t:,y^ j>'a^^^^ -/f-^^ 
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN.
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN 
 
 A CRITICAL ESSAY. 
 
 BY 
 
 ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 CHATTO AND WINDUS, PICCADILLY 
 1S75.
 
 Z'^ SAiNXA BAltiUliA 
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 ^ I ^HE fame which from his own day to ours has 
 never wholly failed to attend the memory of 
 George Chapman has yet been hitherto of a looser 
 and vaguer kind than floats about the memory of 
 most other poets. In the gi*eat revival of studious 
 enthusiasm for the works of the many famous men 
 who won themselves a name during the seventy- 
 five memorable years of his laborious life, the mass 
 of his original work has been left too long unnoticed 
 and unhonoured. Our " Homer-Lucan," as he was 
 happily termed by Daniel in that admirable Defence 
 of Rhyme which remains to this day one of the 
 
 1
 
 2 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 most perfect examples of sound and temperate 
 sense, of pure style and just judgment, to be found 
 in the literature of criticism, has received it may be 
 not much less than his due meed of praise for those 
 Homeric labours by -^yhich his name is still chiefly 
 known ; but what the great translator could accom- 
 plish when fighting for his own hand few students 
 of English poetry have been careful to inquire or 
 competent to appreciate. 
 
 And yet there are not many among his various 
 and unequal writings which we can open without 
 some sense of great qualities in the workman whose 
 work lies before us. There are few poets from 
 whose remains a more copious and noble anthology 
 of detached beauties might be selected. He has a 
 singular force and depth of moral thought, a con- 
 stant energy and intensity of expression, an occa- 
 sional delicacy and perfection of fanciful or reflective 
 beauty, which should have ensured him a place in 
 the front rank at least of gnomic poets. It is true 
 that his " wisdom entangles itself in over-niceness ;" 
 that his philosophy is apt to lose its way among 
 brakes of digression and jungles of paradox ; that
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 3 
 
 his subtle and sleepless ingenuity can never resist 
 the lure of any quaint or perverse illustration which 
 may start across its path from some obscure corner 
 at the unluckiest and unlikeliest time ; that the 
 rough and barren byways of incongruous allusion, 
 of unseasonable reflection or preposterous and 
 grotesque symbolism, are more tempting to his feet 
 than the highway of art, and the brushwood or the 
 morass of metaphysics seems often preferable in his 
 eyes to the pastures or the gardens of poetry. But 
 from first to last the grave and frequent blemishes 
 of his genius bear manifestly more likeness to the 
 deformities of a giant than to the malformations of 
 a dwarf, to the overstrained muscles of an athlete 
 than to the withered limbs of a weaklinof. 
 
 He was born between Spenser and Shakespeare, 
 before the first dawn of English tragedy with the 
 morning star of Marlowe. Five years later that 
 great poet began a life more brief, more glorious 
 and more fruitful in proportion to its brevity than 
 that of any among his followers except Beaumont 
 and Shelley : each of these leaving at the close of 
 some thirty years of life a fresh crown of immor- 
 
 1—2
 
 4 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 tality to the national drama founded by the first- 
 born of the three. A few months more, and 
 Shakespeare was in the world; ten years further, 
 and Ben Jonson had followed. This latter poet, 
 the loving and generous panegyrist of Chapman, 
 was therefore fifteen years younger than his friend, 
 who was thus twenty years older than Fletcher, 
 and twenty-seven years older than Beaumont. All 
 these immortals he outlived on earth, with the 
 single exception of Jonson, who died but three 
 years after the death of the elder poet. No man 
 could ever look round upon a more godlike com- 
 pany of his fellows ; yet we have no record of his 
 relations with any of these but Jonson and Fletcher. 
 The date of Chapman's birth is significant, and 
 should be borne in mind when we attempt to 
 determine his rank among the poets of that golden 
 age. From the splendid and triumphant example 
 of the one great poet whose popularity his earlier 
 years must have witnessed, he may have caught a 
 contagious love of allegory and moral symbolism ; 
 he certainly caught nothing of the melodious ease 
 and delicate grace which gave Spenser his su-
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. .5 
 
 premacy in the soft empire of that moonlight- 
 coloured world where only his genius was at home. 
 Chapman's allegories are harsh, crude, and shape- 
 less ; for the sweet airs and tender outlines and 
 floating Elysian echoes of Spenser's vision, he has 
 nothing to offer in exchange but the thick rank 
 mist of a lowland inhabited by monstrous hybrids 
 and haunted by jarring discords. 
 
 Behind Spenser came Sidney and tlie Euphuists ; 
 and in their schools neither Chapman nor any other 
 was likely to leai-n much good. The natural defects 
 and dangers of his genius were precisely of the kind 
 most likely to increase in the contagion of such 
 company. He had received from nature at his 
 birtli a profuse and turbid imagination, a fiery 
 energy and restless ardour of moral passion and 
 spiritual ambition, with a plentiful lack of taste and 
 judgment, and a notable excess of those precious 
 qualities of pride and self-reliance which are at once 
 needful to support and liable to misguide an artist 
 on his way of work. The two main faults of the 
 school of poets which blossomed and faded from the 
 brief flower of court favour during the youth of
 
 6 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 Chapman were tedious excess of talk and grotesque 
 encumbrance of imagery; and Chapman had un- 
 happily a native tendency to the grotesque and 
 tedious, which all his study of the highest and 
 purest literature in the world was inadequate to 
 suppress or to chasten. For all his labours in the 
 field of Greek translation, no poet was ever less of a 
 Greek in style or spirit. He enters the serene 
 temples and handles the holy vessels of Hellenic art 
 with the stride and the grasp of a high-handed and 
 high-minded barbarian. 
 
 Nevertheless, it is among the schools of Greek 
 poetry that we must look for a type of the class to 
 which this poet belongs. In the great age of Greece 
 he would have found a place of some credit among 
 the ranks of the gnomic poets, and written much 
 grave and lofty verse of a moral and political sort 
 in praise of a powerful conservative oligarchy, and 
 in illustration of the public virtues which are fos- 
 tered and the public vices which are repressed under 
 the strong sharp tutelage of such a government. At 
 the many-headed beast of democracy he would have 
 discharged the keenest arrows of his declamation,
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 7 
 
 and sought shelter at need from its advance behind 
 the shield of some tutelary Pittacus or Pisistratus. 
 What Pope said of Chapman's Homer may be applied 
 with a difference to his original poetry ; it might 
 not be inaccurate to say that he often writes, not in- 
 deed as Homer, but as Theognis might have written 
 before he came to years of discretion. He shows, 
 we must admit, only in a few couplets or brief para- 
 graphs the pure and luminous charm of perfect 
 speech proper to a Greek moralist of the elegiac 
 school ; but he has more of a certain fire and force 
 of fancy than we should look for in a poet of that 
 order, where with far less of thick acrid smoke there 
 is also less real heat and flame perceptible than 
 struggles here through the fume and fog of a Cim- 
 merian style. The dialect of Chapman's poems is 
 undoubtedly portentous in its general barbarism ; 
 and that study of purer writers, which might in 
 another case have been trusted to correct and chasten 
 the turgid and fiery vigour of a barbarian imagina- 
 tion, seems too often to have encrusted the mind 
 with such arrogance and the style with such 
 pedantry as to make certain of these poems, full of
 
 8 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 earnest thought, of passionate energy, of tumid and 
 fitful eloquence, the most indigestible food ever 
 served up to the guests of a man of genius by the 
 master of the feast. Under no circumstances, pro- 
 bably, would Chapman have been always a pure 
 and harmonious writer, capable of casting into fit 
 and radiant form the dark hard masses of his deep 
 and ardent thought, of uttering the weighty and 
 noble things he had to say in a fluent and lucid 
 style ; but as it was, he appears from first to last to 
 have erected his natural defects into an artificial 
 system, and cultivated his incapacities as other men 
 cultivate their faculties. 
 
 " That Poesy should be as pervial as oratory, and 
 plainness her special ornament, were the plain way 
 to barbarism :" so he tells us at the very outset of 
 his career, in a letter of dedication prefixed to the 
 second of his published poems, and containing 
 several excellent reflections on the folly of those who 
 expect grave and deep matter of poetry to be so 
 handled that he who runs or lounges need not 
 pause or rouse himself to read. " That energia, or 
 clearness of representation, required in absolute
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 9 
 
 poems, is not the perspicuous delivery of a low in- 
 vention ; but high and hearty invention expressed 
 in most significant and unaffected phrase." That is 
 admirably said ; but when we turn to the practical 
 comment supplied by the poetry which illustrates 
 this critical profession of faith, we find it hard to 
 stomach the preacher's application of his text. In 
 this same dedication, which is well worth note and 
 regard from all students of Chapman — and with all 
 his shortcomings we may reasonably hope that the 
 number of them will increase, with the first issue of 
 his complete works, among all professed students of 
 English poetry at its highest periods — he proceeds 
 to a yet more distinct avowal of his main principle ; 
 and it is something to know that he had any, 
 though the knowledge be but too likely to depress 
 the interest and dishearten the sympathy of a reader 
 who but for this assurance of design would probably 
 have supposed that great part of these poems had 
 been written in a chaotic jargon, where grammar, 
 metre, sense, sound, coherence and relevancy are 
 hurled together on a heap of jarring and hurtling 
 ruins, rather because the author wanted skill or care
 
 lo GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 to write better, than because lie took pains to 
 achieve so remarkable a result by the observance of 
 fixed means for the attainment of a fixed purpose. 
 It should seem to be with malice aforethought that 
 lie sets himself to bring to perfection the qualities 
 of crabbed turgidity and barbarous bombast with 
 which nature had but too richly endowed him, 
 mingling these among many better gifts with so 
 cunning a hand and so malignant a liberality as 
 well-nigh to stifle the good seed of which yet she 
 had not been sparing. 
 
 " There is no confection made to last, but is ad- 
 mitted more cost and skill than presently-to-be- 
 used simples ; and in my opinion that which being 
 with a little endeavour searched adds a kind of 
 majesty to poesy is better than that which every 
 cobbler may sing to his patch. Obscurity in affec- 
 tion of words and indigested conceits is pedantical 
 and childish ; but where it shroudeth itself in the 
 heart of his subject, uttered with fitness of figure 
 and expressive epithets, with that darkness will I 
 still labour to be shadowed." This promise, we may 
 add, was most religiously kept ; but the labour was
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. ii 
 
 at least superfluous. To translate out of the crude 
 and incoherent forms of expression in which they 
 now lie weltering the scholastic subtleties and meta- 
 ph3'"sical symbols which beset the reader's diverted 
 and distracted attention at every step through the 
 jungle of these poems, and thus to render what he 
 had to say into some decent order and harmony, he 
 would have found a harder if a more profitable 
 labour than to fling forth his undigested thoughts 
 and incongruous fancies in a mass of rich inextri- 
 cable confusion for them to sift and sort who list. 
 But this, we see, was far enough from his purpose. 
 He takes his motto from Persius : — 
 
 " Quis leget hasc % Nemo, hercule, nemo ; 
 Vel duo vel nemo ;" 
 
 and the label thus afiixed to the forehead of one 
 volume might have served for almost any other of 
 his poems. His despair of a fit audience is less 
 remarkable than the bitter and violent expression 
 of his contempt for general opinion. " Such is the 
 wilful poverty of judgments, wandering like pass- 
 portless men in contempt of the divine discipline of
 
 12 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 poesy, that a man may well fear to frequent their 
 walks. The profane multitude I hate, and only 
 consecrate my strange poems to those searching 
 spirits whom learning hath made noble, and nobility 
 sacred." And this is throughout his manner of 
 reference to the tastes and judgments of those com- 
 mon readers in whose eyes he took such less than 
 little pains to make his work even passably attrac- 
 tive that we may presume this acrid tone of angry 
 contempt, half haughty and half petulant in its 
 endless repetition, to have had in it some salt of 
 sincerity as well as some underlying sense of con- 
 scious failure in the pursuit of that success on the 
 image or idea of which he turns and tramples with 
 passionate scorn. It is not usually till he has failed 
 to please that a man discovers how despicable and 
 undesirable a thing it would have been to succeed. 
 
 No student, however warm his goodwill and ad- 
 miration for the high-toned spirit and genius of 
 Chapman, will be disposed to wonder that he found 
 cause to growl and rail at the neglect and distaste 
 of the multitude for his writings. Demosthenes, 
 according to report, taught himself to speak with
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 13 
 
 pebbles in his mouth ; but it is presumable that he 
 also learnt to dispense with their aid before he stood 
 up against ^schines or Hyperides on any great 
 occasion of public oratory. Our philosophic poet, 
 on the other hand, before addressing such audience 
 as he may find, is careful always to fill his mouth 
 till the jaws are stretched wellnigh to bursting with 
 the largest, roughest, and most angular of polygonal 
 flintstones that can be hewn or dug out of the mine 
 of human language ; and as fast as one voluminous 
 sentence or unwieldy paragraph has emptied his 
 mouth of the first batch of barbarisms, he is no less 
 careful to refill it before proceeding to a fresh 
 delivery. I sincerely think a.nd hope that no poems 
 with a tithe of their genuine power and merit were 
 ever written on such a plan or after such a fashion 
 as the Shadoiv of Night or Andromeda Liherata of 
 Chapman. It is not merely the heavy and convul- 
 sive movement of the broken and jarring sentences, 
 the hurried broken-winded rhetoric that seems to 
 wheeze and pant at every painful step, the incessant 
 byplay of incongruous digressions and impenetrable 
 allusions, that make the first reading of these poems
 
 14 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 as tough and tedious a task for the mind as oakum- 
 picking or stone-breaking can be for the body. 
 Worse than all this is the want of any perceptible 
 centre towards which these tangled and ravelled 
 lines of thought may seem at least to converge. 
 We see that the author has thought hard and felt 
 deeply ; we apprehend that he is charged as it were 
 to the muzzle with some ardent matter of spiritual 
 interest, of which he would fain deliver himself in 
 explosive eloquence ; we perceive that he is angry, 
 ambitious, vehement and arrogant; no pretender, 
 but a genuine seer or Pythian bemused and stifled 
 by the oracular fumes which choke in its very 
 utterance the message they inspire, and for ever 
 preclude the seer from becoming properly the prophet 
 of their mysteries : 
 
 " We understand a fury in his words, 
 But not the words ;" 
 
 and the fury which alone we understand waxes 
 tenfold hotter at our incompetence to comprehend 
 what the orator is incompetent to express. He 
 foams at the mouth with rage through all the flints
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. i5 
 
 and pebbles of hard language which he spits forth, 
 so to say, in the face of ''the prejudicate and peremp- 
 tory reader" whose ears he belabours with "very 
 bitter words," and with words not less turgid than 
 were hurled by Pistol at the head of the recalcitrant 
 and contumelious Mistress Tearsheet : nor assuredly 
 had the poet much right to expect that they would 
 be received by the profane multitude with more 
 reverence and humility than was the poetic fury 
 of "such a fustian rascal" by that " honest, virtuous, 
 civil gentlewoman." 
 
 The charge of obscurity is perhaps of all charges 
 the likeliest to impair the fame or to imperil the 
 success of a rising or an established poet. It is as 
 often misapplied by hasty or ignorant criticism as 
 any other on the roll of accusations ; and was never 
 misapplied more persistently and perversely than to 
 an eminent writer of our own time. The difficulty 
 found by many in certain of Mr. Browning's works 
 arises from a quality the very reverse of that which 
 produces obscurity properly so called. Obscurity 
 is the natural product of turbid forces and con- 
 fused ideas ; of a feeble and clouded or of a
 
 j6 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 vigorous but unjSxed and chaotic intellect. Such a 
 poet as Lord Brooke, for example — and I take 
 George Chapman and Fulke Greville to be of all 
 English poets the two most genuinely obscure in 
 style upon whose works I have ever adventured to 
 embark in search of treasure hidden beneath the 
 dark gulfs and crossing currents of their rocky and 
 weedy waters, at some risk of my understanding 
 being swej)t away by the grounds well — such a poet, 
 overcharged with overflowing thoughts, is not 
 sufficiently possessed by any one leading idea, or 
 attracted towards any one central point, to see with 
 decision the proper end and use with resolution the 
 proper instruments of his design. Now if there is 
 any great quality more perceptible than another in 
 Mr. Browning's intellect it is his decisive and in- 
 cisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity 
 of perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of 
 aim. To charge him with obscurity is about as accu- 
 rate as to call Lynceus purblind or complain of the 
 sluggish action of the telegraphic wire. He is some- 
 thing too much the reverse of obscure ; he is too 
 brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 17 
 
 writer to follow with any certainty the track of an 
 intelligence which moves with such incessant 
 rapidity, or even to realize with what spider-like 
 swiftness and sagacity his building spirit leaps and 
 lightens to and fro and backward and forward as it 
 lives along the animated line of its labour, springs 
 from thread to thread and darts from centre to cir- 
 cumference of the glittering and quivering web of 
 living thought woven from the inexhaustible stores 
 of his perception and kindled from the inexhaust- 
 ible fire of his imagination. He never thinks 
 but at full speed; and the rate of his thought 
 is to that of another man's as the speed of a 
 railway to that of a waggon or the speed of a 
 telegraph to that of a railway. It is hopeless 
 to enjoy the charm or to apprehend the gist of his 
 writings except with a raind thoroughly alert, an 
 attention awake at all points, a spirit open and 
 ready to be kindled by the contact of the writer's. 
 To do justice to any book which deserves any other 
 sort of justice than that of the fire or the waste- 
 *paper basket, it is necessary to read it in the fit 
 frame of mind ; and the proper mood in which to 
 
 2
 
 i8 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 study for the first time a book of Mr. Browning's is 
 the freshest, clearest, most active mood of the mind 
 in its brightest and keenest hours of work. Read at 
 such a time, and not " with half-shut eyes falling 
 asleep in a half-dream," it will be found (in Chap- 
 man's phrase) " pervial " enough to any but a slug- 
 gish or a sandblind eye ; but at no time and in no 
 mood will a really obscure writer be found other than 
 obscure. The difference between the two is^the differ- 
 ence between smoke and lightning ; and it is far 
 more difficult to pitch the tone of your thought in 
 harmony with that of a foggy thinker, than with 
 that of one whose thought is electric in its motion. 
 To the latter we have but to come with an open and 
 pliant spirit, untired and undisturbed by the work 
 or the idleness of the day, and we cannot but receive 
 a vivid and active pleasure in following the swift 
 and fine radiations, the subtle play and keen vibra- 
 tion of its sleepless fires ; and the more steadily we 
 trace their course the more surely do we see that 
 these forked flashes of fancy and changing lights of 
 thought move unerringly around one centre, and
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 19 
 
 strike straight in the end to one point. Only ran- 
 dom thinking and random writing produce obscurity; 
 and these are the radical faults of Chapman's style 
 of poetry. We find no obscurity in the lightning, 
 whether it play about the heights of metaphysical 
 speculation or the depths of character and motive ; 
 the mind derives as much of vigorous enjoyment 
 from the study by such light of the one as of the 
 other. The action of so bright and swift a spirit 
 gives insight as it were to the eyes and wings to the 
 feet of our own; the reader's apprehension takes 
 fire from the writer's, and he catches from a subtler 
 and more active mind the infection of spiritual 
 interest ; so that any candid and clear-headed stu- 
 dent finds himself able to follow for the time in 
 fancy the lead of such a thinker with equal satisfac- 
 tion on any course of thought or argument ; when 
 he sets himself to refute Renan through the dying 
 lips of St. John or to try conclusions with Strauss 
 in his own person, and when he flashes at once the 
 whole force of his illumination full upon the inmost 
 thought and mind of the most infamous criminal, a 
 
 2—2
 
 20 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 Guido Franceschini or a Louis Bonaparte, com- 
 pelling the black and obscene abyss of such a spirit 
 to yield up at last the secret of its profoundest 
 sophistries, and let forth the serpent of a soul that 
 lies coiled under the most intricate and supple 
 reasonings of self-justified and self-conscious crime. 
 And thanks to this very quality of vivid spiritual 
 illumination, we are able to see by the light of the 
 author's mind without being compelled to see with 
 his eyes, or with the eyes of the living mask which 
 he assumes for his momentary impersonation of 
 saint or sophist, philosopher or malefactor; with- 
 out accepting one conclusion^ conceding one point, 
 or condoning one crime. It is evident that to 
 produce any such effect requires above all things 
 brightness and decision as well as subtlety and 
 pliancy of genius ; and this is the supreme gift 
 and distinctive faculty of Mr. Browning's mind. 
 If indeed there be ever any likelihood of error 
 in his exquisite analysis, he will doubtless be 
 found to err rather through excess of light than 
 through any touch of darkness ; we may doubt, 
 not without a sense that the fittest mood of criti-
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 11 
 
 cism might be that of a self-distrustful confidence 
 in the deeper intuition of his finer and more 
 perfect knowledge, whether the perception of good 
 or evil would actually be so acute in the mind of 
 the supposed reasoner; whether for instance a 
 veritable household assassin, a veritable saviour of 
 society or other incarnation of moral pestilence, 
 would in effect see so clearly and so far, with what- 
 ever perversion or distortion of view, into the re- 
 cesses of the pit of hell wherein he lives and moves 
 and has his being; recognising with quick and 
 delicate apprehension what points of vantage he 
 must strive to gain, what outposts of self-defence 
 he may hope to guard, in the explanation and 
 vindication of the motive forces of his nature 
 and the latent mainspring of his deeds. This 
 fineness of intellect and dramatic sympathy which 
 is ever on the watch to anticipate and answer 
 the unspoken imputations and prepossessions of 
 his hearer, the very movements of his mind, the 
 very action of his instincts, is perhaps a quality 
 hardly compatible with a nature which we might 
 rather suppose, judging from public evidence and
 
 22 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 historic indication, to be sluggish and short-sighted, 
 " a sly slow thing with circumspective eye " that 
 can see but a little way immediately around it, but 
 neither before it nor behind, above it nor beneath ; 
 and whose introspection, if ever that eye were 
 turned inward, would probably be turbid, vacil- 
 lating, cloudy and uncertain as the action of a spirit 
 incapable of self-knowledge but not incapable of 
 self-distrust, timid and impenitent, abased and un- 
 abashed, remorseless but not resolute, shameless but 
 not fearless. If such be in reality the public traitor 
 and murderer of a nation, we may fairly infer that 
 his humbler but not viler counterpart in private life 
 will be unlikely to exhibit a finer quality of mind 
 or a clearer faculty of reason. But this is a question 
 of realism which in no wise affects the spiritual 
 value and interest of such work as Mr. Browning's. 
 What is important for our present purpose is to 
 observe that this work of exposition by soliloquy 
 and apology by analysis can only be accomplished 
 or undertaken by the genius of a great special 
 pleader, able to fling himself with all his heart and 
 all his brain, with all the force of liis intellect and
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 23 
 
 all the strength of his imagination, into the assumed 
 part of his client; to concentrate on the cause in 
 hand his whole power of illustration and illumina- 
 tion, and bring to bear upon one point at once 
 all the rays of his thought in one focus. Apart 
 from his gift of moral imagination, Mr. Brown- 
 ing has in the supreme degree the qualities of a 
 great debater or an eminent leading counsel ; his 
 finest reasoning has in its expression and develop- 
 ment something of the ardour of personal energy 
 and active interest which inflames the argument of 
 a public speaker ; we feel, without the reverse 
 regret of Pope, how many a firstrate barrister or 
 parliamentary tactician has been lost in this poet. 
 The enjoyment that his best and most characteristic 
 work afibrds us is doubtless far other than the 
 delight we derive from the purest and highest forms 
 of lyi'ic or dramatic art; there is a radical dif- 
 ference between the analyst and the dramatist, the 
 pleader and the prophet. It would be clearly im- 
 possible for the subtle tongue which can undertake 
 at once the apology and the anatomy of such mo- 
 tives as may be assumed to impel or to support a
 
 24 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 "Prince Holienstiel-Schwangau " on Lis ways of 
 thought and action, ever to be touched with the fire 
 which turns to a sword or to a scourge the tongue 
 of a poet to whom it is given to utter as from Pat- 
 mos or from Sinai the word that fills all the heaven 
 of song with the lightnings and thunders of chas- 
 tisement. But in place of lyric rapture or dramatic 
 action we may profitably enjoy the unique and 
 incomparable genius of analysis which gives to these 
 special pleadings such marvellous life and interest 
 as no other workman in that kind was ever or will 
 ever again be able to give ; we may pursue with 
 the same sense of strenuous delight in a new exer- 
 cise of intellect and interest the slender and luminous 
 threads of speculation wound up into a clue with so 
 fine a skill and such happy sleight of hand in Fijine 
 at the Fair or the sixth book of Bordello, where the 
 subtle secret of spiritual weakness in a soul of too 
 various powers and too restless refinement is laid 
 bare with such cunning strength of touch, con- 
 demned and consoled with such far-sighted compas- 
 sion and regret. 
 
