Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

Which he disdaining, whisk'd his sword about,

And with the wound [wind] thereof the King fell down;
Then from the navel to the throat at once

He ripp'd old Priam."

If these lines are Marlowe's they must have been written at the very beginning of his career. Compared with this extraordinary passage the rant of Tamburlaine is tame. It seems probable that Marlowe left the scene unfinished, and that Nashe worked it up into its present ridiculous shape. If the lines I have quoted are Nashe's he must surely have been laughing in his sleeve when he wrote them. It was a good opportunity of showing that he had learnt the trick of "bragging blank verse," and could swagger in "drumming decasyllabons." Earlier in the same scene we find passages quite worthy of Marlowe, as in the description how, when Sinon unlocked the wooden horse,

"Suddenly

From out his entrails, Neoptolemus,

Setting his spear upon the ground, leapt forth,
And, after him, a thousand Grecians more
In whose stern faces shined the quenchless fire
That after burnt the pride of Asia."

About the authorship of such lines as those there can be no possible doubt; but there are very few passages in Dido where the "mighty line" rings so unmistakeably.

The exquisite fragment of Hero and Leander, which was entered in the Stationers' Books on 28th September 1593, was first published in 1598, and a second edition,1

1 Two copies of this edition were discovered a few years ago by Mr.

with Chapman's continuation, appeared in the same year. From a passage of the Third Sestiad it appears that Marlowe, perhaps with a foreboding of his untimely death, had enjoined upon Chapman the task of completing the poem. The lines are these:

"Then, ho, most strangely-intellectual fire

That, proper to my soul, hast power t' inspire
Her burning faculties, and with the wings
Of thy unsphered flame visits't the springs
Of spirits immortal. Now, as swift as Time
Doth follow Motion, find th' eternal clime
Of his free soul whose living subject stood
Up to the chin in the Pierian flood,
And drunk to me half this Musaean story,
Inscribing it to deathless memory;
Confer with it, and make my pledge as deep
That neither's draught be consecrate to sleep :
Tell it how much his late desires I tender

(If yet it know not), and to light surrender
My soul's dark offspring."

When Chapman is inspired he is not always articulate. In this apostrophe to the "free soul" of Marlowe we cannot fail to be moved by the impassioned fervour of the language; but when we come to re-read the passage, and ask ourselves what is the meaning of the italicised lines, we are beset with some difficulties. It is certain that the words "late desires" cannot refer to any deathbed utterance of Marlowe; for we know that his end was fearfully sudden. But if it has any meaning at all,

Charles Edmonds in a lumber-room at Lamport Hall, Northamptonshire, the seat of Sir Charles Isham, Bart. No edition of the complete poem earlier than that of 1600 had been previously known.

[ocr errors]

the line, "And drunk to me half this Musaean story," implies that Marlowe had shown his unfinished poem to Chapman. It would not be rash to assert that Chapman had encouraged Marlowe to proceed with the poem, or that it had been originally undertaken at Chapman's request. The words "his late desires" refer to some conversation that had passed between the two poets. Marlowe must have expressed a desire that in the event of his death Chapman should edit and complete the poem, a duty which Chapman solemnly pledged himself to perform. In my judgment the passage shows that Chapman not only had a profound admiration for Marlowe, but had been on terms of intimate friendship with him. Dyce remarks that "as to the conclusion of the passage, 'and to light surrender,' &c., I must confess that I am far from understanding it clearly." But the meaning seems intelligible: his "soul's dark offspring" is the continuation of the poem, the four last sestiads as yet undisclosed to public view; and "to light surrender" merely means to set forth in print to the gaze of the world.

Among all the Elizabethan poets there was none whose genius fitted him to complete the poem of Hero and Leander. The music of Marlowe's rhymed heroics was all his own; he was a master without pupils. In Michael Drayton's Heroical Epistles, which need fear no comparison with Ovid's Heroides, we find fluency and freedom and sweetness; but the clear, rich, fervent notes of Hero and Leander were heard but once. No less truly than finely does Mr. Swinburne say that the

poem "stands out alone amid all the wild and poetic wealth of its teeming and turbulent age, as might a small shrine of Parian sculpture amid the rank splendour of a tropic jungle." In Chapman's continuation, as in everything that Chapman wrote, there are fine passages in abundance; but the reader is wearied by tedious digressions, dull moralising, and violent conceits. There are couplets in the Tale of Teras (Fifth Sestiad) that for purity of colour and perfection of form are hardly excelled by anything in the first two sestiads; such passages, however, are few. Malone stated that Marlowe left in addition to the two first sestiads "a hundred lines of the third," but he afterwards retracted the statement.

Hero and Leander sprang at once into popularity. Shakespeare, as everybody knows, quoted in As You Like It the line, "Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" apostrophising the ill-fated poet, not without a touch of pity, as "dead shepherd;" Ben Jonson introduced passages of the poem into Every Man in his Humour; Henry Petowe, a feeble versifier but a sincere admirer of Marlowe's genius, had the audacity to write and in 1598 to publish The Second part of Hero and Leander; Nashe in Lenten Stuffe speaks of "divine Musaeus and a diviner Muse than him, Kit Marlowe ; Taylor the water-poet tells how he used to sing couplets of Hero and Leander as he plied his sculls on the Thames. Sometimes the poem is mentioned in company with Venus and Adonis. "I have conveyed away," says Harebrain in Middleton's A mad World my Masters, "all her wanton

[ocr errors]

pamphlets; as Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis: O two luscious marrow-bone pies for a young married wife." Marlowe's translation of the First Book of Lucan was entered in the Stationers' Books on 28th September 1593, but no earlier edition than the quarto of 1600 is now known to exist. Lucan's name stood much higher in Elizabethan times than in our own day. His grandiloquence, his artificiality, his frigid rhetoric have blinded modern readers to the genuine power which the author of the Pharsalia undoubtedly possessed. Quintilian's judgment was well expressed-"Lucanus ardens et concitatus et sententiis clarissimus et, ut dicam quod sentio, magis oratoribus quam poetis imitandus." Lucan was not a born poet; there was no spontaneity in his verse, and even in his best passages he merely keeps on the border-land between poetry and rhetorical prose. he could rap out telling lines, and he had an imposing vocabulary. Marlowe's version of the first book of the Pharsalia is a piece of close translation, more poetical in some passages than the original, but not doing justice to Lucan in single lines. In the description of the prodigies observed at Rome after Cæsar's passage of the Rubicon the advantage is undoubtedly Marlowe's, but on the other hand Lucan's pregnant antitheses and telling phrases are often insufficiently rendered, as where the famous line

"Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni,"

is Englished by

"Cæsar's cause

The gods abetted, Cato liked the other."

But

« ZurückWeiter »