hooker to resign his fellow-
ship at Oxford; and he accepted a small parish in the
diocese of Lincoln. Here, about a year afterwards, he
was visited by his two former pupils, Edwin Sandys and
George Cranmer. It was sufficient for Mrs. Hooker to
know that they were scholars, and that they revered her
husband. She accordingly at once set in motion certain
petty feminine modes of annoyance, to indicate that her
husband was her servant, and that his friends were un-
welcome guests. As soon as they were fairly engaged
in conversation, recalling and living over the quiet
15*
346
HOOKER.
joys of their college life, the amiable lady that Mr.
Hooker had married to be his nurse called him sharply
to come and rock the cradle. His friends were all but
(6
*.
turned out of the house. Cranmer, in parting with
him, said: "Good tutor, I am sorry that your lot is
fallen in no better ground as to your parsonage; and
more sorry that your wife proves not a more comfortable
companion, after you have wearied yourself in your
restless studies." My dear George," was Hooker's
answer, “if saints have usually a double share in the
miseries of this life, I, that am none, ought not to re-
pine at what my wise Creator hath appointed for me,
but labor as indeed I do daily to submit mine to
his will, and possess my soul in patience and peace." Is
it not to be supposed that John Calvin, if placed in
similar circumstances, would have shown a little more
of the ancient Adam? Would it not have been some-
what dangerous for Catherine, wife of Martin Luther,
to have screamed to her husband to come and rock the
cradle while he was discoursing with Melancthon on the
insufficiency of works?
One result of this visit of his pupils was that Sandys,
whose father was Archbishop of York, warmly repre-
sented to that dignitary of the Church the scandal of
allowing such a combination of the saint and sage as
Richard Hooker to be buried in a small country parson-
HOOKER.
347
•
age; and, the mastership of the Temple falling vacant
at this time, the Archbishop used his influence with the
judges and benchers, and in March, 1585, obtained
the place for Hooker. But this promotion was destined
to give him new disquiets, rather than diminish old ones.
The lecturer who preached the evening sermons at
the Temple was Walter Travers, an able, learned,
and resolute theologian, who preferred the Presbyterian
form of church-government to the Episcopal, and who,
in his theological belief, agreed with the Puritans. It
soon came to be noted that the sermon by Hooker in
the morning disagreed, both as to doctrine and disci-
pline, with the sermon delivered by his subaltern in the
evening; and it was wittily said that "the forenoon
sermon spake Canterbury and the afternoon Geneva."
This difference soon engaged public attention. Canter-
bury stepped in, and prohibited Geneva from preaching.
Travers appealed unsuccessfully to the Privy Council,
and then his friends privately printed his petition.
Hooker felt himself compelled to answer it. As the
controversy refers to deep mysteries of religion, still
vehemently debated, it would be impertinent to venture
a judgment on the relative merits of the disputants;
but it may be said that the reasoning of Hooker, when
the discussion does not turn on the meaning of authori-
tative Scripture texts, insinuates itself with more sub-
348
HOOKER.
tile cogency into the natural heart and brain, and is
incomparably more human and humane, than the reason-
ing of his antagonist. A fine intellectual contempt
steals out in Hooker's rejoinder to the charges of Trav-
ers regarding some minor ceremonies, for which the
Puritans, in their natural jealousy of everything that
seemed popish, had, perhaps, an irrational horror, and
to which the Churchmen were apt to give an equally
irrational importance. Hooker quietly refers to "other
exceptions, so like these, as but to name I should have
thought a greater fault than to commit them." One
retort has acquired deserved celebrity: "Your next
argument consists of railing and reasons. To your rail-
ing I say nothing; to your reasons I say what follows."
It was unfortunate for Hooker's logic that it was sup-
ported by the arm of power. Travers had the great
advantage of being persecuted; and his numerous
friends in the Temple found ways to make Hooker so
uncomfortable that he wished himself back in his se-
cluded parish, with nobody to torment him but his wife.
He was a great controversialist, ás far as reason enters
into controversies; but the passions which turn contro-
versies into contentions, and edge arguments with invec-
tive, were foreign to his serenely capacious intellect
and peaceable disposition. As he brooded over the con-
dition of the Church and the disputes raging within it,
HOOKER.
349
he more and more felt the necessity of surveying the
whole controversy from a higher ground, in larger rela-
tions, and in a more Christian spirit. So far, the
dispute raged within, and had not rent, the Church.
