BOOKS.
GEORGE CHAPMAN.*
GEORGE CHAPMAN was endowed by nature with groat poetical gifts, he achieved by industry great poetical deeds, and great poetical fame has been thrust upon his memory by a band of enthusiastic admirers. But in no true sense of the words can George Chapman be reckoned a great poet. His genius was a flawed and imperfect chrysolite, and his works reflect the flaws and imperfections of his genius only too faithfully, while the public voice has steadfastly and rightly refused to accept the verdict of the critics.. Yet Chapman had many advan- tages which better poets have lacked. He did not kick against the pricks, like Shelley, nor burn life's candle at both ends, like Byron, nor hide his light under the bushel (of sloth), like Coleridge. Pious, temperate, and industrious, he enjoyed the many blessings of his lot is pas reAucd, as Aristotle says, and died in 1639, at the ripe age of seventy-seven. His works now lie before us, in three closely-printed volumes of double columns, and con- sist of (1) minor poems and translations, (2) of plays, and (3) of the celebrated translation of Homer's Rds a and Odysseus. In any case, and in despite of any disparaging criticism we may have to make upon it, we thank the publishers heartily for this handy reprint of a worthy old English classic. His works, if they will not—and we think they will not—either attract or repay the attention of the general reader, are for the philological student of English and for the Shakspearian scholar a mine of wealth, which is well-nigh inexhaustible. And in this, we take it, will be found to lie their main use and chiefest value. For the springs of Castaly which flow from Chapman's pen flow for the most part among "entree vast and deserts wild," and quarries of the roughest.. Or we may compare the river of his verse to a stream which clears itself awhile, and flows on bright and strong, but aeon grows turbid, stagnant ;—and often, very often, in the tragedies, iews,e-e-pings from butchers' stalls, dung, guts and blood,
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud, Dead cats, and turnip-tops, come tumbling down the flood."
Tragedy, indeed, to say the least of it, was not Chapman's forte, nor for the matter of that, was comedy either, but his comedies are at lead not choked with the "heaps of clotted non- sense" which encumber his tragedies, and are for the most part written in a style which is surprisingly clear and simple. Their damning fault is this,—that they, like Pope's women, have no characters at all. Take All Fools, for instance, which Mr. Swin- burne calls an excellent play. The hand of the author is visible everywhere in this comedy, the mind of the creative poet nowhere. The plot of it is improbable enough, but we care little for that. So is the plot of Twelfth Night, "the best in this kind" perhaps that was ever written. But the comic poet has a licence of his own as regards plots. Many abuse this licence indeed till their comedies are merely farces spoiled, and spoiled farces they must ever be, when the improbable plot is developed by
unintelligible puppets. We know how afalvolio leaves the scene, and could he, in fact, leave it otherwise ? — " be
revenged on the whole pack of you." Just so, but had Shakespeare made him meet Sir Toby and the rest in the cheery vein with which Falstaff meets the Prince and Poing, when they " baffle " him, we should be shocked indeed, and feel that the poet was making " gecks and gulls" of ourselves. But similar changes of face and front are common in playwrights of Chapman's stamp, and they neither shock us nor surprise us. Why, indeed, should not the marionettes dance one and all upon their heads, if so be that by their doing so the action may better and more speedily gi grow to a point," and the business of the puppet-show be more "notably discharged." Inconsistencies, moreover, and absurdities when seen upon the stage often fail to strike the mind, segnius irritant animos—to quote Horace, as the devil quotes Scripture—than when read in the closet.. We know from his own energetic confession how Dryden, masterly critic as he was, was taken in by one of Chapman's blood-and-buckram things ; and who, in this year of grace one thousand eight hun- dred and seventy-six, could, by any possibility, read either Rip Van Winkle or the Colleen Baum?
But if the comedies of Chapman must be rated, on the whole, as silly stuff, what is to be said of his tragedies? They are studded, it is true, but by no means thickly studded, with purple patches of noble rhetoric and fine description, but the ambient The Tfork8of---0171.—on—cloz-7: Matto and Windus. 1876. gloom in which these flashes of eloquence and insight play is vast, and all but impenetrable. Ideas rude and undigested, wrapt in words so wild and whirling that the clearest thoughts would show but dark through such a medium, form the staple of these precious effusions. Their prevailing note is fustian, and this fustian, from which Shakespeare himself sometimes escapes only by the skin of his teeth, may be called the " Hall-mark " of our earliest dramatists. Its origin has been ascribed to the religious mysteries from which our drama sprang, and its vogue to the histrionic fondness for big-mouthed rant and stagy declamation. It is curious that of the three great dramatists of Greece, in the first only do we find any traces of bombast, and it is easy to see from Aristophanes how much more bombastic ..Eschylus must have been than we could have guessed from his plays which have come down to us. But the huffing, braggart words of the Athenian poet have little in common with the
This may, perhaps, he best defined fustian of our countrymen.
