Weimar, official waistcoats rose and fell with admirable but not very inspiring regularity over self-possessed and irreproachable bosoms. The talk was of poems, pictures, busts, medals, and the last little new law of the Duke. It is not surprising that Schiller's art should have a touch of coldness in it. Marlowe had behind him, not a critical movement like the German, but the glare of Smithfield fires and the ghostly procession of noble figures dealt with by the headsman on Tower Hill, terrible religious and political battles, and the downfall of a faith. For his own part, taking art as the object of his devotion, he thrust all religions somewhat fiercely aside, and professed an angry Atheism. The Catholic hierarchy and creed he seems to have hated with an energy profoundly different from the feeling of Shakspeare, distinguished as that was by a discriminating justice. The reckless Bohemian London life which Marlowe shared with his companions, Greene, Lodge, Nash, and other wild livers, had nothing in it to sober his judgment, to chasten and purify his imagination and taste, nothing or very little to elevate his feelings. But it was quick and passionate. The "Sturm und Drang" through which our English dramatists passed was of far sterner stress than that of Germany. But Marlowe did pass through it. He perished unhappily before he had acquired mastery in his second style. He lived long enough to escape from the period, so to speak, of his Robbers, not long enough to attain to the serene ideality of a Wilhelm Tell. But Marlowe possessed one immense advantage over Schiller he stood not in the midst of a petty ducal court, but in the centre of a great nation, and at a time when that nation was all air and fire, its baser elements disappearing in the consciousness of new-found power, a time when the nation was no aggregation of atoms cohering by accident, and each clamorous for its own particular rights, but a living body, with something like a unity of ideas, and with feelings self-organised around splendid objects of common interest, pride, and admiration. The strength and weakness of what Marlowe accomplished in literature correspond with the influences from the real world to which he was subject. He is great, ardent, aspiring; but he is also without balance, immoderate, unequal, extravagant. There is an artistic grace which is the counterpart of the theological grace of charity. It pervades everything that Shakspeare has written; there is little of it in Marlowe's writings. There is in them "a hunger and thirst after unrighteousness, a glow of the imagination unhallowed by anything but its own energies. His thoughts burn within him like a furnace with bickering flames, or throwing out black smoke and mists that hide the dawn of genius, or like a poisonous mineral corrode the heart." If a Schiller, then, surely a Schiller of a Satanic school. ¡ (1) Hazlitt. Marlowe's works consist of six or seven plays and some translations, one of which-a paraphrase of the Hero and Leander of the pseudo-Musaus-is remarkable as evidencing, more than any other of his writings, the thoroughly Renaissance feeling for sensuous beauty which Marlowe possessed in a degree hardly less than that displayed by Shakspeare in his youthful Venus and Adonis. Of the dramas, one was produced in conjunction with Nash, and we cannot safely assign to its authors their respective shares in the work. One-The Massacre at Paris-seems to have been thrown off to meet some temporary occasion; and certainly, however this may have been, it may without remorse be set down as worthless. A third was written, we can hardly doubt, when the poet was in the transition period from his early to what would have been, if he had lived, his mature style. It is in truth the least characteristic of all his more important writings. There are critics who can more readily forgive any literary deficiencies or incapacities than sins of actual commission, who can bear with every evidence of dulness of poetical vision, languor of the thinking power, uncertainty of the shaping hands, and constitutional asthenia, but who have no toleration for splendid crimes, broad-blown sins of the sanguine temperament, extravagant fancies, thoughts that climb too high, turbulency of manner, and great swelling words of vanity. These have pronounced Edward the Second Marlowe's best play. And it is, doubtless, free from the violence and extravagance of the dramas that preceded it, from the vaulting ambition of poetical style, which "o'erleaps itself, and falls o' the other;" but, except in a few scenes, and notably the closing ones, it wants also the clear raptures, the high reaches of wit, the "brave translunary things," the single lines —each one enough to ransom a poet from captivity—which especially characterise Marlowe. The historical matter he is unable to handle as successfully as a subject of an imaginative or partly mythical kind; it does not yield and take shape in his hands as readily, and accordingly Edward the Second, though containing a few splendid passages, is rather a series of scenes from the chronicles of England than a drama. Three plays remain,' and on these the fame of Marlowe must rest -Tamburlaine the Great, The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus, and The Jew of Malta. Each of these is admirably characteristic, and could have proceeded from no other brain than that of its creator. The three together form a great achievement in literature for a man probably not more than twenty-seven years of age when the latest was written; and they still stand apart from the neighbouring crowd of dramatic compositions, and close to one another—a little group distinguished by peculiar marks of closest kinship, a (1) Four, if we count separately the two parts of Tamburlaine. physiognomy, and complexion, and demeanour, and accent of their own. Each of the three is the rendering into artistic form of the workings of a single passion, while at the same time each of these several passions is only a different form of life assumed by one supreme passion, central in all the great characters of Marlowe, magisterial, claiming the whole man, and in its operation fatal. The subject of Tamburlaine-probably Marlowe's earliest work, certainly the first which made an impression on the public-if we would express it in the simplest way, is the mere lust of dominion, the passion of "a mighty hunter before the Lord" for sovereign sway, the love of power in its crudest shape. This, and this alone, living and acting in the person of the Scythian shepherd, gives