Chapter 14
I would not, however, be supposed to undervalue the genuine and graceful ability of execution displayed by the author at his best. He could write at times very much after the earliest fashion of the adolescent Shakespeare; in other words, after the fashion of the day or hour, to which in some degree the greatest writer of that hour or that day cannot choose but conform at starting, and the smallest writer must needs conform for ever. By the rule which would attribute to Shakespeare every line written in his first manner which appeared during the first years of his poetic progress, it is hard to say what amount of bad verse or better, current during the rise and the reign of their several influences,--for this kind of echo or of copywork, consciously or unconsciously repercussive and reflective, begins with the very first audible sound of a man's voice in song, with the very first noticeable stroke of his hand in painting--it is hard to say what amount of tolerable or intolerable work might not or may not be assignable by scholiasts of the future to Byron or to Shelley, to Mr. Tennyson or to Mr. Browning. A time by this rule might come--but I am fain to think better of the Fates--when by comparison of detached words and collation of dismembered phrases the memory of Mr. Tennyson would be weighted and degraded by the ascription of whole volumes of pilfered and diluted verse now current--if not yet submerged--under the name or the pseudonym of the present {237} Viceroy--or Vice-empress is it?--of India. But the obvious truth is this: the voice of Shakespeare's adolescence had as usual an echo in it of other men's notes: I can remember the name of but one poet whose voice from the beginning had none; who started with a style of his own, though he may have chosen to annex--"annex the wise it call"; _convey_ is obsolete--to annex whole phrases or whole verses at need, for the use or the ease of an idle minute; and this name of course is Marlowe's. So starting, Shakespeare had yet (like all other and lesser poets born) some perceptible notes in his yet half boyish voice that were not borrowed; and these were at once caught up and re-echoed by such fellow-pupils with Shakespeare of the young Master of them all--such humbler and feebler disciples, or simpler sheep (shall we call them?) of the great "dead shepherd"--as the now indistinguishable author of _King Edward III_.
In the first scene of the first act the impotent imitation of Marlowe is pitifully patent. Possibly there may also be an imitation of the still imitative style of Shakespeare, and the style may be more accurately definable as a copy of a copy--a study after the manner of Marlowe, not at second hand, but at third. In any case, being obviously too flat and feeble to show a touch of either godlike hand, this scene may be set aside at once to make way for the second.
The second scene is more animated, but low in style till we come to the outbreak of rhyme. In other words, the energetic or active part is at best passable--fluent and decent commonplace: but where the style turns undramatic and runs into mere elegiacs, a likeness becomes perceptible to the first elegiac style of Shakespeare. Witness these lines spoken by the King in contemplation of the Countess of Salisbury's beauty, while yet struggling against the nascent motions of a base love:--
Now in the sun alone it doth not lie With light to take light from a mortal eye: For here two day-stars that mine eyes would see More than the sun steal mine own light from me. Contemplative desire! desire to be In contemplation that may master thee!
_Decipit exemplar vitiis imitabile_: if Shakespeare ever saw or heard these pretty lines, he should have felt the unconscious rebuke implied in such close and facile imitation of his own early elegiacs. As a serious mimicry of his first manner, a critical parody summing up in little space the sweet faults of his poetic nonage, with its barren overgrowth of unprofitable flowers,--bright point, soft metaphor, and sweet elaborate antithesis--this is as good of its kind as anything between Aristophanes and Horace Smith. Indeed, it may remind us of that parody on the soft, superfluous, flowery and frothy style of Agathon, which at the opening of the _Thesmophoriazusae_ cannot but make the youngest and most ignorant reader laugh, though the oldest and most learned has never set eyes on a line of the original verses which supplied the incarnate god of comic song with matter for such exquisite burlesque.
To the speech above cited the reply of the Countess is even gracefuller, and closer to the same general model of fanciful elegiac dialogue:--
Let not thy presence, like the April sun, Flatter our earth, and suddenly be done: More happy do not make our outward wall Than thou wilt grace our inward house withal. Our house, my liege, is like a country swain, Whose habit rude, and manners blunt and plain. Presageth naught; yet inly beautified With bounty's riches, and fair hidden pride; For where the golden ore doth buried lie, The ground, undecked with nature's tapestry, Seems barren, sere, unfertile, fruitless, dry; And where the upper turf of earth doth boast His pride, perfumes, {239} and particoloured cost, Delve there, and find this issue and their pride To spring from ordure and corruption's side. But, to make up my all too long compare, These ragged walls no testimony are What is within; but, like a cloak, doth hide From weather's waste the under garnished pride. More gracious than my terms can let thee be, Entreat thyself to stay awhile with me.
