JOHN. I can hardly persuade myself that the grand metaphor of the torch did not come from Hebrew lips. I know no other image that would so well express the fickleness and uncertainty of our hold on life as this. The likening of virtue, too, to the poor, stayed fisherman that had never been out of his country's sight, is very sweet. With the first part of the passage you read I was rather disappointed. But the last made up for all. PHILIP. I read it that the contrast might be the greater, and also to give you a specimen of his language. He does not, you see, pick his words much. He was in haste to get to the last half of the soliloquy, where he had something to say that pleased him better. You will find that he himself resembles those "unskilful statuaries not a little sometimes. The length, and intricacy even, of the last comparison in what I read pleases me, perhaps from its putting me in mind so much of the goldenmouthed Jeremy Taylor. But Taylor always begins his similes with a so have I seen," which gives great liveliness and force to them. forerunners of the glorious band who set the divine right of all temporal power forever beneath the feet of that diviner right of the eternal soul,) ashamed to bend the knee, nay, even to pay common civility to any conventionality, howsoever seemingly venerable and august. Indeed, there is too much scorn and pride in him to consist with the highest genius. For great genius is humble; its confidence is not in its own strength, but in that of its cause. Pride cannot fly over the great void gulf between its performance and its hope; but, if she tempt the perilous voyage, flutters her vain wings, and drops exhausted into that unfathomable grave. Chapman's independent bearing often breaks down into a mere swagger, and, indeed, is seldom confined within the limits of established propriety. Doubtless he was of opinion, with Fuller, that "it is better to lap one's pottage like a dog, than to eat mannerly with a spoon of the Devil's giving"; and if he be sometimes bent on believing that all spoons, save a clumsy horn one of his own make, are presents from that liberal gentleman, and go about laboriously to lap like a dog when he had better have eaten like a Christian, (like some who foolishly think a certain rude ungraciousness of bearing best befitting a radical,) yet . we should pardon a great deal to a mistaken love of principle, when the principle is a good one, remembering that the flanks of our own hobbies are bloody with our too fiery spurring, and that enthusiasm is the most amiable of excesses. JOHN. A long sentence, but safely delivered at last. Those radicals you speak of are the deep-seeing philosophers who believe that an innate democracy resides in cowhide boots, and that a thorough knowledge of government and a general intelligence upon all subjects soak into the brain from the liberal virtue of a roofless hat; who suspect good-breeding for a monarchist in disguise; believe that all white men are their brothers on the day before election; and proudly stand sponsors, while Mr. Dorr (a man who, mistakenly, it is true, but no less surely, would have stabbed true democracy to the heart, by appealing to brute force) is christened over again with the abused name of Algernon Sydney. And yet such men as these play off the puppet-show of our government; such men as these persuade the workingmen of our dear New England to rivet the chains upon three millions of their fellow-workers, and so drug their senses with idle flatteries, as to make them forget, that, while the laborer is bought and sold in one part of a country, he can never be truly respected in the other. I can hardly keep my tears down, when I think of it. PHILIP. I Who goes mad now? But I do not wonder. said that Chapman has little dramatic power. His is a specimen. The king's brother, who wishes to gain over to his own interest so brave a man as D'Ambois, finds him lying on the ground, and says to him : "Turned to earth, alive? Up, man! the sun shines on thee. I am no mote to play in 't, as great men are." that "Death and Destiny Come behind D'Ambois," as if even they feared to face him. But you will see enough of this in all the passages I shall read to you. No man ever had a larger or nobler idea of the might and grandeur of the human soul than Chapman. He had a great deal of that exulting feeling of strength and self-help which contemporaries endeavour to paralyze by calling it conceit, but which the heart of posterity swells over as the instinct and stamp of greatness. It is a something which we find in the lives of all great men; a recollection, as it were, of wings, which enables them, in the words of Marvell, "Remembering still their former height," to rise above these lower regions of turmoil into a clearer and serener air. It is a feeling of trustfulness, which is needful to those who dare to cast their seed upon these waves of time, that it may float down and come to fruitage in eternity, and who "I watched how fearfully, And yet how suddenly, he cured his lies; The right wit of a woman." I shall now go on reading extracts from the rest of this play, and from others; without following the plot, or any other order than chance or fancy may dictate. Indeed, Chapman's plots are of little importance to him, except as threads for his thoughts to crystallize around. Here are one or two specimens of his exalted notion of greatness, and of the noble vigor and stateliness which animate and expand his verse in the expression of it. "His words and looks Are like the flashes and the bolts of Jove; Which shuts still as it opes, and leave no tracks JOHN. D'Ambois. Grand, and grandly spoken. PHILIP. The following is even finer, or at least shows more art in expression. "His great heart will not down: 't is like the sea, That, partly by his own internal heat, Partly the stars' daily and nightly motion, Their heat and light, and partly by the place O' th' divers frames, but chiefly by the moon, (No, not when the hearts of all those powers are burst) To make retreat into his settled home, Till he be crowned with his own quiet foam." D'Ambois. |