 This last-named poem has been held especially
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 25 
 
 liable to the cliarge which we have seen to be espe- 
 cially inapplicable to the general work of its author ; 
 but although the manner of its construction should 
 not seem defensible, as to me I may confess that it 
 does not, it would be an utter misuse of terms to 
 find in obscurity of thought or language the cause 
 of this perceptible defect. The point of difference 
 was accurately touched by the exquisite critical 
 genius of Coleridge when he defined the style of 
 Persius as " hard — not obscure :" for this is equally 
 trae in the main of the style of bordello ; only the 
 hard metal is of a different quality and temper, as 
 the intellect of the English thinker is far wider in 
 its reach, far subtler in its action and its aim, than 
 that of the Roman stoic. The error, if I vosky take 
 on myself to indicate what I conceive to be the 
 error, of style in Sordello is twofold ; it is a com- 
 posite style, an amalgam of irreconcilable materials 
 that naturally refuse to coalesce ; and, like a few of 
 the author's minor poems, it is written at least par- 
 tially in shorthand, which a casual reader is likely 
 to mistake for cipher, and to complain accordingly 
 that the key should be withheld from him. A
 
 26 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 curious light is thrown on the method of its com- 
 position by the avowal put forth in the dedication 
 of a reissue of this poem, that since its first adven- 
 ture on publicity the writer had added and had can- 
 celled a notable amount of illustrative or explanatory 
 matter, preferring ultimately to leave his work such 
 a poem as the few must like, rather than such as 
 the many might. Against this decision no one has 
 a right to appeal ; and there is doubtless much in 
 the work as it stands that all imaginative thinkers 
 and capable students of poetry most assuredly must 
 regard with much more than mere liking ; but when 
 the reader is further invited to observe that the sole 
 aim kept in sight, the sole object of interest pursued 
 by the author, was the inner study of an individual 
 mind, the occult psychology of a single soul, the 
 personal pathology of a special intelligence, he has 
 a right to suggest that in that case there is too 
 much, and in any other case there is not enough, of 
 external illustration and the byplay of alien actions 
 and passions which now serve only to perplex the 
 scheme they ought to explain. If it was the 
 author's purpose to give to his philosophic poem a 
 
 1
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. vj 
 
 background of historic action, to relieve against the 
 broad mass and movement of outer life the solitary 
 process of that inward and spiritual tragedy which 
 was the main occupation of his mind and art^ to set 
 the picture of a human spirit in the frame of cir- 
 cumstances within which it may actually have been 
 environed and beset with offers of help, with threats 
 and temptations, doubts and prospects and chances 
 of the day it had on earth, — if this was his pur- 
 pose, then surely there is not here enough of such 
 relief to illustrate a design which there is more than 
 enough of it to confuse. But if, as we are now 
 obliged to assume, the author's purpose was stu- 
 diously and strenuously to restrict within the limits 
 of inner spiritual study the interest and the motive 
 of his work, to concentrate our attention with his 
 own upon the growth and the fortune, the triumph 
 and the failure, the light and the darkness of this 
 one human spirit^ the soul of a man of genius fallen 
 upon evil days and elect for great occasions and 
 begirt with strange perplexities, then surely there is 
 here far too much of external distraction and diver- 
 sion for the reader's mind even to apprehend the
 
 28 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 issue, much less to comprehend the process, of this 
 inner tragic action. The poem, in short, is like a 
 picture in which the background runs into the fore- 
 ground, the figures and the landscape confound each 
 other for want of space and proportion, and there is 
 no middle distance discernible at all. It is but a 
 natural corollary to this general error that the body 
 like the spirit of the poem, its form not less than its 
 thought, should halt between two or three diverse 
 ways, and that the style should too often come to 
 the ground between two stools or more ; being as it 
 is neither a dramatic nor a narrative style, neither 
 personal nor impersonal, neither lyric nor historic, 
 but at once too much of all these and not enough of 
 any. The result may be to the hasty reader no less 
 repellent than the result of obscurity in thought or 
 in style ; but from identity of effect we are not to 
 infer an identity of cause. 
 
 The best parts of this poem also belong in sub- 
 stance always and sometimes in form to the class of 
 monodramas or soliloquies of the spirit ; a form to 
 which the analj^tic genius of Mr. Browning leads 
 him ever as by instinct to return, and in which
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 29 
 
 alone it finds play for its especial faculties and 
 security against its especial liabilities to error and 
 confusion of styles ; a security for want of which 
 his lyric and dramatic writing is apt to be neither 
 dramatic nor lyrical, simply because of the writer's 
 natural and inevitable tendency to analysis, which, 
 by the nature of things as well as by the laws 
 of art, can only explain a,nd express itself either 
 through the method of direct exposition or in the 
 form of elaborate mental monologue. The whole 
 argument of the sixth book is monodramatic \ 
 and its counterpart is to be sought in the most 
 dramatic and to me the most delightful passage 
 of equal length in the poem, the magnificent 
 soliloquy of Salinguerra in the fourth book, full of 
 the subtle life and reality and pathos which the 
 author, to speak truth as it seems to me, too gene- 
 rally fails to transfer from monologue into dialogue, 
 to translate into the sensible action and passion of 
 tragedy, or adequately to express in fulness and fit- 
 ness of lyric form. The finest and most memorable 
 parts of his plays not less than of his poems are 
 almost always reducible in their essence to what I
 
 30 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 have called monodrama ; and if cast into the mono- 
 dramatic form common to all his later writings 
 would have found a better if not a keener expression 
 and left a clearer if not a deeper impression on the 
 mind. For one example, the communing of old 
 King Victor with himself on his return to the palace 
 he has resigned is surely far more impressive and 
 memorable to any reader than the rest of the play 
 where his character is exhibited in the mutual action 
 and reaction of dialogue among characters who 
 seem unable to say rightly what they should say 
 except when alone or secure from interruption. 
 Even Chapman, from whom I may be thought to 
 have wandered somewhat far in this inquiry as to 
 what is or is not properly definable as obscurity, has 
 in my judgment a sounder instinct of dramatic dia- 
 logue and movement than the illustrious writer who 
 has carved out for himself in the second period of 
 his career a new and better way to the end appointed 
 by nature for the exercise of his highest powers ; 
 and Chapman was certainly not remarkable among 
 the great men of his day for the specially dramatic 
 bent of his genius.
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 31 
 
 I have dwelt thus long on a seemingly irrelevant 
 and discursive inquiry because I could discover no 
 method so fit to explain the nature of the fault I 
 cannot but find in the poet of whom I have to speak, 
 as by contrast of his work with the work of another, 
 upon whom this fault has been wrongly charged by 
 the inaccurate verdict of hasty judges. In answer 
 to these I have shown that the very essence of Mr. 
 Browning's aim and method, as exhibited in the 
 ripest fruits of his intelligence, is such as implies 
 above all other things the possession of a quality 
 the very opposite of obscurity — a faculty of spiritual 
 illumination rapid and intense and subtle as light- 
 ning, which brings to bear upon its central object 
 by way of direct and vivid illustration every symbol 
 and every detail on which its light is flashed in 
 passing. Thus in Fijine the illustration derived 
 from a visionary retrospect of Venice, and in Sor- 
 dello the superb and wonderful comparison of the 
 mental action of a man who puts by for a season 
 the memories in which he has indulged for a mo- 
 ment before turning again to the day's work, with 
 that of a fugitive slave who thinks over in a pause
 
 32 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 of his flight and puts aside for more practical means 
 of revenge the thought of enchantments " sovereign 
 to plague his enemies," as he buckles himself again 
 to the grim business of escape — these and other such 
 illustrative passages are not more remarkable for 
 the splendour of their imaginative quality than for 
 the aptness of their cunning application and the 
 direct lisht reflected from them on the immediate 
 argument which is penetrated and vivified through- 
 out by the insinuation and exploration of its radi- 
 ance. Few poets, on the other hand, have been 
 more unsparing in the use of illustration than Chap- 
 man ; he flings about similes by the handful, many 
 of them difluse and elaborate in expression, most of 
 them curiously thoughtful and ingenious, not a few 
 of them eloquent and impressive ; but in many cases 
 they tend rather to distract the attention of the 
 reader than to elucidate the matter of his study. 
 To his first poem, short as it is, Chapman appends a 
 glossary to explain the accumulated allusions of a 
 mythological kind, with this note at the foot of it : 
 ^*For the rest of his own invention, figures and 
 similes, touching their aptness and novelty, he hath
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 33 
 
 not laboured to justify them, because he hopes they 
 will be proved enough to justify themselves, and 
 prove sufficiently authentical to such as understand 
 them; for the rest, God help them" (for the poet 
 evidently will not), " I cannot do as others, make 
 day seem a lighter woman than she is, by painting 
 her." The poem is however rich in fine verses 
 which struggle into sight through the vaporous 
 atmosphere of bombast and confusion ; it is thought- 
 ful, earnest, eloquent, with interludes of mere violent 
 and dissonant declamation, and rarer flashes of high 
 and subtle beauty. The licentious grammar and 
 the shapeless structure of sentences that break all 
 bounds of sense or harmony are faults that cannot 
 be overlooked and must be condoned if we care to 
 get at the kernel underlying these outer and inner 
 husks of hard language. The same comment may 
 be applied to the poems which follow; but the 
 second Hymn, being longer and more discursive 
 than the first, is more extravagant and inco- 
 herent, and its allegory more confused and difii- 
 cult (whenever it is possible) to follow. Whether 
 or not there be as usual any reference to EKzabeth 
 
 3
 
 34 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 and her court under the hkeness of Cynthia and 
 her nymphs, or any allusion to English matters of 
 contemporary interest, to perils and triumphs of 
 policy or war, in the " sweet chase" of the trans- 
 formed nymph Euthymia under the shape of a pan- 
 ther or a boar by the hounds of the goddess which 
 pursue her into the impenetrable thicket where the 
 souls of such as have revolted from the empire of 
 Cynthia are held in bondage and torment, and 
 whence the hunters who hew themselves a way into 
 the covert are forced to recoil in horror, it is easier 
 to conjecture than to determine : but the " fruitful 
 island" to which the panther flies and eludes the 
 hounds who track her by scent should be recog- 
 nizable as England, " full of all wealth, delight, and 
 empery;" though the sequel in which the panther, 
 turned into a huger boar than that of Calydon, lays 
 waste its "noblest mansions, gardens, and groves" 
 through which the chase makes way, may seem 
 now more impenetrable to human apprehension 
 than the covert before described. Leaving how- 
 ever to others, without heed of the poet's expressed 
 contempt for our " flesh-confounded souls," the task
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 35 
 
 of seeking a solution for riddles to us insoluble, we 
 may note in this poem the first sign of that high 
 patriotic quality which, though common to all the 
 great of his generation, is more constantly per- 
 ceptible in the nobler moods of Chapman's mind 
 than in the work of many among his compeers. 
 Especially in the reference of one elaborate simile 
 to a campaign in the Netherlands, and the leader- 
 ship of the English forces by 
 
 "War's qviick artisan, 
 Fame-thriving Vere, that in those countries wan 
 More fame than guerdon," 
 
 we trace the lifelong interest taken by this poet in 
 the fortunes of English fighting men in foreign wars 
 and the generous impulse which moved him twenty- 
 eight years later, at the age of sixty-three, to plead 
 in earnest and fervent verses the cause of Sir Hora- 
 tio Vere, then engaged ' with his poor handful of 
 English' in the 'first act of the Thirty Years' 
 War,'* (' besieged and distressed in Mainhem,' 
 Chapman tells us,) in the ears of the courtiers of 
 James I. A quainter example of this interest in the 
 
 * Carlyle's Frederick the Great, book iii. chapter xvi. ; 
 vol. i. p. 329. 
 
 3—2
 
 36 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 foreign campaigns of his countrymen may be found 
 in the most untimely intrusion of sach another 
 simile into the third sestiad of Hero and Leander. 
 
 Before I take in hand the examination of Chap- 
 man's works as a dramatist, T may sum up the best 
 and the worst I have to say of his earlier poems in 
 the remark that on a jfirst plunge into their depths 
 even the reader most willing to accept and most 
 anxious to admire the firstfruits of a poet's mind 
 which he knows to have elsewhere put forth such 
 noble fruit as Chapman's will be liable to do them 
 less than justice until his own mind recovers from the 
 shock given to his taste by the crabbed and bom- 
 bastic verbiage, the tortuous and pedantic obscurity, 
 the rigidity and the laxity of a style which moves 
 as it were with a stiff shuffle, at once formal and 
 shambling; which breaks bounds with a limping 
 gait, and plays truant from all rule without any of 
 the grace of freedom; wanders beyond law and 
 straggles out of order at the halting pace of age and 
 gravity, and in the garb of a schoolmaster plays the 
 pranks of a schoolboy with a ponderous and lumba- 
 ginous license of movement, at once rheumatic and
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 37 
 
 erratic. With the recovery will probably come a 
 reaction from this first impression ; and the student 
 will perhaps be more than sufficiently inclined to 
 condone these shortcomings in favour of the merits 
 they obscure at first sight ; the wealth of imagery, 
 the ardour of thought and feeling, the grave and 
 vigorous harmony of the better parts, and the 
 general impression left on us of communion with a 
 strong, earnest, high-minded man of genius, set 
 adrift without helm or rudder ; of lofty instincts 
 and large aspirations that run rather to leaf than to 
 fruit for want of an eye to choose their proper aim, 
 and a hand to use the means to it aright. The 
 editor of the first and by no means the worst 
 English anthology has gathered from these poems, 
 and especially from Ovid's Banquet of Sense, large 
 handfuls of fine verses, which when thus culled out 
 and bound up into separate sheaves make a better 
 show than in the text where they lay entangled 
 among weeds and briars. There are beauties 
 enough lost in this thick and thorny jungle of 
 scholastic sensuality to furnish forth a dozen or so 
 of pilfering poeticules with abundance of purple
 
 38 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 patches to be sewn on at intervals to the common 
 texture of their style. 
 
 It is with a singular sense of jarring admiration 
 and irritation that we find couplets and quatrains 
 of the most noble and delicate beauty embedded in 
 the cumbrous ore of crude pedantic jargon : but 
 those who will may find throughout the two earliest 
 publications of Chapman a profusion of good verses 
 thickly scattered among an overgrowth of bad. The 
 first poem however which leaves us on the whole 
 with a general and equable impression of content 
 is the small " epic song " or copy of verses on the 
 second expedition to Guiana. Here the poet has 
 got clear of those erotic subtleties and sensual 
 metaphysics which were served up at his "banquet" 
 in such clumsy vessels of the coarsest ware by the 
 awkward and unwashed hands of an amorous 
 pedant, soiling with the ink of the schools the lifted 
 hem of the garment of love ; he has found instead a 
 fit argument for his genius in the ambition and 
 adventure of his boldest countrymen, and applied 
 himself to cheer and celebrate them " in no ignoble 
 verse." The first brief paragraph alone is crabbed
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 39 
 
 and inflated in style ; from thence to the end, with 
 but slight breaks or jars, the strong and weighty- 
 verse steps out with masculine dignity, and delivers 
 in clear grave accents its cordial message of praise 
 and good cheer. At all times Chapman took 
 occasion to approve himself a true son of the 
 greatest age of Englishmen in his quick and fiery 
 sympathy with the daring and the suffering of its 
 warriors and adventurers ; a sympathy which found 
 vent at times where none but Chapman would have 
 made room for it ; witness the sudden and singular 
 illustration, in his Epicede on the death of Prince 
 Henry, of the popular anguish and dismay at that 
 calamity by a " description of the tempest that cast 
 Sir Th. Gates on the Bermudas, and the state of his 
 ship and men, to this kingdom's plight applied in 
 the Prince's death." It has been remarked by 
 editors and biographers that between the years 
 1574, at or about which date, according to Anthony 
 Wood, " he, being well-grounded in school learning, 
 was sent to the university," and 1594, when he 
 published his first poem, we have no trace or hint 
 to guide us in conjecturing how his life was spent
 
 40 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 from fifteen to thirty-five. This latter age is the 
 least he can have attained by any computation at 
 the time when he put forth his Shadow of Night, 
 full of loud and angry complaints of neglect and 
 slio-ht endured at the hands of an unthankful and 
 besotted generation ; it is somewhat late in life for 
 the first appearance of a poet, and the poem then 
 issued is a more crude and chaotic performance than 
 might be looked for from a writer who has no longer 
 the plea of unripe age to put forward in excuse of 
 the raw green fruits which he offers to the reader. 
 
 Dr, Elze, in the learned and ingenious essay 
 prefixed to his edition of Chapman's Alphonsus, 
 points out that from the internal evidence of that 
 play ' we are driven to the alternative either of 
 supposing Chapman to have been in Germany or of 
 allowing him a German partner ' (p. 33), and a little 
 before observes that 'there is ample room between 
 his leaving the university without a degree in 1576 
 or 1578 and his first acknowledged publication in 
 1594 even for a lengthened stay in Germany.' In 
 default of evidence we might perhaps be permitted 
 to throw out a guess that the future poet had in his
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 4r 
 
 youth seen some service and been possibly an eye- 
 ■witness of some part of the campaigns in the Low 
 Countries to which he refers in a manner showing 
 his intimate acquaintance with the details of an 
 action on the 'most excellent river' Wall before 
 * stately-sighted sconce-torn Nimiguen,' fought be- 
 tween the cavalr}^ of ' the Italian Duke ' and 
 the English leader, Sir Francis or Sir Horatio 
 Vere, who drew the enemy's horse, by a feint made 
 with his own, into an ambuscade of infantry by 
 which they were put to rout. Both the text 
 and the note appended show a willingness to 
 display this knowledge of the strategy and 
 geography of the skirmish with some ostentation 
 of precision; his parting remark at the end of 
 the note has a tone of satisfaction in the dis- 
 covery of a new order of illustration. 'And 
 these like similes, in my opinion, drawn from the 
 honourable deeds of our noble countrymen, clad in 
 comely habit of poesy, would become a poem as 
 well as further-fetched grounds, if such as be poets 
 nowadays would use them.' He was not himself, 
 as we have seen, over careful to use them at the
 
 42 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 right moment or turn them to the most natural 
 account; but to the principle here advanced he 
 remained stanch in his later writings. 
 
 It may be thought somewhat out of keeping with 
 the general reputation of Chapman as a retired 
 student of a grave and sober habit of life that he 
 should be supposed to have ever taken any active 
 part in a military campaign ; but those were days 
 when scholars and men of letters were not uncom- 
 monly found apt for employment in matters of war 
 and policy, and gave good proof of a right to claim 
 their place among other servants of the state for the 
 performance of high patriotic duty; nor, unless we 
 please, need we imagine Chapman to have served 
 personally as a volunteer in the English ranks ; but 
 it is reasonable to conceive that either in person or 
 by proxy he may have had special opportunities of 
 studying the incidents of war in the Netherlands, 
 which he would evidently have been mindful to 
 make the most of and quick to put to use. It is 
 also possible that his relations with the stage may 
 have begun at an earlier date than has yet been 
 traced ; and as we know that in 1585, when Chap-
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 4j 
 
 man was twenty-six years old, Leicester brouglit 
 over to Holland a company of actors in his train 
 when he set sail as commander of the forces des- 
 patched from England to the support of the States- 
 General, and that others followed suit on their own 
 score in succeeding years, those who are unwilling 
 to allow him a chance of service as a soldier may 
 prefer to conjecture that he was drawn to the seat 
 of war by the more probable force of some poetic or 
 theatrical connection with either the general's first 
 troop of players or that which followed in its track 
 five years later. That these earlier adventurers 
 were succeeded by fresh companies in 1604 and 
 1605, and again forty years later, at an unpropitious 
 date for actors in England, eleven years after the 
 death of Chapman, I further learn from an article in 
 the AtJwiiceum (Sept. 5th, 1874) on Herr von Hell- 
 wald's ' History of the Stage in Holland j' and eight 
 years later than the venture of the second company 
 of players in 1590, we find Chapman classed by 
 Meres ' among the best of our tragic writers for the 
 stage/ and repeatedly entered on Henslowe's books 
 as debtor to the manager for some small advance of
 
 44 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 money on future dramatic work to be supplied to 
 his company. 
 
 In any case it is remarkable that his first play 
 should not have been brought on the stage till the 
 poet was thirty-six, or published till he was rising 
 forty ; an age at which most men, who might have 
 written such a play at sixteen, would have been un- 
 willing to expose it to the light. It is even a more 
 crude and graceless piece of work, if we consider it 
 as designed for the stage, than his first venture of 
 the preceding year if we regard it as intended for 
 the study. The plot is more childish, though the 
 language may be purer, than we find in the rudest 
 sketches of Greene or Peele, whose day was now 
 well over ; and even for the firstfruits of ' a person 
 of most reverend aspect, religious and temperate, 
 qualities rarely meeting in a poet,' it will be ad- 
 mitted that the moral tone of Chapman's two earliest 
 comedies is not remarkably high. The first deals 
 solely with the impossible frauds, preposterous adul- 
 teries, and farcical murders committed by a disguised 
 hero who assumes the mask of as many pseudonyms 
 to perpetrate his crimes as ever were assumed in Old
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 45 
 
 or New Grub Street by a prudent member of the 
 libellous order of rascally rhymesters to vent his 
 villainies in shameful safety. The story is beneath 
 the credulity of a nursery, and but for some de- 
 tached passages of clear and vigorous writing the 
 whole work might plausibly have been signed by 
 any of the names under which a dunce of the order 
 above-mentioned might think it wisest to put forth 
 his lyrics or his lies. In the better passages, and 
 noticeably in a description of jewels engraved with 
 figures of the gods, we catch a faint echo of the 
 " mighty line " in which Marlowe would lavish on 
 such descriptions the wealth and strength, the ma- 
 jesty and the fancy, of his full imperial style. 
 
 The frank folly and reckless extravagance of in- 
 cident which appear to have won for Chapman's 
 first play the favour of an audience not remarkable, 
 it should seem, for captious nicety of critical taste 
 and judgment, are less perceptible in his second 
 venture ; but this also is a crude and coarse sample 
 of workmanship. The characters are a confused 
 crowd of rough sketches, whose thin outlines and 
 faint colours are huddled together on a ragged can-
 
 46 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 vass without order or proportion. There is some 
 promise of humour in the part of a Puritan adul- 
 teress, but it comes to little or nothing; and the 
 comedy rather collapses than concludes in a tangle 
 of incongruous imbecilities and incoherent indecen- 
 cies. The text is seemingly more corrupt than we 
 find in Chapman's other plays, which are generally 
 exempt from such gross and multitudinous misprints 
 as deform the early editions of many Elizabethan 
 dramatists ; their chief defect is the confusion and 
 the paucity of stage directions. In the opening 
 speech of An Humorous Day's Mirth, from the 
 fourteenth to the sixteenth verse, we must supply 
 with some such reading as this the evident hiatus 
 of sense and metre in the fifteenth : 
 
 " But pure rehgion being but mental stuff, 
 And sense, indeed, [being] all* [but] for itself, 
 'Tis to be doubted," etc. 
 
 The text and arrangement of the scenes through- 
 
 * Perhaps an adjective has here dropped out, and we 
 might read the hemistich thus : ' all covetous for itself,' or 
 ^ careful/ ' curious,' ' gluttonous,' any of which words would 
 fit the metre, and suit the sense of the passage.
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 47 
 
 out this comedy require a more careful revision than 
 has yet been given ; since if the crudest work of a 
 man of genius is not to be rejected from the list of 
 his writings in which it has once found place, it 
 claims at least so much of editorial care as may 
 leave it in a reasonably legible form. 
 
