A BOOK OF THE MOMENT.

HERO AND LEANDER.

[COPYRIGHT rai TEE UNITED' STATES OF AMERICA BY THE New York Times.] Hero and Leander. Begun by Christopher Marlowe and finished by George Chapman, 1598. The Haslewood Reprints. (Printed for Frederick Etchella and Hugh Macdonald at la Kensington Place, W. 8. 15a. net.)

MARLOWE died in the spring of 1503, and in the autumn of that year a book entitled Hero and Leander, being an amorous poem devised by Christopher Marlatoe,was licensed to be printed. The poem, however, did not see the light till five years later when, in 1598, Edward Blount published the unfinished poem in a quarto volume. Of this issue, as a note to the present

edition tells us, only one copy is extant—a copy in a private library in America. But George Chapman, very much to

the enrichment of our verse, as I hope to show later, had finished the poem in the same year, partly as a tribute to his dead friend, and still more, I expect, for pride of authorship, for Chapman put some of his best• and most characteristic poetry into his traduction of the legend of Leander; It is no exaggeration to say that by this publication a world was affected—the world of English verse. The Hero and Leander poem was astonishingly popular in its own time. New editions were published in 1600, 1606, 1609; 1613, 1617, 1622, 1629 and 1637, and we know from contemporary allusions that London glowed and murmured with the glorious couplets which Marlowe had let loose upon the town like a swarm of golden bees. Does not Taylor, the Water Poet, tell us that the Thames wherrymen sweetened. the labour of their oars by chanting verses from the Sestiad ? Well might they do so. The rower requires a song, and where could he get a better than in the tale of

" Amorous Leander, beautiful and young, Whose tragedy divine Museus sung "

That couplet is enough in itself to inspire the dashing oar with vital force. Almost by itself it would carry a party of " Templars " across the Thames to see some high drama at the Phoenix. What a tale it is when sung by Marlowe, for moving and animating the human heart ! It gave a touch of human feeling even to Byron's painted, Regent Street

Muse :—

" The tale is old, but Love anew May nerve young hearts to prove as true."

Even the languid Cockney poet, Leigh Hunt, caught fire and distinction from the story. He tells us that :—

" I never think of young Leander's fate,

And how he swam, and how his love sat late,"

without thinking also of some modern tragedy of the honey- moon or of early wedded life. The primal sorrow of the Hellespont haunts his heart. For him, he tells us in a poignant parenthesis :-

" The story's heart still beats against its side."

But if Marlowe's Hero and Leander is memorable for lighting a torch in men's hearts, it is almost as memorable, though it may at first sight seem pedantic, almost priggish, to say so, for its effect on English prosody. In Marlowe's Hero and Leander sprang fully armed into existence what is, perhaps, the greatest of all poetic measures—the English heroic couplet; the ten-syllabled iambic- rhymed verse. Before Marlowe's Hero and Leander there had been plenty of ten- syllabled couplets, but they had been for the most part dull, formless, and uninspired. The exception is Chaucer, but Chaucer does not really count, for he affords the exception to every rule, in thought, in matter, in style, and in inspiration.

Marlowe made the heroic couplet, gave it its verve,' its haunting charm, its distinction, its capacity for the highest argument and the noblest rhetoric. He made a measure so triumphant that nothing that haughty Greece or insolent Rome can bring in comparison is of the least avail. Only its twin sister, our blank verse iambic ten-syllabled line, can dare

to challenge its supremacy. There are, no doubt, those who think, as I do, that in the last resort blank verse is and must be always nobler than rhymed verse, and that the metre of the dramatists carries the day. But the writing of blank verse is an authentic, a terrible ordeal. The poet who essays it must remember that lie is like the Greek legislator who had to go into his parliament with a rope round his neck. If his projet de toi failed to win support and approval, he was

strung up out of hand at the nearest Hellenic equivalent of a lamp-post.

