succession of dialogues, but I can think of no earlier example of its application to a production in dramatic form than by the Bachelor Fernando de Rojas in this instance. It was made over into English, rather than translated, in 1520-our first literary debt to Spain, I should guess. The Spanish theatre, though the influence of Seneca is apparent in the form it put on, is more sincerely a growth of the soil than any other of modern times, and it has one interesting analogy with our own in the introduction of the clown into tragedy, whether by way of foil or parody. The Spanish dramatists have been called marvels of fecundity, but the facility of their trochaic measure, in which the verses seem to go of themselves, makes their feats less wonderful. The marvel would seem to be rather that, writing so easily, they also wrote so well. Their invention is as remarkable as their abundance. Their drama and our own have affected the spirit and sometimes the substance of later literature more than any other. They have to a certain extent impregnated it. I have called the Spanish theatre a product of the soil, yet it must not be overlooked that Sophocles, Euripides, Plautus, and Terence had been translated into Spanish early in the sixteenth century, and that Lope de Rueda, its real founder, would willingly have followed classical models more closely had the public taste justified him in doing so. But fortunately the national genius triumphed over traditional criterions of art, and the Spanish theatre, asserting its own happier instincts, became and continued Spanish, with an unspeakable charm and flavor of its own. One peculiarity of the Spanish plays makes it safe to recommend them even virginibus puerisque-they are never unclean. Even Milton would have approved a censorship of the press that accomplished this. It is a remarkable example of how sharp the contradiction is between the private morals of a people and their public code of morality. Certain things may be done, but they must not seem to be done. I have said nothing of the earlier Italian Drama because it has failed to interest me. But Italy had indirectly a potent influence, through Spenser, in supplying English verse till it could answer the higher uses of the stage. The lines -for they can hardly be called verses of the first attempts at regular plays are as uniform, flat, and void of variety as laths cut by machinery, and show only the arithmetical ability of their fashioners to count as high as ten. A speech is a series of such laths laid parallel to each other with scrupulous exactness. But I shall have occasion to return to this topic in speaking of Marlowe. Who, then, were the Old English Dramatists? They were a score or so of literary bohemians, for the most part, living from hand to mouth in London during the last twenty years of the sixteenth century and the first thirty years of the seventeenth, of the personal history of most of whom we fortunately know little, and who, by their good luck in being born into an unsophisticated age, have written a few things so well that they seem to have written themselves. Poor, nearly all of them, they have left us a fine estate in the realm of Faery. Among them were three or four men of genius. comrade of theirs by his calling, but set apart from them alike by the splendor of his endowments and the more equable balance of his temperament, was that divine apparition known to mortals as Shakespeare. The civil war put an end to their activity. The last of them, in the direct line, was James Shirley, remembered chiefly for two lines from the last stanza of a song of his in The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses, which have become a proverb: "Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in the dust." A It is a nobly simple piece of verse, with the slow and solemn cadence of a funeral march. The hint of it seems to have been taken from a passage in that droningly dreary book the Mirror for Magistrates. This little poem is one of the best instances of the good fortune of the men of that age in the unconscious simplicity and gladness (I know not what else to call it) of their vocabulary. The language, so to speak, had just learned to go alone, and found a joy in its own mere motion, which it lost as it grew older, and to walk was no longer a marvel. Nothing in the history of literature seems more startling than the sudden spring with which English poetry blossomed in the later years of Elizabeth's reign. We may account for the seemingly unheralded apparition of a single genius like Dante or Chaucer by the genius itself; for, given that, everything else is possible. But even in such cases as these much must have gone before to make the genius available when it came. For the production of great literature there must be already a language ductile to all the varying moods of expression. There must be a certain amount of culture, or the stimulus of sympathy would be wanting. If, as Horace tells us, the heroes who lived before Agamemnon have perished for want of a poet to celebrate them, so doubtless many poets have gone dumb to their graves, or, at any rate, have uttered themselves imperfectly, for lack of a