 It appears that in the same year which gave to 
 the press this loose and slipshod effort at a comedy, 
 the most perfect of Chapman's plays, though not 
 published till six years later, was completed for the 
 stage. The admirable comedy of All Fools is the 
 first work which bears full evidence of the vigorous 
 and masculine versatility, the force and freshness of 
 his free and natural genius. The dedication, which 
 seems to have been cancelled almost as soon as is- 
 sued, gives one of the most singular proofs on record 
 of a poet's proverbial inability to discern between 
 his worse and better work. The writer who ten 
 years before was so loud in his complaint of men's 
 neglect, and so haughty in his claim on their atten- 
 tion for his crudest and faultiest work, now assures 
 the friend to whom he inscribes a poem of real ex- 
 cellence,
 
 48 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 " I am most loth to pass your sight 
 
 With any such-like mark of vanity, 
 Being marked with age for aims of greater weight 
 
 And drowned in dark death-ushering melancholy ;" 
 
 but for fear of piratical publishers who might print 
 'by stealth' an unauthorized and interpolated 
 edition, ' without my passport, patched with other's 
 wit,' he consents to ' expose to every common eye ' 
 what he calls 
 
 " The least allowed birth of my shaken brain," 
 
 alleffino; as his excuse that ' of two enforced ills I 
 elect the least;' and with this most superfluous 
 apology he ushers in one of the most faultless ex- 
 amples of high comedy to be found in the whole rich 
 field of our Elizabethan drama. The style is limpid 
 and luminous as running water, the verse pure, 
 simple, smooth and strong, the dialogue always 
 bright, fluent, lively, and at times relieved with 
 delicate touches of high moral and intellectual 
 beauty ; the plot and the characters excellently 
 fitted to each other, with just enough intricacy and 
 fullness of incident to sustain without relaxation or 
 confusion the ready interest of readers or spectators.
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 49 
 
 The play and counterplay of action by which all the 
 chief persons of the comedy trick and are tricked by 
 each other in turn might easily have become per- 
 plexed or excessive in less careful and skilful hands ; 
 but the lightness and dexterity of handling which 
 the poet has here for once manifested throughout 
 the whole development of his dramatic scheme 
 suflfice to keep the course of the story clear and the 
 attention of the reader alert without involution or 
 fatigue ; and over all the dialogue and action there 
 plays a fresh and radiant air of mirth and light 
 swift buoyancy of life which breathes rather of 
 joyous strength and high-spirited health than of 
 the fumes of ' dark death-ushering melancholy ;' 
 and as in matter of fact death was not ushered by 
 melancholy or any other evil spirit into the stout 
 presence of the old poet till full thirty-five years 
 after the appearance and twenty-nine years after 
 the dedication of this play, we may hopefull}^ set 
 down this malcontent phrase to some untimely fit of 
 spleen from which, having thus given it vent, he 
 soon shook himself clear and struck his pen through 
 the record of it. 
 
 4
 
 50 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 I find but one slight and characteristic blemish 
 worth noting in a comedy in which the proudest 
 among his great compeers might have permissibly 
 taken fresh pride : it is that the final scene of dis- 
 covery which winds up the main thread and recon- 
 ciles the chief agents of the intrigue is somewhat 
 hurriedly despatched, with too rapid a change of 
 character and readjustment of relations, to make 
 room for a thin-spun and wiredrawn sample of that 
 tedious burlesque declamation with which the author 
 was too prone to indulge a taste not likely to be 
 shared or relished by his readers for the minute 
 dissection of a dead jest, so dry that it crumbles into 
 dust under the scalpel of the anatomist. All the rest 
 of the comedy is so light, bright, and easy in all its 
 paces that we are the less disposed to tolerate the 
 stiffness and elaboration of this oratorical interlude. 
 But this is really the only spot or patch I can dis- 
 cover on the jocund face of a delightful comic 
 poem. 
 
 It is not impossible that the merit of pure and 
 lucid style which distinguishes the best comedies of 
 Chapman from the bulk of his other writings may
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 51 
 
 in part be owing to the slighter value set b}^ the 
 author on the workmanship of these. By tempera- 
 ment and inclination he was rather an epic or tragic 
 than a comic poet : and in writing verse of a tragic 
 or epic quality he evidently felt it incumbent on 
 him to assert the dignity of his office, to inflate and 
 exalt his style with all helps of metaphor and hyper- 
 bole, to stiffen the march of his metre and harden 
 the structure of his lano-uage : and hence he is but 
 too prone to rely at need on false props of adven- 
 titious and barbaric dignity, to strut on stilts or to 
 swim on bladders : whereas in writing for the comic 
 stage he was content to forget, or at least to forego, 
 this imaginary dignity and duty ; he felt himself no 
 longer bound to talk big or to stalk stiffly, and in 
 consequence was not too high-minded to move easily 
 and speak gracefully. It is clear that he set no 
 great store by his comic talent as compared with the 
 other gifts of his genius ; of all his comedies two only, 
 All Fools and The Widoivs Tears, have dedications 
 prefixed to them, and in both cases the tone of the 
 dedication is almost apologetic in its slighting re- 
 ference to the slight worth of the work presented ; a 
 
 4—2
 
 52 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 tone by no means to be ascribed in this case to a 
 general and genuine humility, since the dedications 
 prefixed to his various poems, and to two among his 
 tragedies published under his own eye, are remark- 
 able for their lofty and dignified self-assertion. The 
 fact that of these two tragedies, one, Tlie Revenge of 
 Bussy cVAmbois, was apparently unsuccessful on the 
 stage, and the other, Ccesar and Pompey, seems 
 never to have obtained a chance of appearing on 
 the boards at all, may naturally have moved the 
 author to assert their right to respect and acceptance 
 with more studied emphasis than usual ; in the 
 earlier instance at least he is emphatic enough in 
 his appeal from the verdict of the ' maligners ' with 
 whom he complains that it met 'in the scenical 
 representation,' to the 'approbation of more worthy 
 judgments ' which ' even therein ' it did not fail to 
 obtain ; and in the second case, though he appears 
 to apologize for the lack of ' novelty and fashion ' 
 in a play ' written so long since ' that it ' had not 
 the timely ripeness of that age ' (seventy-two) ' that, 
 I thank God, I yet find no fault withal for any such 
 defects,' yet he is apparently and reasonably confi-
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 53 
 
 dent that the offering of his * martial history ' is 
 one honourable alike to poet and to patron. Both 
 plays are rich in rhetorical passages of noble elo- 
 quence ; but in all points of workmanlike construc- 
 tion and dramatic harmony they are incomparably 
 inferior to the better sort of his comedies. 
 
 The year of the publication of All Fools was 
 memorable to Chapman for a more hazardous mis- 
 adventure on a more serious stage than the failure 
 of a comedy on the boards, for which he had to 
 thank the merited success of a play whose strange 
 fortune it was to prove as tragical in its sequence as 
 merry in itself, thus combining in a new fashion the 
 two main qualities of Bottom's immortal interlude. 
 All readers will remember the base offence taken 
 and the base revenge threatened by the son of 
 Darnley or of Rizzio for a passing jest aimed at 
 those among his countrymen who had anticipated 
 Dr. Johnson's discovery of the finest prospect ever 
 seen by a native of Scotland ; none can forget the 
 gallantry with which Ben Jonson, a Scot by des- 
 cent of whom it might have been said as truly as 
 of the greatest in the generation before him that he
 
 54 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 ' never feared the face of man/ approved himself the 
 like-minded son of a Koman-spirited mother by 
 coming forward to share the certainty of imprison- 
 ment and the probability of mutilation with the 
 two comrades who without his knowledge had in- 
 serted such perilous matter into their common work ; 
 and many will wish with me that he had never 
 borne a nearer and less honourable relation to a king 
 wlio combined with the northern virulence and 
 pedantry which he may have derived from his tutor 
 Buchanan a savour of the worst qualities of the 
 worst Italians of the worst period of Italian de- 
 cadence. It was worthier of the great spirit and 
 the masterful genius of Jonson to be the subject of 
 his tyranny than the laureate of his court. Far 
 more fitly, had such an one then been born, would 
 that office have been filled by any scribbling Scot 
 of the excremental school of letters who misfht have 
 
 O 
 
 sought and found in his natural prince a congenial 
 patron with whom to bathe his sympathetic spirit 
 in the pure morality, while swimming with some- 
 what short strokes in " the deep delicious stream of 
 the Latinity," of Petronius Arbiter. Such a Oris-
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 55 
 
 piiiiilus or Crispinaccio would have found his proper 
 element in an atmosphere whose fumes should never 
 have been inhaled by the haughty and high-souled 
 author of TIlg Poetaster; and from behind his master's 
 chair, with no need to seek for fear if not for shame 
 the dastardly and l^'^ing shelter of a pseudonym 
 which might at a pinch have been abjured, and the 
 responsibility for its use shifted from his own shoul- 
 ders to those of a well-meaning and invisible friend, 
 the laurelled lackey of King James might as securely 
 have launched his libels against the highest heads of 
 poets to whom in that age all eyes looked up which 
 would have looked down on him, as ever did the 
 illustrious Latinist Buchanan against the mother 
 of the worthy patron whose countenance would pro- 
 bably have sufficed to protect the meanest and ob- 
 scurest creature of his common and unclean favour 
 against all recrimination on the part of Shakespeare 
 or of Jonson, of Beaumont or of Webster, of Fletcher 
 or of Chapman. 
 
 The comedy thus celebrated for the peril it brought 
 upon the ears and noses of its authors has of itself 
 meiit enough to have won for writers of less previous
 
 56 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 note a sufficient share of more enviable celebrity. 
 It is one of tlie most spirited and brilliant plays 
 belonging to tliat class of which the two most 
 famous examples are the Merry Wives of Windsor 
 and Every Man in His Humour ; and for life and 
 movement, interest and gaiety, it may challenge a 
 comparison even with these. All the actors in East- 
 ward Ho, down to the very slightest, such as the 
 drawer, the butcher's man, and the keeper of the 
 prison, have some quality and character of their 
 own which gives them a place in the comic action ; 
 and in no play of the time do we get such a true 
 taste of the old city life so often turned to mere 
 ridicule and caricature by playwrights of less good 
 humour, or feel about us such a familiar air of 
 ancient London as blows through every scene ; the 
 homely household of the rich tradesman, the shop 
 with its stall in front, the usurer\s lodging, the 
 waterside tavern, the Thames wharfs, stand out as 
 sharply as if etched by the pen of Dickens or the 
 needle of Whistler. The London of Hoo-arth, as set 
 before us in that immortal series of engravings for 
 which he is said to have taken the hint from this
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 57 
 
 comedy, does not seem nearer or more actual than 
 this elder London of Jonson, Chapman, and Mar- 
 ston ; and the more high-flying genius of Frank 
 Quicksilver is as real and lifelike as the humbler 
 debauchery and darker doom of Tom Idle. The 
 parts of Mistress Touchstone and Gertrude are 
 worthy of Moliere in his homelier mood ; and but 
 for one or two momentary indecencies dropped here 
 and there to attest the passage of Marston, the 
 scenes in which they figure would be as perfect and 
 blameless examples of pure broad comedy as any 
 stage can show. The fluttering and exuberant 
 ambition of the would-be Celimene or Millamant of 
 the city is painted with such delightful force and 
 freshness, her imperial volubility of contemjjt, the 
 joyous and tremulous eagerness with which she 
 obeys the precept of the Psalmist to ' forget her own 
 people and her father's house,' her alternate phases 
 of gracious patronage and overflowing obloquy, are 
 so charming in the buoyancy and fertility of their 
 changes that we are rejoiced when after the term of 
 adversity so differently put to use by the prodigal 
 daughter and the profligate apprentice Frank and
 
 58 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 Gertrude are alike restored to the favour of the ex- 
 cellent old citizen by the kind offices of his worthy 
 son-in-law. Not only have the poets given proof of 
 gentler morality and a juster sense of justice than the 
 great painter who followed long after in the track 
 of their invention, but they have contrived even to 
 secure our cordial regard for the kindly virtues of 
 the respectable and industrious characters whose 
 aim it is to rise by thrift and honesty; and we 
 salute the promotion of 'Master Deputy's worship' 
 to the proud office of substitute for the alderman 
 of his ward with a satisfaction which no man surely 
 ever felt in the exaltation of Hogarth's Lord Mayor 
 to sit in judgment on his luckless fellow. The 
 figures of Gertrude's gallant knight and his crew of 
 Virginian adventurers, whose expedition finally cul- 
 minates in a drunken shipwreck on the Thames, are 
 as vivid and as pleasant as any of these other 
 studies; and the scenes in which the jealous usurer 
 is induced by the devices of Quicksilver and Sir 
 Petronel to bring his disguised wife into the com- 
 pany of her paramour and reassure her supposed
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 59 
 
 scruples with his pithy arguments against conjugal 
 fidelity, while he lets fly at her supposed husband 
 the well-worn jests which recoil on his own head, 
 have in them enough of wit and humorous invention 
 to furnish forth the whole five acts of an ordinary 
 comedy of intrigue. Even in these sketches from 
 the prosaic fife of their day the great and gene- 
 rous poets of that age were as prodigal of the 
 riches of their genius as in the tragic and romantic 
 work of their higher moods. The style of Chap- 
 man is perceptible in some of the best of these 
 scenes in the third act as well as in the moral pass- 
 age of metrical philosophy put into the lips of the 
 half-drowned Quicksilver in the fourth, where only 
 the last editor has taken note of his handiwork. 
 Two allusions in the mouth of the usurer, one to 
 'the ship of famous Draco,' and one to the camel's 
 horns of which we hear something too often from 
 this poet, are in the unmistakable manner of Chap- 
 man. Other such points might perhaps be dis- 
 covered ; but on the whole we may probably feel 
 safe in assigning to each of the three associates as
 
 6o GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 equal a share in the labour and the credit as they 
 bore in the peril entailed on them by a comedy 
 which, though disclaiming all unfriendly aim at 
 rivahy with one of similar title already familiar 
 to the stage, must probably and deservedly have 
 eclipsed the success of two plays not published till 
 two years later under cognate names by Decker and 
 Webster ; though the plot of Northward Ho is not 
 wanting in humour and ingenuity, and in Westivard 
 Ho there is one scene of exquisite and incongruous 
 beauty in which we recognize at once the tender 
 and reckless hand which five years earlier had 
 inserted into the yet more inappropriate framework 
 of the Satiromastix as sweet an episode of seeming 
 martyrdom and chastity secured under the shelter 
 of a sleep like death. 
 
 In his next play Chapman reassumed the more 
 poetical style of comedy Avhich in Eastward Ho 
 had been put off for the plainer garb of realism. 
 The Gentleman Usher is distinguishable from all his 
 other works by the serious grace and sweetness of 
 the love-scenes, and the higher tone of feminine 
 character and masculine regard which is sustained
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN.. 6i 
 
 throughout the graver passages. Elsewhere it 
 should seem that Chapman had scorned to attempt 
 or failed to achieve the task of rousins: and retainingc 
 the chief interest of his reader in the fortune of two 
 young lovers : but in this play he has drawn such a 
 passionate and innocent couple with singular ten- 
 derness and delicacy. The broader effects of humour 
 are comic enough, though perhaps somewhat too 
 much prolonged and too often repeated ; but the 
 charm of the play lies in the bright and pure quality 
 of its romantic part. The scene in which the prince 
 and Margaret, debarred by tyranny and intrigue 
 from the right of public marriage, espouse each 
 other in secret by a pretty ceremony devised on the 
 spot, and the dialogue of the wounded Strozza with 
 the wife who has restored him to spiritual strength 
 by ' the sweet food of her divine advice,' are models 
 of the simple, luminous, and fervent style of poetry 
 proper to romantic comedy at its highest. A noble 
 passage in the fifth act of this play contains, as far 
 as I know, the first direct protest against the prin- 
 ciple of monarchy to be found in our poetical or 
 dramatic literature ; his last year's hazardous ex-
 
 62 GEORGE CHAPMAN, 
 
 perience of royal susceptibilities may not impro- 
 bably have given edge to the author's pen as it set 
 down these venturous lines in a time when as yet 
 no king had been taught, in the phrase of old Lord 
 Auchinleck, that he had a joint in his neck. 
 
 " And what's a prince % Had all been virtuous men, 
 There never had been prince upon the earth, 
 And so no subject : all men had been princes. 
 A virtuous man is subject to no prince, 
 But to his soul and honour ; vrhich are laws 
 That carry fire and sword within themselves, 
 Never corrupted, never out of rule ; 
 What is there in a prince, that his least lusts 
 Are valued at the lives of other men, 
 When common faults in him should prodigies be. 
 And his gross dotage rather loathed than soothed ?" 
 
 I should be surprised to find in any poet of Chap- 
 man's age an echo of such clear and daring words as 
 these, which may suffice to shew that the oligarchic 
 habit of mind to which I have before referred in 
 him was the fruit of no sycophantic temper, no 
 pliant and prostitute spirit, tlie property of a cour- 
 tier or a courtezan, but sprung rather from pure 
 intellectual haughtiness and a contempt for the mob 
 .f minds. Nevertheless it is well worth remark 
 that such a deliberate utterance of republican prin-
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 63 
 
 ciple should then have been endured on the stage ; 
 that so loud a blast of direct challenge to the domi- 
 nant superstition of the day should have been blown 
 so near the court in the ears of a popular audience 
 by a poet who, though at no time chargeable with 
 any stain of venal or parasitic servility, was after- 
 wards the habitual and grateful recipient of patron- 
 age from princes and favourites, and at all times, it 
 must be confessed, in all his other works a strenu- 
 ous and consistent supporter of the tradition of 
 royalty against the conception of democracy. 
 
 The opening scene of Monsieur d' Olive, the next 
 on the list of Chapman's comedies, is one of the 
 most admirable in any play. More than once in- 
 deed the author has managed his overture, or what 
 in the classic dialect of the old French stage was 
 called the exposition, with a skill and animation 
 giving promise of better things to come than he has 
 provided ; as though he had spent the utmost art 
 his genius could command in securing the interest 
 of his audience at the first start, and then left it for 
 chance to support, letting his work float at will on 
 the lazy waters of caprice or negligence. No more
 
 64 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 impressive introduction to a play could have been 
 devised than the arrival of the chief person, newly 
 landed in high hopes and spirits from a long voyage, 
 before the closed gates and curtained casements of 
 an old friend's house, within which tapers are burn- 
 ing at noon, and before which the master walks 
 sadly up and down, and repels his proffered em- 
 brace ; and the whole scene following which explains 
 the trouble of one household and the mourning of 
 another is a model of clear, natural, dignified dia- 
 logue, in which every word is harmonious, appro- 
 priate, and noble. The grace, and interest of this 
 exposition are more or less well sustained during 
 the earlier part of the play ; but as the underplot 
 opens out at greater length, the main interest is 
 more and more thrust aside, cramped as it were for 
 space and squeezed out of shape, till at last it is 
 fairly hustled into a corner of the action to make 
 way for the overwrought fooleries of the gull 
 d'Olive and the courtiers who play upon his vanity ; 
 and this underplot, diverting enough in a slight 
 way for one or two scenes, is stretched out on the 
 tenterhooks of farcical rhetoric and verbose dia-
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 65 
 
 logue till the reader finds himself defrauded of the 
 higher interest which he was led to expect, and 
 wearied of the empty substitute which the way- 
 wardness or indolence of the author has chosen to 
 palm off on him in its stead. Towards the end in- 
 deed there is a profuse waste of good points and 
 promising possibilities \ the humorous ingenuity of 
 the devices so well contrived to wind up together 
 and in order the double thread of the main plot is 
 stinted of room to work in and display its excellent 
 quality of invention, and the final scenCj which 
 should have explained and reconciled all doubts and 
 errors at large with no less force and fulness of 
 careful dramatic capacity than was employed upon 
 their exposition, is hastily patched up and slurred 
 over to leave place for a last superfluous exhibition 
 of such burlesque eloquence as had already been ad- 
 mitted to encumber the close of another comedy, 
 more perfect than this in construction, but certainly 
 not more interesting in conception. In spite how- 
 ever of this main blemish in the action. Monsieur 
 d' Olive may properly be counted among the more 
 notable and successful plays of Chapman. 
 
 5
 
 66 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 Of his two remaining comedies I may as "well 
 say a word here as later. Mayday, which was 
 printed five years after the two last we have ex- 
 amined, is full of the bustle and justle of intrigue 
 which may be expected in such comedies of incident 
 as depend rather on close and crowded action than 
 on fine or forcible character for whatever they may 
 merit of success. There is no touch in it of romance 
 or poetical interest, but several of the situations 
 and dialogues may have credit for some share of 
 vigour and humour. 
 
 But of these qualities Chapman gave much fuller 
 proof next year in the unchivalrous comedy of The 
 Widow's Tears. This discourteous drama is as rich 
 in comic force as it is poor in amiable sentiment. 
 There is a brutal exuberant fun throughout the 
 whole action which finds its complete expression 
 and consummation in the brawny gallantry and 
 muscular merriment of Tharsalio. A speculative 
 commentator might throw out some conjecture to 
 the efiect that the poet at fifty-three may have been 
 bent on revenge for a slight offered to some unsea- 
 sonable courtship of his own by a lady less amen-
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 67 
 
 able to the proffer of future fame than the " belle 
 marquise " who has the credit for all time to come 
 of having lent a humble ear to the haughty suit 
 and looked with a gracious eye on the grey hairs of 
 the great Corneille. But whether this keen on- 
 slaught on the pretensions of the whole sex to con- 
 tinence or constancy were or were not instigated 
 by any individual rancour, the comedy is written 
 with no little power and constructed with no little 
 ingenuity ; the metrical scenes are pure and 
 vigorous in style, and the difficulty of fitting such 
 a story to the stage is surmounted with scarcely 
 less of dexterity than of daring. The action of the 
 last scene is again hampered by the intrusion of 
 forced and misplaced humours ; and while the 
 superfluous underlings of the play are breaking am 
 bandying their barren jests, the story is not so 
 much wound up as huddled up in whispers and 
 byplay ; but it may certainly be pleaded in excuse 
 of the poet that the reconciliation of the Ephesian 
 matron to her husband was a somewhat difficult 
 ceremony to exhibit at length and support with 
 any plausible or effectual explanation. 
 
 5—2
 
 68 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 Two other titles are usually found in the cata- 
 logue of Chapman's extant comedies ; but it seems 
 to me as diiScult to discover any trace of Chapman 
 in the comedy of The Ball as of Shirley in the 
 tragedy of CJiahot. These two plays were issued 
 by the same printer in the same year for the same 
 publishers, both bearing the names of Chapman 
 and Shirley linked together in the bonds of a most 
 incongruous union ; but I know not if there be any 
 further ground for belief in this singular associa- 
 tion. The mere difference in age would make the 
 rumour of a collaboration between the eldest of old 
 English dramatists and the latest disciple of their 
 school so improbable as to demand the corrobora- 
 tion of some trustworthier authority than a book- 
 seller's title-page bearing date five years after the 
 death of Chapman. In the very next year a play 
 was published under the name of Fletcher, who 
 had then been fifteen years dead; this play was 
 afterwards reclaimed by Shirley as the work of 
 his own hand, and of his alone; nor is there 
 any doubt that Fletcher had not a finger in it. 
 Of the authorship of Chabot there can be no
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 69 
 
 question; the subject, the style, the maimer, the 
 metre^ the construction, the characters, all are per- 
 fectly Chapman's. The Ball, on the other hand, is 
 as thoroughly in the lightest style of Shirley, and 
 not a bad example of his airily conventional man- 
 ner ; it is lively and easy enough, but much below 
 the mark of his best comedies, such as The Lady of 
 Pleasure (where an allusion to this earlier play is 
 brought into the dialogue), which but for a single 
 ugly incongruity would be one of the few finest 
 examples of pure high comedy in verse that our 
 stage could show against that of Moliere. 
 
 A foundling of yet more dubious parentage has 
 been fathered upon Chapman by the tradition which 
 has affixed to his name the putative paternity of 
 " a comical moral censuring the follies of this age," 
 anonymously published in his sixty-first year. It 
 has been plausibly suggested that the title of this 
 wonderful medley, T^vo Wise Men and all the rest 
 Fools, was the first and last cause of its attribution 
 to the hand of Chapman, and that the error arose 
 from a confusion of this with the title of All 
 Fools, the best of Chapman's comedies. In any
 
 70 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 case it is difficult to believe that this voluminous 
 pamphlet in the form of dialogue on social ques- 
 tions can have been the work of any practised or 
 professional dramatist. It is externally divided 
 into seven acts, and might as reasonably have 
 been divided into twenty-one. A careful and 
 laborious perusal of the bulky tract from pro- 
 logue to epilogue, which has enabled me in some 
 measure to appreciate the double scientific ex- 
 periment of Mr. Browning on " Sibrandus Schaf- 
 naburgensis," emboldens me also to affirm that 
 it has no vestige of dramatic action, no trace of 
 a story, no phantom of a plot; that the reader 
 who can believe the assertion of its title-page that 
 it was " divers times " or indeed ever " acted " on 
 any mortal stage by any human company before 
 any living audience will have a better claim to be 
 saved by his faith than the author by this sample 
 at least of his works; that it contains much curious 
 and sometimes amusing detail on social matters of 
 the day, and is not wanting in broad glimpses 
 or intervals of somewhat clownish humour. In 
 the strong coarse satire on female Puritanism
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 71 
 
 those who will may discern touches which recall 
 the tone if not the handiwork of the author of An 
 Humorous Day's Mirth. The fact that several 
 names occurring in the course of the dialogue, 
 though not in the long list of marvellously labelled 
 interlocutors, are anagrams of the simplest kind, 
 being merely common English names spelt back- 
 wards, may be thought to indicate some personal 
 aim in this elaborate onslaught on usurers, money- 
 lenders, brokers, and other such cattle ; and if so 
 we have certainly no right to lay an anonymous 
 attack of the kind, even upon such as these, to the 
 charge of a poet who so far as we know never pub- 
 lished a line in his long life that he feared to sub- 
 scribe with his own loyal and honourable name. 
 Such an one is not lightly to be suspected of the 
 least approach in form or substance to the dirty 
 tactics of a verminous pseudonymuncule, who at 
 the risk of being ultimately shamed into avowal or 
 scared into denial of his ignominious individuality 
 may prefer for one rascally moment the chance of 
 infamy as a slanderer to the certitude of obscurity 
 as a scribbler.
 