The Puritans were not dissenters, attacking the Church
from without, but reformers, attempting to alter its con-
stitution from within. The idea occurred to Hooker,
that a treatise might be written, demonstrating "the
power of the Church to make canons for the use of
ceremonies, and by law to impose obedience to them, as
upon her children,” written with sufficient compre-
hensiveness of thought and learning to convince the
reason of his opponents, and with sufficient comprehen-
siveness of love to engage their affections. This idea
ripened into the Ecclesiastical Polity. He began this trea-
tise at the Temple; but he found that the theological at-
mosphere of the place, though it stimulated the intellectual,
was ungenial to the loving qualities he intended to em-
body in his treatise; and he therefore begged the Arch-
bishop to transfer him to some quiet parsonage, where
he might think in peace. Accordingly, in 1591, he re-
ceived the Rectory of Boscum; and afterwards, in 1595,
the Queen, who seems to have held him in great respect,
presented him with the living of Bourne, where he re-
mained until his death, which occurred in the year 1600,
in his forty-sixth year. In 1594 four books of the Ec-
350
HOOKER.
clesiastical Polity were published, and a fifth in 1597;
the others not till after his death. Walton gives a most
beautiful picture of him in his parsonage, illustrating
Hooker's own maxim, "that the life of a pious clergy-
man is visible rhetoric." His humility, benevolence,
self-denial, devotion to his duties, the innocent wisdom
which marked his whole intercourse with his parish-
ioners, and his fasting and mortifications, are all set.
forth in Walton's blandest diction. The most surprising
item in this list of perfections is the last; for how, with
"the clownish and silly" Mrs. Hooker always snarling
and snapping below, while he was looking into the
empyrean of ideas from the summits of his intellect, he
needed any more of the discipline of mortification, it
would puzzle the most resolute ascetic to tell. That
amiable lady, as soon as she understood that her hus-
band was opposed to the Puritans, seems to have joined
them; spite, and the desire to plague him, appearing to
inspire her with an unwonted interest in theology,
though we have no record of her theological genius,
except the apparently erroneous report that, after
Hooker's death, she destroyed or mutilated some of his
manuscripts. In Keble's Preface to his edition of
Hooker's Works will be found an elaborate account
of the publication of the last three books of the Ec-
clesiastical Polity, and an examination and approximate
HOOKER.
351
settlement of the question regarding their authenticity
and completeness.
Hooker's nature was essentially an intellectual one;
and the wonder of his mental biography is the celerity
and certainty with which he transmuted knowledge and
experience into intelligence. It may be a fancy, but
we think it can be detected in an occasional uncharac-
teristic tartness of expression, that he had carried up
even Mrs. Hooker into the region of his intellect, and
dissolved her termagant tongue into a fine spiritual
essence of gentle sarcasm. Not only did his vast learn-
ing pass, as successively acquired, from memory into
faculty, but the daily beauty of his life left its finest and
last result in his brain. His patience, humility, dis-
interestedness, self-denial, his pious and humane senti-
ments, every resistance to temptation, every benevolent
act, every holy prayer, were by some subtile chemistry
turned into thought, and gave his intellect an upward
lift, increasing the range of its vision, and bringing it
into closer proximity with great ideas. We cannot read
a page of his writings, without feeling the presence of
this spiritual power in conception, statement, and argu-
ment. And this moral excellence, which has thus
become moral intelligence, this holiness which is in per-
fect union with reason, this spirit of love which can not
only feel but see, gives a softness, richness, sweetness,
352
HOOKER.
and warmth to his thinking, quite as peculiar to it as its
dignity, amplitude, and elevation.
As a result of this deep, silent, and rapid growth of
nature, this holding in his intelligence all the results
of his emotional and moral life, he attaches our sympa-
thies as we follow the stream of his arguments; for we
feel that he has communed with all the principles he
communicates, and knows by direct perception the spir-
itual realities he announces. His intellect, accordingly,
does not act by intuitive flashes; but "his soul has
sight" of eternal verities, and directs at them a clear,
steady, divining gaze. He has no lucky thoughts;
everything is earned; he knows what he knows, in all
its multitudinous relations, and cannot be surprised by
sudden objections, convicting him of oversight of even
the minutest application of any principle he holds in his
calm, strong grasp. And as a controversialist he has
the immense advantage of descending into the field of
controversy from a height above it, and commanding it,
while his opponents are wrangling with their minds on a
level with it. The great difficulty in the man of thought
is, to connect his thought with life; and half the litera-
ture of theology and morals is therefore mere satire,
simply exhibiting the immense, unbridged, ironic gulf
that yawns, wide as that between Lazarus and Dives,
between truth and duty on the one hand and the actual
HOOKER.
