GEORGE CHAPMAN.* IF Chapman is anything more than a name

to the ordinary reader of poetry, it is probably due rather to three great modern singers than to any knowledge at first-hand of his best plays or even his Homeric paraphrases. Keats's eulogistic sonnet is familiar enough ; so are also, we suppose, the lines prefixed as a motto to Shelley's Berolt of /gam from the concluding portion of the third act of Byron's Conspiracy ; and perhaps as well known as these are the striking words of Bussy in the fifth act of Bussy D'Ambois, quoted by Poe in one of his most gruesome stories :— " I am up;

Here like a Roman statue I will stand Till death bath made me marble."

From competent critics Chapman has, of course, always received his due meed—Mr. Phelps thinks rather more than

his due meed—of praise, and that he should have a special

fascination for reflective minds is intelligible enough to any one at all familiar with the great thoughts in which both his plays and poems abound, for scattered broadcast through their pages we find sententious observations such as the following, which must have afforded a singular delight to appreciative readers like Lamb, Emerson, Lowell, and Whipple :—" Policy is but a guard corrupted, and a way ventured in deserts, without guide or path." " Truth is a golden ball cast in our way to make us stript outstripped] by falsehood." Strength to aspire is still accompanied with weakness to endure." " Man is a torch borne in the wind, a dream but of a shadow, snmm'd with all his substance." " 0 incredulity, the wit of fools, the coward's castle, and the sluggard's cradle." " Wisdom is Learning refined and with the understanding power combined." " God bath made none, that all might be, contented." If strong thought, couched in nervous language, bold imagery, and picturesque expression, were sufficient of themselves to constitute a great dramatic poet, it would be safe to say that Chapman bad but one superior in his own day, and certain it is that in largeness of brain, if not in largeness of heart, he was at least the peer of any of his poetic brethren except Shakespeare. Like the latter, too, and unlike some even of the more successful dramatists of the period, he was a poet of a very high order, as the following lines sufficiently attest :-

" Like a calm Before a tempest, when the silent air Lays her soft ear close to the earth to hearken For that she fears steals on to ravish her.

If ever I did good, I lock'd it safe In you, th' impregnable defence of goodness; If ill, I press it with my penitent knees To that unwounded depth whence nought returneth.

• The Best Plays of the 014 Dramatists George Chapman. Ed ted, with an Introduction and Notes, by William Lyon Phelps, M.A., Ph.D, ImUtictor is RogTh Literature at Yale College. London : T. Faber CnWn. Then turn'd your brave duke head, and, with such ease

As doth an echo beat back violent sounds, With their own forces, he, as if a wall Start suddenly before them, pash'd them all Flat as the earth, and there was that field won."

And yet, as a dramatist pure and simple, Chapman's faults and deficiencies are so many and serious as to forbid even those who most admire him to claim for him an equal rank with such masters as Marlowe, Beaumont, Webster, Jonson, Dekker, Ford, Tourneur, Messinger, and Middleton. How- ever crude and imperfect may be the plots of some of these writers, they never fail to interest us deeply, and the effect of certain scenes in their tragedies is absolutely electrical, but Chapman's tragedies, except Bussy D'Ambois, are almost destitute of plot or movement, and, despite the glow and energy of his thought, the poet never shakes the inmost soul as Webster and Tourneur do, for though his reflections are often as sombre as theirs, they lack the strong human sympathy and unmistakable note of personal suffering which characterise the latter. There are no appeals to the heart, though there are powerful ones to the understanding. If it cannot be said of Chapman that the passions move at his command, still less can it be claimed for him that be possesses that other gift of the born dramatist, mastery of character. The most marked trait in his leading personages is their boastfulness, and such other qualities as they or the minor children of his brain possess are not distinctive enough to

give us that intimate acquaintance with them which alone can make imaginary beings seem real to us. His two chief characters, Bussy and Byron, are equally vainglorious —a fault from which the poet himself was by no means free—

their sentiments and language are accordant, if not identical, and the gradual demoralisation of Byron is almost all that- differentiates him from Busy; to like or dislike either is out of the question, and, if we feel admiration, it is not for them or their acts, but for the profound suggestiveness of their utterances. In other words, it is only the poet of whom we think when reading his tragedies, neither Byron nor Bussy nor any other important character being much more than the mouthpiece of their creator. This, which is a great fault, was, no doubt, a merit in Chapman's own eyes, for, misled as so many have been, by the example of Seneca, be undoubtedly held that plot and character were beneath the consideration

of a tragic poet, and that the greatness of a tragedy depended mainly, if not solely, upon its ethical beauty. There is certainly no lack of plot in his best comedies, All Fools, The GEntiotian, Usher, and The Widow's Tears, and we know that

he had but a poor opinion of the first, and, on the whole, the greatest of these, stigmatising it very unjustly as the "least allow'd birth of his shaken brain." Probably he did not set a much higher value on the other two, though be may have preferred the least worthy of them from a dramatic point of view, The Gentleman Usher, for the pithy sayings which it, alone of the three comedies, has in common with the tragedies. It is worthy of note that in The Widow's Tears we have the nearest approach to a living character in Tharsalio that the poet ever condescended to give us, though a mild antipathy is the only feeling with which even he can inspire us, and his cynicism is too evidently but a reflection of Chapman's own. Another fault, which has been much dwelt upon by all hie critics and cannot be overlooked, is his frequent obscurity.