 72 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 Although, however, we may be inclined to allow- 
 no great weight to the tradition current fifty-seven 
 years after the death of Chapman, which according 
 to Langbaine was at that date the only authority 
 that led him to believe in the general vague ascrip- 
 tion of this work to the poet under whose name it 
 has ever since found a questionable place in the 
 corners of catalo2:ues at the tail of his authentic 
 comedies, the very fact of this early attribution 
 gives it a certain external interest of antiquarian 
 curiosity, besides that which it may fairly claim as 
 a quaint example of controversial dialectics on the 
 conservative side. The dialogues are not remark- 
 able either for Platonic skill or for Platonic urbanity ; 
 for which reason they may probably be accepted 
 with the more confidence as fairly expressive of the 
 average of opinion than afloat among honest English 
 citizens of the middle class, jealous of change, sus- 
 picious of innovation, indignant at the sight of 
 rascality which they were slow to detect, much 
 given to growl and wail over the decay of good old 
 times and the collapse of good old landmarks, the 
 degeneracy of modern manners, and the general in-
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 73 
 
 tolerability of things in an age of hitherto unknown 
 perversity; men of heavy-headed patience and 
 heavy- witted humour, but by no means the kind of 
 cattle that it would be safe for any driver to goad 
 or load overmuch. The writer may be taken as an 
 exponent of Anglican conservatism if not of Catholic 
 reaction in matters of religious doctrine and disci- 
 pline ; he throws his whole strength as a dialectician 
 (which is not Herculean, or quite equal to his evi- 
 dent goodwill) into the discussion of a proposal to 
 secularize the festivals and suppress the holidays 
 appointed by the Church; and the ground of his 
 defence is not popular but clerical ; these holidays 
 are to be observed not for the labourer's but for the 
 saint's sake ; and above all because our wiser fore- 
 fathers have so willed it, for reasons which we are 
 in duty bound to take on trust as indisputably more 
 valid than any reasoning of our own. He has a 
 hearty distrust of lawyers and merchants, and a 
 cordial distaste for soldiers and courtiers ; his senti- 
 ments towards a Puritan are those of Sir Andrew 
 Aguecheek, his opinion of an agitator is worthy of
 
 74 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 a bishop, and his view of a demagogue would do 
 honour to a duke. 
 
 A very different work from the effusion of this 
 worthy pamphleteer bears likewise, or at least has 
 once borne, the dubious name of Chapman. This is 
 a tragic or romantic drama without a title of its 
 own, labelled it should seem for the sake of con- 
 venience by the licenser of plays as a " Second 
 Maiden's Tragedy." It was first printed in 1824, 
 with a brief note of introduction, from which we 
 learn that the manuscript was originally inscribed 
 with the name of William Goughe ; that Thomas was 
 then substituted for William, while a third Goughe, 
 Robert, seems to have figured as one of the principal 
 actors ; that a second correction struck out either 
 Goughe at one sweep of the pen, and supplanted 
 both names by that of George Chapman ; and that 
 last of all this also was erased to make way for no 
 less a claimant than William Shakespeare. To this 
 late and impudent attempt at imposture no manner 
 of notice need be accorded ; but the claim preferred 
 for Chapman deserves some attention from all stu- 
 dents of our dramatic poetry.
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 75 
 
 In style and metre this play, which bears the date 
 of his fifty-third year (1611), is noticeably different 
 from all his acknowledged tragedies, one only ex- 
 cepted ; but it is not more different from the rest 
 than this one, which, though not published till 
 twenty years after the death of Chapman, has never 
 yet been called in question as a dubious or spurious 
 pretender to the credit of his authorship. And if, as 
 I am unwilling to disbelieve. Chapman was actually 
 the author of Revenge for Honour, one serious 
 obstacle is cleared out of the way of our belief in 
 the justice of the claim advanced for him to this 
 play also. Not that the two can be said to show 
 many or grave points of likeness to each other ; but 
 between all other tragedies assigned to Chapman 
 such points of intimate resemblance do undoubtedly 
 appear, while the points of unlikeness between any 
 one of these and either of the plays in question are 
 at once as many and as grave. 
 
 Of the posthumous tragedy I purpose to say a 
 word in its turn ; meantime we may observe that it 
 is not easy to conjecture any motive of interest 
 which might have induced a forger of names to attri-
 
 76 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 bute an illegitimate issue of this kind to Chapman 
 rather than to another. His name was probably 
 never one of those whose popularity would have 
 sufficed to float the doubtful venture of a spurious 
 play. To Shakespeare or to Fletcher it was of 
 covu'se a profitable speculation for knavish book- 
 sellers to assign the credit or discredit of any dra- 
 matic bantling which they might think it but barely 
 possible to leave undetected at the door of such a 
 foster-father, or to pass off for a time on the 
 thickest- witted of his admirers as a sinful slip of 
 the great man's grafting in his idler hours of human 
 infirmity. But if there was in efiect no plea for the 
 intrusion of such a changeling into the poetic 
 household of Chapman, whose quiver was surely 
 full enough without the insertion of a stranger's 
 shaf c, the gratuitous selection of this poet as sponsor 
 for this play appears to me simply unaccountable. 
 No plausible reason can as far as I see be assigned 
 for the superscription of Chapman's name in place 
 of the cancelled name of Goughe, unless the writer 
 did actually believe that the genuine work of George 
 Chapman had been wrongly ascribed to Thomas or
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. tt 
 
 William Goughe; whereas no reader of the play 
 will imagine it possible that the name of Shake- 
 speare can have been substituted in good faith and 
 singleness of heart by a corrector honestly desirous 
 of repairing a supposed error. Again, if the doubt- 
 less somewhat fragile claim of Chapman be definitely 
 rejected, we find hitherto no other put forward to 
 take its place. The author of Deailis Jest-booh, in 
 that brilliant correspondence on poetical questions 
 which to me gives a higher view of his fine and 
 vigorous intelligence than any other section of his 
 literary remains, reasonably refuses to admit a 
 suggestion that the authorship of this nameless and 
 fatherless poem might be ascribed to Massinger. 
 ' The poisoning and painting is like him, but also 
 like Cjnril Tourneur ; and it is too poetical for old 
 Philip.' He might have added that it is also far 
 too loose and feeble in construction for the admirable 
 artist of whom Coleridge so justly remarked that 
 his plays have the interest of novels ; but Beddoes, 
 whose noble instinct for poetry could never carry 
 him in practice beyond the production of a few lofty 
 and massive fragments of half-formed verse which
 
 ^8 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 stand better by themselves when detached from the 
 incoherent and disorderly context, was apparently 
 as incapable of doing justice to the art of Massinger 
 as of reducing under any law of harmony to any 
 fitness of form his own chaotic and abortive con- 
 ceptions of a plot ; for the most faithful admirer of 
 that genius which is discernible beyond mistake in 
 certain majestic passages of his blank verse must 
 admit that his idea of a play never passed beyond 
 the embryonic stage of such an organism as that 
 upon which he conferred the gift of lyric utterance 
 in his best and favourite song, and that his hapless 
 dramatic offspring was never and could never have 
 been more than * a bodiless childful of life in the 
 gloom. Crying with frog voice, What shall I be ?' 
 Perhaps too for him the taint of Gifford's patron- 
 age was still on Massinger, and the good ofiices of 
 that rancorous pedant may have inclined him to 
 undervalue the worth of a poet announced and 
 accompanied by the proclamation of such a herald. 
 This connexion, fortunate as in one way it was for 
 the dramatist to whose works it secured for ever a 
 good and trustworthy text admirably edited and
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 79 
 
 arranged, was unfortunate in its influence on the 
 minds of men who less unnaturally than unjustly 
 were led to regard the poet also with something of 
 the distaste so justly and generally incurred by his 
 editor. This prepossession evidently inflamed and 
 discoloured the opinions of the good Leigh Hunt, 
 who probably would under no conditions have been 
 able adequately to estimate the masculine and un- 
 fanciful genius of such writers as Ben Jonson, 
 Massinger, and Ford ; and a like influence may not 
 impossibly have disturbed the far surer judgment 
 and affected the far finer taste of a student so 
 immeasurably superior to either Hunt or Beddoes 
 in the higher a,nd rarer faculties of critical genius as 
 Charles Lamb. To Massinger at least, though 
 assuredly not to Ford (who had not yet been edited 
 by Gifford when Lamb put forth his priceless and 
 incomparable book of " Specimens "), the most 
 exquisite as well as the most generous of great 
 critics was usually somewhat less than liberal, if 
 not somewhat less than just. 
 
 But what is most notable to me in the judgment 
 above cited from the correspondence of Beddoes is
 
 8o GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 that he should have touched on the incidental point 
 of action which this anonymous play has in common 
 with The Revenger's Tragedy and The Duke of 
 Milan, and should also have remarked on the 
 poetical or fanciful quality which does undoubtedly 
 distinguish its language from the comparatively 
 unimaginative diction of Massinger, without taking- 
 further account of the general and radical dissimi- 
 larity of workmanship which leaves the style of 
 this poem equidistant from the three several styles 
 of the sober Philip, the thoughtful George, and 
 the fiery Cj'-riL It is singular that the name of a 
 fourth poet, the quality of whose peculiar style is 
 throughout perceptible, should have been missed 
 by so acute and well-read a student of our dra- 
 matic poetry. The style is certainly and equally 
 unlike that of Chapman, Massinger, or Tour- 
 neur; but it is very like the style of Middleton. 
 The combination of the plots is as pitifully 
 incongruous and formless, the movement of the 
 metre as naturally sweet and fluent, the pathos of 
 the situations as occasionally vivid and impressive, 
 the play of the fancy as generally delicate and
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 8i 
 
 unaffected, as in the best or the worst works of the 
 fitful and powerful hand which gave us The, Change- 
 ling and The Witch, The Spanish Gipsy and Women 
 beware Women. Were there but one grain of 
 external evidence, though light as that which now 
 incHnes the scale of probabilities in. favour of Chap- 
 man, I should not hesitate in assigning to it the 
 workmanship of this poem also ; but as even such a 
 grain of proof or of likelihood as this is wanting, we 
 may remark one or two points in which a resem- 
 blance may be traced to the undoubted handiwork 
 of Chapman ; such as a certain grotesque abruptness 
 and violence in some of the incidents ; for example, 
 the discharge of a pistol at the father of the heroine 
 from the hand of her lover, by which that * ancient 
 sinner ' is ' but mocked with death;' a semi-burlesque 
 interlude in a scene of tragic interest and prelude to 
 a speech of vivid eloquence, which may recall the 
 sudden and random introduction of deeds of violence 
 into the action in some of Chapman's plays, as for 
 instance the two attempts at murder in The Gentle- 
 man Usher, where, though the plot is neither ill 
 devised nor ill arranged, yet some excesses and 
 
 6
 
 82 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 singularities in the leading incidents are at once 
 perceptible and pardonable ; and again, the manner 
 of the ghost's reappearance at the close, where a 
 disembodied spirit takes part in the stage business 
 ■with all the coolness and deliberation of a living 
 actor, and is apparently received among the com- 
 pany with little more sign of disturbance or surprise 
 than if she were not confronted with her own dead 
 body, can only be paralleled in Chapman's Bussy 
 d'Amhois or the Death's Jest-hooh of Beddoes, in 
 each of which a leading part is filled throughout the 
 later scenes by a ghost who takes his full share of 
 the action and the dialogue, and may be said to 
 make himself generally and creditably useful, with- 
 out exciting the slightest remark or perturbation, 
 among his fleshly fellows of the scene. The quaint 
 materialism of these realistic and too solid spectres, 
 who show no sign and no desire of dissolution by 
 melting into air or evaporating into dew, has in it 
 nothing of the fine imagination which raises the 
 supernatural agencies employed by the author of 
 The Witch into a middle region of malign and 
 monstrous life as far above the common ground of
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 83 
 
 mere prosaic phantoms as below the dark aerial 
 height at which Shakespeare has clothed the forms 
 with clouds and winged with winds the feet of the 
 weird sisters. Nevertheless, both in Bussy d'Ambois 
 and in this ' second Maiden's Tragedy ' (as the 
 Master of the Revels has somewhat inaptly labelled 
 it), the first introduction of ghostly agency is im- 
 pressive : and the scene in this latter where the 
 sleep of the dead is first disturbed and her tomb 
 violated by the passion of the baffled tyrant is well 
 worthy of the praise it has received for the choice 
 simplicity and earnest sweetness of style which yet 
 hardly distinguish it above many other scenes and 
 passages in this beautiful and singular poem, the 
 story of whose fate has proved as strange and as 
 fantastic as the incidents of its plot. ^ 
 
 The first of Chapman's historic tragedies was 
 published at the age of forty-eight, and stands now 
 sixth on the list of the plays in which he had the 
 help of no partner. He never wrote better and he 
 seldom wrote worse than in this only play of his 
 writing which kept any firm and durable hold on 
 the stage. The impression made on Dryden by its 
 
 6—2
 
 84 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 ' glaring colours ' in the representation, and the 
 indignant reaction of his judgment ' in the reading,' 
 are probably known to more than have studied the 
 work by the light of their own taste. All his 
 vituperation is well deserved by such excerpts as 
 those which alone Sir Walter Scott was careful to 
 select in his editorial note on this passage by way 
 of illustration ; not even the sharpest terms in the 
 terrible and splendid arsenal of Dryden's satire can 
 be too vivid or too vigorous in their condemnation 
 of the damnable jargon in which the elder poet was 
 prone to indulge his infirmity ; whole sections 
 of his poems and whole scenes of his plays are 
 indeed but shapeless masses of bombast and bulky 
 vacuity, with nothing better in them than most 
 villainous 'incorrect English, and a hideous mingle 
 of false poetry and true nonsense ; or at best 
 a scantKng of wit, which lies gasping for life 
 and groaning beneath a heap of rubbish.' The 
 injustice of the criticism lies only in the assertion 
 or implication that there was nothing discover- 
 able on all Chapman's ground but such cinder- 
 heaps and windbags ; whereas the proportion of
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 85 
 
 good to bad in this very play of Biissy cVAmhois 
 is enough to outweigh even such demerits as it 
 doubtless shares with too much of its author's work. 
 There is a bright and fiery energy throughout, a 
 vigour of ambitious aspiration, which is transmitted 
 as it were by echo and reflection from the spirit of 
 the poet into the spirit of his hero. The brilliant 
 swordsman of the court of Henri III., who flashes 
 out on us as the joyous central figure of one of the 
 most joyous and vigorous in all the bright list of 
 those large historic groups to which the strong swift 
 hand of Dumas gave colour and life, has undergone 
 at the heavier hand of the old English poet a 
 singular transfiguration. He is still the irresistible 
 duellist and amorist of tradition ; but, instead of the 
 grace and courtliness proper to his age and rank, 
 Chapman has bestowed on him the grave qualities 
 of an epic braggart, whose tongue is at least as long 
 as his sword, and whose gasconades have in them 
 less of the Gascon than of our ' Homer-Lucan' him- 
 self; who with all his notable interest in the France 
 of his time and her turbulent history had assuredly 
 nothing of the lighter and more gracious charac-
 
 86 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 teristics of French genius. But in the broad full 
 outline of this figure, and in the robust handling of 
 the tragic action which serves for environment or 
 for background to its haughty and dilated propor- 
 tions, there is more proof of greatness than Chapman 
 had yet given. His comic or gnomic poetry may be 
 better or at least less faulty in its kind, but in that 
 kind there is less room for the growth and display 
 of those greater qualities which not unfrequently 
 struggle through the hot and turbid atmosphere of 
 his tragic writing, and show by a stormy and cloudy 
 illumination the higher reaches of his real genius. 
 Nor is there in these rugged outlying highlands of 
 traged}% and in the somewhat thick and troubled 
 air of the brooding skies above them, no beauty 
 perceptible but the beauty of cloud and flame, of 
 flood and fell : they have intervals of pure sunshine 
 and soft greensward, interludes of grave and tender 
 harmony, aspects of deep and serene attraction. 
 There is a noticeable abruptness and want of ease 
 in the disposal of the incidents, as though the 
 workman were not yet well broken in to his busi- 
 ness ; and in effect Chapman never did learn to run
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. %^ 
 
 with perfect ease and grace ia tragic harness. Yet 
 if his tragedies were erased from the roll of his 
 works, and only the most perfect of his comedies 
 and the better portions of his other poems were left 
 for our judgment, the sentence that we should then 
 have to pass would assuredly assign him a much 
 lower place among English poets than he now may 
 rightly claim to hold. A greater and a faultier 
 genius finds expression in these tragic poems than 
 in the more general and equable excellence of even 
 his best comic or romantic plays. 
 
 The first in order of these, especially at first sight, 
 is beyond question the most effective in point of 
 dramatic interest. With all its tumid and turbid 
 exuberance of speech, the action of this play never 
 actually halts or flags. There is no depth or delicacy 
 of character discernible in any of the leading parts ; 
 in some cases indeed it is hard at fii*st to determine 
 whether the author meant to excite the sympathies 
 or the antipathies of his audience for a good or for 
 a bad character ; the virtue of the heroine collapses 
 without a touch, and friends and foes change sides 
 with no more reason shown than that the figure of
 
 88 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 tlie dance requires it. But the power of hand is 
 gigantic which shifts and shuffles these puppets 
 about the board; there are passages of a sublime 
 and Titanic beauty, rebellious and excessive in style 
 as in sentiment, but full of majestic and massive 
 harmony. The magnificent speech of the hero, 
 stricken to death and leaning on his sword to die, 
 has been often quoted, and as a sample of fiery 
 imagination clothed in verse of solemn and sonorous 
 music it can never be overpraised ; the inevitable 
 afterthought that the privilege of tragic poetry to 
 exceed the range of realism is here strained to the 
 utmost and beyond it will recur on reading many of 
 the most memorable passages in these plays, where 
 the epic declamation of the speaker breaks the last 
 limit of law to attain the last limit of license pos- 
 sible to a style which even in outward form keeps 
 up any pretence of dramatic plausibility. Any 
 child may see and object that no man ever died 
 with such a funeral oration on his lips ; but any 
 critic qualified to judge of such a poet in his strength 
 and his weakness will temper the reflection with 
 admiration of " that full and heightened style " which
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 89 
 
 the third among English tragic poets has applauded 
 in the tragedies of Chapman. The height indeed is 
 somewhat giddy, and the fullness too often tends or 
 threatens to dilate into tumidity; sometimes the 
 foot slips and the style stumbles heavily from its 
 height, while for its fulness we find but the empti- 
 ness of a burst bladder ; but while the writer's head 
 remains clear and his hand sure, the high air of this 
 poetry is fresh and buoyant, and its full cadences 
 have in them a large echo as of mountain winds and 
 waters. And if Webster, with the generous justice 
 proper to a great fellow-craftsman in the highest 
 guild of art, was able to condone the manifest abuse 
 in Chapman's work of rhetoric and mere poetry, 
 those may well be content to do likewise who bear 
 duly in mind the admirable absence of any such 
 defect from the vivid and intense veracity of his 
 own. 
 
 If the union of active interest with superb decla- 
 mation may suffice to explain the prolonged good 
 fortune of Chapman's first tragedy on the boards, 
 we can discover no such pretext to account for the 
 apparent favour shown to his next venture in the
 
 90 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 same field. It has no passage comparable for force 
 and vehemence of imagination to the highest moods 
 of the author oi Bussy d'Ambois ; to the second evo- 
 cation of the spirit in a speech of which Lamb said 
 well that it was ' tremendous, even to the curdling 
 of the blood; I know nothing in poetry like it;' 
 nor to the dying appeal of Bussy to his own sur- 
 viving fame, or the sweet and weighty verses of 
 invocation in which his mistress adjures ' all the 
 peaceful regents of the night ' to favour the first 
 meeting of the lovers. It is disfigured by no such 
 bloated bombast and animated by no such theatrical 
 changes of effect, such sudden turns and sharp sur- 
 prises, as fit the earlier play to catch the eyes and 
 ears of an audience more impressible than critical. 
 It has no such violent interlude of action and emo- 
 tion as the scene in which Montsurry (Monsoreau) 
 extorts by torture the confession of her guilt from 
 the bleeding hand of his wife ; an incident which 
 singularly enough recalls a similar scene in the 
 earliest play of the great French improvisatore who 
 has told in such different fashion the story of the 
 ambuscade by which Bussy fell under the weight
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 91 
 
 of treacherous nunibers ; though Dumas, in accord- 
 ance I believe with all tradition, assigns to the 
 duke of Guise the brutal act of force by which his 
 wife was compelled to allure her lover into the snare 
 set by her husband ; whereas the English poet has 
 not only altered the persons of the agent and 
 patient, but has increased the means of compulsion 
 from a pinch on the arm to the application of the 
 rack to a body already mangled by such various 
 wounds that the all but unparalleled tenacity of life 
 in the victim, who reappears in the last scene not 
 perceptibly the worse for these connubial endear- 
 , ments, is not the least notable in a series of wonders 
 among which we scarcely make account of the 
 singular part assigned to ' that affable familiar ghost' 
 which moves so freely among the less incorporeal 
 actors. To the tough nerves and vigorous appe- 
 tite of the original audience this scene was no doubt 
 one of the most acceptable in a closing act as re- 
 markable for the stately passion of the style as for 
 the high poetic interest of thought and action. Of 
 these two qualities we find but one, and that the 
 less dramatic, in the next work of the poet. No
 
 92 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 poem, I suppose, was ever cast in dramatic form 
 which appealed so wholly to the pure intellect. 
 The singleness of purpose and the steadiness of 
 resolution with which the poet has pursued his 
 point and forborne all occasions to diverge from his 
 path to it have made his work that which it is : a 
 sculptured type and monument of his high and aus- 
 tere genius in the fulness of its faculties and the 
 ripeness of its aims. 
 
 Tim Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of 
 Byron, Marshal of France, a small epic in ten books 
 or acts, is the noblest memorial we have of its 
 author's original powers. Considered from the point 
 of view it requires us to assume if we would do any 
 justice to the mind which conceived and the hand 
 which completed such a design, it is a wholly great 
 and harmonious work of genius. Here for once not 
 a note is out of tune, not a touch is out of keeping ; 
 the very inflation of the style is never the inflation 
 of vacuity ; its majesty is no longer tumid, and its 
 elevation is no longer insecure. This at least has a 
 right to be counted for ever among the classic works 
 of English poetry. We close the book at last with
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 93 
 
 a full and satisfied sense of severe deUght in the 
 deep inner music which sounds on in the mind's ear 
 after study of the thought and passion which mform 
 it. The height and the harmony of this poem are 
 equal forces in the composition of its excellence; 
 the height of its conception and the harmony of its 
 completion were alike needed to do justice to such 
 lofty thought and such profound passion as it was 
 called upon to handle and to sound. The strength 
 and wealth of intelligence and of language from the 
 opening of the first act to the close of the tenth 
 show not a sign anywhere of possible exhaustion or 
 inadequacy to the large demands made on them by 
 the poet's high design. But that such a poem should 
 ever have been ' acted in two plays at the Black- 
 friars and other public stages ' must seem to us one 
 of the strangest records in theatrical history. Its 
 appearance on any boards for a single night would 
 have been remarkable enough ; but its reappearance 
 at various theatres is aU but incredible. The stan- 
 dard of culture and the level of intelligence required 
 in its auditors surpass what we can conceive any thea- 
 trical audience to have attained in any modern age.
 
 94 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 It is not merely that the hearer or spectator of 
 such a poem in action would have to follow an un- 
 broken line of high thought and lofty language 
 without interlude or relief worth mentioning of 
 lower or lighter material ; he would have to forego 
 all points of interest whatever but the satisfaction 
 of the pure intelligence. There is endless repetition 
 with absolutely no progress; infinite effusion of 
 speech without one break of material incident. 
 Even the subtle action and reaction of the mind^ the 
 ebb and flow of spiritual forces, the coming and 
 going of intellectual influences, are not here given 
 with the strength and cunning of such a master's 
 hand as might secure and sustain the interest of a 
 student in tracing their various movements by the 
 light of his guidance ; those movements are too deep 
 and delicate for the large epic touch of Chapman to 
 pursue with any certitude. A few strong broad 
 strokes often repeated suffice to complete the simple 
 and vigorous outline which is all he can give us of a 
 character. 
 
