or colour something that will not be expressed or attained, nor pass into the like. ness of any perishable life; but though all were done that all poets could do, "Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, No poet ever came nearer than Marlowe to the expression of this inexpressible beauty, to the incarnation in actual form of ideal perfection, to the embodiment in mortal music of immortal harmony; and he it is who has left on record and on evidence to all time the truth that no poet can ever come nearer. The lesser artist, with less liberty of action, will be the likelier of the two to show less loyalty of submission to the eternal laws of thought which find their full and natural expression in the eternal canons of art. In him we shall find that intellectual energy has taken what it can of the place and done what it can of the work proper to ideal passion. This substitution of an intellectual for an ideal end, of energetic mental action for passionate spiritual emotion as the means towards that end, is as good a test as may be taken of the difference in kind rather than in degree between the first and the second order of imaginative artists. By the change of instrument alone a critic of the higher class may at once verify the change of object. In almost every page of Chapman's noblest work we discern the struggle and the toil of a powerful mind convulsed and distended as by throes of travail in the effort to achieve something that lies beyond the proper aim and the possible scope of that form of art within which it has set itself to work. The hard effort of a strong will, the conscious purpose of an earnest ambition, the laborious obedience to a resolute design, is as perceptible in Jonson and Chapman as in Shakespeare and in Marlowe is the instinct of spiritual harmony, the loyalty and the liberty of impulse and of work. The lesser poets are poets prepense; the greater are at once poets of their own making and of nature's, equidistant in their line of life from the mere singing-bird and the mere student. Of the first order we may be sure that in any age or country the men that compose it must have been what they were, great as poets or artists, lyric or dramatic; of the second order we may well believe that in a different time or place the names which we find written in its catalogue might have been distinguished by other trophies than such as they now recall. And this, which may seem imply a superiority of intellectual power, does actually imply the reverse. Those are not the greatest among men of whom we can reasonably conceive that circumstance might have made them as great in some different way from that in which they walked; those are not the highest poets or soldiers or statesmen whom it is possible or permissible to imagine as winning equal fame in some other field than their own, by the application to some other end of such energy and genius as made them great in the line which they were impelled to select at least as much by pressure of accident as by force of instinct, by the external necessity of chance as by the internal necessity of nature. Accident and occasion may be strongest with men of the second order; but with minds of the first rank that which we call the to impulse of nature is yet more strong than they. I doubt not that Jonson might in another age have sought and won distinction from the active life of soldiership or of statecraft; I take leave to doubt whether Shakespeare, had he sought it, would have won. I am not disinclined to admit the supposition that Chapman might have applied his power of moral thought and his interest in historic action to other ends than they ever served in literature or in life. But neither for his sake nor for ours am I disposed to regret that circumstance or destiny should have impelled or induced him to take instead that way of work which has given his memory a right to live with that of men who could never have taken another way than they took; which has made it honourable and venerable to all who have any reverence for English poetry or regard for English fame; which has set him for ever in the highest place among the servants and interpreters of Homer, and allowed us to inscribe in our imagination, as on the pedestal of a statue reared in thought to the father of our tragic verse, the name of George Chapman not too discreditably far beneath the name of Christopher Marlowe. APPENDIX. THE following list of passages extracted from Chapman's poems by the editor of the Elizabethan anthology published in 1600 under the name of England's Parnassus, or the choicest Flowers of our Modern Poets, was drawn up from my own copy of the original edition before I was aware that a similar list had been compiled by Mr. J. P. Collier to accompany and illustrate a private reprint of the book. From this source I learn that one extract given at p. 312 as from Chapman is in fact taken from the Albion's England of Warner; as indeed, though acquainted only with fragmentary excerpts from that poem, I had already conjectured that it must be. This is preceded by another extract signed with the name of Chapman, which according to Mr. Collier is discoverable in Ovid's Banquet of Sense; but after a second and third search through every turn and recess of that dense and torrid jungle of bad and good verses I have failed to light on this particular weed or flower. Five other extracts have baffled alike my own researches and the far more capable inquisition of even Mr. Collier's