Not only the exquisite grace of this charming last couplet, but the smooth sound strength, the fluency and clarity of the whole passage, may serve to show that the original suggestion of Capell, if (as I think) untenable, was not (we must admit) unpardonable. The very oversight perceptible to any eye and painful to any ear not sealed up by stepdame nature from all perception of pleasure or of pain derivable from good verse or bad--the reckless reiteration of the same rhyme with but one poor couplet intervening--suggests rather the oversight of an unfledged poet than the obtuseness of a full-grown poeticule or poetaster.
But of how many among the servile or semi-servile throng of imitators in every generation may not as much as this be said by tolerant or kindly judges! Among the herd of such diminutives as swarm after the heel or fawn upon the hand of Mr. Tennyson, more than one, more than two or three, have come as close as his poor little viceregal or vice-imperial parasite to the very touch and action of the master's hand which feeds them unawares from his platter as they fawn; as close as this nameless and short-winded satellite to the gesture and the stroke of Shakespeare's. For this also must be noted; that the resemblance here is but of stray words, of single lines, of separable passages. The whole tone of the text, the whole build of the play, the whole scheme of the poem, is far enough from any such resemblance. The structure, the composition, is feeble, incongruous, inadequate, effete. Any student will remark at a first glance what a short-breathed runner, what a broken- winded athlete in the lists of tragic verse, is the indiscoverable author of this play.
There is another point which the Neo-Shakespearean synagogue will by no man be expected to appreciate; for to apprehend it requires some knowledge and some understanding of the poetry of the Shakespearean age--so surely we now should call it, rather than Elizabethan or Jacobean, for the sake of verbal convenience, if not for the sake of literary decency; and such knowledge or understanding no sane man will expect to find in any such quarter. Even in the broad coarse comedy of the period we find here and there the same sweet and simple echoes of the very cradle-song (so to call it) of our drama: so like Shakespeare, they might say who knew nothing of Shakespeare's fellows, that we cannot choose but recognise his hand. Here as always first in the field--the genuine and golden harvest-field of Shakespearean criticism, Charles Lamb has cited a passage from _Green's Tu Quoque_--a comedy miserably misreprinted in Dodsley's Old Plays--on which he observes that "this is so like Shakespeare, that we seem to remember it," being as it is a girl's gentle lamentation over the selfish, exacting, suspicious and trustless love of man, as contrasted with the swift simple surrender of a woman's love at the first heartfelt appeal to her pity--"we seem to remember it," says Lamb, as a speech of Desdemona uttered on a first perception or suspicion of jealousy or alienation in Othello. This lovely passage, if I dare say so in contravention to the authority of Lamb, is indeed as like the manner of Shakespeare as it can be--to eyes ignorant of what his fellows can do; but it is not like the manner of the Shakespeare who wrote _Othello_. This, however, is beside the question. It is very like the Shakespeare who wrote the _Comedy of Errors--Love's Labour's Lost--Romeo and Juliet_. It is so like that had we fallen upon it in any of these plays it would long since have been a household word in all men's mouths for sweetness, truth, simplicity, perfect and instinctive accuracy of touch. It is very much liker the first manner of Shakespeare than any passage in _King Edward III_. And no Sham Shakespearean critic that I know of has yet assigned to the hapless object of his howling homage the authorship of _Green's Tu Quoque_.
Returning to our text, we find in the short speech of the King with which the first act is wound up yet another couplet which has the very ring in it of Shakespeare's early notes--the catch at words rather than play on words which his tripping tongue in youth could never resist:
Countess, albeit my business urgeth me, It shall attend while I attend on thee.
And with this pretty little instance of courtly and courteous euphuism we pass from the first to the second and most important act in the play.
Any reader well versed in the text of Shakespeare, and ill versed in the work of his early rivals and his later pupils, might surely be forgiven if on a first reading of the speech with which this act opens he should cry out with Capell that here at least was the unformed hand of the Master perceptible and verifiable indeed. The writer, he might say, has the very glance of his eye, the very trick of his gait, the very note of his accent. But on getting a little more knowledge, such a reader will find the use of it in the perception to which he will have attained that in his early plays, as in his two early poems, the style of Shakespeare was not for the most part distinctively his own. It was that of a crew, a knot of young writers, among whom he found at once both leaders and followers to be guided and to guide. A mere glance into the rich lyric literature of the period will suffice to show the dullest eye and teach the densest ear how nearly innumerable were the Englishmen of Elizabeth's time who could sing in the courtly or pastoral key of the season, each man of them a few notes of his own, simple or fantastic, but all sweet, clear, genuine of their kind:--
Facies non omnibus una, Nec diversa tamen:
and yet so close is the generic likeness between flower and flower of the same lyrical garden that the first half of the quotation seems but half applicable here. In Bird's, Morley's, Dowland's collections of music with the words appended--in such jewelled volumes as _England's Helicon_ and _Davison's Poetical Rhapsody_--their name is Legion, their numbers are numberless. You cannot call them imitators, this man of that, or all of any; they were all of one school, but it was a school without a master or a head. And even so it was with the earliest sect or gathering of dramatic writers in England. Marlowe alone stood apart and above them all--the young Shakespeare among the rest; but among these we cannot count, we cannot guess, how many were wellnigh as competent as he to continue the fluent rhyme, to prolong the facile echo, of Greene and Peele, their first and most famous leaders.