 It has been observed that the portrait of the 
 traitor marshal ' is overlaid with so many touches
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 95 
 
 that the outline is completely disguised ;' but as 
 none of these are incongruous, none mistimed or 
 misplaced, we may reply that it is of the very 
 essence of this character to express its passion with 
 such effusion and exuberance of verbal energy that 
 the very repetition and prolongation of these effects 
 tend rather to heighten than to weaken the design, 
 to intensify than to impair the impression of the 
 weakness and the force of the mind that thus pours 
 itself out and foams itself away in large and swelling 
 words. The quality of pathos is not among the 
 dominant notes of Chapman's genius ; but there is 
 pathos of a high and masculine order in the last 
 appeals and struggles of the ruined spirit and the 
 fallen pride which yet retain some trace and likeness 
 of the hero and the patriot that has been, though 
 these be now wellnigh erased and buried under the 
 disajrace of deeds which have left nothino- in his 
 place but the ruins of a braggart and a traitor. 
 Upon the two high figures of the marshal and the 
 king Chapman has expended his utmost power ; 
 and they confront each other on his page in gigantic 
 outline like two studies of a great sculptor whose
 
 96 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 work is never at its best but when it assumes the 
 heroic proportion of simple and colossal forms. 
 There is no growth or development in either cha- 
 racter ; Chapman is always least happy when he 
 tries his prentice hand at analysis ; he only does 
 well when as here he brings before us a figure at 
 once full-gTown, and takes no care but to enforce 
 the first impression by constant deepening of the 
 lines first drawn, not by addition of fresh light and 
 shade, by softening or heightening of minor tones 
 and effects. 
 
 The high poetic austerity of this work as it now 
 stands is all the more striking from the absence of 
 any female element ; the queen appears in the 
 fourth act of the second part as little more than 
 a dumb figure ; the whole interest is political, and 
 the whole character is masculine, of the action and 
 the passion on which the poet has fixed our atten- 
 tion and concentrated his own. A passage now 
 cancelled in which the queen and Mademoiselle de 
 Verneuil were brought forward, and the wife gave 
 the mistress a box on the ear, had naturally drawn 
 down a remonstrance from the French ambassador
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 97 
 
 who saw the domestic life of his master's court pre- 
 sented with such singular frankness of exposition to 
 the contemporary eyes of London playgoers; and at 
 his instigation the play was not unreasonably pro- 
 hibited, by an act of censorship assuredly |^not so 
 absurd or so arbitrary as in our own day has re- 
 peatedly exposed the direction of the English stage 
 to the contempt and compassion of civilized Europe; 
 which has seen at once the classical and the con- 
 temporary masterpieces of Italy and of France, and 
 amons: them the works of the greatest tragic dra- 
 matist whom the world has seen since the death of 
 Shakespeare, forbidden by the imperial mandate of 
 some Lord Chamberlain or other Olympian person 
 to corrupt the insular chastity of an audience too 
 virtuous to face the contamination of such writers 
 as Hugo or Alfieri ; while the virtue thus tenderly 
 guarded from the very sight of a Marion or a Mirra 
 was by way of compensation — there is a law of com- 
 pensation in all things — graciously permitted by 
 leave of official examiners and under favour of a 
 chaste Chamberlain to gloat upon the filthiest farces 
 that could be raked from the sweepings of a stage 
 
 7
 
 98 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 whose national masterpieces were excluded from our 
 own. But it is only proper that the public virginity 
 which averts lier eyes from the successors of Euri- 
 pides or of Shakespeare should open her bosom to 
 the successors of Wycherley and Mrs. Behn. 
 
 In the time of Chapman the Master of the Revels 
 wielded with as fitful a Imnd as imperious an autho- 
 rity as any court official of later date ; yet then also 
 there was so curious and scandalous an alternation 
 of laxity with rigour in the direction of stage affairs 
 that in the teeth of a direct prohibition the players, 
 " when they saw that the whole court had left town, 
 persisted in acting" the s uppressed play with all the 
 offending parts revived for the satisfaction of an 
 audience of citizens, whose uncourtly suffrage was 
 possibly attracted by this defiance of the court; and 
 it may be conjectured that the savour of this politi- 
 cal scandal gave zest and edge to their relish of the 
 otherwise grave and sober entertainment set before 
 them by the poet, whose somewhat weighty venture 
 may thus have been floated into favour on the arti- 
 ficial tide of a chance which had made it the pretext 
 of a popular cry. If however there was any such
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 99 
 
 anti-Gallican or seditious element in the success of 
 a play which must certainly, one would say, have 
 needed all the outward and casual help it could get 
 to impose itself on the goodwill of the multitude, 
 the French envoy was not slack in bringing a coun- 
 ter influence to bear against it ; for three of the re- 
 calcitrant actors were arrested at his suit ; but M. 
 de Beaumont regretfully adds that " the principal 
 person, the author^ escaped." When three years 
 later the poem was published, his printers had pro- 
 bably learnt caution enough from this fresh experi- 
 ence to ensure the suppression in all published copies 
 of every trace of the forbidden part ; and indeed 
 there should seem to be two gaps in the printed 
 text ; one at the sudden end of the brief fourth act 
 of the first part, which breaks ofi" sharply after the 
 eloquent and elaborate narrative of the speeches 
 exchanged on the occasion of Biron's embassy to 
 England between the marshal, Queen Elizabeth, and 
 her prime minister ; one at the end of the first or 
 opening of the second act of the second part, which 
 acts in both editions of the play are run into each 
 other without any mark of division ; but the great 
 
 7—2
 
 loo GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 length of the fifth (or tenth) act as it now stands 
 may suggest that this seeming confusion has been 
 caused by a mere numerical derangement or mis- 
 print. 
 
 The fittest symbol I can find for this great and 
 central work of Cnapman's genius would be one 
 derived from itself; we might liken the poem to 
 that " famous mountain " which was to be carved 
 into the colossal likeness of the hero, a giant hold- 
 ing a city in his left hand and pouring from his 
 right an endless flood into a raging sea. This device 
 of a mad and magnificent vanity gives as it were a 
 reflection of the great and singular qualities of the 
 poem ; it has an epic and Titanic enormity of ima- 
 gination, the huge and naked solitude of a mountain 
 rising from the sea, whose head is bare before the 
 thunders, and whose sides are furrowed with stormy 
 streams ; and from all its rocks and torrents, crags 
 and scaurs and guUeys, there seems to look forth 
 the likeness afar off" of a single face, superhuman 
 and inordinate in the proportion of its prodigious 
 features. The general effect is as that of some vast 
 caprice of landscape ; at once fantastic, exaggerated.
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. loi 
 
 and natural. Around it we may group the remain- 
 ing works of its author as lower spurs of the out- 
 lying range of mountains. None of these lesser 
 poems were ever befriended by such an occasion as 
 lifted for a season into perilous popularity the 
 mightiest of their author's dramatic brood; that the 
 two likest in form and spirit to this giant brother 
 of their race appear to have won no popular favour 
 at all is certainly less remarkable than the record of 
 its own success. 
 
 The, 'Revenge of Bussy cVAmhois is a singular 
 example of Chapman's passion for paradox. It is a 
 work of mature power and serious interest, richer in 
 passages of moral magnificence and interludes of 
 exalted meditation than any but that greatest of 
 his poems which we have just been considering; 
 from the large storehouse of these three plays a 
 student may select at every step among their mas- 
 sive heaps of mental treasure fresh samples of rare 
 thought and costly style, fresh ingots of weighty 
 and glittering gold, fresh jewels of profound and 
 living lustre. The third of these has less in com- 
 mon with the play of which it is the nominal
 
 102 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 sequel than with the two of intervening date ; it 
 has indeed more of incident than they, but its value 
 and interest mainly depend on its gnomic or con- 
 templative passages. In the argument, the action, 
 and the characters of this poem one chief aim of the 
 author was apparei^tly to reverse all expectations 
 that might be excited by its title, and by way of 
 counterpart to produce a figure in all points opposite 
 to that of his former hero. 
 
 The brother and avenger of Bussy appears as the 
 favourite and faithful follower of a leading accom- 
 plice in his murder ; he is as sober, sententious, and 
 slow in action as his brother was boastful, im- 
 petuouSj and violent; he turns every chance of 
 fortune and every change of place into an occasion 
 for philosophic debate and moral declamation ; the 
 shelter provided by his patron and the ambuscade 
 prepared by his enemies are to liim equally op- 
 portune for the delivery of a lecture on ethics, as 
 close and serried in its array of argument as it is 
 grave and measured in its eloquence of exposition. 
 Hamlet himself gave less cause of complaint to the 
 " poor ghost " whose second resurrection was insuffi-
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. io3 
 
 cient to impel him to the discharge of his office 
 than this yet more deliberate and meditative 
 avenger of blood : and it is not without cause that 
 the tardy shade of Bussy rises to rebuke the 
 tardier hand of his brother in words heavier and 
 more bitter than any that fall from the majesty of 
 buried Denmark. The quaint contrast between the 
 tragic violence of the story and the calm interest of 
 the dialogue is not the only aspect afforded by this 
 poem of its author's taste for extravagance of para- 
 dox and shocks of moral surprise. His delight 
 throughout these historic plays is to put into the 
 mouths of his chief speakers some defence of the 
 most preposterous and untenable proposition, some 
 apology for the most enormous and unpopular 
 crime, that his ingenuity can fix upon for explana- 
 tion or excuse. Into the mouth of Biron he had 
 already put a panegyric on the policy and the per- 
 son of Philip II. ; into the mouth of Clermont he 
 puts a vindication of the massacre of St. Bartholo- 
 mew. This latter curious and courageous abuse of 
 intellectual dexterity may perhaps have contri- 
 buted to the ill success of a play which in any case
 
 104 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 must have disappointed, and that apparently by- 
 design and of malice prepense, the expectations ap- 
 pealed to by a title seemingly devised to trade upon 
 the popularity of Bussy d'Amhois, and make its 
 profit out of the artificial capital of a past success. 
 The audience attracted by the promise implied in 
 such a title may easily have been disinclined by 
 such a disappointment to receive with toleration 
 these freaks of dialectic ingenuity. 
 
 It is not likely that a writer who must have 
 been old enough at the age of thirteen to feel and 
 to remember the shock of the first tidings of the 
 hideous twenty-fourth of August 1572 — that an 
 English poet and patriot of the stalwart type 
 which from all that we know of Chapman we 
 might expect to find always as nobly exemplified in 
 his life and writings as in those of such elder and 
 younger contemporaries as Spenser and Jonson — 
 should have indulged any more personal sentiment 
 in these eccentric trials of intellectual strength 
 than a wayward pleasure in the exercise and ex- 
 hibition of his powers of argument and eloquence ; 
 but there was certainly in his nature something of
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 105 
 
 the sophist as well as of the gnomic poet, of Thrasy- 
 maehus as well as of Theognis. He seems to feel a 
 gladiator's pleasure in the sword-play of a bois- 
 terous and high-handed sophistry, less designed to 
 mislead or convince than to baffle or bear down his 
 opponent. We can imagine him setting up almost 
 any debateable theorem as a subject for dispute in 
 the schools of rhetoric, and maintaining his most 
 indefensible position with as much energy and cun- 
 ning of argument as his native force of mind could 
 bring to the support of his acquired skill of fence : 
 we can perceive that in any such case he would 
 argue his point and reinforce his reasoning with no 
 less passion and profusion of thought and speech 
 than if his heart and conscience had been enlisted 
 on the side which in fact he had taken up by mere 
 chance or defiant caprice. 
 
 This however is by no means the general character 
 of the philosophy set forth and the eloquence dis- 
 played in this poem. The whole character of Cler- 
 mont, conceived as it is in a spirit of direct defiance 
 to all rules and traditions of dramatic effect, and 
 elaborated as though in disdain of possible success
 
 io6 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 or the anticipated chance of popularity, shows once 
 more the masterly workmanship of a potent and re- 
 solute hand. In almost everyscene there are examples 
 of sound and noble thought clothed in the sober 
 colours of terse and masculine poetry ; of deep and 
 high meditation touched now and then with the 
 ardour of a fervid spirit and the light of a subtle 
 fancy. At every page some passage of severe 
 beauty reminds us with how great a spirit we are 
 called to commune, and stand in the presence of 
 how proud and profound a mind. 
 
 His equal love for the depths and the heights of 
 speculation may too often impel this poet to over- 
 strain his powers of thought and utterance in the 
 strong effort to dive or to soar into an atmosphere 
 too thin or a sea too stormy to admit the facile and 
 natural play of his vigorous faculties; but when 
 these are displayed in their full strength and clear- 
 ness, the study of them gives us some taste of the 
 rare and haughty pleasure that their owner must 
 have taken in their exercise. Here as elsewhere 
 I had taken note in my mind of special verses and 
 passages fit for extraction, which might give some
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. • 107 
 
 sample of the general power and charm of the keen 
 intellect and the fine imagination that shape and 
 inform the scheme and action of the poem ; but to 
 cite one or more instances of these would be to 
 wrong the profuse and liberal genius which has 
 sown them broadcast in so rich a soil. The reader 
 who seeks them for himself with a judging eye and 
 an apprehensive spirit will not be unlikely to make 
 of Tlie Revenge of Bussy cVAmhois, for the wealth 
 and the weight of its treasures of ethical beauty, 
 his chosen and peculiar favourite among the works 
 of Chapman. 
 
 In the last of this stately line of tragic poems 
 dealing with the recent or immediate history of 
 France we find the same prevailing qualities of 
 moral force and poetic dignity. The tragedy of 
 Chahot is more equable and less ambitious in treat- 
 ment than any of its compeers ; but the model 
 given in its hero of majestic faith and august in- 
 tegrity may be classed among the purest and most 
 perfect studies that we have from the sculptor's 
 hand. The serene and stainless figure of a wholly 
 righteous and loyal man is so thoroughly and truth-
 
 io8 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 fully sustained by the high instinct and spiritual 
 sense of the poet that we may trace and recognize 
 from the first a nature so inflexible at once and so 
 sensitive as to refuse all shelter or compromise 
 which might rather protect than vindicate his 
 innocence from the attacks of fraud and injustice, 
 and when cleared of all their charges and restored 
 to all his honours to lie down and die of the wound 
 inflicted by the mere shame of suspicion : a heart 
 so stout and so tender that it could resist all shocks 
 and strokes of power or treachery, and bleed to 
 death for grief to be distrusted where most of all it 
 had deserved to find trust. 
 
 But here again the singleness and purity of the 
 interest could hardly be expected to secure success 
 on the stage ; and though we have no hint as to 
 the good or ill fortune of this high-toned poem, we 
 may conjecture that it could hardly have been re- 
 deemed from popular indiflference by the dramatic 
 power and pathetic impression of the scene in which 
 the wife and father-in-law of the arraigned admiral 
 prevail by the justice and dignity of their appeal 
 upon the pride and prepossession of the queen.
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 109 
 
 Yet this at least, and the last scene, in which 
 Chabot dies at the feet of his repentant master, 
 with a prayer for the pardon of his enemy on the 
 lips that kiss for the last time the hand which 
 must confer it, should have found favour with an 
 audience capable of doing justice to the high desert 
 of such austere and unseductive excellence. 
 
 As we have no external ground for conjecture by 
 what original impulse or bias of mind the genius of 
 Chapman was attracted to the study and represen- 
 tation on an English stage of subjects derived from 
 the annals of contemporary France, or what freak of 
 perverse and erratic instinct may have led him to 
 bring before a Protestant audience the leading 
 criminals of the Catholic party under any but an 
 unfavourable aspect, so we have no means of guess- 
 ing whether or not any conscious reason or principle 
 induced him to present in much the same light 
 three princes of such diverse characters as the first 
 Francis and the third and fourth Heni'ies of France. 
 Indeed, but for a single reference to his ransom 
 'from Pavian thraldom' (Act ii. Scene iii.), we 
 should be wholly at a loss to recognize in the royal
 
 no GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 master of Chabot the radiant and exuberant lover of 
 the whole world of women, 
 
 " ce roi sacr6 chevalier par Bayard, 
 Jeune homme auquel il faut des plaisirs de vieillard," 
 
 who in our own age has been far otherwise pre- 
 sented on the theatre of a far mightier poet. There 
 is no hint in the play that any more prevailing and 
 less legitimate influence than a wife's was brought 
 to bear in favour of Chabot on a king with whom 
 his lawful consort might have been supposed of all 
 women the least likely to prevail \ and by this sup- 
 pression or disguise of the personal interest actually 
 exerted on behalf of his hero the dramatist has de- 
 frauded of her due credit the real friend of the 
 fallen admiral ; for it was not at the instance of the 
 queen, but at the instance of Madame d'Etampes, a 
 kinswoman of Chabot, that the chancellor Poyet was 
 arrested and disgraced in the same year (1542) 
 which had seen the fall, the restoration, and the 
 death by heartbreak of the faithful minister who 
 owed not to the intercession of the king's wife but 
 to his own alliance by blood with the king's mis-
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. nr 
 
 tress that revenge which at the first occasion 
 given the duchess was not slow to exact from her 
 lover on the triumphant enemy of her kinsman. 
 
 The haughty integrity which involved and upheld 
 Chabot in danger and disgrace, and the susceptible 
 pride which when restored to favour could no longer 
 support him under the sense of past degradation, 
 are painted from the life of history ; but his poet 
 may be thought to have somewhat softened the 
 harsher features of that arrogance and roughness of 
 temper which impaired the high qualities and im- 
 perilled the high station of the brave and upright 
 admiral who dared his king to find a ground for his 
 impeachment. And if we miss in Chapman's portrait 
 those chivalrous and amorous features which long 
 kept fresh in popular fancy the knightly fame of 
 Francis I., the figure set before us is not wanting in 
 a kingly grace and dignity which the dramatist has 
 chosen to bestow with an equal hand on the grandson 
 to whom neither history nor tradition has assigned 
 even so much of ' the king-becoming graces' as may 
 be allowed to the conqueror of Marignano. Chap- 
 man indeed has in this case taken so little care to
 
 112 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 preserve the historic relations of his leading cha- 
 racters, that the king by whose intervention Bussy 
 d'Ambois was betrayed to the jealousy of Mon- 
 soreau appears not as the treacherous enemy but as 
 the trusty friend and patron of his brother's re- 
 bellious favourite ; pardons and prefers him to the 
 rank of his own, and adopts him into that station 
 by the surname of his eagle ; while Instead of the 
 king it is here the duke of Anjou who delivers 
 his refractory minion into the murderous snare 
 set for him by an injured husband. But if I 
 read aright the hinted imputation of Brantome, 
 it would seem that some years before he put into 
 the hands of Monsoreau the intercepted corre- 
 spondence of Bussy with his wife the king had 
 already laid an ambush of 'twelve good men' armed 
 with pistols and ' mounted on Spanish horses taken 
 from the stables of a very great personage who had 
 set them on' to attempt the life of his brother's 
 indomitable champion, who was preserved as well 
 by his own presence of mind and discretion as by 
 the good fortune which befell him to find the door
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 113 
 
 of a neighbour's house ajar for him to slip through 
 and fasten it against pursuit. Being compelled 
 after this adventure to leave Paris in consequence 
 of his threats 'to slit folk's nostrils, and that he 
 ■would kill everybody' in retaliation for this noc- 
 turnal assault, the gallant bravo was escorted out 
 of the city by all the noble retainers of his ignoble 
 patron the duke of Anjou, but by three gentlemen 
 only of the king's household brigade ; his kins- 
 man Brantome, whom he charged at parting to 
 bear back his defiance to the whole court, M. de 
 Neuville, and the hero Crillon, who in spite of his 
 attachment to the king's party refused to forsake 
 the friendship of so stout a swordsman. 
 
 Although the first standard edition of Brantome's 
 Lives was not published by a descendant of his 
 fa,mily till thirty-two years after the death of 
 Chapman, it is singular that the English poet who 
 thought fit to choose as a subject for tragedy the 
 fate of a man at the time of whose murder he had 
 himself reached the age of twenty should also 
 have thought tit so seriously to alter the facts of 
 
 8
 
 114 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 his story for no discernible reason but a desire to 
 shift the charge of the principal villainy from the 
 shoulders of a king to those of his brother. In 
 either play dedicated to the memory of Bussy — 
 who at the wildest pitch of his windy and bois- 
 terous vanity can never have anticipated that 
 twenty-eight years after his death he would figure 
 on the page of a foreign poet as a hero of the 
 Homeric or Lucanian type — the youngest son of 
 Catherine de' Medici is drawn in colours as hateful 
 as those of truth or tradition j whereas the last 
 king of his line is handled with such remarkable 
 forbearance that his most notorious qualities are 
 even less recognizable than those of his grandfather 
 in the delicate and dignified study of Chapman. A 
 reader indeed, if such an one were possible, who 
 should come to the perusal of these plays with no 
 previous knowledge of French history, would find 
 little difference or distinction between Henri de 
 Valois and Henri de Bourbon ; and would probably 
 carry away the somewhat inaccurate impression 
 that the slayer of the duke of Guise and the judge 
 of the duke of Biron were men of similar tastes
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 115 
 
 and manners, respectable if not venerable for their 
 private virtues, elegant and sententious in their 
 habitual choice of language, grave and decorous in 
 their habitual carriage and discourse, and equally 
 imbued with a fine and severe sense of responsi- 
 bility for the conscientious discharge of the 
 highest and hardest duties of their royal 
 ofiice. 
 
 It is less remarkable, as the dramatist in his 
 dedication to Sir Thomas Howard disclaims all 
 pretension to observe " the authentical truth of 
 either person or action," as a thing not to be ex- 
 pected " in a poem whose subject is not truth, but 
 things like truth," that he should have provided to 
 avenge the daring and turbulent desperado who out- 
 braved the gorgeous minions of the king with a 
 simple dress set off by the splendour of six pages 
 in cloth of gold, and then signalized by a fresh in- 
 sult under the very eyes of Henry his enforced re- 
 conciHation with the luckless leader of their crew, 
 a brother of whose name I know nothing but that 
 Georges de Clermont d'Amboise, not a follower of 
 Guise but a leader of the Huguenots, was slain 
 
 8—2
 
 ii6 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 seven years earlier than Bussy in the massacre of 
 St. Bartholomew. Chapman's apology for the attri- 
 bution of this name to the apparently imaginary 
 avenger of his brother's blood is better worth remem- 
 bering than such inquiries are worth pursuing. " Poor 
 envious souls they are," says the poet, " that cavil at 
 truth's want in these natural fictions ;" a reasonable 
 and memorable protest against the perverse or sense- 
 less paradox which confounds truth with fact, and 
 refuses to distinguish veracity from reality ; and 
 which would not be worth the passing notice of a 
 contemptuous instant, if men of genius would for- 
 bear to confuse the minds of their feebler and more 
 servile admirers by the adoption and promulgation 
 in the loudest tones of prophecy of such blatant 
 and vacuous babble about "kinship of fiction to 
 lying " and so forth as should properly be left to 
 the lips of the dunces who may naturally believe 
 it, being thick-witted enough to accept as serious 
 reasoning and deliberate opinion the most wilful 
 and preposterous paradoxes thundered forth from 
 pulpit or from tripod in the most riotous and ludi-
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 117 
 
 crous paroxysms of wayward humour or fantastic 
 passion. 
 
 That the "Roman tragedy " of Goesar and Pom- 
 pey was earlier in date than most though later in 
 publication than any except Ghdbot of the French 
 series, we might have conjectured without the evi- 
 dence of the dedication. It is more unequal and 
 irregular in the proportion of its good parts and 
 its bad than any of Chapman's tragedies except 
 Bussy d'Ambois ; I should imagine it to be a 
 work of nearly the same period ; though, as was 
 before intimated, it bears more affinity to the 
 sequel of that play and to the great tragic poem 
 on Biron in the main quality of interest and the 
 preponderance of speech over action. To this play 
 we might adapt a well-known critical remark of 
 Dr. Johnson's on Henry VIII., much less applic- 
 able in that case than in this, and say that the 
 genius of the author comes in and goes out with 
 Cato. Not that even in this case that rhetorical 
 phrase would be wholly accurate ; there are noble 
 lines and passages discernible elsewhere ; but the
 
 ii8 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 glory of tlie poem is given it by the scenes in 
 which Cato is the leading figure. I know nothing 
 in moral or contemplative poetry more admirable 
 than the speech in the first scene on fear or 
 mistrust of the gods, and the soliloquy in the 
 last act on sleep and death. The serene and 
 sublime emotion of heroic wisdom is in either pas- 
 sage so touched and tempered with something of 
 the personal ardour of a noble passion that its tone 
 and effect are not merely abstract or didactic, but 
 thoroughly dramatic and human ; and the weighty 
 words ring in the ear of our remembrance long after 
 the mind has first unconsciously absorbed and re- 
 tained the lofty sound and sense of the memorable 
 and magnificent verse. 
 
