No one denies that there are nobler words than any that we have quoted, in Jonson, in Fletcher, or in Massinger; but there is hardly a play (perhaps none) of theirs in which the immoralities of which we complain do not exist,—few of which they do not form an integral part; and now, if this is the judgment which we have to pass on the morality of the greater poets, what must the lesser ones be like?
Look, then, at Webster’s two masterpieces, ‘Vittoria Corrombona’ and the ‘Duchess of Malfi.’ A few words spent on them will surely not be wasted; for they are pretty generally agreed to be the two best tragedies written since Shakspeare’s time.
The whole story of ‘Vittoria Corrombona’ is one of sin and horror. The subject-matter of the play is altogether made up of the fiercest and the basest passions. But the play is not a study of those passions from which we may gain a great insight into human nature. There is no trace—nor is there, again, in the ‘Duchess of Malfi’—of that development of human souls for good or evil which is Shakspeare’s especial power—the power which, far more than any accidental ‘beauties,’ makes his plays, to this day, the delight alike of the simple and the wise, while his contemporaries are all but forgotten. The highest aim of dramatic art is to exhibit the development of the human soul; to construct dramas in which the conclusion shall depend, not on the events, but on the characters; and in which the characters shall not be mere embodiments of a certain passion, or a certain ‘humour’: but persons, each unlike all others; each having a destiny of his own by virtue of his own peculiarities, and of his own will; and each proceeding toward that destiny as he shall conquer, or yield to, circumstances; unfolding his own strength and weakness before the eyes of the audience; and that in such a way that, after his first introduction, they should be able (in proportion to their knowledge of human nature) to predict his conduct under those circumstances. This is indeed ‘high art’: but we find no more of it in Webster than in the rest. His characters, be they old or young, come on the stage ready-made, full grown, and stereotyped; and therefore, in general, they are not characters at all, but mere passions or humours in human form. Now and then he essays to draw a character: but it is analytically, by description, not synthetically and dramatically, by letting the man exhibit himself in action; and in the ‘Duchess of Mall’ he falls into the great mistake of telling, by Antonio’s mouth, more about the Duke and the Cardinal than he afterwards makes them act. Very different is Shakspeare’s method of giving, at the outset, some single delicate hint about his personages which will serve as a clue to their whole future conduct; thus ‘showing the whole in each part,’ and stamping each man with a personality, to a degree which no other dramatist has ever approached.
But the truth is, the study of human nature is not Webster’s aim. He has to arouse terror and pity, not thought, and he does it in his own way, by blood and fury, madmen and screech-owls, not without a rugged power. There are scenes of his, certainly, like that of Vittoria’s trial, which have been praised for their delineation of character: but it is one thing to solve the problem, which Shakspeare has so handled in ‘Lear,’ ‘Othello,’ and ‘Richard the Third,’—‘Given a mixed character, to show how he may become criminal,’ and to solve Webster’s ‘Given a ready-made criminal, to show how he commits his crimes.’ To us the knowledge of character shown in Vittoria’s trial scene is not an insight into Vittoria’s essential heart and brain, but a general acquaintance with the conduct of all bold bad women when brought to bay. Poor Elia, who knew the world from books, and human nature principally from his own loving and gentle heart, talks of Vittoria’s ‘innocence—resembling boldness’ 4—and ‘seeming to see that matchless beauty of her face, which inspires such gay confidence in her,’ and so forth.
Perfectly just and true, not of Vittoria merely, but of the average of bad young women in the presence of a police magistrate: yet amounting in all merely to this, that the strength of Webster’s confest master-scene lies simply in intimate acquaintance with vicious nature in general. We will say no more on this matter, save to ask, Cui bono? Was the art of which this was the highest manifestation likely to be of much use to mankind, much less able to excuse its palpably disgusting and injurious accompaniments?
