as gods." All secrets of Nature and of Fate he desires to penetrate, but not in order that he may contemplate their mysteries in philosophic calmness, not that he may possess his soul in the serene light of ascertained primal truths; rather it is for the lordship over men and things which knowledge places in his hands that he chiefly desires it. Logic, law, physic, divinity, have yielded their whole stores into his keeping, but they have left his intellect unsatisfied, craving for acquisitions of a less formal, a more natural and living kind, and they have afforded him no adequate field, and feeble instruments for the display of the forces of his will. It is magic which with every discovery to the intellect unites a corresponding gift of power:

"Tis magic, magic that hath ravished me.”

What is knowledge worth if it does not enable him to obtain mastery over gross matter, over the lives and fortunes of men, over the elements of air and earth, of fire and water, and over the strong elemental spirits? To be surrounded with proofs and witnesses of the transcendent might of his own will,-this is the ultimate desire of Faustus, as in other circumstances and seeking other manifestations, it was of Tamburlaine. But the scholar does not ever disappear in the magician. In the first heated vision of the various objects towards which the new agency at his command might be turned, projects rise before him of circling Germany with brass, of driving the Prince of Parma from the land, and reigning "sole king of all the provinces;" yet even in that hour there mingle with more vulgar ambitions the ambitions of the thinker and the student; he would have his subject spirits resolve him of all ambiguities, and read to him strange philosophies. The pleasure, which afterwards he seeks, less for its own sake than to banish the hated thought of the approaching future, is the quintessence of pleasure. He is not made for coarse delights. He desires no beauty but that of "the fairest maid in Germany," or the beauty of Helen of Troy :

"Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships,

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss."

He chooses no song but Homer's song, no music but that of Amphion's harp:

Long ere this I should have slain myself

Had not sweet pleasure conquer'd deep despair.
Have not I made blind Homer sing to me

Of Alexander's love and Enon's death?

And hath not he that built the walls of Thebes,

With ravishing sound of his melodious harp,
Made music with my Mephistophilis?"

And in the scene of parting with the two scholars, immediately preceding the uncompanioned agony of the doomed man's latest hour-a scene distinguished by a lofty pathos which we find

nowhere else in Marlowe-there is throughout an atmosphere of learning, of refinement, of scholarly urbanity, which makes us feel how thoroughly Marlowe had preserved his original conception of the character of Faustus, even while he degraded him to the low conjurer of certain passages, introduced by a writer singularly devoid of humour, to make sport for the groundlings of the theatre.

The

Evil desires, evil Nine-tenths of the

A grosser air is breathed throughout The Jew of Malta. whole play is murky with smoke of the pit. thoughts, evil living, fill its five acts to the full. picture are as darkly shadowed as some shadowy painting of Rembrandt; but, as might also be in one of Rembrandt's paintings, in the centre there is a head relieved against the gloom, lit by what strange light we do not know, unless it be the reflection from piles of gold and gems-a head fascinating and detestable, of majestic proportions, full of intellect, full of malice and deceit, with wrinkled brow, beak-like nose, cruel lips, and eyes that, though half-hooded by leathery lids, triumph visibly in the success of something devilish. Barabas is the dedicated child of sin from his mother's womb. As he grew in stature he must have grown in crooked wisdom and in wickedness. His heart is a nest where there is room for the patrons of the seven deadly sins to lodge, but one chief devil is its permanent occupier-Mammon. The lust of money is the passion of the Jew, which is constantly awake and active. His bags are the children of his bowels, more loved than his Abigail, and the dearer because they were begotten through deceit or by violence. Yet Barabas is a superb figure. His energy of will is so great; his resources and inventions are so inexhaustible; he is so illustrious a representative of material power and of intellectual. Even his love of money has something in it of sublime, it is so huge a desire. He is no miser treasuring each contemptible coin. Precisely as Tamburlaine looked down with scorn at all ordinary kingships and lordships of the earth, as Faustus held for worthless the whole sum of stored-up human learning in comparison with the infinite knowledge to which he aspired, so Barabas treats with genuine disdain the opulence of common men. The play opens, as Faustus does, in an impressive way, discovering the merchant alone in his counting-house, flattering his own sense of power with the sight of his possessions. He sits in the centre of a vast web of commercial enterprises, controlling and directing them all. Spain, Persia, Araby, Egypt, India, are tributary to the Jew. He holds hands with the Christian governor of the island. By money he has become a lord of men, as Tamburlaine did by force, and Faustus by knowledge, and the winds and the seas that bear his argosies about are his ministers.

It is obvious that the lust of money, and the power that comes by money, form the subject of The Jew of Malta. We should indeed be straining matters, accommodating them to gain for our exposition

an artistic completeness, if we were to say that Barabas desires money only for the power which its possession confers. This, in his worship of gold, is certainly a chief element, but he loves it also for its own sake with a fond extravagance. In the dawn after that night when Abigail rescued his treasures from their hiding-place in his former dwelling, now converted into a Christian nunnery, the old raven hovers amorously over his recovered bags, and sings above them as a lark does above her young. Yet still it is the sense of power regained which puts the sweetest drop into his cup of bliss:

My gold, my fortune, my felicity,

Strength to my soul, death to mine enemy!
Welcome the first beginner of my bliss."