unity to the multitude of scenes which grow up before us and fall away, like the fiery-hearted blossoms of some inexhaustible tropical plant, blown with sudden and strong desire, fading and dropping away at night, and replaced next morning by others as sanguine and heavy with perfume. There is no construction in Tamburlaine. Instead of two plays there might as well have been twenty, if Marlowe could have found it in his heart to husband his large supply of kings, emperors, soldans, pashas, governors, and viceroys who perish before the Scourge of God, or had he been able to discover empires, provinces, and principalities with which to endow a new race of rulers. The play ends from sheer exhaustion of resources. As Alexander was reduced to weep for another world to conquer, so Tamburlaine might have wept because there were no more emperors to fill his cages, no more monarchs to increase his royal stud. He does not weep, but what is much better, dies. The play resembles in its movement no other so much as the Sultan Amurath of De Quincey's elder brother. "What by the bowstring, and what by the scimitar, the sultan had so thinned the population with which he commenced business that scarcely any of the characters remained alive at the end of Act the first." Five crops had to be taken off the ground in the tragedy, amounting, in short, to five tragedies involved in one. The difference is, that Marlowe could not be satisfied with less than ten crops and a corresponding number of tragedies. Yet Tamburlaine is the work of a master-hand, untrained. If from some painting ill-composed, full of crude and violent colour, containing abundant proofs of weakness and inexperience, and having half its canvas crowded with extravagant grotesques which the artist took for sublime—if from such a painting one wonderful face looked out at us, the soul in its eyes and on its lips, a single desire possessing it, eager and simple as a flame, should we question the genius of the painter? And somewhat in this manner the single passion which has the hero of the piece for its temporary body and instrument looks out at us from the play of Tamburlaine. The lust and the pride of conquest, the ambition to be a god upon earth, the confident sense that in one's own will resides the prime force of nature, disdain of each single thing, how splendid soever, which the world can offer by way of gift or bribe, because less than the possession of all seems worthless-these are feelings which, though evidence from history that they are real is not wanting, are yet even imagined in a vivid way by very few persons. The demands which most of us make on life are moderate; our little lives run on with few great ambitions, and this gross kind of ambition is peculiarly out of relation to our habits of desire. But Marlowe, the son of the Canterbury shoemaker, realised in imagination this ambition as if it were his very own, and gave it most living expression; most sincere and natural expression also. The author of Faustus and The Jew of Malta is wholly in such lines as these of Tamburlaine, spoken while he was yet a mere fortunate adventurer : And these: "But, since they measure our deserts so mean, : "Forsake thy king, and do but join with me, And these spoken of Tamburlaine by Meander : "Some powers divine, or else infernal, mix'd Their angry seeds at his conception; For he was never sprung of human race, And lastly these, Tamburlaine speaking: "Nature that fram'd us of four elements Until we reach the ripest fruit of all, The sweet fruition of an earthly crown." There is something gross in this ambition, this thirst for reign, this gloating over "the sweetness of a crown," but the very excess or transcendency of the passion saves it from vulgarity. The love of pomp is not the mean love of pomp, but the imperial, combined with the self-surrender of the Renaissance poet to the lust of the eye and the pride of life. Command over material display and pageantry, from the "copper-laced coat and crimson velvet breeches" of the Conqueror up to the "pampered jades of Asia," is valued chiefly as an emblem of triumph and of power, or rather as a fragment of that universal power which sways all things to its will, and suggestive of it. It is a fine piece of consistency preserved in resistance to the temptation of stage moralising, that when Tamburlaine's great career draws towards its close, and he sees the world passing away from his grasp, he does not lose faith in the kingdoms of the world and their glory. He knows that he must submit to the tyranny of Death; he exhorts his sons to the acquiring of "that magnanimity That nobly must admit necessity;" life, he sees, is transitory, but he does not despise it for its transitoriness; sovereignty must be resigned, but still he is proud that he was Tamburlaine and a king; and he delivers over the possession of his empire to his children, lamenting only that their "sweet desires," and those of his friends, must henceforth be deprived of his company. There is a severity of conception in this scene of Tamburlaine's death, which was attained through the projection into his art of Marlowe's own exceeding pride of will. In one of the passages quoted above the reader may have been struck by the fine line in which our souls are spoken of as "still climbing after knowledge infinite." That aspiring, insatiate, and insatiable curiosity, which for our generation Mr. Browning has endeavoured to represent in the person of Paracelsus, Marlowe also conceived in his own way, and with characteristic energy. Faustus is the Paracelsus of Marlowe. Over the soul of the Würtemberg doctor the passion for knowledge dominates, and all influences of good and evil, the voices of damned and of blessed angels reach him faint and ineffectual as dreams, or distant music, or the suggestions of long-forgotten odours, save as they promise something to glut the fierce hunger and thirst of his intellect. All subjects, however, in the stream of Marlowe's genius are hurried in a single direction. Pride of will drew to itself all other forces of his nature, and made them secondary and subordinate; and accordingly we are not surprised when we find that, in Marlowe's hands, the passion for knowledge which possesses Faustus becomes little more than a body, as it were, giving a special form of life to the same consuming lust of power which he had treated in the earlier drama of Tamburlaine. To Faustus, in the suggestion of the Tempter, the words "knowing good and evil" grow dim in the unhallowed splendour of the promise "Ye shall be |