as magniloquent twaddle, and in his preliminary essay, which is marred in other ways by the intrusion of Mr. Browning, and a gentleman of Scotch extraction, alluded to as Crispinulus and Crispinaceio, Mr. Swinburne has not entirely escaped the fierce contagion of this unmeaning rant. The main use, then, and value of Chapman's Plays is, we repeat, for students of philology and Shakespeare. Nor is the case very widely different with his Poems and Translations, As to the indecency of some of the poems, it does not offend us like the premeditated grossness of Dryden, being evidently due to the taste of the age, and written in perfectly good faith. 'The indecencies of the Amorous Zodiac, for instance, may be ranked with the affecta- tions of Tennyson's Lilians and Adelines, and come under the general head, if we may use so pedantic a phrase, of Elizabethan-erotic common-place. In this genre Shakespeare's " Venus and Adonis' is, in spite of Mr. Swinburnels protest, the phoenix of word-painting, as far removed from the cynical impurity of Byron as from the lisping prurience of our modern erotic revivalists. The conclusion which Chapman wrote to Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" is far more inferior to that beautiful fragment, than that beautiful fragment is to Shake- speare's brilliant masterpiece, and we might liken the first of these poems to a marigold, the second to a violet, and the third to a rose. His other poems, the "Tears of Peace," Ovid's 44 Banquet of Sense," &c., we may compare to the quarries in Port- land, whose gigantic talus-heaps of rubble ffll us with a vague sensation of amazement and puzzled discomfort. Of the minor translations, we will only say that a scholar would find both amusement and profit from comparing the version of the "Hymn to Mercury" with Shelley's, and both with the original. But if it be true that all siersified translation is dancing in fetters, then is Chapman's dancing as the dancing of a bear, and Shelley's as the dancing of Perdita herself.
It remains for us to speak of the celebrated translation of Homer, a work -which, with all its faults, no lover of English literature would willingly let die. We do not, however, agree with Mr. Swinburne in thinking that the key-note of the final verdict on this work was struck by Keats, in his well-known sonnet. The admiration there expressed, and the feelings which induced Charles Lamb to kiss his folio copy of Chapman in ecstasy, strike us as exaggerated. Christopher North came much nearer the mark. "The old boy!" he says, "had certainly a fiery spirit and an energetic style. Be satisfied to skip or slur over all his asperities and roughnesses ; as you value your life, to steer clear of his jaw-breakers ; and shut your eyes, if you can, against the bold blunders that he dashes into your face, and you may often be roused and elevated by his Iliad," It is, indeed, a most refreshing book for readers who have much English and some Greek, but for those who have much Greek and little English—we are not speaking of foreigners—it cannot but prove a choke-pear. Charles Lamb loved it, we are convinced, for its quaint and noble words, and for the beauties of its good old English syntax, much more than for any portion of the Homeric spirit which may breathe and burn in it.. He loved it as he loved the works of Fuller and Sir Thomas Browne, and for somewhat similar reasons. But this famous translation will always, we fear, remain "caviare to the general," and if this be true, it stands condemned and confessed a failure. Pope's Homer is a most unequal work, but it is not more unequal than Chapman's, and at times the younger poet writes with a. fire and dash which the elder never reaches :— " Who dares think one thing and another tell, My heart detests him as the gates of hell," is far more spirited than Chapman's rendering of the two most spirited lines of the most spirited speech in the Iliad. In many and many another crucial passage Pope beats his predecessor ii. the same way, and makes us wonder at the audacity, bred of genius and ignorance, with which Keats dared to disparage the bard of Twickenham. It is only fair to add that many passages might be quoted where Chapman has the best of Pope, and far be it from us to hint a word which might deter an intending reader from throw- ing himself, heart and soul, into the free-flowing river of Chap- man's eloquence. Only we would warn him not to expect too much. Rocks are there in that river, and whirlpools, and quick- sands, and snags ; but it is a river worth navigating, on more accounts than one. iVaviget was the brief, imperious word which Jove sent to Eneas, loitering in the Court of Carthage ; and naviget is the word we wbuld as vehemently send for the reader hesitating on the brink of this tumultuous stream, and dallying in the shadow-land of that analytical sentimentalism which is the curse and bane of modern English poetry. But he must not expect too much, and must not be easily offended. Pope finely says of Homer that "his expression is never too big for the sense, but justly great in proportion to it." Would that we could say the same of Chapman. But we cannot. His expression is often too big, and very much too big, for the sense, as witness the way in which he 44 traduces" Sosptsclis vAaacza-cc (.4 smiling in tears ") by "fresh streams of love's soft fire billowid on her soft cheeks,"—an atrocity, as 'Wilson justly says, deserving death. But we are not going to part with Chapman thus, and if the following passage will not induce all lovers true of noble English to study the "Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets, done into. English by George Chapman," then nothing which we can add will make them do so. The hosts of Greece are pouring forth to battle with their great captain, restored to them, in their midst :— " And as from air the frosty north wind blows a cold thick sleet, That dazzles eyes, flakes after flakes incessantly descending ; So thick helms, curets, ashen darts, and round shields never ending, Flow'd from the navy's hollow womb ; their splendours gave Heaven's.
eye His beams again ; Earth laughed to see her face so like the sky ; Arms shined so hot, and she such clouds made with the dust she east, She thuuder'd—feet of men and horse importuned her so fast. • In midst of all, divine Achilles had his fair person arm'd ;
His teeth gnashed as he stood—his eyes so fall of fire, they wartu'd; His greaves first used, his goodly curets on his bosom shin'd; His sword, his shield that cast a brightness from it like a moon. And as from seas sailors discern a harmful fire, let ran By herdsmen's faults, till all their stall fires up in rustling flame, Which being on hills, is seen far off ; but being alone, none came To give it quench, at shore no neighbours, and at sea their friends Driven off with tempests; such ft fire from his bright shield extends HES ominous radiance, and in heaven impressed his fervent blaze. His crested helmet, grave and high, had next triumphant place On his curi'd head, and like a star, it cast a spurry ray, About which a bright thicken'd bush of golden hair did play, Which Vulcan forged him for a plume."
Verily there is, as Pope somewhat grudgingly admits, a daring,. fiery spirit in this translation, which covers a multitude of sins,. and the poetic fire of Chapman, intermittent though it be, is eo genuine, that we can but sympathise, after all, with such readers and Keats and Charles Lamb, for whom this radiance fairly- brightened all the rubbish about it, till they could discern nothing but its own splendour.
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