But Marlowe found means in another way to gratify in this play his own passion for power, his pride in the display of the puissance of human will. The opening scene, in which the Jew appears as a great master in the art of money-getting, and surrounded by the works of his hands, in which he is proud, secure, and happy, is quickly succeeded by others in which he is seen stripped of his wealth, turned out of doors by Christian tyranny, and exposed to common ignominy and insult. The rest of the drama is occupied with the great game which Barabas plays, first against his Christian persecutors, afterwards against his own daughter allied with them, and his dangerous tool Ithamore, the cut-throat slave whom he has bought. His hand is henceforth against every man, and every man's hand against him. When he is hunted he doubles on his pursuers, and for a while escapes; any swine-eating dog that comes too close gets a shrewd bite which stops his cry, and at last, when brought to bay, and when his supreme design has failed by counter-treachery, when fairly hunted down, he turns fiercely on his opponents, is still master of himself and of the situation, and rises above those who watch his death by the grandeur of his resolution.

It has not seemed necessary here to dwell upon all that is worthless, and worse than worthless, in Marlowe's plays-on the "midsummer madness" of Tamburlaine, the contemptible buffoonery of Dr. Faustus, and the overloaded sensational atrocities of The Jew of Malta. Such criticism everyone but an Ancient Pistol does for himself. We all recognise the fustian of Marlowe's style, and the ill effects of the demands made upon him by sixteenth-century play-goers for such harlequinade as they could appreciate. A more important thing to recognise is that up to the last Marlowe's great powers were ripening, while his judgment was becoming sane, and his taste purer. He was escaping, as has been already said, from his "Sturm und Drang" when he was lost to the world. Tamburlaine was written at the age of twenty-two, Faustus two or three years later. At such

an age accomplishment is rare; we usually look for no more than promise. If Shakspeare had died at the age when Marlowe died we should have known little of the capacity which lay within him of creating a Macbeth, a Lear, an Othello, a Cleopatra. Marlowe has left us three great ideal figures of Titanic strength and size. That we should say is much. In one particular a most important advance from Tamburlaine to Dr. Faustus and the later plays is discernible— in versification. His contemporaries appear to have been much impressed by the greatness of his verse-Marlowe's "mighty line;" and it was in the tirades of Tamburlaine that blank verse was first heard upon a public stage in England. But in this play the blank verse is like a gorgeous robe of brocade, stiff with golden embroidery; afterwards in his hands it becomes pliable, and falls around the thought or feeling which it covers in nobly significant lines.

Had Marlowe lived longer we may surmise, with some degree of assurance, one, at least, of the subjects which would have engaged his attention-the lust of beauty and the power of beauty. There is very little of amatory writing in any of his plays except that written in conjunction with Nash. Tender love-making of the idyllic or romantic kind Marlowe was little fitted to represent. But we have the clearest evidence from scattered passages that Marlowe had conceived the tyrannous power of beauty in that transcendent way in which he conceived other forms of power. It is sufficient to remind the

reader of the scene in which Helena rises before Faustus. And there is one passage in Tamburlaine which in itself is quite enough to show us that the passionate desire of beauty in its most ideal form was not inexperienced by the poet :

"What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then?

If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admired themes;
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit;

If these had made one poem's period,

And all combin'd in beauty's worthiness,

Yet should there hover in their restless heads,

One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,

Which into words no virtue can digest."

If another passage in Tamburlaine :—

"Still climbing after knowledge infinite,"

announced the poet's Paracelsus, does not this more distinctly announce his never-created Aprile?

VOL. VII. N.S.

G

EDWARD DOWDEN.

THE DEATH-LAMENTS OF SAVAGES.

PROFESSOR HUXLEY, in a recent paper in the Fortnightly Review, has said: "It is absurd to say of men in a state of primitive savagery that all their conceptions are in a theological state. Nine-tenths of them are eminently realistic, and as 'positive' as ignorance and narrowness can make them. It no more occurs to a savage than it does to a child, to ask the why of the daily and ordinary occurrences which form the greater part of his mental life. But in regard to the more striking or out-of-the-way events, which force him to speculate, he is highly anthropomorphic; and, as compared with a child, his anthropomorphism is complicated by the intense impression which the death of his own kind makes upon him, as indeed it well may. The warrior, full of ferocious energy, perhaps the despotic chief of his tribe, is suddenly struck down. A child may insult the man a moment before so awful; a fly rests undisturbed upon the lips from which undisputed command issued. And yet the bodily aspect of the man seems hardly more altered than when he slept, and sleeping he seemed to himself to leave his body and wander through dreamland. What then if that something, which is the essence of the man, has really been made to wander by the violence done to it, and is unable, or has forgotten to come back to its shell? Will it not retain somewhat of the powers it possessed during life? May it not help us if it be pleased, or (as seems to be by far the more general impression), hurt us if it be angered? Will it not be well to do towards it those things which would have soothed the man and put him in good humour during his life? It is impossible to study trustworthy accounts of savage thought without seeing that some such train of ideas as this is at the bottom of their speculative beliefs." What falls from Professor Huxley is always of interest and value. Let us then take this thought upon savages, trace it through some of their poetry and laments, and thus ascertain what light these throw upon it.

The aged Te Heuhcu, chief of the district and lake of Taupo, in the centre of the north island of New Zealand, was buried, with his whole village and many of his relatives, by the eruption of a stream of mud from a volcano. His body was with great difficulty dug out, laid in state by the remnant of his tribe, and the following lament was sung over it, the mourners looking northward, and eastward, over a lake, about thirty miles long, at the end of which rises the lofty peak of Mount Tauhara, an extinct volcano.

I have been obliged to add a few explanatory words to the original lament, to enable the English reader to understand some of the allusions it contains. I have not had sufficient leisure to attempt a poetical translation either of this lament or of any of the poems which follow it; but the sense is more literally preserved in a prose translation than it could be in a poetical one.