No more docile or capable pupil could have been desired by any master in any art than the author of _David and Bethsabe_ has found in the writer of this second act. He has indeed surpassed his model, if not in grace and sweetness, yet in taste or tact of expression, in continuity and equality of style. Vigour is not the principal note of his manner, but compared with the soft effusive ebullience of his master's we may fairly call it vigorous and condensed. But all this merit or demerit is matter of mere language only. The poet--a very pretty poet in his way, and doubtless capable of gracious work enough in the idyllic or elegiac line of business--shows about as much capacity to grasp and handle the fine intimacies of character and the large issues of circumstance to any tragic or dramatic purpose, as might be expected from an idyllic or elegiac poet who should suddenly assume the buskin of tragedy. Let us suppose that Moschus, for example, on the strength of having written a sweeter elegy than ever before was chanted over the untimely grave of a friend and fellow-singer, had said within himself, "Go to, I will be Sophocles"; can we imagine that the tragic result would have been other than tragical indeed for the credit of his gentle name, and comical indeed for all who might have envied the mild and modest excellence which fashion or hypocrisy might for years have induced them to besprinkle with the froth and slaver of their promiscuous and pointless adulation?
As the play is not more generally known than it deserves to be,--or perhaps we may say it is somewhat less known, though its claim to general notice is faint indeed compared with that of many a poem of its age familiar only to special students in our own--I will transcribe a few passages to show how far the writer could reach at his best; leaving for others to indicate how far short of that not inaccessible point he is too generally content to fall and to remain.
The opening speech is spoken by one Lodowick, a parasite of the King's; who would appear, like Francois Villon under the roof of his Fat Madge, to have succeeded in reconciling the professional duties--may I not say, the generally discordant and discrepant offices?--of a poet and a pimp.
I might perceive his eye in her eye lost, His ear to drink her sweet tongue's utterance; And changing passion, like inconstant clouds, That, rackt upon the carriage of the winds, Increase, and die, in his disturbed cheeks. Lo, when she blushed, even then did he look pale; As if her cheeks by some enchanted power Attracted had the cherry blood from his: {245a} Anon, with reverent fear when she grew pale, His cheeks put on their scarlet ornaments; But no more like her oriental red Than brick to coral, or live things to dead. {245b} Why did he then thus counterfeit her looks? If she did blush, 'twas tender modest shame, Being in the sacred presence of a king; If he did blush, 'twas red immodest shame To vail his eyes amiss, being a king; If she looked pale, 'twas silly woman's fear To bear herself in presence of a king; If he looked pale, it was with guilty fear To dote amiss, being a mighty king.
This is better than the insufferable style of _Locrine_, which is in great part made up of such rhymeless couplets, each tagged with an empty verbal antithesis; but taken as a sample of dramatic writing, it is but just better than what is utterly intolerable. Dogberry has defined it exactly; it is most tolerable--and not to be endured.
The following speech of King Edward is in that better style of which the author's two chief models were not at their best incapable for awhile under the influence and guidance (we may suppose) of their friend Marlowe.
She is grown more fairer far since I came hither; Her voice more silver every word than other, Her wit more fluent. What a strange discourse Unfolded she of David and his Scots! _Even thus_, quoth she, _he spake_--and then spake broad, With epithets and accents of the Scot; But somewhat better than the Scot could speak: _And thus_, quoth she--and answered then herself; For who could speak like her? but she herself Breathes from the wall an angel's note from heaven Of sweet defiance to her barbarous foes. When she would talk of peace, methinks her tongue Commanded war to prison; {246} when of war, It wakened Caesar from his Roman grave To hear war beautified by her discourse. Wisdom is foolishness, but in her tongue; Beauty a slander, but in her fair face; There is no summer but in her cheerful looks, Nor frosty winter but in her disdain. I cannot blame the Scots that did besiege her, For she is all the treasure of our land; But call them cowards that they ran away, Having so rich and fair a cause to stay.
But if for a moment we may fancy that here and there we have caught such an echo of Marlowe as may have fallen from the lips of Shakespeare in his salad days, in his period of poetic pupilage, we have but a very little way to go forward before we come upon indisputable proof that the pupil was one of feebler hand and fainter voice than Shakespeare. Let us take the passage on poetry, beginning--
Now, Lodowick, invocate {247} some golden Muse To bring thee hither an enchanted pen;
and so forth. No scholar in English poetry but will recognise at once the flat and futile imitation of Marlowe; not of his great general style alone, but of one special and transcendant passage which can never be too often quoted.