353
affairs and conduct of the world on the other. But
Hooker, one of the loftiest of thinkers, was also one
of the most practical. His shining idea, away up in
the heaven of contemplation, sends its rays of light
and warmth in a thousand directions upon the earth;
illuminating palace and cottage; piercing into the crevi-
ces and corners of concrete existence; relating the high
with the low, austere obligation with feeble perform-
ance; and showing the obscure tendencies of imperfect
institutions to realize divine laws.
This capacious soul was lodged in one of the feeblest
of bodies. Physiologists are never weary of telling us
that masculine health is necessary to vigor of mind;
but the vast mental strength of Hooker was inde-
pendent of his physical constitution. His appearance
in the pulpit conveyed no idea of a great man. Small
in stature, with a low voice, using no gesture, never
moving his person or lifting his eyes from his ser-
mon, he seemed the very embodiment of clerical in-
capacity and dulness; but soon the thoughtful listener
found his mind fascinated by the automaton speaker;
a still, devout ecstasy breathed from the pallid lips; the
profoundest thought and the most extensive learning
found calm expression in the low accents; and, more
surprising still, the somewhat rude mother-tongue of
Englishmen was heard for the first time from the lips.
W
354
HOOKER.
of a master of prose composition, demonstrating its
capacity for all the purposes of the most refined and
most enlarged philosophic thought. Indeed, the serene
might of Hooker's soul is perhaps most obviously per-
ceived in his style, in the easy power with which he
wields and bends to his purpose a language not yet
trained into a ready vehicle of philosophic expression.
It is doubtful if any English writer since his time has
shown equal power in the construction of long sen-
tences, those sentences in which the thought, and the
atmosphere of the thought, and the modifications of the
thought, are all included in one sweeping period, which
gathers clause after clause as it rolls melodiously on
to its foreseen conclusion, having the general gravity
and grandeur of its modulated movement pervaded by
an inexpressibly sweet undertone of individual senti-
ment. And his strength is free from every fretful and
morbid quality such as commonly taint the performances
of a strong mind lodged in a sickly body. It is as
serene, wholesome, and comprehensive, as it is powerful.
The Ecclesiastical Polity is the great theological
work of the Elizabethan age. Pope Clement having
said to Cardinal Allen and Dr. Stapleton, English Ro-
man Catholics at Rome, that he had never met with an
English book whose writer deserved the name of author,
they replied that a poor, obscure English priest had
HOOKER.
355
written a work on church polity, which if he should
read would change his opinion. At the conclusion of
the first book, the Pope is said to have delivered this
judgment: "There is no learning that this man hath
not searched into, nothing too hard for his understand-
ing. This man indeed deserves the name of an author;
his books will get reverence from age; for there is in
them such seeds of eternity, that, if the rest be like this,
they shall last until the last fire consume all learning."
But it must be admitted that the rest, however great
their merits, are not "like this." The first book of the
Ecclesiastical Polity is not only the best, but it is that
in which Hooker's mind is most effectually brought into
relation with all thinking minds, and that in virtue of
which he takes his high place in the history of litera-
ture and philosophy. The theologians he opposed in-
sisted that a definite scheme of church polity was
revealed in the Scriptures, and was obligatory on Chris-
tians. This, of course, reduced the controversy to a
mere wrangle about the meaning of certain texts; and,
as this mode of disputation does not make any call upon
the higher mental and spiritual powers, it has always
been popular among theologians,—giving everybody a
chance in the textual and logical skirmish, and condu-
cing to that anarchy of opinions which is not without its
charm to the sternest champion of authority, if he has in
356
HOOKER.
him the belligerent instinct. But Hooker, constitution-
ally averse to controversy, and looking at it, not as an
end, but a means, had that aching for order which char-
acterizes a peaceable spirit, and that demand for funda-
mental ideas which characterizes a great mind. Ac-
cordingly, in the first book, he mounts above the con-
troversy before entering into it, and surveys the whole
question of law, from the one eternal, Divine Law to the
laws which are in force among men. He makes the
laws which God has written in the reason of man divine
laws, as well as those he has supernaturally revealed
in the Scriptures; and especially he enforces the some-
what startling principle, that law is variable or invaria-
ble, not according to the source from which it emanates,
but according to the matter to which it refers. If the
matter be changeable, be mutable, the law must partici-
pate in the mutability of that which it was designed to
regulate; and this principle, he insists, is independent
of the fact whether the law originated in God or in the
divinely constituted reason of man. There are some
laws which God has written in the reason of man which
are immutable; there are some laws supernaturally
revealed in Scripture which are mutable. In the first
case, no circumstance can justify their violation, in the
other, circumstances necessitate a change. The bearing
of this principle on the right of the Church of England
HOOKER.