fitting vehicle or of an amiable atmosphere. Genius, to be sure, makes its own opportunity, but the circumstances must be there out of which it can be made. For instance, I cannot help feeling that Turold, or whoever was the author of the Chanson de Roland, was endowed with a rare epical faculty, and that he would have given more emphatic proof of it had it been possible for him to clothe his thought in a form equivalent to the vigor of his conception. Perhaps with more art, he might have had less of that happy audacity of the first leap which Montaigne valued so highly, but would he not have gained could he have spoken to us in a verse as sonorous as the Greek hexameter, nay, even as sweet in its cadences, as variously voluble by its slurs and elisious, and withal as sharply edged and clean cut as the Italian pentameter? It is at least a question open to debate. Mr. Matthew Arnold taxes the Song of Roland with an entire want of the grand style; and this is true enough; but it has immense stores of courage and victory in it, as Taillefer proved at the battle of Hastings ---yes, and touches of heroic pathos, too. Many things had slowly and silently concurred to make that singular pre-eminence of the Elizabethan literature possible. First of all was the growth of a national consciousness, made aware of itself and more cumulatively operative by the existence and safer accessibility of a national capital, to serve it both as head and heart. The want of such a focus of intellectual, political, and material activity has had more to do with the backwardness and provincialism of our own literature than is generally taken into account. My friend Mr. Hosea Biglow ventured to affirm twenty odd years ago that we had at last arrived at this national consciousness through the convulsion of our civil war-a convulsion so violent as might well convince the members that they formed part of a common body. But I make bold to doubt whether that consciousness will ever be more than fitful and imperfect, whether it will ever, except in some moment of supreme crisis, pour itself into and re-enforce the individual consciousness in a way to make our literature feel itself of age and its own master till we shall have got a common head as well as a common body. It is not the size of a city that gives it this stimulating and expanding quality, but the fact that it sums up in itself and gathers all the moral and intellectual forces of the country in a single focus. London is still the metropolis of the British as Paris of the French race. We admit this readily enough as regards Australia or Canada, but we willingly overlook it as regards ourselves. Washington is growing more national and more habitable every year, but it will never be a capital till every kind of culture is attainable there on as good terms as elsewhere. Why not on better than elsewhere? We are rich enough. Bismarck's first care has been the Museums of Berlin. For a fiftieth part of the money Congress seems willing to waste in demoralizing the country, we might have had the Hamilton books and the far more precious Ashburnham manuscripts. Perhaps what formerly gave Boston its admitted literary supremacy was the fact that fifty years ago it was more truly a capital than any other American city. Edinburgh once held a similar position, with similar results. And yet how narrow Boston was! How scant a pasture it offered to the imagination! I have often mused on the dreary fate of the great painter who perished slowly of inanition over yonder in Cambridgeport, he who had known Coleridge and Lamb and Wordsworth, and who, if ever any, greatest amount and greatest variety of intellect and character, the most abundant elements of civilization, performs the best function of a university. London was such a centre in the days of Queen Elizabeth. And think what a school the Mermaid Tavern must have been! The verses which Beaumont addressed to Ben Jonson from the country point to this: "What things have we seen As if that every one from whence they came Of his dull life; then when there hath been Wit able enough to justify the town For three days past, wit that might warrant be This air, which Beaumont says they left authors of that day had was the freshness of the language, which had not then become literary, and therefore more or less commonplace. All the words they used were bright from the die, not yet worn smooth in the daily drudgery of prosaic service. I am not sure whether they were so fully conscious of this as we are, who find a surprising charm in it, and perhaps endow the poet with the witchery that really belongs to the vocables he employs. The parts of speech of these old poets are just archaic enough to please us with that familiar strangeness which makes our own tongue agreeable if spoken with a hardly perceptible foreign ac. cent. The power of giving novelty to things outworn is, indeed, one of the prime qualities of genius, and this novelty the habitual phrase of the Elizabethans has for us without any merit of theirs. But I think, making all due abatements, that they had the hermetic gift of buckling wings to the feet of their verse in a measure which has fallen to the share of few