 It is especially in such examples as these that we 
 perceive the great quality of Chapman's genius, the 
 true height and purity of its power; majestic in- 
 tellect lighted and enkindled by poetic imagination, 
 the high beauty of heroic thought warmed and 
 winged with the spiritual fire of a living sentiment. 
 It is true that those who read only the glorious ex- 
 cerpts given from this poem by Charles Lamb will
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 119 
 
 have a nobler impression of its merit than they who 
 read the whole ; but those only who read the whole 
 will know all its merit as well as all its demerit ; they 
 wiU find fresh treasures of fine thought and high ex- 
 pression embedded among dense layers of crabbed 
 and confused rhetoric, wedged in between rocky strata 
 of thick and turgid verse. As there is little other life 
 or movement in the play but that of declamation or 
 discussion, we might presume that if it had ever 
 " touched at the stage " its reception would in all 
 likelihood have been something less than favour- 
 able ; but we have already remarked on such inex- 
 plicable variations of good and ill luck in the for- 
 tunes of Chapman's plays that no conclusion of the 
 kind can be assumed as certain. That it never did 
 lose on any boards its long-preserved immunity 
 from the touch of actors or managers, we may, I 
 suppose, after the author's assurance of its vir- 
 ginity at the date of publication, be tolerably confi- 
 dent. 
 
 Twenty years after the death of Chapman the 
 long list of his dramatic works was completed by 
 the publication of two tragedies in which, though
 
 I20 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 tliere are but few qualities common to both, there 
 are yet fewer traces of either the chief merits or 
 the chief defects which distinguish and deform alike 
 the poems and the tragic plays published during the 
 life of the author. There is nothing in them of 
 bombast, of barbarism, or of obscurity ; there is 
 assuredly no lack of incidents, and these, however 
 crowded and violent in themselves, are conducted 
 with such clearness and simplicity of exposition 
 as to keep the attention and interest of the 
 reader undistracted and unfatigued. The style 
 in both is pure, lucid, and vigorous; equably 
 sustained at an even height above the lowlands 
 of prosaic realism and beneath the cloudland of 
 winds and vapours; more forcible and direct in 
 the first play, more florid and decorative in the 
 second. On the other hand, these posthumous 
 children have not the lofty stature, the kingly 
 aspect, the gigantic sinews and the shining eyes, 
 which went far to redeem the halting gait and the 
 irregular features of their elders. They want the 
 breadth of brow, the weight of brain, the fulness of 
 speech and the fire of spirit, which make amends
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 121 
 
 foi* the harsh voice and stammering tongue that im- 
 perfectly deliver the message entrusted to them ; 
 the tumultuous eloquence which bears down and 
 sweeps away all physical impediment of utterance, the 
 fervid vitality which transfigures and atones for all 
 clumsiness of gesture or deformity of limb. No 
 thought so ripe and sweet, no emotion so exalted 
 and august is here discernible as that which uplifts 
 the contemplation and upholds the confidence of the 
 highest in spirit and the deepest in thought among 
 those earlier speakers who served as mouthpieces of 
 the special genius of their high-minded and deep- 
 souled creator. There is no trace of the ethical 
 power which informs and moulds the meditation of 
 Clermont or of Cato, no relic of the imaginative 
 passion which expands and inflates the fancy of 
 Bussy or of Biron. 
 
 In Alphonsus there is more of Chapman's quality 
 at first perceptible than in Revenge for Honour ; 
 there is a certain hardness in the simplicity of tone, 
 a certain rigidity in the sharp masculine lineaments 
 of style and character, common to much of his work 
 when free from the taint of crabbed or bombastic
 
 J 22 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 obscurity. The singular violations and confusions of 
 history, which may be taken to mask the probable 
 allusions to matters of more recent political interest, 
 are ably explained and illustrated by Dr. Elze in 
 the thoroughly efficient and sufficient introduction 
 to his edition of this play ; in which the student 
 will observe, with gratitude for his help and admira- 
 tion for his learning in all matters of social and 
 historical illustration, that the German editor has 
 kept well to such work as he was perfectly compe- 
 tent to discharge, and has never on this occasion 
 exchanged the highest seat in the hall of scholarship 
 for the lowest form in the school of criticism. By 
 him as by others the actual merit of this most un- 
 historic of historical dramas has perhaps been some- 
 what underrated. Naked as it is of ornament, vio- 
 lent in most of its action and repulsive in several of 
 its scenes, barren of beauty in language and poor in 
 treasure of thought, it never fails in animation and 
 interest; and the hardened student of our early 
 stage who has once entered the shambles will hardly 
 turn away in disgust or weariness from the fume 
 and flow of monotonous bloodshed till his curiosity
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 123 
 
 at least has been satisfied by tlie final evolution of 
 the tangled web of slaughter. In this catastrophe 
 especially there is a remarkable sense of strong ma- 
 terial effect, with a notable capacity for vigorous 
 theatrical manipulation of incident, which is as 
 notably deficient in the earlier and loftier works of 
 Chapman. 
 
 In the tragedy of Revenge for Honour I have 
 already noticed the curious change of style which 
 distinguishes it from all other works of Chapman : 
 a change from rigidity to relaxation, from energy to 
 fluency, from concentration to effusion of language. 
 It has something of the manner and metre of 
 Fletcher and his school, something of the softness 
 and facility which lend a half effeminate grace to 
 the best scenes of Shirley ; while in the fifth act at 
 least I observe something too much of the merely 
 conventional imagery and the overflow of easy ver- 
 bosity which are the besetting sins of that poet's 
 style. Only in one image can I find anything of 
 that quaint fondness for remote and eccentric illus- 
 tration in which the verse of Chapman resembles 
 the prose of Fuller : this is put into the mouth of
 
 124 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 the villain of the piece, who repudiates conscience 
 as 
 
 " a weak and fond remembrance 
 Which men should shun, as elephants clear springs, 
 Lest they behold their own deformities 
 And start at their grim shadows." 
 
 Even here the fall of the verse is not that of 
 Chapman ; and the tone of the verses which imme- 
 diately follow is so utterly alien from the prevailing 
 tone of his that the authenticity of the scene, as 
 indeed of the whole play, can only be vindicated by 
 a supposition that in his last years he may for once 
 have taken the whim and had the power to change 
 his style and turn his hand to the new fashion of 
 the youngest writers then prospering on the stage. 
 Only the silliest and shallowest of pedants and of 
 sciolists can imagine that a question as to the date 
 or the authorship of any poem can be determined 
 by mere considerations of measure and mechanical 
 computation of numbers ; as though the language 
 of a poem were divisible from the thought, or (to 
 borrow a phrase from the Miltonic theology) the 
 effluence were separable from the essence of a man's
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 125 
 
 genius. It should be superfluotis and impertinent 
 to explain that the expression is not to be considered 
 apart from the substance ; but while men who do 
 not know this are suffered to utter as with the 
 authority of a pedagogue or a pulpiteer the verdict 
 of gerundgrinders and metremongers on the finest 
 and most intricate questions of the subtlest and 
 most sublime of arts, it is but too evident that the 
 explanation of even so simple and radical a truth 
 can be neither impertinent nor superfluous. It is 
 not because a particular pronoun or conjunction is 
 used in this play some fifty times oftener than 
 in any other work of its author, a point on 
 which I profess myself neither competent nor careful 
 to pronounce, that I am prepared to decide on the 
 question of its authenticity or its age. That ques- 
 tion indeed I am difiident enough to regard as one 
 impossible to resolve. That it is the work of Chap- 
 man I see no definite reason to disbelieve^ and not a 
 little reason to suppose that it may be. The selec- 
 tion and treatment of the subject recall the trick of 
 his fancy and the habit of his hand ; the process of 
 the story is in parts quaint and bloody, galvanic and
 
 126 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 abrupt ; but the movement on the whole is certainly 
 smoother, the evolution more regular, the arrange- 
 ment more dramatic than of old. Accepting it as 
 the last tragic effort of the author whose first extant 
 attempt in that line was Bussy d'Ambois, we shall 
 find perhaps in the general workmanship almost as 
 much of likeness as of unlikeness. Considered 
 apart and judged by its own merits, we shall cer- 
 tainly find it, like Alphonsus, animated and amusing, 
 noticeable for a close and clear sequence of varying 
 incident and interest, and for a quick light touch in 
 the sketching of superficial character. These being 
 its chief qualities, we may fairly pronounce that 
 whether or not it be the work of Chapman it be- 
 longs less to his school than to the school of Shirley ; 
 yet being as it is altogether too robust and mascu- 
 line for a work of the latter school, it seems most 
 reasonable to admit it as the child of an older father, 
 the last-born of a more vigorous generation, with 
 less of strength and sap than its brothers, but with 
 something in return of the younger and lighter 
 graces of its fellows in age. The hero and his father 
 are figures well invented and well sustained: the
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 127 
 
 villains are not distorted or overdrawn, and the 
 action is full of change and vivacity.- 
 
 Of the poems published by Chapman after the 
 first of his plays was given to the press, we may 
 say generally that they show some signs of advance 
 and none of retrogression from the standard of his 
 earlier work. Out of many lovely lines embedded 
 in much thick and turbid matter I choose one coup- 
 let from TliQ Tears of Peace as an example of their 
 best beauties : 
 
 " Free sufferance for the truth makes sorrow sing, 
 And mourning far more sweet than banqueting." 
 
 In this poem, with much wearisome confusion and 
 iteration of thought and imagery, reprobation and 
 complaint, there are several noble interludes of 
 gnomic and symbolic verse. The allegory is of 
 course clouded and confounded by all manner of 
 perversities and obscurities worth no man's while 
 to elucidate or to rectify ; the verse hoarse and stiff, 
 the style dense and convulsive, inaccurate and vio- 
 lent ; yet ever and anon the sense becomes clear, the 
 style pure, the imagery luminous and tender, the
 
 128 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 verse gracious and majestic ; transformed for a mo- 
 ment and redeemed by great brief touches of high 
 and profound harmony ; of which better mood let 
 us take in proof a single instance, and that the most 
 sustained and exquisite we shall find : 
 
 Before her fiew Affliction, girt in storms, 
 
 Gash'd all with gushing wounds, and all the forms 
 
 Of bane and misery frowning in her face ; 
 
 Whom Tyranny and Injustice had in chase ; 
 
 Grim Persecution, Poverty, and Shame ; 
 
 Detraction, Envy, foul Mishap, and lame 
 
 Scruple of Conscience ; Fear, Deceit, Despair ; 
 
 Slander and Clamour, that rent all the air ; 
 
 Hate, War, and Massacre ; uncrowned Toil ; 
 
 And Sickness, t' all the rest the base and fod, 
 
 Crept after ; and his deadly weight trod down 
 
 Wealth, Beauty, and the glory of a crown. 
 
 These ushered her far off ; as figures given 
 
 To show, these crosses borne make peace with heaven. 
 
 But now, made free from them, next her before, 
 
 Peaceful and young, Herculean silence bore 
 
 His craggy club ; which up aloft he hdd ; 
 
 With which and his fore-finger's charm he still'd 
 
 All sounds in air ; and left so free mine ears, 
 
 That I might hear the music of the spheres, 
 
 And all the angels singing out of heaven ; 
 
 Whose tunes were solemn, as to passion given ; 
 
 For now, that Justice was the happiness there 
 
 For all the wrongs to Right inflicted here.
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 129 
 
 Such was the passion that Peace now put on ; 
 And on all went ; when suddenly was gone 
 All light of heaven before us : from a wood, 
 Whose sight, fore-seen, now lost, amazed we stood, 
 The sun still gracing us ; when now, the air 
 Inflamed with meteors, we discovered fair 
 The skipping goat ; the horse's flaming mane ; 
 Bearded and trained comets ; stars in wane ; 
 The burning sword ; the firebrand-flying snake ; 
 The lance ; the torch ; the licking fire ; the drake ; 
 And all else meteors that did ill abode ; 
 The thunder chid ; the lightning leapt abroad : 
 And yet when Peace came in all heaven was clear ; 
 And then did all the horrid wood appear. 
 Where mortal dangers more than leaves did grow ; 
 In which we could not one free step bestow. 
 For treading on some murder'd passenger 
 Who thither was by witchcraft forced to err ; 
 Whose face the bird hid that loves humans best. 
 That hath the bugle eyes and rosy breast, 
 And is the yeUow autumn's nightingale." 
 
 This is Chapman at his best ; and few then can 
 better him. The language hardly holds lovelier 
 lines, of more perfect colour and more happy 
 cadence, than some few of these which I have 
 given to shew how this poet could speak when 
 for a change he was content to empty his mouth of 
 pebbles and clear his forehead of fog. The vision 
 
 9
 
 I30 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 of Homer which serves as overture to this poem is 
 not the only other noble feature which relieves a 
 landscape in too great part made up of rocks and 
 brambles, of mire and morass ; and for the sake of 
 these hidden green places and sunny moments some 
 yet may care to risk an hour or so of toil along the 
 muddy and thorny lanes that run between. 
 
 From the opening verses of The Tears of Peace 
 we get one of the few glimpses allowed us into the 
 poet's personal life, his birthplace, the manner and 
 the spirit of his work, and his hopes in his ' retired 
 age ' for ' heaven's blessing in a free and harmless 
 life ;' the passage has beauty as well as interest far 
 beyond those too frequent utterances of querulous 
 anger at the neglect and poverty to which he could 
 not resign himself without resentment. It would have 
 been well for himself as for us, who cannot now 
 read such reiterated complaints without a sense of 
 weariness and irritation, if he had really laid once 
 for all to heart the noble verses in which he sup- 
 poses himself to be admonished by the ' spirit Ely- 
 sian ' of his divine patron Homer, who told him, as 
 he says, 'that he was angel to me, star, and fate.'
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 131 
 
 " Thou must not undervalue what thou hast, 
 In weighing it with that which more is graced ; 
 The worth that weigheth inward should not long 
 For outward prices. This should make thee strong 
 In thy close value : Nought so good can be 
 As that which lasts good between God and thee. 
 Remember thine own verse — Should Heaven turn Hell 
 For deeds well done, I would do ever well." 
 
 The dignity and serenity of spirit here inculcated 
 are not compatible with the tone of fierce remon- 
 strance and repining defiance which alternates with 
 such higher tones of meditation a,nd self-reliance as 
 constantly exalt and dignify the praises of those 
 patrons to whom he appeals for recognition as for a 
 right not to be withheld without discredit to them 
 and danger of future loss of that glory which he 
 had to give. In all dedicatory verse known to me 
 I find nothing that resembles the high self-respect 
 and haughty gratitude of a poet who never forgets 
 that for every benefit of patronage conferred he 
 gives fully as much as he may receive. Men 
 usually hurry over the dedications of poet to patron 
 with a keen angry sense of shame and sorrow, of 
 pity and repulsion and regret ; but it may be 
 justly claimed for Chapman that his verses of dedi- 
 
 9—2
 
 132 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 cation can give no reader such pain as those of 
 others. 
 
 His first and best patron in the court of James 
 was that youth on whose coflin so many crowns of 
 mourning verse were showered, and who does by 
 all report seem to have well deserved that other 
 than official regrets should go with him to his 
 grave. A boy dpng at eighteen after three years' 
 l^roof of interest in the higher culture of his time, 
 three years during which he had shown himself, as 
 far as we can see, sincere and ardent in his love of 
 noble things only, and only of noble men, of poetry 
 and of heroes — champion of Kaleigh in his prison 
 and patron of Chapman in his need — must certainly 
 have been one worthy of notice in higher places 
 than a court; one who, even if born in a loftier 
 atmosphere and likelier to bring forth seed of en- 
 during honour, would assuredly have earned remark 
 and remembrance as a most exceptional figure, of 
 truly rare and admirable promise. 
 
 The inscription of Chapman's Iliad to Prince 
 Henry is one of his highest and purest examples of
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 133 
 
 moral verse : the august praise and grave exaltation 
 of his own great art give dignity to the words of 
 admonition as much as of appeal with which he 
 commends it to the acceptance and reverence of 
 kings. We may well believe that the prince's 
 death gave to the high heart of his old Homeric 
 teacher and counsellor of royal and heroic things a 
 sharper pain than the mere sense of a patron lost 
 and of personal as well as of national hopes cut off. 
 Yet in his special case there was good reason for 
 special regret. The latter instalments of his lofty 
 labour on the translation of Homer were inscribed to 
 the ignoblest among the minions, as the former had 
 been inscribed to the noblest among the children of 
 the king. An austere and stately moralist like Chap- 
 man could hardly have sought a stranger patron than 
 Carr ; and when we find him officiating as para- 
 nymph at those nuptials which recall the darkest 
 and foulest history in all the annals of that reign, 
 the poisonous and adulterous secrets of blood and 
 shame in whose darkness nothing; is discernible 
 but the two masked and muffled figures of treachery
 
 134 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 and murder, we cannot but remember and apply 
 the parallel drawn by Macaulay from the court of 
 Nero; nor can it be with simple surprise that 
 we listen to the sermon or the song composed by 
 Seneca or by Lucan for the epithalamium of Sporus 
 and Locusta. 
 
 The celebration of that monstrous marriage in 
 ethic and allegoric verse brought nothing to Chap- 
 man but disquiet and discredit. Neither Andro- 
 meda Lady Essex nor Perseus Earl of Somerset had 
 reason to thank or to reward the solitary singer 
 whose voice was raised to call down blessings on 
 the bridal bed which gave such a Julia to the arms 
 of such a Manlius. The enormous absurdity of 
 Chapman's ever unfortunate allegory was on this 
 auspicious occasion so much more than absurd 
 that Carr himself would seem to have taken such 
 offence as his luckless panegyrist had undoubt- 
 edly no suspicion that he might give. And yet 
 this innocence of intention affords one of the 
 oddest instances on record of the marvellous want 
 of common sense and common tact which has 
 sometimes been so notable in men of genius.
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 135 
 
 It is hardly credible that a grave poetic moralist 
 of fifty-five should have written without after- 
 thought this thrice unhaj)py poem of Andronieilaj 
 Liberata. Its appearance did for once succeed in 
 attracting attention; but the comment it drew 
 down was of such a nature as at once to elicit from 
 the author "a free and offenceless justification of a 
 lately published and most maliciously misinter- 
 preted poem ;" a defence almost as amazing as the 
 offence, and decidedly more amusing. The poet 
 could never imagine till now so far-fetched a 
 thought in malice (" such was my simplicity," he 
 adds with some reason) as would induce any reader 
 to regard as otherwise than " harmlessly and grace- 
 fully applicable to the occasion " — these are his 
 actual words — the representation of "an innocent 
 and spotless virgin (sic) rescued from the polluted 
 throat of a monster, which I in this place applied 
 to the savage multitude." Such is the perversity 
 of man, that on perusing this most apt and judicious 
 allegory " the base, ignoble, barbarous, giddy mul- 
 titude " of readers actually thought fit to inquire 
 from what " barren rock" the new Perseus might
 
 136 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 be said to have unbound his fettered virgin ; and in 
 answer to this not unnatural inquiry Chaprfan had 
 the audacious innocence to affirm — and I doubt not 
 in all truth and simplicity — that the inevitable ap- 
 plication of this happy and appropriate symbol had 
 never so much as crossed his innocent mind. As 
 if, he exclaims indignantly, the word "barren" 
 could be applied to a man ! — was it ever said a man 
 was barren ? or was the burden of bearing fruit 
 ever laid on man ? 
 
 Whether this vindication was likely under the 
 circumstances to mend matters much " the pre- 
 judicate and peremptory reader" will judge for 
 himself. One rumour however the poet repudiates 
 in passing with some violence of language ; to the 
 effect, we may gather, that he had been waylaid 
 and assaulted as was Dryden by Rochester's ruf- 
 fians, but at whose instigation we can only con- 
 jecture. He will omit, he says, " as struck dumb 
 with the disdain of it, their most unmanly lie both 
 of my baffling and wounding, saying, ' Take this 
 for your Andromeda ;' not being so much as 
 touched, I witness God, nor one syllable suffering."
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 137 
 
 The rumour is singular enough, and it would be 
 curious to know if at least any such threat or 
 attempt were actually made. From Carr at all 
 events we can hardly believe that it would have 
 come ; for it must be set down to his credit that in 
 the days of obscurity which followed on his dis- 
 grace and retirement he seems to have befriended 
 the poet whose humbler chances of court favour 
 had presumably fallen with his own. 
 
 It was unlikely that any man ever so slightly as- 
 sociated with the recollection of a matter which the 
 king was probably of all men least desirous to keep 
 in mind should again be summoned by two of the 
 Inns of Court, as Chapman had been summoned the 
 year before, to compose the marriage masque for a 
 royal wedding. More inauspicious by far though 
 far more innocent than those of Somerset were the 
 nuptials he had then been chosen to celebrate ; the 
 nuptials of Elizabeth, called the Queen of Hearts, 
 with Frederick, one day to be surnamed the Winter- 
 King. For that fatal marriage-feast of "Goody 
 Palsgrave " and her hapless bridegroom he had 
 been bidden to provide due decorations of pageantry
 
 138 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 and verse ; and had produced at least some bright 
 graceful couplets and stanzas, among others hardly 
 so definable. But to such a task he was now not 
 likely to be called again ; the turning-point of his 
 fortunes as far as they hung upon the chance of 
 patronage at court vras the wedding-day of Carr. 
 
 As a favourite of the dead prince to whom his 
 Homer had been ascribed in weighty and worthy 
 verses, he may have been thought fit the year 
 before to assist as the laureate of a day at the mar- 
 riage which had been postponed by the death of 
 the bride's brother in the preceding autumn ; and 
 some remembrance of the favour shown him by the 
 noble youth for whom the country if not the court 
 had good reason to mourn may have kept his name 
 for awhile before the eyes of the better part of the 
 courtiers, if a better part there were ; but if ever, 
 as we may conjecture, his fortune had passed 
 through its hour of rise and its day of progress, we 
 must infer that its decline was sudden and its fall 
 irremediable. 
 
 In the same year which witnessed the unlucky 
 venture of his Andromeda Chapman put forth a
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 139 
 
 poem on the death of Lord Russell of Thornhaugh, 
 a patron, it should seem, of a far other kind than 
 Carr; distinguished as a soldier in the field now 
 only memorable to us for the death of Sir Philip 
 Sydney, where if report may be trusted his romantic 
 or Homeric valour was worthy to have employed 
 the pen of a translator of the Iliad ; and yet more 
 remarkable for the comparative justice and mercy 
 displayed in his military administration of Ireland, 
 This epicede, longer and more ornate than that 
 issued two years before on Prince Henry, is neither 
 much worse nor much better in substance and in 
 style. Each may boast of some fine and vigorous 
 verses, and both are notable as examples of the 
 poet's somewhat troubled and confused elevation of 
 thought and language. In Eugenia especially the 
 same high note of moral passion alternates with the 
 same sharp tone of contemptuous complaint that we 
 find in TIlq Tears of Peace and in the very last 
 verses affixed by way of epilogue to his translation 
 of the Hymns and other Homeric fragments. This 
 bitterness of insinuation or invective against meaner 
 scholars or artists we should set down rather to a
 
 I40 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 genuine hatred of bad work, a genuine abhorrence 
 of base ambition and false pretence, than to any un- 
 just or malevolent instinct of mere jealousy; which 
 yet might perhaps be found pardonable to the neg- 
 lected and laborious old age of a high-minded artist 
 and hard-working scholar such as Chapman. There 
 are impressive touches of a higher mood in the fune- 
 ral hymn which completes the somewhat voluminous 
 tribute of ceremonial verse offered up at the grave 
 of Lord Russell ; but the greater part of the poem is 
 more noticeable for quaintness than for any better 
 quality, being indeed eccentric in execution as in 
 conception beyond the wont even of Chapman. It 
 carries however some weight of thought, and con- 
 tains probably the longest and minutest catalogue 
 ever given in verse of the signs of an approaching 
 storm ; a description which shows at once the close 
 and intense observation of nature, the keen and 
 forcible power of reproduction, and the utter Id- 
 competence to select and arrange his material, alike 
 and at all times distinctive of this poet. 
 