The marvellous thing about the verse of Hero and Leander, as Marlowe handled it, is not merely that it contains hints of, or aspirations to, the great and magnificent thing that the couplet was to become, but that actual lines and passages illus- trating what were to be the future developments are veritable " sealed patterns " of these new developments—patterns of so perfect a kind that they cannot be improved on. Everybody, from Donne to Dryden, from Dryden to Pope, from Pope to Johnson, from Johnson to Keats and Crabbe, and onwards

from Keats, Crabbe, Wordsworth and Coleridge to Swinburne, Morris and Myers and Flecker, is to be found foreshadowed in the magic garden of Marlowe. The account of the beauty of Leander is Elizabethanism at its very best. It reminds one of some exquisite tapestry or of the Florentine woodcuts,

which presumably Marlowe had seen in the English version of the Hypnerotomachia Porphyrii :—

" His dangling tresses that were never shorn, Had they been cut, and unto Colchos borne, Would have alined the venturous youth of Greece To hazard more than for the Golden Fleece. Fair Cynthia wished his arms might be her sphere,. Grief makes her pale, because she moves not there. His body was as straight as Circe's wand, You might have sipped out Nectar from his hand."

Here is a piece of vital, harmonious rhetoric which Dryden might well have envied. I mean the oft-quoted, but never

too much quoted, lines on Fate and Love :-

" It lies not in our power to love, or hate,

For will in us is over-ruled by fate. When two are stript long ere the course begin, We wish that one should lose, the other win.

And one especially do we affect, Of two gold Ingots like in each respect ; The reason no man knows, let it suffice, What we behold is censur'd by our eyes. Where both deliberate, the love is slight, Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight

Here is Donne waiting to be born :-

" One is no number ; Maids are nothing then, Without the sweet society of men."

Here is the kind of narration in which Keats first and Swim burne and Morris, and in a sense Myers, so greatly delighted.

It is part of Hero's invitation to the other side of the Helles- pont .-

" Upon a rock, and underneath a hill,

Far from the town (where all is whist and still, Save that the sea playing on yellow sand, Sends forth a. rattling murmur to the land, Whose sound allures the golden Morpheus In silence of the night to visit us) My turret stands, and there God knows I play With Venus swans and sparrows all the day."

How cunning as well as how new is the use of emphasis— the master key of English prosody—in the couplet :- "Cupid beats down her prayers with his wings, Her vows about the empty air he flings "

There are many subtle suggestions and many metrical developments in mynext quotation. Some of these have already been adopted and adapted. Others await the knight who will touch the elusive shield of Marlowe with his spear point. Marlowe never rose higher, or the couplet either, than in Leandcr's invocation to his bride when he stood wet, cold, and exhausted, by her bedside in the Tower. The lines drop honey-dew and ambrosia :—

" If not for love, yet love for pity sake,

Me in thy bed and maiden bosom take, At least vouchsafe these arms some little room, Who hoping to embrace thee, cheerily swum. This head was beat with many a churlish billow, And therefore let it rest upon thy pillow."

Those who want further proofs of what I have said must turn to Hero and Leander itself. They will be amused to firk distinctly Popian couplets with the antithesis and .the halt

line caesura fully developed—couplets which go off like a cracker, or perhaps it would be better to say like a Roman candle and shoot out self-contained stars of blue, or green, of red.

But I intended this review when I began not to provide a panegyric for Marlowe—he needs no praise from me of

anybody else—but to serve another and almost contradictory

purpose. I wanted to ask people not to be too" Much swallowed up in Marlowe when they read Hero and Leander, but to

pursue Chapman's genius through verse turgid and almost muddy in comparison with Marlowe's, for they will find in that turbid current much precious gold in solution. In truth, Chapman was a very great poet, though he had extraordinary difficulty in bringing his goods to market. And this is not merely because he was a great, but inarticulate, thinker and mover of his own and other people's emotions, but because there was a curious metrical kink in his mind. He saw things with the true poet's eye, and he was capable of very magnifi- cent phraseology. He had besides, though he hid it, an exquisite ear for the melody of words. Unfortunately, how- ever, there was something outside, some external influence which made him always spoil his best poetical and metrical efforts. He could not make a good or deeply moving line without adding to it something crabbed and distracting— something which was bound to prove an emotional non- conductor.

Everything Chapman wrote is tantalizing, but it is also apt to be exceedingly disappointing. The truth is we want some good scholar and true lover of the Muses to produce a guide to. the ChaPman labyrinth. We have had critical editions of Chapman's works, elaborate accounts of his period, and wonderful guesses at his supposed relations with Shakespeare and "dark ladies " and " fair gentlemen " ; but nobody has ever interpreted Chapman to us, as he might be, and ought to

be, interpreted—i.e., as a maker of " golden shower " rockets in verse. That was the man he really was ; though I admit that his rockets were apt to be as annoying as datnp

squibs.