or no modern poets. I think some of them certainly were fully aware of the fine qualities of their mother tongue. Chapman, in the poem "To the Reader," prefixed to his translation of the Iliad, protests against those who preferred to it the softer Romance languages: "And for our tongue that still is so impaired By travailing linguists, I can prove it clear, And meet, opposed in rhyme, as they did kiss." I think Chapman has very prettily maintained and illustrated his thesis. But, though fortunate in being able to gather their language with the dew still on it, as herbs must be gathered for use in certain incantations, we are not to suppose that our elders used it indiscriminately, or tumbled out their words as they would dice, trusting that luck or chance would send them a happy throw; that they did not select, arrange, combine, and make use of the most cunning artifices of modulation and rhythm. They debated all these questions, we may be sure, not only with a laudable desire of excellence, and with a hope to make their native tongue as fitting a vehicle for poetry and eloquence as those of their neighbors, or as those of Greece and Rome, but also with Another great advantage which the something of the eager joy of adventure "Cæsar did never wrong but with just cause," which is no longer to be found in the play of Julius Cæsar. Perhaps Heminge and Condell left it out, for Shakespeare could have justified himself with the hook-nosed fellow of Rome's favorite Greek quotation, that nothing justified crime but the winning or keeping of supreme power. Never could London, before or since, gather such an academy of genius. It must have been a marvellous whetstone of the wits, and spur to generous emulation. and discovery. They must have felt with Lucretius the delight of wandering over the pathless places of the Muse, and hence, perhaps, it is that their step is so elastic, and that we are never dispirited by a consciousness of any lassitude when they put forth their best pace. If they are natural, it is in great part the benefit of the age they lived in, but the winning graces, the picturesque felicities, the electric flashes, I had almost said the explosions, of their style are their own. And their diction mingles its elements so kindly and with such gracious reliefs of changing key, now dallying with the very childishness of speech like the spinsters and the knitters in the sun, and anon snatched up without effort to the rapt phrase of passion or of tragedy that flashes and reverberates! The dullest of them, for I admit that many of them were dull as a comedy of Goethe, and dulness loses none of its disheartening properties by age, no, nor even by being embalmed in the precious gems and spices of Lamb's affectionate eulogy-for I am persuaded that I should know a stupid mummy from a clever one before I had been in his company five minutes the dullest of them, I say, has his lucid intervals. There are, I grant, dreary wastes and vast solitudes in such collections as Dodsley's Old Plays, where we slump along through the loose sand without even so much as a mirage to comfort us under the intolerable drought of our companion's discourse. Nay, even some of the dramatists who have been thought worthy of editions all to themselves, may enjoy that seclusion without fear of its being disturbed by me. Let me mention a name or two of such as I shall not speak of in this course. Robert Greene is one of them. He has all the inadequacy of imperfectly drawn. tea. I thank him, indeed, for the word "brightsome," and for two lines of Sephestia's song to her child, "Weep not, my wanton, smile upon my knee, When thou art old, there's grief enough for thee," which have all the innocence of the Old Age in them. Otherwise he is naught. I say this for the benefit of the young, for in my own callow days I took him seriously because the Rev. Alexander Dyce had edited him, and I endured much in trying to reconcile my instincts with my superstition. He it was that called Shake speare "an upstart crow beautified with our feathers," as if any one could have any use for feathers from such birds as he, except to make pens of them. He was the cause of the dulness that was in other men, too, and human nature feels itself partially avenged by this stanza of an elegy upon him by one "R. B.," quoted by Mr. Dyce: "Greene is the pleasing object of an eye; Greene pleased the eyes of all that looked upon him; Greene is the ground of every painter's dye; Greene gave the ground to all that wrote upon him; Nay, more, the men that so eclipsed his fame Purloyned his plumes; can they deny the same?" Even the libeller of Shakespeare deserved nothing worse than this! If this is "R. B." when he was playing upon words, what must he have been when serious? Another dramatist whom we can get on very well without is George Peele, the friend and fellow-roisterer of Greene. He, too, defied the inspiring influence of the air he breathed almost as successfully as his friend. But he had not that genius for being dull all the time that Greene had, and illustrates what I was just saying of the manner in which the most tiresome of these men waylay us when we least expect it with some