MA_RLOWE.

THE erection of a statue to Marlowe in his birthplace, the City of Canterbury, has called forth not only an inaugural address from Mr. Henry Irving, but a great number of leading articles in the daily papers. Many of these have been excellent in their way, but, as a rale, the most interesting point about Marlowe has been missed. What makes his career almost a literary miracle is the fact that he created a style and

manner of writing which in its essentials has remained un- changed to the present day. Behind Marlowe, English poetry may be beautiful, interesting, truthful to Nature, inspired, what you will, but it is confessedly archaic, mediaeval, un- modern. Contemporary with and after him, the style of English verse is revolutionised, and becomes what, for want of a better general term, we must call modern. For example, we find Marlowe, the moment he begins to write, pens such couplets as : —

"Where both deliberate, the love is slight: Whoever loved that loved not at first sight ?"

It was no doubt to be expected that the Renaissance would in England, as elsewhere, rapidly affect our literature. Still, a period of transition was to be looked for, as in France and Italy. Marlowe, however, with practically nothing behind him from which to draw inspiration for a new form, begins, as a lad of twenty, to east his thoughts in the mould which is used by the poets of the nineteenth century. Marlowe's verbal imagery may be more gorgeous, because his imagina- tion was more profuse, but in essentials he writes as men write to-day. Take his blank verse, "the mighty line" which caused the admiration of Ben Jonson. Surrey had imported from Italy " a drumming deccasyllabon," with the rhythms of an imperfect musical-box. Marlowe took the instrument, and invoked from it harmonies which, for mere music, have never been and never can be surpassed. But the melody of his verse, like his style, depends in no sense upon the charm of archaicism. We do not admire it because it has a quaint old-world air about it. Instead, it is bold, clear- cut,—classical, that is, in the best sense of the word. The

blank-verse prologue to Taraburlaine, Marlowe's first play, shows that the poet realised how great was the revolution he was effecting. He tells his audience that he will lead them from their old clownish conceits and the "jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits" to" the stately tent of war," and show them the

picture of the "Scythian Tamburlaine." As an example

and proof of the astonishing modernity of Marlowe's verse, we may take one of the less-known passages from Faustus.

Faustus, in a soliloquy, after recalling his temptations to self-slaughter, proceeds :— "And long ere this I should have done the deed, Had not sweet Pleasure conquered deep Despair : Have I not made blind Homer sing to me Of Alexander's love and ,Enon's death ? And hath not he that built the walls of Thebes With ravishing sounds of his melodious harp, Made music with my Mephistophiles ? "

Equally modern is the handling of language in the famous address to Helen, which begins :— " Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium ?"

or the hardly less well known dying speech, where Faustus, in his agony, implores help from Heaven :— "See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament, One drop of blood will save me : 0, my Christ !

Rend not my heart from naming of my Christ !"

Most modern of all, however, are the gnomic couplets in the poem of "Hero and Leander," in which the poet strives to put some piece of wit and wisdom in epigrammatic form. We have quoted already the best-known of these, but the following are nearly as remarkable :— "Sweet are the kisses, the embracements sweet, Where like desires and like affections meet."

"Love is not full of pity, as men say, But deaf and cruel where he means to prey."

As a last proof of our assertion, we may quote a stanza from a somewhat objectionable poem called " Ignoto." The following stanza, in which the poet enumerates some of the reasons for which he does not love his mistress—he loves her for all, and not for any one in particular—might, except for one turn of

phrase, have been written as well in the seventeenth, the eighteenth, or the nineteenth, as in the sixteenth century :—

"I love thee not for that my soul doth dance And leap with pleasure when those lips of thine Give musical and graceful utterance To some (by thee made happy) poet's line."

As astonishing as the revolution in English style affected by Marlowe, is the manner in which he affected his con- temporaries. One expects a poet with a new gospel of his art, to win his way slowly ; to be derided at first as strange and extravagant, and only after his death to convert the world to the new style. This was what happened to both Words- worth and Keats. Marlowe, however, had a perfectly different experience. Instead of having to create an audience capable of appreciating him, of educating his public, he became at once a popular poet. The new style "caught on " from the first.