The ‘Duchess of Malfi’ is certainly in a purer and loftier strain: but in spite of the praise which has been lavished on her, we must take the liberty to doubt whether the poor Duchess is a ‘person’ at all. General goodness and beauty, intense though pure affection for a man below her in rank, and a will to carry out her purpose at all hazards, are not enough to distinguish her from thousands of other women: but Webster has no such purpose. What he was thinking and writing of was not truth, but effect; not the Duchess, but her story; not her brothers, but their rage; not Antonio, her major-domo and husband, but his good and bad fortunes; and thus he has made Antonio merely insipid, the brothers merely unnatural, and the Duchess (in the critical moment of the play) merely forward. That curious scene, in which she acquaints Antonio with her love for him and makes him marry her, is, on the whole, painful. Webster himself seems to have felt that it was so; and, dreading lest he had gone too far, to have tried to redeem the Duchess at the end by making her break down in two exquisite lines of loving shame: but he has utterly forgotten to explain or justify her love by giving to Antonio (as Shakspeare would probably have done) such strong specialties of character as would compel, and therefore excuse, his mistress’s affection. He has plenty of time to do this in the first scenes,—time which he wastes on irrelevant matter; and all that we gather from them is that Antonio is a worthy and thoughtful person. If he gives promise of being more, he utterly disappoints that promise afterwards. In the scene in which the Duchess tells her love, he is far smaller, rather than greater, than the Antonio of the opening scene: though (as there) altogether passive. He hears his mistress’s declaration just as any other respectable youth might; is exceedingly astonished, and a good deal frightened; has to be talked out of his fears till one naturally expects a revulsion on the Duchess’s part into something like scorn or shame (which might have given a good opportunity for calling out sudden strength in Antonio): but so busy is Webster with his business of drawing mere blind love, that he leaves Antonio to be a mere puppet, whose worthiness we are to believe in only from the Duchess’s assurance to him that he is the perfection of all that a man should be; which, as all lovers are of the same opinion the day before the wedding, is not of much importance.
Neither in his subsequent misfortunes does Antonio make the least struggle to prove himself worthy of his mistress’s affection. He is very resigned and loving, and so forth. To win renown by great deeds, and so prove his wife in the right to her brothers and all the world, never crosses his imagination. His highest aim (and that only at last) is slavishly to entreat pardon from his brothers-in-law for the mere offence of marrying their sister; and he dies by an improbable accident, the same pious and respectable insipidity which he has lived,—‘ne valant pas la peine qui se donne pour lui.’ The prison-scenes between the Duchess and her tormentors are painful enough, if to give pain be a dramatic virtue; and she appears in them really noble; and might have appeared far more so, had Webster taken half as much pains with her as he has with the madmen, ruffians, ghosts, and screech-owls in which his heart really delights. The only character really worked out so as to live and grow under his hand is Bosola, who, of course, is the villain of the piece, and being a rough fabric, is easily manufactured with rough tools. Still, Webster has his wonderful touches here and there—
‘Cariola. Hence, villains, tyrants, murderers! Alas
What will you do with my lady? Call for help!
Duchess. To whom? to our next neighbours? they are mad folk.
Farewell, Cariola.
I pray thee look thou giv’st my little boy
Some syrup for his cold; and let the girl
Say her prayers ere she sleep.—Now, what you please;
What death?’
And so the play ends, as does ‘Vittoria Corrombona,’ with half a dozen murders coram populo, howls, despair, bedlam, and the shambles; putting the reader marvellously in mind of that well-known old book of the same era, ‘Reynolds’s God’s Revenge,’ in which, with all due pious horror and bombastic sermonising, the national appetite for abominations is duly fed with some fifty unreadable Spanish histories, French histories, Italian histories, and so forth, one or two of which, of course, are known to have furnished subjects for the playwrights of the day.
The next play-writer whom we are bound to notice is James Shirley, one of the many converts to Romanism which those days saw. He appears, up to the breaking out of the Civil War, to have been the Queen’s favourite poet; and, according to Laugbaine, he was ‘one of such incomparable parts that he was the chief of the second-rate poets, and by some has been thought even equal to Fletcher himself.’
We must entreat the reader’s attention while we examine Shirley’s ‘Gamester.’ Whether the examination be a pleasant business or not, it is somewhat important; ‘for,’ says Mr. Dyce, ‘the following memorandum respecting it occurs in the office-book of the Master of the Records:—“On Thursday night, 6th of February, 1633, ‘The Gamester’ was acted at Court, made by Sherley out of a plot of the king’s, given him by mee, and well likte. The king sayd it was the best play he had seen for seven years.”’
This is indeed important. We shall now have an opportunity of fairly testing at the same time the taste of the Royal Martyr and the average merit, at least in the opinion of the Caroline court, of the dramatists of that day.
The plot which Charles sent to Shirley as a fit subject for his muse is taken from one of those collections of Italian novels of which we have already had occasion to speak, and occurs in the second part of the ‘Ducento Novelle’ of Celio Malespini; and what it is we shall see forthwith.