And yet look at the man ! Even in his turgid Epistle

Dedicatory of his " finishing " of Marlowe's Hero and Leander, addressed to Lady Walsingham, with a kindly enthusiasm he compliments his patroness • by telling her she has got the

real divine wit, and not merely the sort of wit that resides in " the leaden gravity of any money-monger." - And then he

proceeds with an extraordinary throw-forward to Johnson, " He that shuns trifles must shun the world." In a moment,

however, the poet ducks his head and is back again in his own age talking about " reverend heaps of substance and austerity." We know them well, these reverend heaps. They belong to our age just as much as to that of the Elizabethans. Think, too, what a power of words he must have had who could tell a lady with literary leanings that by her kindness and encouragement of authors she had done much more than if she had displayed " Ensigns of state and sourness in your fore-head, made smooth with nothing but sensuality and presents." • " Sensuality and presents " is so good a combina- tion that I venture to recommend it as a title to one of the adventurous youths of modern literature.

But better than any preface are the " Sestiads " which

Chapman added to Marlowe's poem. They are full of such haunting things as :— " And young Leander, Lord of his desires " ; •

or

" And sweeten human thoughts like Paradise."

Every now and then, too, though it is rare, you get a couplet, as well as a line, which is absolutely satisfying. When Leander had come back from his first swim and first adventure of love, the tired but happy young man betook himself to his sister :—

" His most kind sister all his secrets knew, And to her singing like a shower he flew."

"Singing like a shower "--the phrase is enough to justify the late lamented and detested summer. The poem, inciden- tally, contains a description of certain personified virtues and vices which are veritable Botticelli pictures in words. Leander, like the good young man that both his poets always represent him, is beginning to, think that his love passages with Hero should be crowned with matrimony ; and then we get a wonderful and intricate dissertation on " Ceremony," and how "Morality" and "Comeliness" are increased thereby.

" Ceremony," gorgeously apparelled and covered with enig-. matical ornaments, comes down to earth :- "Thus she appeared, and sharply did reprove Leander's bluntness in his violent love : Told him how poor was substance without rites, _Lik-b. bills unsixned, desires without.delights".; - Like meats unseasoned ; like rank corn that grows On cottages, that none or reaps or sows : Not being with civil forfns confirm'd and bounded, For human dignities and„cninforts founded : But loose and secret all their glories hide, Fear fills the chamber; darkness decks the Bride."

" Fear fills the chamber, darkness decks the Bride." That is so great a line that I almost feel I ought not to have bestowed

so many metrical blessings upon Marlowe. Doing so has somewhat disarmed me from praising Chapman. I feel as Isaac felt when Jacob had. intercepted Esau's blessing. But in

reality the judgment is true:for if I was to put in the " tosh " —one must call it by that name—as well as the " pure poetry " of Chapman, I should disgust as much as I am sure I am now pleasing my readers. Marlowe, however, though he is occasionally lascivious to the point of lubricious brutality, is never foolish, or distracting, or fustian. But I shall fill the Spectator if I go on enumerating Chapman's good things. I will only indulge myself with two more quotations. What a couplet is here :-

" Glad to disclaim her self—proud of an Art, That makes the face a Pander to the heart."

This is the quintessence of an unborn Pope. Chapman goes on to tell us how " Lapwing faces " still cry, " 'Here 'tis,' when that they vow, is nothing nigh."

There follows a wonderful passage about faces in which the curious will find an 'illuminating and almost uncanny com- parison with Raoine's PhAtire. I mean, of course, the' famous lines, doubtless very well known to most of my readers, in which Phedre tells her confidant that she cannot keep up in her face as do so many abandoned wives the pretence of having a happy home and an undeceived and beloved husband when in

truth her heart is full of hate, treason and deceit. She dare not make her husband say, " I found not Cassio's kisses on her lips." But it is time to say good-bye to Chapman. If I shall prove to have_ brought anyone to read his continuation of

Marlowe's work I shall be more than happy. He was a great poet with a great mind, though unfortunately he was without doubt the worst dressed and turned out genius who ever paced the terraced heights of Parnassus. Half his work was a pure disgrace to the profession of a poet.

J. ST. LOE STRACIIEY.