It is true his contemporaries, who were at once strongly affected, were themselves moving in the same direction, and so were ready to be influenced. We have, however, evidence that Marlowe became during his lifetime a popular poet. His "smooth song," "Come, live with me, and be my love," was at once taken up by the country-people, and was sung, as Isaak Walton found, by milkmaids at the pail. Nor is this all. We are told that when the "Hero and Leander" was published, the watermen on the Thames sweetened their labours at the oar by chanting its lines. Mr. Browning introduced a new poetic style, but no one ever heard the drivers of hansoms or four-wheelers spouting "The Gram- marian's Funeral." Marlowe, we believe, stands alone in literature as a writer who led a revolution in Letters, and yet contrived to make himself a popular poet.

Another point worth noticing about Marlowe, is the fact that he, alone of the English writers of his epoch, thoroughly im- bibed the spirit of the Renaissance. In Greene, in Peele, in Lodge, Webster, Massinger, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Shakespeare, there is always an element that is both Christian and English. The writings of Beaumont and Fletcher, and Ford, and several of the other dramatists, are as gross or grosser than those of Marlowe ; but it is only in him that one feels the adoption of the ultra-Pagan standpoint. It is impossible to read Marlowe and not to feel that his intel- lectual attitude is perfectly different from that of even the most licentious of his contemporaries. They are merely immoral in the sense "of being reckless and rebellious of restraint. His attitude is that of the man who does not recognise moral considerations at all. It is the unmoral standpoint throughout. Beauty and pleasure are the governing factors of the world. This globe of ours is a vast and wonder- ful palace of delights, full of strange secrets and new pleasures, which yield themselves to the learned and the daring. Man finds himself in this treasure-house for a little space, and if he is wise, avails himself of the chances that are offered to him. This splendid, glittering, or rather, irradiated, materialism, found in Marlowe its only true apostle of English blood during the period of the Renaissance. Other men were half-hearted and insincere in their passion for the pleasures of sense, and of the intellect on its sensuous side. He, like his own Faust, "made sweet Pleasure conquer deep Despair;" and reeked not of right or truth or duty.

We have no desire to censure Marlowe here because he yielded to the Pagan spirit of the Renaissance. What we have to do with is his poetry, and not his life or his opinions.

It is, however, a perfectly legitimate exercise of the functions of criticism to point out that Marlowe's poetry suffered because it was, like its author, devoid of the moral element.

Unless we are to snppose that a prolongation of life would have brought a change of intellectual attitude, it is quite safe to say that our literature has not lost another Shake- speare in Marlowe. No poetry which is unmoral, which is dead to the true view of life, will ever be entirely great. That poetry is the highest and the best which is widest, which concerns itself most directly and most broadly with human life, and which leaves least out. But experience shows that, whether right or wrong, the majority of mankind believe in and set before themselves certain ideals of duty and justice, and believe also in the imposition of certain responsibilities. Some form one estimate of these ideals, others another ; but the majority agree that they have a real existence. The poetry that ignores them, and is purely sensuous in its aims, however beautiful, is sure, therefore, to suffer from a certain narrowness and insufficiency. It will contain only a portion, not the whole. Shakespeare is greater than Marlowe, because the moral standpoint belonged to him, the unmoral to his predecessor.

Before we leave the subject of Marlowe's verse, we cannot refrain from quoting what, judged as melody, is unquestion- ably one of the greatest pieces of blank verse in the English language. It occurs in Marlowe's earliest play, and must have been written when he was almost a youth. It is, in fact, a lyric- ecstasy put into the mouth of Taxaburlaine on the death of hie. wife Zenocrate

:- "Now walk the angels on the walls of Heaven

As sentinels to warn immortal souls, To entertain divine Zenocrate.

Apollo, Cynthia, and the ceaseless lamps That gently looked upon this loathsome earth, Shine downward now no more, but deck the Heavens, To entertain divine Zenocrate.

The crystal spring whose taste illuminates Refined eyes with aneternal sight,

Like tried silver runs through Paradise, To entertain divine Zenocrate.

The cherubims and holy seraphims

That sing and play before the King of Kings

Use all their voices and their instruments, To entertain divine Zenocrate."