Mr. Phelps agrees with those who have attributed this to the poet's" misty intellect," but something of it is also chargeable

to the misprints and faulty punctuation which characterise former editions of the plays, and from which even the " Mer- maid" selection is not wholly free. The rant and fustian which abound in Bussy D'Ambois, and which occasionally break out in the other tragedies, have often been censured, and by none more strongly than Dryden, who, however, did not set a much better example in some of his own plays, and certainly did no sort of justice to the frequent grandeur of thought and noble poetry which exist side by side with the lamentable bombast he so justly condemned.

Admitting, as we own we do, reluctantly, that Chapman must rank as a playwright below the most notable of his con- temporaries and immediate successors, we yet think that his merits are sufficiently rare and great to overbalance the defects we have mentioned, and that his dramas are capable of yielding as much delight and intellectual satisfaction in the perusal as even such masterpieces as The Duchess of lifalfi and The Broken Heart. Such story as there is in his tragedies retains its hold on the reader throughout, and if one cannot be greatly interested in the actions or fortunes of his person- ages, their sayings, at least, never fail to rivet our atten- tion, and there is a real glow in most of his pages, though it is the glow of thought, not of emotion, and rarely, if ever, of feeling and thought inextricably blended. His genius is thoroughly virile and healthy, the sentiment, if sometimes cynical, is never mean or sordid, the sails of his verse, to adapt a metaphor of his own, are breathed upon by no languid airs, but constantly "filled with a lusty wind," and if we miss, as we certainly do in Chapman, the buoyancy and magnetism of youth—so engaging in poets like Marlowe, Beaumont, and Fletcher—there is, at least, the vigorous step of robust manhood, with no distressing indication of approaching senility. He writes admirable blank verse and equally admir- able prose ; his is a distinct voice—dissonant and inarticulate though the voice may sometimes be—not an echo, and the wealth of his thought is almost equalled by the wealth of his similes —Byron's Conspiracy is particularly rich in these—which are eminently picturesque and original, in no way resembling the cold and hackneyed ones in which the " heroic " poetry of the eighteenth century abounds.

In spite of the "dark death-ushering melancholy" in which Chapman described himself as " drowned," the tragedies are rather elevating than saddening, and the capable reader may rise from their perusal a wiser, scarcely a sadder, man. And though there is abundance of scorn for all things mean and unjust, there is little of that "indignation qui sort de la tristesse." Chapman's susceptibilities were probably not very keen, though his perception was strong enough, and he bad a high sense of his own merits, angrily resenting any depreciation of them. The universal suffering seems to have touched him but little, and though the eternal problems of life and death are by no means overlooked in his plays, they seem scarcely to have been a burden and a weight to him as they assuredly were to writers like Shakespeare, Webster, and Tonrneur. The following is as sombre as any passage to be found in his plays :-

" I know this body but a sink of folly, The ground-work and raised frame of woe and frailty ;

The bond and bundle of corruption ; A quick corse, only sensible of grief, A walking sepulchre, or household thief : A glass of air, broken with less than breath, A slave bound face to face to death, till death.

And what said all you more ? I know, besides, That life is but a dark and stormy night, Of senseless dreams, terrors, and broken sleeps ; A tyranny, devising pains to plague And make man long in dying, racks his death; And death is nothing ; what can you say more ?"

The " Mermaid " selection comprises five of Chapman's plays, All Fools, Bussy D'Ambois, The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, The Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron, and The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, and though we may regret the exclusion of others, these are unquestionably the master- pieces of their author. All Fools, the only comedy, is delightful reading, humorous both in action and dialogue, and the blank verse is singularly graceful, easy, and harmonious, quite unlike the full and stately verse of the tragedies, though, in its different way, that is• equally masterly, and here, for once at least, we have an. amusing and interesting plot, and almost as little moralising as we find in the comedies of the Restoration, some of whose characteristics were certainly anticipated by Chapman not only in this play,' but also in The Gentleman Usher and The Widow's Tears. The two tragedies on Bussy contain some of his best writing, and in the dying speech of Bussy he may be said to touch his highest point, but Byron's Conspiracy and Tragedy are the most perfect, on the whole, of his serious plays, and their equable strength and noble thought and diction should make it at least as easy for the reader to pardon the lack of stirring incident, as it apparently was for the Elizabethan playgoer

with whom the two tragedies were favourites, as Mr. Phelps's introduction tells us. Except in the third act of the Con-

spiracy, in which Byron storms, not unnaturally, at the astrologer who informs him that it is his doom to be decapitated, there is a complete freedom from the rant which disfigures so much of Bussy D'Ambois.

Of the introduction we have left ourselves but little room to speak. It is scholarly and thoughtful, but scarcely in- spiring. Chapman's faults seem to the present writer rather too much insisted upon, and though Mr. Phelps owns that

the poet had "a mighty spirit," his merits are too grudgingly acknowledged, and one cannot help feeling that if introduced to the general reader at all, he ought to have been better recommended. The dramas of Chapman are quite as well worthy of praise and study, though it may be on different grounds, as those of most of his compeers, and this Mr. Phelps does not show, or perhaps think. A striking portrait of the poet serves as a frontispiece to his " best plays."