357
to command rules and ceremonies which might not have
been commanded by Scripture is plain. Even if the
principle were denied by his opponents, it could be
properly denied only by being confuted; and to confute
it exacted the lifting up of the controversy into the
region of ideas.
But it is not so much in the conception and appli-
cation of one principle, as in the exhibition of many
principles harmoniously related, that Hooker's largeness
of comprehension is shown. No other great logician is
so free from logical fanaticism. His mind gravitates to
truth; and it therefore limits and guards the application
of single truths, detecting that fine point where many
principles unite in forming wisdom, and refusing to be
pushed too far in any one direction. He has his hands
on the reins of a hundred wild horses, unaccustomed to
exercise their strength and fleetness in joint effort; but
the moment they feel the might of his meekness, they
all sedately obey the directing power which sends them
in orderly motion to a common goal. The central`idea
of his book is law. Even God, he contends, "works
not only according to his own will, but the counsel
of his own will," according to the order which
he before all ages hath set down for himself to do all
things by." A self-conscious, personal, working, divine
reason is therefore at the heart of things, and infinite
358
HOOKER.
power and infinite love are identical with infinite intelli-
gence. Hooker's breadth of mind is evinced in his refus-
ing, unlike most theologians, to emphasize and detach any
one of these divine perfections, whether it be power, or
love, or intelligence. Intelligence is in power and love;
power and love are in intelligence.
It would be impossible, in our short space, to trace
the descent of Hooker's central idea of law to its appli-
cations to men and states. The law which the angels
obey, the law of nature, the law which binds man as an
individual, the law which binds him as member of a
politic community, the law which binds him as a mem-
ber of a religious community, the law which binds na-
tions in their mutual relations, all are exhibited with
a force and clearness of vision, a mastery of ethical
and political philosophy, a power of dealing with rela-
tive as well as absolute truth, and a sagacity of practi-
cal observation, which are remarkable both in their
separate excellence and their exquisite combination.
To this comprehensive treatise Agassiz the naturalist,
Story the jurist, Webster the statesman, Garrison the
reformer, could all go for principles, and for applications
of principles. He appreciates, beyond any other thinker
who has taken his stand on the Higher Law, but who
still believes in the binding force of the laws of men,
the difficulty of making an individual, to whom that Law
HOOKER.
359
is revealed through reason, a member of a politic or re-
ligious community; and he admits that the best men,
individually, are often those who are apt to be most un-
manageable in their relations to state and church. The
argument he addresses to such minds, though it may not
be conclusive, is probably the least unsatisfactory that
has ever been framed; for it is presented in connection
with all that he has previously said in regard to the
binding force of the divine law.
Of this divine law, the law which angels obey; the
law of love; the law which binds in virtue of its power
to allure and attract, and which weds obligation to ec-
stasy, of this law he thus speaks in language which
seems touched with a consecrating radiance :
"But now that we may lift up our eyes (as it were)
from the footstool to the throne of God, and, leaving
these natural, consider a little the state of heavenly and
divine creatures: touching angels, which are spirits im-
material and intellectual, the glorious inhabitants of
those sacred palaces, where nothing but light and
blessed immortality, no shadow of matter for tears, dis-
contentments, griefs, and uncomfortable passions to work
upon, but all joy, tranquillity, and peace, even for ever
and ever doth dwell: as in number and order they are
huge, mighty, and royal armies, so likewise in perfec-
tion of obedience unto that law, which the Highest,
360
HOOKER.