phrase or verse that shines and trembles in the memory like a star. Such are: "For her I'll build a kingly bower Seated in hearing of a hundred streams"; and this, of God's avenging lightning, "At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt, And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings, Sit ever burning in his hateful bones." He also wrote some musically simple stanzas, of which I quote the first two, the rather that Thackeray was fond of them: "My golden locks Time hath to silver turned (O Time too swift, and swiftness never ceasing), My youth 'gainst age, and age at youth hath spurned, But spurned in vain; youth waneth by increasing. Beauty, strength, and youth, flowers fading been; Duty, faith, and love, are roots, and ever green. My helmet now shall make an hive for bees, And lover's songs shall turn to holy psalms; A man-at-arms must now sit on his knees, And feed on prayers, that are old age's alms. And so from court to cottage I depart, My saint is sure of mine unspotted heart." There is a pensiveness in this, half pleas urable, half melancholy, that has a charm of its own. Thomas Dekker is a far more important person. Most of his works seem to have been what artists call pot-boilers, written at ruinous speed, and with the bailiff rather than the Muse at his elbow. There was a liberal background of prose in him, as in Ben Jonson, but he was a poet and no mean one, as he shows by the careless good luck of his epithets and similes. He could rise also to a grave dignity of style that is grateful to the ear, nor was he incapable of that heightened emotion which might almost pass for passion. His fancy kindles wellnigh to imagination at times, and ventures on those extravagances which entice the fancy of the reader as with the music of an invitation to the waltz. I had him in my mind when I was speaking of the obiter dicta, of the fine verses dropt casually by these men when you are beginning to think they have no poetry in them. Fortune tells Fortunatus, in the play of that name, that he shall have gold as countless as "Those gilded wantons that in swarms do run To warm their slender bodies in the sun," thus giving him a hint also of its ephemeral nature. Here is a verse, too, that shows a kind of bleakish sympathy of sound and sense. Long life, he tells us, "Is a long journey in December gone." It may be merely my fancy, but I seem to hear a melancholy echo in it, as of footfalls on frozen earth. Or take this for a pretty fancy: "The moon hath through her bow scarce drawn to the head, Like to twelve silver arrows, all the months when do you suppose? I give you three guesses, as the children say. Since 1600! Poor Fancy shudders at this opening of Haydn's Dictionary of Dates, and thinks her silver arrows a little out of place, like a belated masquerader going home. under the broad grin of day. But the verses themselves seem plucked from Midsummer Night's Dream. This is as good an instance as may be of the want of taste, sense of congruity, and of the delicate discrimination that makes style, which strike and sometimes even shock us in the Old Dramatists. This was a disadvantage of the age into which they were born, and is perhaps implied in the very advantages it gave them, and of which I have spoken. Even Shakespeare offends sometimes in this way. Good taste, if mainly a gift of nature, is also an acquisition. It was not impossible even then. Samuel Daniel had it, but the cautious propriety with which it embarrassed him has made his drama of Cleopatra unapproachable, in more senses than one, in its frigid regularity. His contemplative poetry, thanks to its grave sweetness of style, is among the best in our language. Yet Daniel wrote the following sentences, which explain better than anything I could say why his contemporaries, in spite of their manifest imperfections, pleased then and continue to please: "Suffer the world to enjoy that which it knows and what it likes, seeing whatsoever form of words doth move delight, and sway the affections of men, in what Scythian sort soever it be disposed and uttered, that is true number, measure, eloquence, and the perfection of speech." Those men did 66 move delight, and sway the affections of men," in a very singular manner, gaining, on the whole, perhaps, more by their liberty than they lost by their license. But it is only genius that can safely profit by this immunity. Form, of which we hear so much, is of great value, but it is not of the highest value, except in combination with other qualities better than itself, and it is worth noting that the modern English poet who seems least to have regarded it, is also the one who has most powerfully moved, swayed, and delighted those who are wise enough to read him. One more passage and I have done. It is from the same play of Old Fortunatus, a favorite of mine. The Soldan of Babylon shows Fortunatus his treasury, or cabinet of bric-a-brac : "Behold yon tower, there stands mine armoury, In which are corselets forged of beaten gold To arm ten hundred thousand fighting men, Whose glittering squadrons when the sun beholds, They seem like to ten hundred thousand Joves, The ball of gold that set all Troy on fire; |