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partisans of hunting whether a good gallop across country, in large parties assembled for the purpose, would not do as well, they say it would not be the same thing. And truly I believe it would not be the same; and it is because it would not be the same that fox-hunting is cruel. It is the stress of the excitement produced in the fox and the dogs by the flying for dear life and pursuing to the uttermost, that communicates the excitement to the men too; the fox may sometimes escape with life, but if he or the dogs expected it, the hunt would lose its charm. That keen spur, that stimulus, would be wanting, which the lower animal natures only derive from the great coarse primitive motives, such as hunger, terror, and the enjoyment of pursuit.

It is the peculiarity of man, as far as we know, and one of our justifications in assuming authority over the lower animals, that he can derive a keen enjoyment from the aesthetic, the moral, and the intellectual portions of his nature. It is plainly degrading to men in the stage of civilisation to which they have attained in our own age and country, to seek their amusements in cultivating their crueller instincts. I do not see how we can escape from Mr. Freeman's conclusion that fox-hunting is cruel, unless we are ready to admit that it is unnecessary. If an amusement might be contrived that would combine all of pleasure that is to be found in fox-hunting without subjecting any living creature to the torture of the chase, or arousing either in men or any other animals the fierce and cruel delight of pursuit, fox-hunting is open to the objection that it inflicts useless pain. If its enjoyment consists in the excitement of the chase, then the enjoyment is in a cruel animal passion, however disguised and decorated by pleasant and innocent accessories.

Avignon.

HELEN TAYLOR.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.

THE study of Shakspeare and his contemporaries is the study of one family consisting of many members, all of whom have the same lifeblood in their veins, all of whom are recognisable by accent and bearing, and acquired habits, and various unconscious self-revealments as kinsmen, while each possesses a character of his own, and traits of mind and manners and expression which distinguish him from the rest. The interest of the study is chiefly in the gradual apprehension, now on this side, now on that, of the common nature of this great family of writers, until we are in complete intellectual possession of it, and in tracing out the characteristics peculiar to each of its individuals. There is, perhaps, no other body of literature towards which we are attracted by so much of unity, and at the same time by so much of variety. If the school of Rubens had been composed of greater men than it was, we should have had an illustrious parallel in the history of painting to the group of Shakspeare and his contemporaries in the history of poetry.

The "school of Rubens" we say; we could hardly speak with accuracy of the "school of Shakspeare." Yet there can be little doubt that he was in a considerable degree the master of the inferior and younger artists who surrounded him. It is the independence of Ben Jonson's work and its thorough individuality, rather than comparative greatness or beauty of poetical achievement, which has given him a kind of acknowledged right to the second place amongst the Elizabethan dramatists, a title to vice-president's chair in the session of the poets. His aims were different from those of the others, and at a time when plays and playwrights were little esteemed, he had almost a nineteenth-century sense of the dignity of art, and of his own art in particular :—

"And he told them plainly he deserved the bays,

For his were called Works, where others were but Plays."

But Ford, and Webster, and Massinger, and Beaumont and Fletcher, and the rest (who were content, like Shakspeare, to write "plays,” and did not aspire to "works") are really followers of the greatest of all dramatic writers, and very different handiwork they would probably have turned out had they wrought in their craft without the teaching of his practice and example. Shakspeare's immediate predecessors were men of no mean powers; but they are separated by a great gulf from his contemporaries and immediate successors. That tragedy is proportioned to something else than the number of slaughtered bodies piled upon the stage at the end of

act five, that comedy has store of mirth more vital, deeper, happier, more human than springs from

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Jigging veins of rhyming mother wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay

these were discoveries in art made by Shakspeare; and is it too much to suppose that but for him these discoveries might have come later by a dozen years or thereabouts? The works of the preShakspearians are of small interest for the most part, except as illustrating a necessary stage of growth in the history of the drama. They do not win upon us with the charm, the singleness of aim, the divine innocency, the sacred inexperience, the unction of art, which we are sensible of in the works of Raphael's predecessors. Italian painting may be personified under the figure of a royal maiden who, after a period of chaste seclusion and tender virginity, came forth into the world, and was a queen and mother of men. The English drama was, first, a schoolboy, taught rude piety by the priests, and rude jokes by his fellows; then a young man, lusty, passionate, mettlesome, riotous, aspiring, friendly, full of extravagant notions and huffing words, given to irregular ways and disastrous chances and desperate recoveries, but, like Shakspeare's wild prince, containing the promise of that grave, deep-thoughted, and magnificent manhood which was afterwards realised.