whom they adore, love, and imitate, hath imposed upon
them, such observants they are thereof, that our Sav-
iour himself, being to set down the perfect idea of that
which we are to pray and wish for on earth, did not
teach to pray and wish for more than only that here it
might be with us as with them it is in heaven. God,
which moveth mere natural agents as an efficient only,
doth otherwise move intellectual creatures, and especially
his holy angels: for, beholding the face of God, in admi-
ration of so great excellency they all adore him ; and, be-
ing rapt with the love of his beauty, they cleave insepara-
bly forever unto him. Desire to resemble him in good-
ness maketh them unweariable, and even insatiable, in
their longing to do by all means all manner of good unto
all the creatures of God, but especially unto the children
of men in the countenance of whose nature, looking
downward, they behold themselves beneath themselves ;
even as upward, in God, beneath whom themselves are,
they see that character which is nowhere but in them-
selves and us resembled. ... Angelical actions may,
therefore, be reduced unto these three general kinds:
first, most delectable love, arising from the visible ap-
prehension of the purity, glory, and beauty of God, in-
visible saving only to spirits that are pure; secondly,
adoration, grounded upon the evidence of the greatness of
God, on whom they see how all things depend; thirdly,
:
HOOKER.
361
imitation, bred by the presence of his exemplary good-
ness, who ceaseth not before them daily to fill heaven
and earth with the rich treasures of most free and unde-
served grace.”
And though the concluding passage of the first book
of the Ecclesiastical Polity has been a thousand times
quoted, it would be unjust to Hooker not here to cite the
sentence which most perfectly embodies his soul:
Wherefore, that here we may briefly end: of law
there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is
the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world:
all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very
least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not ex-
empted from her power; both angels and men and
creatures of what condition soever, though each in differ-
ent sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent, ad-
miring her as the mother of their peace and their joy."
In concluding these essays on the Literature of the
Age of Elizabeth, let us pass rapidly in review the
writers to whom they have referred. And first for the
dramatists, whose works in our day on the dissecting-
tables of criticism, but in their own all alive with intel-
lect and passion made the theatres of Elizabeth and
James rock and ring with the clamors or plaudits of a
mob too excited to be analytic. Of these professors of
1
16
362
HOOKER.
the science of human nature, we have attempted to por-
tray the fiery imagination that flames through the fus-
tian and animal fierceness of Marlowe; the bluff arro-
gance of the outspoken Jonson, with his solid understand-
ing, caustic humor, delicate fancy, and undeviating be-
lief in Ben; the close observation and teeming mother-
wit which found vent in the limpid verse of Heywood;
Middleton's sardonic sagacity, and Marston's envenomed
satire; the suffering, and the soaring and singing cheer,
the beggary and the benignity, so quaintly united in
Dekkar's vagrant life and sunny genius; Webster's be-
wildering terror, and Chapman's haughty aspiration ;
the subtile sentiment of Beaumont ; the fertile, flashing,
and ebullient spirit of Fletcher; the easy dignity of
Massinger's thinking, and the sonorous majesty of his
style; the fastidious elegance and melting tenderness
of Ford; and the one-souled, "myriad-minded" Shake-
speare, who is so unmistakably beyond them all.
Then, recurring to the undramatic poets, we have en-
deavored to catch a glimpse of the fairy-land of Spen-
ser's celestialized imagination; and lightly to touch on
the characteristics of the poets who preceded and fol-.
lowed him; on the sternly serious and unjoyous cre-
ativeness of Sackville; the meditative fulness and
tender fancy of "well-languaged" Daniel; the enthusias-
tic expansiveness of description, and pure, bright, and
HOOKER.
.363
vigorous diction of Drayton; the sententious sharpness
of Hall; the clear imaginative insight and dialectic felici-
ty of Davies; the metaphysical voluptuousness and witty
unreason of Donne; the genial, thoughtful, well-propor-
tioned soul of Wotton; the fantastic devoutness of Her-
bert; and the coarsely frenzied commonplaces of Warner,
"Who stood
Up to the chin in the Pierian
mud!
Again, in Sidney we have striven to portray genius
and goodness as expressed in behavior; in Raleigh,
genius and audacity as expressed in insatiable, though
somewhat equivocal, activity of arm and brain; in Ba-
con, the beneficence and the autocracy of an intellect
whose comprehensiveness needs no celebration; and
in Hooker, the passage of holiness into intelligence, and
the spirit of love into the power of reason.