learning; nor have they proved traceable by the energy and enthusiasm of Chapman's latest editor, who has properly included them in his text as authentic fragments of unknown poems by the writer to whom four of them have been assigned by Robert Allot, the editor of England's Parnassus. The second of these five passages he ascribes to Spenser; Spenser's it undoubtedly is not; and as it is followed by an excerpt from Chapman's Hero and Leander, which is likewise bestowed on Spenser by the too hasty liberality of the old editor, we have some additional reason to rely on the unmistakeable evidence of the style, which bears immediate witness to the peculiar handiwork of Chapman. The last excerpt but one seems familiar to me, and is rather in the manner of Greene or Peele and their fellows than of Chapman or any later poet; I cannot but think that a student more deeply read than I in the poems interspersed among the romances of Greene and Lodge might be able to trace both the two last passages of the five here fathered on Chapman to the hand of one or the other. They have the fluency or fluidity rather of the blank verse written by the smaller scholastic poets whom we may see grouped about the feet of Marlowe; the same facile profusion and effusion of classic imagery, the same equable elegance and graceful tenuity of style, crossed here and there by lines of really high and tender beauty. It may be thought that in that case they would have been as speedily and as surely tracked by Mr. Collier as were the verses transferred from Warner to Chapman ; but the most learned and acute among scholars cannot always remember the right place for all things on which his eye must have lit in the course of a lifelong study; and I find in Mr. Collier's list two passages, one given at p. 22 of England's Parnassus under the heading ‘Bliss,' the other at p. 108 under the heading ‘Gifts,' marked as of unknown origin, of which the first occurs in the fifth sestiad of Chapman's Hero and Leander, the second in his Shadow of Night. These in the list that follows are assigned to their proper places. The number of the page referred to on the left is that in England's Parnassus; the number on the right refers to the page in which the same passage appears in this first edition of Chapman's collected poems. List of Passages extracted from Chapman's Poems in England's Parnassus; or, the Choicest Flowers of our Modern Poets. 1600. (In the next line E. P. reads: To be a beetle else were no defame.") 16. Rich Beauty, that each lover labours for * E. P. has three misprints in this extract; 'gaining' for 'gracing,' 'conflict' for 'constant," 'time content' for true content;' but in a later extract at p. 38 it gives the right reading, and cites the two first lines of the stanza following, which with the third and fourth are here omitted. It attempts however to correct two seeming errors in the fifth and sixth reading 'is' for 'in' and 'thrones' for thorns;' but in the first instance the text will be found right if the punctuation be corrected by striking out the period at the end of the line preceding; and 'thorns' may be taken to mean the harsh doctrines of the stoics subsequently referred to. In the ninth line of this unlucky stanza E. P. misprints 'grave' for ' graven.' + So E. P. for 'beauty's fair;' and in v. 5 reads 'fault' for 'fate,' and in v. 8 'god self-love' for 'good self-love.' To imitate a false and forgèd bliss Bliss not in height doth dwell 38. All wealth and wisdom rests in true content' 56. In things without us no delight is sure 68. Begin where lightness will, in shame it ends ro8. Good gifts are often given to men past good 110. Kind Amalthea was transformed by Jove 120. Good deeds in case that they be evil placed 141. Many use temples to set godly faces 161. The noblest born dame should industrious be. 164 Inchastity is ever prostitute 170. They double life that dead things' grief sustain 180. Love paints his longings in sweet virgins' eyes. PAGE 82 90 29 85 74 76 80 80 13 5 ? ? 86 15 77 74 35 49 87 77 34 5 6 82 86 the two following lines are transcribed exactly as they stand in the third sestiad of Hero and Leander. This extract runs thus in E. P.; 'Good deeds, in case that they be evil placed, Ill deeds are reckoned, and soon disgraced. That is a good deed that prevents a bad.' The third line occurs in the third sestiad of Hero and Leander (p. 76). So E. P. for 'And.' So E. P. for 'rites.' These two words are interpolated by the editor of E. P. PAGE PAGE 72 76 76 We know not how to vow till love unblind us 297. Use makes things nothing huge, and huge things nothing (Blind Beggar of Alexandria, vol. 1. p. 2.) 314. 324. The gentle humorous night Impliest her middle course, and the sharp east. 355. (With two lines prefixed at bottom of preceding page— * In the third line of this extract E. P. reads 'Love's proper lesson' instead of 'special.' So E. P. The right reading of this beautiful couplet is Ah, nothing doth the world with mischief fill, But want of feeling one another's ill.-Hero and Leander, 5th sestiad. (E. P. prints 'will' for ill.') 3333 32 This word alone would suffice to vindicate the authenticity of the fragment. It recurs perpetually in the poems of Chapman, who always uses it in the same peculiar and licentious manner. § In the third line of this stanza England's Parnassus reads her night' for the night', in the eighth choisefull' for 'charmful;' in the ninth 'varnishing' for 'vanishing.' So E. P. for 'and.' So E. P. for 'and.' |