The play opens with a scene between one Wilding and his ward Penelope, in which he attempts to seduce the young lady, in language which has certainly the merit of honesty. She refuses him, but civilly enough; and on her departure Mrs. Wilding enters, who, it seems, is the object of her husband’s loathing, though young, handsome, and in all respects charming enough. After a scene of stupid and brutal insults, he actually asks her to bring Penelope to him, at which she naturally goes out in anger; and Hazard, the gamester, enters,—a personage without a character, in any sense of the word. There is next some talk against duelling, sensible enough, which arises out of a bye-plot,—one Delamere having been wounded in a duel by one Beaumont, mortally as is supposed. This bye-plot runs through the play, giving an opportunity for bringing in a father of the usual play-house type,—a Sir Richard Hurry, who is, of course, as stupid, covetous, proud, and tyrannical and unfeeling, as play-house fathers were then bound to be: but it is a plot of the most commonplace form, turning on the stale trick of a man expecting to be hanged for killing some one who turns out after all to have recovered, and having no bearing whatsoever on the real plot, which is this,—Mrs. Wilding, in order to win back her husband’s affections, persuades Penelope to seem to grant his suit; while Mrs. Wilding herself is in reality to supply her niece’s place, and shame her husband into virtue. Wilding tells Hazard of the good fortune which he fancies is coming, in scenes of which one can only say, that if they are not written for the purpose of exciting the passions, it is hard to see why they were written at all. But, being with Hazard in a gambling-house at the very hour at which he is to meet Penelope, and having had a run of bad luck, he borrows a hundred pounds of Hazard, stays at the table to recover his losses, and sends Hazard to supply his place with the supposed Penelope. A few hours before Penelope and Hazard have met for the first time, and Penelope considers him, as she says to herself aside, ‘a handsome gentleman.’ He begins, of course, talking foully to her; and the lady, so far from being shocked at the freedom of her new acquaintance, pays him back in his own coin in such good earnest that she soon silences him in the battle of dirt-throwing. Of this sad scene it is difficult to say whether it indicates a lower standard of purity and courtesy in the poet, in the audience who endured it, or in the society of which it was, of course, intended to be a brilliant picture. If the cavaliers and damsels of Charles the First’s day were in the habit of talking in that way to each other (and if they had not been, Shirley would not have dared to represent them as doing so), one cannot much wonder that the fire of God was needed to burn up (though, alas! only for a while) such a state of society; and that when needed the fire fell.
The rest of the story is equally bad. Hazard next day gives Wilding descriptions of his guilt, and while Wilding is in the height of self-reproach at having handed over his victim to another, his wife meets him and informs him that she herself and not Penelope has been the victim. Now comes the crisis of the plot, the conception which so delighted the taste of the Royal Martyr. Wilding finds himself, as he expresses it, ‘fitted with a pair of horns of his own making;’ and his rage, shame, and base attempts to patch up his own dishonour by marrying Penelope to Hazard (even at the cost of disgorging the half of her portion, which he had intended to embezzle) furnish amusement to the audience to the end of the play; at last, on Hazard and Penelope coming in married, Wilding is informed that he has been deceived, and that his wife is unstained, having arranged with Hazard to keep up the delusion in order to frighten him into good behaviour; whereupon Mr. Wilding promises to be a good husband henceforth, and the play ends.
Throughout the whole of this farrago of improbable iniquity not a single personage has any mark of personal character, or even of any moral quality, save (in Mrs. Wilding’s case) that of patience under injury. Hazard ‘The Gamester’ is chosen as the hero, for what reason it is impossible to say; he is a mere nonentity, doing nothing which may distinguish him from any other gamester and blackguard, save that he is, as we are told,
‘A man careless
Of wounds; and though he have not had the luck
To kill so many as another, dares
Fight with all them that have.’
He, nevertheless, being in want of money, takes a hundred pounds from a foolish old city merchant (city merchants are always fools in the seventeenth century) to let his nephew, young Barnacle, give him a box on the ear in a tavern, and (after the young cit has been transformed into an intolerable bully by the fame so acquired) takes another hundred pounds from the repentant uncle for kicking the youth back into his native state of peaceful cowardice. With the exception of some little humour in these scenes with young Barnacle, the whole play is thoroughly stupid. We look in vain for anything like a reflection, a sentiment, even a novel image. Its language, like its morality, is all but on a level with the laboured vulgarities of the ‘Relapse’ or the ‘Provoked Wife,’ save that (Shirley being a confessed copier of the great dramatists of the generation before him) there is enough of the manner of Fletcher and Ben Jonson kept up to hide, at first sight, the utter want of anything like their matter; and as one sickens at the rakish swagger and the artificial smartness of his coxcombs, one regrets the racy and unaffected blackguardism of the earlier poets’ men.
This, forsooth, is the best comedy which Charles had heard for seven years, and the plot, which he himself furnished for the occasion, fitted to an English audience by a Romish convert.