And, in attempting to delineate so many diverse indi-
vidualities, we have been painfully conscious of another
and more difficult audience than that we address. The
imperial intellects, the Bacons, Hookers, Shake-
speares, and Spensers, the men who on earth are as
much alive now as they were two hundred and fifty
years ago, are, in their assured intellectual dominion,
blandly careless of the judgments of individuals; but
there is a large class of writers whose genius we have
considered, who have well-nigh passed away from the
364
•
HOOKER.
protecting admiration and affectionate memory of gen-
eral readers. As we, more or less roughly, handled
these, as we felt the pulse of life throbbing in every
time-stained and dust-covered volume, dust out of
which Man was originally made, and to which Man, as
author, is commonly so sure to return, the books re-
sumed their original form of men, became personal
forces, to resent impeachments of their honor, or miscon-
ceptions of their genius; and a troop of Spirits stalked
from the neglected pages to confront their irreverent
critic. There they were, ominous or contemptuous
judges of the person who assumed to be their judge:
on the faces of some, sarcastic denial; on others, tender
reproaches; on others, benevolent pity; on others, se-
renely beautiful indifference or disdain.
"Who taught
you," their looks seemed to say, "to deliver dogmatic
judgments on us? What know you of our birth, cul-
ture, passions, temptations, struggles, motives, two hun-
dred years ago? What right have you, to blame?
What qualifications have you, to praise? Let us abide
in our earthly oblivion, in our immortal life. It is
sufficient that our works demonstrated on earth the
inextinguishable vitality of the Soul that glowed within
us; and, for the rest, we have long passed to the only
infallible the Almighty-critic and judge of works
and of men!"


UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
wils
820.9 W57
Whipple, Edwin Percy, 1819-1886
The literature of the age of Elizabeth.
3 1951 002 016 423 X
WILSON
ANNEX
AISLE 38
0123456
0123456
0123456
QUAWN
4
2
3
1
QUAWN--
EXTAWN-I

654321
A4 Page 8543210
AIIM SCANNER TEST CHART #2
4 PT
6 PT
8 PT
Spectra
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:",/?$0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:”,./?$0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:',./?$0123456789
10 PT ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:",./?$0123456789
Times Roman
4 PT
6 PT
8 PT
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:'../?$0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:",./?$0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:",./?$0123456789
10 PT ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:",./?$0123456789
4 PT
6 PT
8 PT
Century Schoolbook Bold
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:",./?$0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:",./?$0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:",./?$0123456789
10 PT ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:",./?$0123456789
4 PT
6 PT
News Gothic Bold Reversed
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:'',/?$0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:',./?$0123456789
8 PT ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:",./?$0123456789
10 PT ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:",./?$0123456789
4 PT
6 PT
8 PT
Bodoni Italic
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:",./?80123456789
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:",./?$0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:",./?$0123456789
10 PT ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz;:",./?$0123456789
ΑΒΓΔΕΞΘΗΙΚΛΜΝΟΠΡΣΤΥΩΝΨΖαβγδεξθηικλμνοπορστνωχ ζ=7",/St=#°><ΕΞ
Greek and Math Symbols
4 PT
6 PT
8 PT
ΑΒΓΔΕΞΘΗΙΚΛΜΝΟΠΦΡΣΤΥΩΧΨΖαβγδεξθηικλμνοπφροτυωχψί=7",/S+=#°><><><=
ΑΒΓΔΕΞΘΗΙΚΛΜΝΟΠΦΡΣΤΥΩΧ Ζαβγδεξθηικλμνοπόρστυωχψίπτ",./St##°><><><Ξ
10 ΡΤ ΑΒΓΔΕΞΘΗΙΚΛΜΝΟΠΦΡΣΤΥΩΧΨΖαβγδεξθηικλμνοπορστνωχ ίΞτ",/St=#°><><=
White
MESH HALFTONE WEDGES
I
|
65
85
100
110
133
150
Black
Isolated Characters
e
3
1
2
3
a
4
5
6
7
о
8
9
0
h
B
O5¬♡NTC
65432
A4 Page 6543210
A4 Page 6543210
©B4MN-C
65432
MEMORIAL DRIVE, ROCHESTER, NEW YORK 14623
RIT ALPHANUMERIC RESOLUTION TEST OBJECT, RT-1-71
0123460
மய
6 E38
5 582
4 283
3 32E
10:
5326
7E28
8B3E
032E ▸
1253
223E
3 3EB
4 E25
5 523
6 2E5
17
分
​155自​杂
​14 E2 S
1323S
12E25
11ES2
10523
5836
835E
7832
0723
SBE 9
OEZE
1328
2 E32
3 235
4 538
5 EBS
6 EB
15853
TYWES
16 ELE
14532
13823
12ES2
11285
1053B
SBE6
8235
7523
◄ 2350
5 SER
10 EBS
8532
9538
7863
ROCHESTER INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, ONE LOMB
PRODUCED BY GRAPHIC ARTS RESEARCH CENTER