 Four years after the miscarriage of Andromeda 
 we find his translation of Hesiod ushered in by a
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN, 141 
 
 dignified appeal and compliment to ' the truly 
 Greek inspiration and absolutely Attic elocution ' 
 of no less a patron than Bacon ; ' whose all-acknow- 
 ledged faculty hath banished flattery therein even 
 from the court ; much more from my country and 
 more than upland simplicity.' But for his Odyssey 
 and Hymns of Homer, as well as for his plea ad- 
 dressed to the country on behalf of the beleaguered 
 handful of troops serving with Sir Horace Vere, he 
 sought or found no patronage but that of Carr ; and 
 that this should not have failed him gives evidence 
 of some not ignoble quality in one whom we are 
 accustomed only to regard as the unloveliest of the 
 Ganymedes whose Jupiter was James. In the dedi- 
 cation of the Hymns he refers to the retired life of 
 his disgraced patron in a tone which might not un- 
 worthily have saluted the more honourable seclusion 
 of a better man. To these as to others of Chapman's 
 moral verses Coleridge has paid a tribute of thouglit- 
 ful and memorable praise, deserved no less by the 
 fragments of ethical poetry printed some years 
 earlier with a metrical version, after that of Petrarca, 
 of the penitential Psalms. Among these there are
 
 142 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 many grains of genuine thought, of terse and grave 
 expression, worth remark and remembrance. So 
 much indeed may be said in parting of Chapman's 
 poetry as a whole ; in all his poems of dedication or 
 mere compliment, as in the elaborate and eloquent 
 rhapsody prefixed to Ben Jonson's Sejanus, we shall 
 find some weight of reflection and some energy of 
 utterance ; in the commendatory verses of Fletcher's 
 Faithful Shepherdess we shall find something better ; 
 four of the loveliest lines in the language, perfect 
 for melody, purity, and simple sweetness of colour. 
 It is better to think of Chapman as the just and 
 generous friend of other and younger men's genius 
 than to remark except in passing on his quarrel in 
 old age with Jonson, of which we know nothing 
 but by an unhappy fragment of virulent and worth- 
 less verse, transcribed it should seem during his last 
 illness by some foolish and officious friend or flatterer 
 (as we may conceive) of the old man's petulances and 
 infirmities. For these there is reason to fear that 
 we may have to make more allowance than must 
 under all circumstances be claimed by age and sick- 
 ness, even where adversity has no share in the
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 143 
 
 sufferings of the last years of a laborious and noble 
 life. After the fall of Chapman's fortunes, if as I 
 have conjectured we may suppose them to have 
 risen for awhile under the patronage of Prince 
 Henry and collapsed with the favour of Carr, he 
 lived for twenty years without further success on 
 the stage to which he had given so much of the best 
 labour and the best faculty of his mind : and we 
 may doubt whether the friends or patrons of his old 
 age were numerous or generous enough to secure 
 these latter years against neglect and obscurity. 
 One comfort however must have been with him to 
 the last, whether or not we agree with Gifford in 
 accepting the apparent evidence for the poverty and 
 solitude in which he died ; the comfort of great work 
 done, the recollection of high hopes attained, the 
 evidence of daring dreams made real and fruitful of 
 fame not yet to be. Some ten years before his death 
 the poet of sixty-five could look on his completed 
 version of all the Homeric poems, and say — 
 
 " The work that I was born to do is done." 
 
 It was a great work, and one wrought in a great
 
 144 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 spirit; and if, as he says of Homer, not without 
 evident and immediate reference to his own lot, 
 ' like a man verecundi ingenii (which he witnesseth 
 of himself), he lived unhonoured and needy till his 
 death,' we may believe that he did not live dis- 
 satisfied or dejected. Unworthy indeed would the 
 workman have been of his own work if from the 
 contemplation of it he had been too poor in spirit or 
 too covetous of reward to draw the consolation of a 
 high content. 
 
 This strong and sovereign solace against all the 
 evils that can beset the failing age and fallen for- 
 tunes of a brave man he surely deserved, if ever 
 man deserved, to have and to retain. His work 
 was done ; neither time nor trouble could affect 
 that ; neither age nor misfortune could undo it. He 
 had lived long and worked hard, and the end of all 
 the valiant labour and strenuous endurance that 
 must have gone to the performance of his task had 
 not been less than triumphant. He had added a 
 monument to the temple which contains the glories 
 of his native language, the godlike images and the 
 costly relics of its past; he had built himself a
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 145 
 
 massive and majestic memorial, where for all the 
 flaws and roughness of the weatherbeaten work the 
 great workmen of days unborn would gather to give 
 honour to his name. He had kindled a fire which 
 the changing winds of time were not to put out, the 
 veering breath of taste and opinion was never to 
 blow upon so hard but that some would return to 
 warm themselves at its heat and to cheer themselves 
 with its light. He showed what he could of Homer 
 to the lifted eyes of Keats, and the strong and fiery 
 reflection was to the greater poet as very dawn 
 itself, the j)erfect splendour of Hellenic sunrise. 
 Much of precious and undying praise has been 
 worthily bestowed on it; but while anything of 
 English poetry shall endure the sonnet of Keats 
 will be the final word of comment, the final note of 
 verdict on Chapman's Homer. 
 
 This of course was the sovereign labour of his 
 life ; and to this the highest of his other works can 
 only be considered as bringing some addition of 
 honour. That there is yet in these enough to serve 
 as the foundation of a lasting fame I have made it 
 the purpose of my present task to shew. But his 
 
 10
 
 146 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 name will always first recall neither the plays nor 
 the poems which might well have sufficed for the 
 work and the witness of a briefer or less fruitful 
 life; the great enterprise of which the firstfruits 
 were given to the world in his fortieth year and the 
 last harvest was garnered in his sixty-sixth must be 
 the first and last claim of his memory on the reve- 
 rence of all students who shall ever devote the best 
 of their time and of their thought to loving research 
 or to thankful labour in the full field of English 
 poetry. The indomitable force and fire of Chap- 
 man's genius have given such breath and spirit to 
 his Homeric poems that whatever their faults and 
 flaws may be they are at least not those of other 
 men's versions ; they have a seed and salt of per- 
 sonal life which divide them from the class of trans- 
 lated works and remove them (it might wellnigh be 
 said) into the rank of original poems. By the 
 standard of original work they may be more fairly 
 and more worthily judged than by the standard of 
 pure translation • and upon their worth as tested by 
 that standard the judgment of Coleridge and of 
 Lamb has been passed once for all, without fear of
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 147 
 
 appeal or danger of reversal while the language in 
 which the poems were written and the judgments 
 given shall endure. To all lovers of high poetry the 
 great old version of our Homer-Lucan must be dear 
 for its own sake and for that of the men who have 
 loved and held it in honour; to those who can be 
 content with fire for light and force for harmony it 
 must give pleasure inconceivable by such as cannot 
 but remember and repine for the lack of that sweet 
 and equal exaltation of style which no English poet 
 of his age, and Chapman less than any, could hope 
 even faintly to reproduce or to recall. 
 
 Iri his original poems the most turgid and 
 barbarous writer of a time whose poets had almost 
 every other merit in a higher degree than those 
 Grecian gifts of perfect form, of perfect light, and of 
 perfect measure, which are the marks of the Homeric 
 poems no less than of the Sophoclean drama, he 
 could not so put off his native sin of forced and 
 inflated obscurity as to copy in the hot high colours 
 of a somewhat strained and tattered canvas more 
 than the outlines of the divine figures which his 
 strong hand and earnest eye were bent to bring 
 
 10—2
 
 148 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 before his readers' sight. It is much that his ardour 
 and vigour, his energy and devotion, should have 
 done the noble and memorable work they have. 
 That 'unconquerable quaintness' which Lamb was 
 the first to point out as the one perpetual note of 
 infirmity and imperfection in the great work of 
 Chapman is more hopelessly alien from the quality 
 of the original than any other defect but that of 
 absolute weakness or sterility of spirit could be. 
 Altering the verdict of Bentley on Pope, we may 
 say that instead of a very pretty it is a very noble 
 poem, but it must not be called Homer. Quaintness 
 and he, to steal a phrase from Juliet, are many miles 
 asunder. 
 
 The temperament of Chapman had more in it of 
 an Icelandic than a Hellenic poet's ; and had Homer 
 been no more than the mightiest of skalds or the 
 Iliad than the greatest of sagas, Chapman would 
 have been fitter to play the part of their herald or 
 interpreter. His fiery and turbid style has in it the 
 action rather of earthquakes and volcanoes than of 
 the oceanic verse it labours to represent ; it can give 
 us but the pace of a giant for echo of the footfaU. of
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 149 
 
 a god ; it can shew but the huge movements of the 
 heaving earth, inflated and inflamed with unequal 
 and violent life, foi- the innumerable unity and har- 
 mony, the radiant and buoyant music of luminous 
 motion, the simplicity and equality of passion and 
 of power, the majestic monochord of single sound 
 underlying as it were at the heart of Homeric 
 verse the multitudinous measures of the epic 
 sea. 
 
 The name of Chapman should always be held 
 great ; yet must it always at first recall the names 
 of greater men. For one who thinks of him as the 
 author of his best play or his loftiest lines of gnomic 
 verse a score will at once remember him as the 
 translator of Homer or the continuator of Marlowe. 
 The most daring enterprise of a life which was full 
 of daring aspiration and arduous labour was this of 
 resuming and completing the ' mighty line ' of Hero 
 and Leander. For that poem stands out alone 
 amid all the wide and wild poetic wealth of its 
 teeming and turbulent age, as might a small shrine 
 of Parian sculpture amid the rank splendour of a 
 tropic jungle. But no metaphor can aptly express
 
 ISO GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 the rapture of relief with which you come upon it 
 amid the poems of Chapman, and drink once more 
 with your whole heart of that well of sweet water 
 after the long draughts you have taken from such 
 brackish and turbid springs as gush up among the 
 sands and thickets of his verse. Faultless indeed 
 this lovely fragment is not ; it also bears traces of 
 the Elizabethan barbarism, as though the great 
 queen's ruff and farthingale had been clapped about 
 the neck and waist of the Medicean Venus ; but for 
 all the strange costume we can see that the limbs 
 are perfect still. The name of Marlowe's poem lias 
 been often coupled with that of the ' first heir ' of 
 Shakespeare's ' invention ;' but with all reverence 
 to the highest name in letters be it said, the com- 
 parison is hardly less absurd than a comparison of 
 Tamhurlaine with Othello. With all its overcrowd- 
 ing beauties of detail, Shakespeare's first poem is on 
 the whole a model of what a young man of genius 
 should not write on such a subject ; Marlowe's is a 
 model of what he should. Scarcely the art of 
 Titian at its highest, and surely not the art of 
 Shakespeare at its dawn, could have made accep-
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 151 
 
 table such an inversion of natural rule as is 
 involved in the attempted violation by a passionate 
 ■woman of a passionless boy ; the part of a Joseph, 
 as no less a moralist than Henri Beyle has observed 
 in his great work on Love, has always a suspicion 
 about it of something ridiculous and offensive : but 
 only the wretchedest of artists could wholly fail to 
 give charm to the picture of such a nuptial night as 
 that of Hero and Leander. The style of Shake- 
 speare's first essay is, to speak frankly, for the most 
 part no less vicious than the matter : it is burdened 
 and bedizened with all the heavy and fantastic 
 jewellery of Gongora and Marini ; too much of it 
 is written in the style which an Italian scholar 
 knows as that of the seicentisti, and which the 
 duncery of New Grub Street in its immeasurable 
 ignorance would probably designate as 'Della- 
 Cruscan ;' nay, there are yet, I believe, in that 
 quarter rhymesters and libellers to be found who 
 imagine such men as Guido Cavalcanti and Dante 
 Alighieri to have been representative members of the 
 famous and farinaceous academy. Not one of the faults 
 chargeable on Shakespeare's beautiful but faultful
 
 152 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 poem can justly be charged on the only not faultless 
 poem of Marlowe. The absence of all cumbrous jewels 
 and ponderous embroideries from the sweet and lim- 
 pid loveliness of its style is not more noticeable than 
 the absence of such other and possibly such graver 
 flaws as deform snd diminish the undeniable 
 charms of Venus, and Adonis. With leave or 
 without leave of a much lauded critic who could 
 see nothing in the glorified version or expansion by 
 Marlowe of the little poem of Musgeus but ' a para- 
 phrase, in every sense of the epithet, of the most 
 licentious kind,' I must avow that I want and am 
 well content to want the sense, whatever it be, 
 which would enable me to discern more offence in 
 that lovely picture of the union of two lovers in 
 body as in soul than I can discern in the parting of 
 "Romeo and Juliet. And if it be always a pleasure 
 to read a page of Marlowe, to read it after a page of 
 Chapman is to the capable student of high verse ' a 
 pleasure worthy Xerxes the great king.' Yet there 
 is not a little to be advanced in favour of Chap- 
 man's audacious and arduous undertaking. The 
 poet was not alive, among all the mighty men then
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 153 
 
 living, who could worthily have completed the 
 divine fragment of Marlowe. As well might we 
 look now to find a sculptor who could worthily 
 restore for us the arms of the Venus of Melos — ' Our 
 Lady of Beauty/ as Heine said when lying at her 
 feet stricken to death, ' who has no hands, and cannot 
 help us.' For of narrative poets there were none in 
 that generation of any note but Drayton and Daniel ; 
 and though these might have more of Marlowe's 
 limpid sweetness and purity of style, they lacked 
 the force and weight of Chapman. Nor is the 
 continuation by any means altogether such as we 
 might have expected it to be — a sequel by Marsyas 
 to the song of Apollo. Thanks, as we may suppose, 
 to the high ambition of the poet's aim, there are 
 more beauties and fewer deformities than I have 
 found in any of his other poems. There are 
 passages indeed which at first sight may almost 
 seem to support the otherwise unsupported tradi- 
 tion that a brief further fragment of verse from the 
 hand of Marlowe was left for Chapman to work up 
 into his sequel. This for instance, though some-
 
 154 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 what over fantastic, has in it a sweet and genuine 
 note of fancy : 
 
 " Her fresli-heat blood cast figures in her eyes, 
 And she supposed she saw in Neptune's skies 
 How her star wander'd, wash'd in smarting brine, 
 For her love's sake, that with immortal wine 
 Should be embathed, and swim in more heart's-ease 
 Than there was water in the Sestian seas.'' 
 
 Here again is a beautiful example of the short sweet 
 interludes which relieve the general style of Chap- 
 man's narrative or reflective verse : 
 
 " For as proportion, white and crimson, meet 
 In beauty's mixture, all right clear and sweet, 
 The eye responsible, the golden hair. 
 And none is held without the other fair ; 
 All spring together, all together fade ; 
 Such intermix'd affections should invade 
 Two perfect lovers." 
 
 And this couplet has an exquisite touch of fanciful 
 
 colour : 
 
 " As two clear tapers mix in one their light. 
 So did the Hly and the hand their white." 
 
 That at least might have been written by Marlowe 
 himself. But the poem is largely deformed by 
 excrescences and aberrations, by misplaced morals 
 and mistimed conceits ; and at the catastrophe,
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 155 
 
 perhaps half consciously oppressed and overcome by 
 the sense that now indeed he must put forth all his 
 powers to utter something not unworthy of what 
 the 'dead shepherd' himself might have spoken 
 over the two dead lovers, he does put forth all his 
 powers for evil and for error, and gives such a 
 narrative of their end as might have sufficed to 
 raise from his grave the avenging ghost of the 
 outraged poet who has been supposed — but unless 
 it was said in some riotous humour of jesting irony, 
 the supposition seems to me incredible — to have 
 commended to Chapman, in case of his death, the 
 task thus iU discharged of completing this death- 
 less and half-accomplished work of a genius ' that 
 perished in its pride.' 
 
 The faults and weaknesses of strong men seem 
 usually an integral part of the character or the 
 genius we admire for its strength ; and the faults 
 ingrained in the work of Chapman were probably 
 indivisible from the powers which gave that work 
 its worth. Those blemishes not less than those 
 beauties of which the student is at almost every 
 other step compeUed perforce to take note, seem
 
 156 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 inevitable by a poet's mind of liis peculiar bent and 
 bias. There are superfluities which we would fain 
 see removed, deformities which we would fain see 
 straightened, in all but the greatest among poets or 
 men ; and these are doubtless in effect irremovable 
 -and incurable. Even the Atlantean shoulders of 
 Jonson, fit to bear the weight of mightiest monar- 
 chies, have been hardly tasked to support and trans- 
 mit to our own day the fame of his great genius, 
 overburdened as it was with the twofold load of his 
 theories on art and his pedantries of practice. And 
 Chapman, though also a brother of the giant brood, 
 had not the Herculean sinews of his younger friend 
 and fellow-student. That weight which could but 
 bend the back that carried the vast world of invention 
 whose twin hemispheres are Yoli[)one and The Alche- 
 mist was wellnigh enough to crush the staggering 
 strength of the lesser Titan. His style reels and 
 struggles under the pressure ; he snorts and heaves 
 as Typhoeus beneath Etna, sending up at each huge 
 turn and convulsion of his uneasy bulk some shower 
 of blinding sparkles or volume of stifling vapour.
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 157 
 
 But for all the discoi'ds and contortions of his 
 utterance the presence is always perceptible of a 
 giant, and of one issued from the lineage of the 
 early gods. He alone, as far as I can see, among 
 all the great men of his great age, had anything in 
 common with Jonson for good or evil. It would not 
 be accurate to lay the heaviest faults of either poet 
 to the account of his learning. A weight of learning 
 at least equal to that which bowed and deformed the 
 genius of Jonson and of Chapman served but to give 
 new shape and splendour to the genius of Milton and 
 of Landor. To these it was but as a staff to guide and 
 a crown to glorify their labours ; a lantern by whose 
 light they might walk, a wellspring from whose water 
 they might draw draughts of fresh strength and rest. 
 But by this light the two elder poets too often 
 failed to walk straight and sure, drank too often 
 from this fountain a heady or a narcotic draught. 
 One at least, and not he who had drunk deepest 
 of the divine and dangerous spring, seems at times 
 under its influence to move and speak as under some 
 Circean transformation. The learning of Jonson,,
 
 158 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 doubtless far wider and sounder than that of Chap- 
 man, never allowed or allured him to exchange for a 
 turbid and tortuous jargon the vigorous purity of his 
 own English spirit and style. Nevertheless, of these 
 four illustrious men whom I suppose to have been 
 the most deeply read in classical literature, with the 
 exception probably of Gray and possibly of Cole- 
 ridge, among all our poets of the past, the two great 
 republicans as surely were not as the two distin- 
 guished royalists surely were pedants : and Chap- 
 man, being the lesser scholar, was naturally the 
 greater pedant of the pair. 
 
 As a dramatic poet he has assuredly never yet 
 received his due meed of discerning praise ; but 
 assuredly no man of genius ever did so much, as 
 though by perverse and prepense design, to insure 
 a continuance of neglect and injustice. Had he 
 allied himself with some enemy in a league against 
 his own fame — had he backed himself against suc- 
 cess for a wager, let his deserts be what they might 
 — he could have done no more than he has done to 
 make certain of the desired failure. With a fair 
 share of comic spirit and invention, remarkable at
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 159 
 
 least in a poet of such a grave and ambitious turn 
 of genius, he has spiced and lardecl his very come- 
 dies with the thick insipid sauce of pedantic decla- 
 mation. Their savourless interludes of false and 
 forced humour may indeed be matched even in the 
 greatest of Jonson's works ; there is here hardly 
 anything heavier than the voluminous foolery of 
 Scoto of Mantua and the dolorous long-winded dosf- 
 gerel drivelled forth by that dreary trinity of dwarf, 
 eunuch, and hermaphrodite, whom any patron of 
 less patience than Volpone, with a tithe of his wit 
 and genius, would surely have scourged out of doors 
 long before they were turned forth to play by Mosca. 
 But when on a fresh reading we skip over these 
 blocks laid as if on purpose in our way through 
 so magnificent a gallery of comic and poetic inven- 
 tions, the monument of a mind so mighty, the 
 palace of so gigantic a genius as Ben Jonson's, 
 we are more than content to forget such passing 
 and perishable impediments to our admiration of 
 that sovereign intellect which has transported 
 us across them into the royal presence of its 
 ruling and informing power. The "shaping
 
 i6o GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 spirit of imagination " proper to all great 
 men, and varying in each case from all other, 
 reforms of itself its own misshapen work, treads 
 down and triumphs over its own faults and errors, 
 renews its faltering forces and resumes its undi- 
 minished reign. Bat he who in so high a matter 
 as the dramatic art can sin so heavily, and so tri- 
 umphantly tread under the penalty of his trans- 
 gression, must be great among the greatest of his fel- 
 lows. Such, with all his excesses and shortcomings 
 in the way of dramatic work, was Jonson ; such cer- 
 tainly was not Chapman. The tragedy for example 
 of Ckabot, a noble and dignified poem in the main, 
 and the otherwise lively and interesting comedy of 
 Monsieur dJ Olive, are seriously impaired by a worse 
 thau Jonsonian excess in the analysis and anatomy 
 of " humours." The turncoat advocate and the mock 
 ambassador bestride the action of the plays and 
 oppress the attention of the reader with a more 
 " importunate and heavy load " than that of Sinbad's 
 old man of the sea. Another point of resemblance 
 to Jonson on the wrong side is the absence or in-
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN, i6i 
 
 significance of feminine interest throughout his 
 works. No poet ever showed less love or regard for 
 women, lesis care to study or less power to paint 
 them. With the exception of a couple of passages in 
 his two best comedies, the wide field of Chapman's 
 writings will be found wellnigh barren of any ten- 
 der or noble trace of passion or emotion kindled 
 between man and woman. These two passages 
 stand out in beautiful and brilliant contrast to the 
 general tone of the poet's mood ; the praise of love 
 has seldom been uttered with loftier and sweeter 
 eloquence than in the well-known verses* which 
 celebrate it as " nature's second sun," informing 
 and educing the latent virtues in man " as the 
 sun doth colours ;" the structure and cadence of the 
 verse, the choice and fullness of the words, are alike 
 memorable for the perfect power and purity, the 
 strong simplicity and luminous completeness of 
 workmanship which may be (too rarely) found and 
 enjoyed in the poetry of Chapman. The passage 
 in The Gentleman Usher (act iv. scene 3) which 
 
 * All Fools, act i. scene i. 
 
 11
 
 i62 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 sets forth the excellence of perfect marriage has 
 less of poetic illustration and imaginative colour, 
 but is a no less admirable model of clear and 
 vigorous language applied to the fit and full 
 expression of high thought and noble emotion. But 
 as a rule we find the genius of Chapman at its best 
 when furthest removed from female influence; as in 
 the two plays of Biron and those nobler parts of the 
 " Roman tragedy" of Caesar and Pompey in which 
 Cato discourses on life and death. The two leading 
 heroines of his tragic drama, Tamyra and Caropia, 
 are but a slippery couple of sententious harlots who 
 deliver themselves in eloquent and sometimes in 
 exalted verse to such amorous or vindictive purpose 
 as the action of the play may suggest. Whether 
 the secret of this singular defect in a dramatic poet 
 were to be sought in coldness of personal tempera- 
 ment, in narrowness of intellectual interest, or 
 simply in the accidental circumstances which may 
 have given a casual direction to his life and thought, 
 we need not now think to conjecture. ~ He was ready 
 enough to read lectures on love or lust, to expatiate 
 with a dry scholastic sensuality on the details and
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 163 
 
 influences of form and colour, to apply the terms 
 and subtleties of metaphysical definition to the 
 phj'-sical anatomy of beauty ; indeed, one at least of 
 his poems may be described as a study in philo- 
 sophic vivisection applied by a lover to his mistress, 
 in which analysis and synthesis of material and 
 spiritual qualities in action and reaction of cause 
 and effect meet and confound each other — to say 
 nothing of the reader. But of pure passion and 
 instinctive simplicity of desire or delight there is 
 little more trace than of higher emotion or deeper 
 knowledge of such things as belong alike to mind 
 and body, and hold equally of the spirit and the 
 flesh. 
 
 Here again we find that Jonson and Chapman 
 stand far apart from their fellow men of genius. 
 The most ambitious and the most laborious poets of 
 their day, conscious of high aims and large capacities, 
 they would be content with no crown that might be 
 shared by others ; they had each his own severe and 
 haughty scheme of study and invention, and sought 
 for no excellence which lay beyond or outside it ; 
 that any could lie above, past the reach of their 
 
 11—2
 
 1 64 GEORGE CHAPMAN, 
 
 strong arms and skilful hands, past the scope of their 
 keen and studious eyes, they would probably have 
 been unable to believe or to conceive. And yet there 
 were whole regions of high poetic air, whole worlds 
 of human passion and divine imagination, which 
 might be seen by humbler eyes than theirs and 
 trodden by feebler feet, where their robust lungs 
 were powerless to breathe, and their strenuous song 
 fell silent. Not greater spirits alone, such as Mar- 
 lowe's and Shakespeare's, but such lesser spirits 
 as Decker's had the secret of ways unknown to them 
 in the world of poetry, the key of chambers from 
 which they were shut out. 
 
 In Marlowe the passion of ideal love for the ulti- 
 mate idea of beauty in art or nature found its per- 
 fect and supreme expression, faultless and unforced. 
 The radiant ardour of his desire, the light and the 
 flame of his aspiration, difi'used and shed through 
 all the forms of his thought and all the colours of 
 his verse, gave them such shapeliness and strength 
 of life as is given to the spirits of the greatest poets 
 alone. He, far rather than Chaucer or Spenser, 
 whose laurels were first fed by the dews and sun-
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 165 
 
 beams of Italy and France, whose songs were full of 
 sweefc tradition from oversea, of memories and notes 
 which " came mended from their tongues," — he alone 
 was the true Apollo of our dawn, the bright and 
 morning star of the full midsummer day of English 
 poetry at its highest. Chaucer, Wyatt, and Spenser 
 had left our language as melodious, as fluent, as 
 flexible to all purposes of narrative or lyrical poetry 
 as it could be made by the grace of genius ; the 
 supreme note of its possible music was reserved for 
 another to strike. Of English blank verse, one of 
 the few highest forms of verbal harmony or poetic 
 expression, the genius of Marlowe was the absolute 
 and divine creator. By mere dint of original and 
 godlike instinct he discovered and called it into 
 life ; and at his untimely and unhappy death, more 
 lamentable to us all than any other on record except 
 Shelley's, he left the marvellous instrument of his 
 invention so nearly perfect that Shakespeare first 
 and afterwards Milton came to learn of him before 
 they could vary or improve on it. In the changes 
 rung by them on the keys first tuned by Marlowe 
 we trace a remembrance of the touches of his hand ;
 
 i66 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 in his own cadences we catch not a note of any- 
 other man's. This poet, a poor scholar of humblest 
 parentage, lived to perfect the exquisite metre in- 
 vented for narrative by Chaucer, giving it (to my 
 ear at least) more of weight and depth, of force 
 and fullness, than its founder had to give; he 
 invented the highest and hardest form of English 
 verse, the only instrument since found possible for 
 our tragic or epic poetry ; he created the modern 
 tragic drama ; and at the age of thirty he went 
 
 " Where Orplieus and where Homer are." 
 