If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, And every sweetness that inspired their hearts, Their minds, and muses on admired themes; If all the heavenly quintessence they still From their immortal flowers of poesy, Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive The highest reaches of a human wit; If these had made one poem's period, And all combined in beauty's worthiness, Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, Which into words no virtue can digest. {248}
Infinite as is the distance between the long roll of these mighty lines and the thin tinkle of their feeble imitator's, yet we cannot choose but catch the ineffectual note of a would-be echo in the speech of the King to his parasite--
For so much moving hath a poet's pen, etc., etc.
It is really not worth while to transcribe the poor meagre versicles at length: but a glance at the text will show how much fitter was their author to continue the tradition of Peele than to emulate the innovations of Marlowe. In the speeches that follow there is much pretty verbiage after the general manner of Elizabethan sonnetteers, touched here and there with something of a higher tone; but the whole scene drags, flags, halts onward at such a languid rate, that to pick out all the prettiest lines by way of sample would give a favourable impression but too likely to be reversed on further and fuller acquaintance.
Forget not to set down, how passionate, How heart-sick, and how full of languishment, Her beauty makes me. . . . . . Write on, while I peruse her in my thoughts. Her voice to music, or the nightingale: To music every summer-leaping swain Compares his sunburnt lover when she speaks; And why should I speak of the nightingale? The nightingale sings of adulterate wrong; And that, compared, is too satirical: For sin, though sin, would not be so esteemed; But rather virtue sin, sin virtue deemed. Her hair, far softer than the silkworm's twist, Like as a flattering glass, doth make more fair The yellow amber:--_Like a flattering glass_ Comes in too soon; for, writing of her eyes, I'll say that like a glass they catch the sun, And thence the hot reflection doth rebound Against my breast, and burns the heart within. Ah, what a world of descant makes my soul Upon this voluntary ground of love!
"Pretty enough, very pretty! but" exactly as like and as near the style of Shakespeare's early plays as is the style of Constable's sonnets to that of Shakespeare's. Unless we are to assign to the Master every unaccredited song, sonnet, elegy, tragedy, comedy, and farce of his period, which bears the same marks of the same date--a date, like our own, of too prolific and imitative production--as we find inscribed on the greater part of his own early work; unless we are to carry even as far as this the audacity and arrogance of our sciolism, we must somewhere make a halt--and it must be on the near side of such an attribution as that of _King Edward III_. to the hand of Shakespeare.
With the disappearance of the poetic pimp and the entrance of the unsuspecting Countess, the style rises yet again--and really, this time, much to the author's credit. It would need a very fine touch from a very powerful hand to improve on the delicacy and dexterity of the prelude or overture to the King's avowal of adulterous love. But when all is said, though very delicate and very dexterous, it is not forcible work: I do not mean by forcible the same as violent, spasmodic, emphatic beyond the modesty of nature; a poet is of course only to be commended, and that heartily, for keeping within this bound; but he is not to be commended for coming short of it. This whole scene is full of mild and temperate beauty, of fanciful yet earnest simplicity; but the note of it, the expression, the dominant key of the style, is less appropriate to the utterance of a deep and deadly passion than--at the utmost--of what modern tongues might call a strong and rather dangerous flirtation. Passion, so to speak, is quite out of this writer's call; the depths and heights of manly as of womanly emotion are alike beyond his reach.
Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, He turns to favour and to prettiness.
"To favour and to prettiness"; the definition of his utmost merit and demerit, his final achievement and shortcoming, is here complete and exact. Witness the sweet quiet example of idyllic work which I extract from a scene beginning in the regular amoebaean style of ancient pastoral.
_Edward_. Thou hear'st me say that I do dote on thee.
_Countess_. If on my beauty, take it if thou canst; Though little, I do prize it ten times less: If on my virtue, take it if thou canst; For virtue's store by giving doth augment: Be it on what it will that I can give And thou canst take away, inherit it.
_Edward_. It is thy beauty that I would enjoy.
_Countess_. O, were it painted, I would wipe it off, And dispossess myself to give it thee: But, sovereign, it is soldered to my life; Take one and both; for like an humble shadow It haunts the sunshine of my summer's life.
_Edward_. But thou mayst lend it me to sport withal.
_Countess_. As easy may my intellectual soul Be lent away, and yet my body live, As lend my body, palace to my soul, Away from her, and yet retain my soul. My body is her bower, her court, her abbey, And she an angel, pure, divine, unspotted; If I should lend her house, my lord, to thee, I kill my poor soul, and my poor soul me.