And yet there is one dramatist of that fallen generation over whose memory one cannot but linger, fancying what he would have become, and wondering why so great a spirit was checked suddenly ere half developed by a fever which carried him off, with several other Oxford worthies, in 1643, when he was at most thirty-two (and according to one account only twenty-eight) years old. Let which of the two dates be the true one, Cartwright must always rank among our wondrous youths by the side of Prince Henry, the Admirable Crichton, and others, of whom one’s only doubt is, whether they were not too wondrous, too precociously complete for future development. We find Dr. Fell, some time Bishop of Oxford, saying that ‘Cartwright was the utmost man could come to’; we read how his body was as handsome as his soul; how he was an expert linguist, not only in Greek and Latin, but in French and Italian, an excellent orator, admirable poet; how Aristotle was no less known to him than Cicero and Virgil, and his metaphysical lectures preferred to those of all his predecessors, the Bishop of Lincoln only excepted; and his sermons as much admired as his other composures; and how one fitly applied to him that saying of Aristotle concerning Œschron the poet, that ‘he could not tell what Œschron could not do.’ We find pages on pages of high-flown epitaphs and sonnets on him, in which the exceeding bad taste of his admirers makes one inclined to doubt the taste of him whom they so bedaub with praise; and certainly, in spite of all due admiration for the Crichton of Oxford, one is unable to endorse Mr. Jasper Mayne’s opinion, that
‘In thee Ben Jonson still held Shakspeare’s style’;
or that he possest
‘Lucan’s bold heights match’d to staid Virgil’s care,
Martial’s quick salt, joined to Musæus’ tongue.’
This superabundance of eulogy, when we remember the men and the age from which it comes, tempts one to form such a conception of Cartwright as, indeed, the portrait prefixed to his works (ed. 1651) gives us; the offspring of an over-educated and pedantic age, highly stored with everything but strength and simplicity; one in whom genius has been rather shaped (perhaps cramped) than developed: but genius was present, without a doubt, under whatsoever artificial trappings; and Ben Jonson spoke but truth when he said, ‘My son Cartwright writes all like a man.’ It is impossible to open a page of ‘The Lady Errant,’ ‘The Royal Slave,’ ‘The Ordinary,’ or ‘Love’s Convert,’ without feeling at once that we have to do with a man of a very different stamp from any (Massinger perhaps alone excepted) who was writing between 1630 and 1640. The specific gravity of the poems, so to speak, is far greater than that of any of his contemporaries; everywhere is thought, fancy, force, varied learning. He is never weak or dull; though he fails often enough, is often enough wrong-headed, fantastical, affected, and has never laid bare the deeper arteries of humanity, for good or for evil. Neither is he altogether an original thinker; as one would expect, he has over-read himself: but then he has done so to good purpose. If he imitates, he generally equals. The table of fare in ‘The Ordinary’ smacks of Rabelais or Aristophanes: but then it is worthy of either; and if one cannot help suspecting that ‘The Ordinary’ never would have been written had not Ben Jonson written ‘The Alchemist,’ one confesses that Ben Jonson need not have been ashamed to have written the play himself: although the plot, as all Cartwright’s are, is somewhat confused and inconsequent. If he be Platonically sentimental in ‘Love’s Convert,’ his sentiment is of the noblest and the purest; and the confest moral of the play is one which that age needed, if ever age on earth did.
‘’Tis the good man’s office
To serve and reverence woman, as it is
The fire’s to burn; for as our souls consist
Of sense and reason, so do yours, more noble,
Of sense and love, which doth as easily calm
All your desires, as reason quiets ours. . . .
Love, then, doth work in you, what Reason doth
In us; here only lies the difference,—
Ours wait the lingering steps of Age and Time;
But the woman’s soul is ripe when it is young;
So that in us what we call learning, is
Divinity in you, whose operations,
Impatient of delay, do outstrip time.’
For the sake of such words, in the midst of an evil and adulterous generation, we will love young Cartwright, in spite of the suspicion that, addressed as the play is to Charles, and probably acted before his queen, the young rogue had been playing the courtier somewhat, and racking his brains for pretty sayings which would exhibit as a virtue that very uxoriousness of the poor king which at last cost him his head. The ‘Royal Slave,’ too, is a gallant play, right-hearted and lofty from beginning to end, though enacted in an impossible court-cloud-world, akin to that in which the classic heroes and heroines of Corneille and Racine call each other Monsieur and Madame.
As for his humour; he, alas! can be dirty like the rest, when necessary: but humour he has of the highest quality. ‘The Ordinary’ is full of it; and Moth, the Antiquary, though too much of a lay figure, and depending for his amusingness on his quaint antiquated language, is such a sketch as Mr. Dickens need not have been ashamed to draw.