 Surely there are not more than two or three 
 names in any literature which can be set above the 
 poet's of whom this is the least that can in simple 
 truth be said. There is no record extant of his 
 living likeness ; if his country should ever bear 
 men worthy to raise a statue or monument to liis 
 memory, he should stand before them with the 
 head and eyes of an Apollo looking homeward from 
 earth into the sun : a face and figure, in the poet's 
 own great phrase, 
 
 " Like his desire, hft upward and divine."
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 167 
 
 To all things alike we find applied in turn this fer- 
 vour of ideal passion ; to the beauty of women, to 
 the hunger after sway, to the thirst after know- 
 ledge, to the energy of friendship or ambition, to 
 the energy of avarice or revenge. Sorrow and tri- 
 umph and rapture and despair find in his poetry 
 their most single and intense expression, extreme 
 but not excessive ; the pleasures and the pains of 
 each passion are clothed with the splendour and 
 harmony of pure conceptions fitted with perfect 
 words. There is the same simple and naked power 
 of abstract outline in every stroke of every study 
 which remains to us from his hand ; in the strenu- 
 ous greed and fantastic hate of Barabas, in the hys- 
 teric ardours and piteous agonies of Edward, in the 
 illimitable appetite of Tamburlaine for material rule 
 and of Faustus for spiritual empire, and in the 
 highest and haughtiest aspirations of either towards 
 that ultimate goal of possession where he may lay 
 hands on power unattainable and touch lips with 
 beauty inexpressible by man, we trace the same 
 ideal quality of passion. In the most glorious 
 verses ever fashioned by a poet to express with
 
 1 68 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 subtle and final truth the supreme aim and the 
 supreme limit of his art, the glory and the joy of 
 his labour, the satisfaction and the insufiicience of 
 his triumph in the partial and finite expression of 
 an infinite delight and an indefinite desire, Marlowe 
 has summed up all that can be said or thought on 
 the ofiice and the object, the means and the end, of 
 this highest form of spiritual ambition, which for 
 him was as it were shadowed forth in all symbols 
 and reflected in all shapes of human energy, in all 
 exaltations of the spirit, in all aspirations of the 
 will. Being a poet of the first order, he was con- 
 tent to know and to accept the knowledge that 
 ideal beauty lies beyond the most perfect words 
 that art can imbue with life or inflame with colour ; 
 an excellence that expression can never realize, that 
 possession can never destroy. The nearer such an 
 artist's work comes to this abstract perfection of 
 absolute beauty, the more clearly will he see and 
 the more gladly will he admit that it never can 
 come so near as to close with it and find, as in things 
 of meaner life, a conclusion set in the act of fruition 
 to the sense of enjoyment, a goal fixed at a point
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 169 
 
 attainable where the delight of spiritual desire may 
 be consummated, and consumed in the moment of 
 its consummation. A man of the second order of 
 genius is of his nature less quick to apprehend the 
 truth that 
 
 " If all the pens that ever poets held 
 Had fed the feeUng of their masters' thoughts," 
 
 and if one single and supreme poem could embody 
 in distilled expression the spirit and the sense of 
 
 " every sweetness that inspired their hearts, 
 Their minds, and muses on admired themes," 
 
 there would remain behind all things attainable and 
 expressible in sound or form or colour something 
 that will not be expressed or attained^ nor pass into 
 the likeness of any perishable life ; but though all 
 were done that all poets could do, 
 
 " Yet should there hover in their restless heads 
 One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, 
 Which into words no virtue can digest." 
 
 No poet ever came nearer than Marlowe to the 
 expression of this inexpressible beauty, to the in- 
 carnation in actual form of ideal perfection, to the
 
 I70 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 embodiment in mortal music of immortal harmony ; 
 and lie it is who has left on record and on evidence 
 to all time the truth that no poet can ever come 
 nearer. The lesser artist, with less liberty of action, 
 will be the likelier of the two to show less loyalty 
 of submission to the eternal laws of thought which 
 find their full and natural expression in the eternal 
 canons of art. In him we shall find that intel- 
 lectual energy has taken what it can of the place 
 and done what it can of the work proper to ideal 
 passion. This substitution of an intellectual for an 
 ideal end, of energetic mental action for passionate 
 spiritual emotion as the means towards that end, is 
 as good a test as may be taken of the difference in 
 kind rather than in degree between the first and 
 the second order of imaginative artists. By the 
 change of instrument alone a critic of the higher 
 class may at once verify the change of object. In 
 almost every page of Chapman's noblest work we 
 discern the struggle and the toil of a powerful mind 
 convulsed and distended as by throes of travail in 
 the efibrt to achieve something that lies beyond the 
 proper aim and the possible scope of that form of
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 171 
 
 art within which it has set itself to work. The 
 hard effort of a strong will, the conscious purpose of 
 an earnest ambition, the laborious obedience to a 
 resolute design, is as perceptible in Jonson and 
 Chapman as in Shakespeare and in Marlowe is the 
 instinct of spiritual harmony, the loyalty and the 
 liberty of impulse and of work. The lesser poets 
 are poets prepense ; the greater are at once poets of 
 their own making and of nature's, equidistant in 
 their line of life from the mere singing-bird and the 
 mere student. Of the lirst order we may be sure 
 that in any age or country the men that compose it 
 must have been what they were, great as poets or 
 artists, lyric or dramatic ; of the second order we 
 may well believe that in a different time or place 
 the names which we find written in its catalogue 
 might have been distinguished by other trophies 
 than such as they now recall. And this, which may 
 seem to imply a superiority of intellectual power, 
 does actually imply the reverse. Those are not the 
 greatest among men of whom we can reasonably 
 conceive that circumstance might have made them 
 as great in some different way from that in which
 
 172 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 
 
 they walked; those are not the highest poets or 
 soldiers or statesmen whom it is possible or per- 
 missible to imagine as winning equal fame in some 
 other field than their own, by the application to 
 some other end of such energy and genius as made 
 them great in the lii^e which they were impelled to 
 select at least as much by pressure of accident as by 
 force of instinct, by the external necessity of chance 
 as by the- internal necessity of nature. Accident 
 and occasion may be strongest with men of the 
 second order ; but with minds of the first rank that 
 which we call the impulse of nature is yet more 
 strong than they. I doubt not that Jonson might 
 in another age have sought and won distinction 
 from the active life of soldiership or of statecraft ; I 
 take leave to doubt whether Shakespeare, had he 
 soun^ht it, would have won. I am not disinclined to 
 admit the supposition that Chapman might have 
 applied his power of moral thought and his interest 
 in historic action to other ends than they ever 
 served in literature or in life. But neither for his 
 sake nor for ours am I disposed to regret that cir- 
 cumstance or destiny should have impelled or in-
 
 GEORGE CHAPMAN. 173 
 
 duced him to take instead that way of work which 
 has given his memory a right to live with that of 
 men who could never have taken another way than 
 they took ; which has made it honourable and vene- 
 rable to all who have any reverence for English 
 poetry or regard for English fame ; which has set 
 him for ever in the highest place among the ser- 
 vants and interpreters of Homer, and allowed us to 
 inscribe in our imagination, as on the pedestal of a 
 statue reared in thought to the father of our tragic 
 vei'se, the name of George Chapman not too dis- 
 creditably far beneath the name of Christopher 
 Marlowe.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 The following list of passages extracted from Chap- 
 man's poems by the editor of the Elizabethan an- 
 thology published in 1600 under the name of Eng- 
 land's Parnassus, or the choicest Flowers of our 
 Modern Poets, was drawn up from my own copy of 
 the original edition before I was aware that a similar 
 list had been compiled by Mr. J. P. Collier to ac- 
 company and illustrate a private reprint of the book. 
 From this source I learn that one extract given at 
 p. 312 as from Chapman is in fact taken from the 
 Albion's England of Warner ; as indeed, though 
 acquainted only with fragmentary excerpts from 
 that poem, I had already conjectured that it must 
 be. This is preceded by another extract signed
 
 176 APPENDIX. 
 
 with the name of Chapman, which according to Mr. 
 Collier is discoverable in Ovid's Banquet of Sense ; 
 but after a second and third search through every 
 turn and recess of that dense and torrid jungle of 
 bad and good verses I have failed to light on this 
 particular weed or ilower. Five other extracts have 
 baffled alike my own researches and the far more 
 capable inquisition of even Mr. Collier's learning ; 
 nor have they proved traceable by the energy and 
 enthusiasm of Chapman's latest editor, who has pro- 
 perly included them in his text as authentic frag- 
 ments of unknown poems by the writer to whom 
 four of them have been assigned by Kobert Allot, 
 the editor of England's Parnassus. The second of 
 these five passages he ascribes to Spenser ; Spenser's 
 it undoubtedly is not ; and as it is followed by an ex- 
 cerpt from Chapman's Hero and Leander, which is 
 likewise bestowed on Spenser by the too hasty 
 liberality of the old editor, we have some additional 
 reason to rely on the unmistakable evidence of the 
 style, which bears immediate witness to the peculiar 
 handiwork of Chapman. 
 
 The last excerpt but one seems familiar to me, and
 
 APPENDIX. 177 
 
 is rather in the manner of Greene or Peele and their 
 fellows than of Chapman or any later poet ; I can- 
 not but think that a student more deeply read than 
 I in the poems interspei'sed among the romances of 
 Greene and Lodo^e mioht be able to trace both the 
 two last passages of the five here fathered on Chap- 
 man to the hand of one or the other. They have 
 the fluency or fluidity rather of the [blank verse 
 written by the smaller scholastic poets whom we 
 may see grouped about the feet of Marlowe ; the 
 same facile profusion and efl'usion of classic imagery, 
 the same equable elegance and graceful tenuity of 
 style, crossed here and there by lines of really high 
 and tender beauty. It may be thought that in that 
 case they would have been as speedily and as surely 
 tracked by Mr. Collier as were the verses transferred 
 from Warner to Chapman ; but the most learned and 
 acute among scholars cannot always remember the 
 right place for all things on which his eye must have 
 lit in the course of a lifelong study ; and I find in 
 Mr. Collier's list two passages, one given at p. 22 of 
 England's Parnassus under the heading * Bliss,' the 
 other at p. 108 under the heading ' Gifts,' marked 
 
 12
 
 178 APPENDIX. 
 
 as of unknown origin, of wliich the first occurs in 
 tlie fiftli sestiacl of Chapman's Hero and Leander, 
 the second in his Shadoi'J of Night. These in the 
 list that folloAvs are assigned to their proper places. 
 The number of the page referred to on the left is that 
 in England's Parnassus ; the number on the right 
 refers to the page in which the same passage appears 
 in the first edition of Chapman's collected poems. 
 
 List of Passages extracted from Chapman's Poems 
 in England's Parnassus ; or, the Choicest Flowers 
 of our Modern Poets. IGOO. 
 
 PACK PACK 
 
 3. The golden chain of Homer's high device . 6 
 9. Things senseless live by art, and rational 
 
 die 77 
 
 12. Sacred beauty is the fruit of sight . 29 
 
 15. All excellence of shape is made for sight . 83 
 
 (In the next line E. P. reads : ' To be a beetle 
 
 else were no defame.') 
 
 IG. Rich Beauty, that each lover labours for 30, 31 
 
 „ Beauty, still thy empire swims in blood 31 
 
 17. *Beauty enchasing love, love gaining 
 
 beauty 29 
 
 * E. P. has three misprints in this extract : ' gaining ' for 
 ' gracing,' ' conflict ' for ' constant,' ' time content ' for ' true
 
 APPENDIX. 17^ 
 
 PAOE PACE 
 
 17. This beauty fair* is an enchantment made 29 
 
 19. Beauty (in) lieaven and earth this grace 
 
 doth win ...... 76 
 
 20. O Beauty, how attractive is thy power ! . 81 
 
 21. So respected 
 
 Was Bashfulness in Athens . . .86 
 „ Preferment seldom graceth Bashfulness . 83 
 
 22. Hard it is 
 
 To imitate a false and forged bliss . .82 
 „ Bliss not in height doth dwell . 90 
 
 38. All wealth and wisdom rests in true 
 
 contentt 29 
 
 40. Action is fiery valour's sovereign good . 85 
 
 content ;' but in a later extract at p. 38 it gives tlie right 
 reading, and cites the two first lines of the stanza following, 
 which with the third and fourth are here omitted. It at- 
 tempts however to correct two seeming errors in the fifth and 
 sixth; reading 'is' for 'in' and ,' thrones' for 'thorns': 
 but in the first instance the text will be found right if the 
 ptinctuation be corrected by striking out the period at the 
 end of the line preceding ; and ' thorns ' may be taken to 
 mean the harsh doctrines of the stoics subsequently referred 
 to. In the ninth line of this unlucky stanza E. P. misprints 
 'grave' for 'graven.' 
 
 * So E. P. for 'beauty's fair ;' and in v. 5 reads 'fault ' 
 for ' fate,' and in v. 8 ' god self-love ' for ' good self-love.' 
 
 + In this extract E. P. corrects ' Bend in our circle ' to 
 ' Bound ;' a reading which seems to me preferable. 
 
 12 2
 
 i8o APPENDIX. 
 
 PACE 
 
 47. Round-headed custom tli' apoplexy is"^ 
 56. In things without us no delight is sure 
 
 67. Fierce lightning from her eyes 
 
 68. Begin where lightness will, in shame it 
 
 ends ...... 
 
 108. Good gifts are often given to men past 
 
 good ...... 
 
 110. Kind Amalthea was transformed by Jove 
 120. Good deeds in case that they be evi' 
 
 placedf 
 
 141. Many use temples to set godl}^ faces. 
 161. The j noblest born dame should industrious 
 
 be 
 
 164. Inchastity is ever prostitute 
 
 170. They double life that dead things' grief 
 
 sustain ...... 
 
 172. Love is a golden bubble, full of dreams 
 
 74 
 
 76 
 80 
 
 80 
 
 IS 
 5 
 
 ? 
 ? 
 
 86 
 15 
 
 77 
 74 
 
 * This is the reading in E. P. of the line 
 
 ' But custom, that the apoplexy is ;' 
 the two following lines are transcribed exactly as they stand 
 in the third sestiad of Revo and Leandcr. 
 t This extract runs thus in E. P. : 
 
 ' Good deeds, in case that they be evil placed, 
 111 deeds are reckoned, and soon disgraced. 
 That is a good deed that prevents a bad.' 
 The third line occurs in the third sestiad of Hero and Le- 
 ande?' (p. 76). 
 1 So E. P. for ' And.'
 
 APPENDIX. i8r 
 
 PACE PAOK 
 
 174. Love is a wanton famine, rich in food . 35 
 178. Love laws and judges hath in fee . . 49 
 
 180. Love paints his longings in sweet virgins' 
 
 eyes . . . / . . .87 
 
 181. Trifling attempts no serious acts advance . 77 
 183. Pure love, said she, the purest grace 
 
 pursues ....... 34 
 
 196. What doth make man without the parts 
 
 of men ....... 5 
 
 197. Like as rade painters that contend to show 
 
 198. Hymen that now is god of nuptial rights'^'" 82 
 ,, Before them on an altar he presented . 8G 
 „ In Athens-|- 
 
 The custom was that every maid did wear 80 
 208. The mind hath in itself J a deity . .15 
 „ That mind most is beautiful and high 16 
 221. We must in matters moral quite reject . 32 
 230. Too much desire to please pleasure di- 
 vorces ....... 28 
 
 260. Like§ as a glass is an inanimate eye. . 74 
 271. None is so poor of sense and eyne 
 
 To whom a soldier doth not shine . . 45 
 
 * So E. P. for ' rites.' 
 
 t These two words are interpolated by tlie editor of E. P. 
 X So E. P. for ' herself.' 
 
 § So E. P. for ' For / and in the next verse ' outwardly ' 
 for ' inwardly.'
 
 i82 APPENDIX. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 271. No elegancie* can beautify . . .44 
 
 273. Every good motion that the soul awakes . ? 
 
 274. As Phoebus throws 
 
 His beams abroad though he in clouds be 
 
 closed 74 
 
 (2%ese Uvo are attributed to Spenser in E. P.) 
 285. Time's golden thigh 
 
 Upholds the flowery body of the earth , 72 
 292. Virtue makes honour, as the soul doth 
 
 sense ....... 32 
 
 „ Joy graven in sense like snow in water 
 
 wastes .72 
 
 295, Good vows are never broken with good 
 
 deeds ....... 76 
 
 „ We know not how to vow till love unblind 
 
 us . . . . . . . .76 
 
 297. Use makes things nothing huge, and huge / 
 things nothing . . . . .32 
 
 303. Wisdom and the sight of heavenly 
 
 things 
 Shines not so clear as earthly vanities 
 {Blind Beggar of Alexandria, Sc. i.) 
 305. Best loves are lost for wit, when men blame 
 
 fortune ....... 32 
 
 308. Words well placed move things were 
 
 never thought . . . . .32 
 
 • So E. P. for ' elegance.'
 
 APPENDIX. I S3 
 
 PAGE TAOE 
 
 312. Their virtues mount like billows to tlio 
 
 skies ....,.,? 
 
 „ Women were made for this intent, to put 
 us into pain. 
 
 (Warner's Albion's England.) 
 314. Women never 
 
 Love beauty in their sex, but envy ever , 83 
 „ Women are most won when men merit 
 
 least* ....... 83 
 
 321. Nothing doth the world so full off mis- 
 chief fill 82 
 
 324. The gentle humorous night 
 
 Implies:]: her middle course, and the sharp 
 
 east ? 
 
 355. With a brace of silver hinds . 9 
 
 35G. Nature's bright eyesight, and the world's 
 
 fair soul 10 
 
 * In the third line of this extract E. P. reads ' Love's 
 "proper lesson ' instead of ' special.' 
 
 t So E. P. The right reading of this beautiful couplet is : 
 'Ah, notliing doth the world with mischief fill, 
 But want of feeling one another's ill.' 
 
 Hero and Leander, 5th sestiad. 
 (E. P. prints 'wiU' for 'iU.') 
 
 J This word alone would suffice to vindicate the authen- 
 ticity of the fragment. It recu.rs perpetually in the poems 
 of Chapman, who always uses it in the same peculiar and 
 licentious manner.
 
 i84 APPENDIX. 
 
 PACK 
 
 357. Amongst this gamesome crew is seen . 48 
 '^\'6^. In flowery season of the year . . .43 
 {Wiili hvo lines prefixed at hottoou of 
 preceding p>cige — 
 The tenth of March when Aries received 
 Dan Phoebns' rays into his horned head.) 
 372, Day's king, God of undaunted verse 81 
 
 379. All suddenly a light of twenty hues . 72, 73 
 395. She lay, and seemed a flood of diamant 29, 30 
 (Omitting ' Now Ovid's muse — to make me 
 better.') 
 399. Their soft young cheek-balls to the eye . 47 
 407. To make the wondrous power of love 
 
 appear 36 
 
 409. '^Then cast she off her robe and stood up- 
 right 23 
 
 „ Herewith she rose, like the autumnal star. 31 
 417. See whei*e she issues in her beauty's pomji. ? 
 „ Her hair was loose, and 'bout her shoulders 
 
 hung ? 
 
 422. Like'l' as a taper burning in the dark . 31 
 „ Now as when heaven is muffled with the 
 
 vapours 33 
 
 " In the third line of this stanza EnglamVs Parnassus reads 
 'her night' for 'the night'; in the eighth 'choisefuU' for 
 ' charmf ul ;' in the ninth ' varnishing ' for ' vanishing.' 
 tSoE. P. for'and.'
 
 APPENDIX. 185 
 
 PAGE PMin 
 
 424. As when Jove at once from east to"^ 
 
 west 33 
 
 464. As she was looking in a glassf . . 32 
 469. In little time these ladies found . . 47 
 481 (Mis2)nnted 465). In that mead-proud- 
 making grass .... 41, 42 
 485. A soft enflowered bank embraced the fount 23 
 488. Grim Melampus with the Ethiop's feet 13 
 
 There are thus in this anthology no less than 
 eighty-one extracts ascribed to Chapman, besides 
 two of which one is known and the other suspected 
 to be the work of his hand; these are wrongly 
 assigned to Spenser. At the time of this publication 
 Chapman Avas in his forty-second year ; he had j)ub- 
 lished but two plays and three volumes of verse, the 
 third being his continuation of Marlowe's Hero and 
 Leander. 
 
 Of the eighty-three passages numbered above, 
 thirty-two are taken from this poem, twenty-five 
 from Ovid's Banquet of Sense, ten from The Shadoiu 
 of jS^igkt, eight from The Contention of Phillis and 
 Flora, a quaint and sometimes a graceful version 
 
 * So E. P. for ' and.' t ' Her dass ' in the text.
 
 1 86 APPENDIX. 
 
 into the Elizabethan dialect of a Latin or more pro- 
 Ibably a quasi-Latin poem ascribed by Ritson to one 
 of the most famous among mediseval masters ; one 
 is taken from the first scene of his first play, one is 
 spurious^ and six (including the passage wrongly 
 referred in a former list to Ovid's Banquet of Sense), 
 whether spurious or genuine, have yet to be traced 
 to their true source. In his critical memoir of Mar- 
 io v/e (Worhs, vol. i. p. Ivii. ed. 1850), Mr. Dyce 
 observes that ' the editor of England's Parnassus 
 appears never to have resorted to manuscript 
 sources ;' and if, as is of course most probable, the 
 supposition of that great scholar and careful critic 
 be well founded, we must conclude that these pas- 
 sages, as well as the more precious and exquisite 
 fragment of a greater poet which called forth this 
 remark from his editor, were extracted h-y Allot 
 from some printed book or books long lost to human 
 sight. One small but noticeable extract of two 
 lines and a half descriptive of midnight is evidently 
 I think from a lost play. The taste of the worthy 
 person who compiled this first English anthology 
 was remarkable apparently for its equal relish of
 
 APPENDIX. 187 
 
 good verse and bad ; but we may be grateful that it 
 was by no means confined to the more popular and 
 dominant authors of his age, such as Spenser and 
 Sidney ; since his faculty of miscellaneous admira- 
 tion has been the means of preserving many curious 
 fragments of fine or quaint verse, and occasionally a 
 jewel of such price as the fragment of Marlowe 
 which alike for tone of verse and tune of thought so 
 vividly recalls Shelley's poem, The Question, written 
 in the same metre and spirit, that one is tempted to 
 dream that some particles of the ' predestined plot 
 of dust and soul' which had once gone to make up 
 the elder must have been used again in the compo- 
 sition of the younger poet, who in fiery freedom of 
 thought and speech was like no other of our greatest 
 men but Marlowe, and in that as in his choice of 
 tragic motive was so singularly like this one. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, SURREY.
 
 ,
 
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 Under the Greenwood Tree. 
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 24 
 
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 Popular Novels — continued. 
 
 Garth. By Julian Hawthorne. 
 Golden Heart By Tom Hood. 
 TheHunchback of Notre Dame. 
 
 By Victor Hugo. 
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 Alfred Hunt. 
 
 Fated to be Free. By Jean 
 
 Ingelow. 
 
 Confidence. By Henry James, 
 
 Jun. 
 
 The Queen of Connaught. By 
 
 Harriett Jay. 
 The Dark Colleen. By H. Jay. 
 Number Seventeen. By Henry 
 
 KiNGSLKY. 
 
 Oakshott Castle. H.Kingsley. 
 Patricia Kemball. By E . Lynn 
 
 Linton. 
 LeamDundas. E.LynnLinton. 
 The World Well Lost. By E. 
 
 Lynn Linton. 
 Under which Lord P By E. 
 
 Lynn Linton. 
 
 The Waterdale Neighbours. 
 
 By Justin McCarthy. 
 Dear LadyDisdain. By the same. 
 My Enemy's Daughter. By 
 
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 Under One Roof. By J. Payn. 
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 Paul Ferroll. 
 
 Why P.Ferroll Killed his Wife. 
 The Mystery of Marie Roget. 
 
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 25 
 
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