It is, however, amongst the pre-Shakspearians that we find the man who, of all the Elizabethan dramatists, stands next to Shakspeare in poetical stature, the one man who, if he had lived longer and accomplished the work which lay clear before him, might have stood even beside Shakspeare, as supreme in a different province of dramatic art. Shakspeare would have been master of the realists or naturalists; Marlowe, master of the idealists. The starting-point of Shakspeare, and of those who resemble him, is always something concrete, something real in the moral world-a human character; to no more elementary components than human characters can the products of their art be reduced in the alembic of critical analysis; further than these they are irreducible. The starting-point of Marlowe, and of those who resemble Marlowe, is something abstract—a passion or an idea; to a passion or an idea each work of theirs can be brought back. Revenge is not the subject of the Merchant of Venice; Antonio and Shylock, Portia and Nerissa, Lorenzo and Jessica, Bassanio and Gratiano-these are the true subjects. Even of Romeo and Juliet the subject is not love, but two young and loving hearts surrounded by a group of most living figures, and overshadowed by a tyrannous fate. Those critics, and they are unfortunately the most numerous since German criticism became a power in this country, who attempt to discover an intention, idea, or, as they say, motiv presiding throughout each of Shakspeare's plays, have

got upon an entirely mistaken track, and they inevitably come out after labyrinthine wanderings at the other end of nowhere. Shakspeare's trade was not that of preparing nuts with concealed mottoes and sentiments in them for German commentators to crack. Goethe,

who wrought in Shakspeare's manner (though sometimes with a selfconsciousness which went hankering after ideas and intentions), Goethe saw clearly the futility of all attempts to release from their obscurity the secrets of his own works, as if the mystery of what he had created were other than the mystery of life. The children of his imagination were bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh, not constructions of his intellect nor embodied types of the passions. "Wilhelm Meister is one of the most incalculable productions"-it is Goethe himself who is speaking-"I myself can scarcely be said to have the key to it. People seek a central point, and that is hard and not even right. I should think a rich manifold life brought close to our eyes would be enough in itself without any express tendency, which, after all, is only for the intellect." A rich manifold life brought close to our eyes-that is the simplest and truest account possible of any or all of Shakspeare's dramas. But Marlowe worked, as Milton also worked, from the starting-point of an idea or passion, and the critic who might dissect all the creatures of Shakspeare's art without ever having the honour to discover a soul, may really, by dexterous anatomy, come upon the souls of Marlowe's or of Milton's creatures-intelligent monads somewhere seated observant in the pineal gland.

Shakspeare and Marlowe, the two foremost men of the Elizabethan artistic movement, remind us in not a few particulars of the two foremost men of the artistic movement in Germany seventy or eighty years ago, Goethe and Schiller. Shakspeare and Goethe are incomparably the larger and richer natures, their art is incomparably the greater and more fruitful; yet they were themselves much greater than their art. Shakspeare rendered more by a measureless sum of a man's whole nature into poetry than Marlowe did; yet his own life ran on below the rendering of it into poetry, and was never wholly absorbed and lost therein. We can believe that under different circumstances Shakspeare might never have written a line, might have carried all that lay within him unuttered to his grave. When quite a young man, and winning great rewards of fame, he could lay aside his pen entirely for a time, as when Spenser lamented

"Our pleasant Willy, ah! is dead of late,"

and, while still in the full manhood of his powers, he chose to put off his garments of enchantment, break his magic staff, and dismiss his airy spirits; or, in plain words, bring to a close his career as poet, and live out the rest of his life as country gentleman in his

native town. It is a suggestive fact, too, that the scattered references to Shakspeare which we find in the writings of his contemporaries, show us the poet concealed and almost forgotten in the man, and make it clear that he moved among his fellows with no assuming of the bard or prophet, no aspect as of one inspired, no air of authority as of one divinely commissioned; that, on the contrary, he appeared as a pleasant comrade, genial, gentle, full of civility in the large meaning of that word, upright in dealing, ready and bright in wit, quick and sportive in conversation. Goethe, also, though he valued his own works highly, valued them from a superior position as one above them, and independent of them. But Marlowe, like Schiller, seems to have lived in and for his art. His poetry was no episode in his life, but his very life itself. With an university education, and a prospect, which for a man of his powers can hardly have been an unpromising one, of success in one of the learned professions (not necessarily the Church), he must abandon his hardly-earned advantages, return to the poverty from which he had sprung, and add to poverty the disgrace of an actor's and playwright's life. His contemporaries usually speak of him as a man would be spoken of who was possessed by his art, rather than as one who, like Shakspeare, held it in possession.

"That fine madness still he did retain," Which rightly should possess a poet's brain."

So wrote Drayton; and according to Chapman's fine hyperbole he "Stood

Up to the chin in the Pierian flood.”

This is not the way in which Shakspeare is spoken of. Nor is it an uncharacteristic circumstance that probably while he lay for a short time tortured with the wound of his own dagger, and death was hastening, one of Marlowe's chief anxieties was about the fate of his Hero and Leander, and that he commended it for completion to the man of all others best fitted for the task-the great translator of Homer, whose words have just been quoted.

But if Marlowe is the Schiller-the subjective poet, the idealist, as Shakspeare is the Goethe, objective and naturalistic, of Elizabethan art-he is a Schiller of a decidedly Satanic school. With an important critical movement behind him, around him a regulated state of society, and many influences calling into activity the better part of his nature, the true Schiller's head and heart and sensibilities as an artist passed through their "Sturm und Drang" fever, and came forth illuminated, purified, and elevated. On the other hand, the world amidst which he moved was too much one of merely cultured refinement; no rude but large and ardent popular heart beat in his hearing; rather, in the court and salons and theatre of

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