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There is in Tamburlaine a speech of some importance to a discussion of Beauty. The theme and figure of Tamburlaine himself are touched, after the grand Renascence habit, with a sense of the metaphysical greatness of action. His victories are a torrent of blood and fire, so much so that the mind of most goodwill tends to weary before the end. But the interest is maintained, not merely by the magniloquence and delicacy of Marlowe’s verse and by that capacity which he has in common with all great poets, of blasting his most monotonous verbal habits with a phrase of catholic importance, but also by the continual touch of philosophical greatness in Tamburlaine himself. He is fatally destined to conquer the world, and his nature is itself a conquest of others. He speaks of himself, and others speak of him, as if he possessed a greater share of divine elemental power than the rest of the world, as if he were, in a different mode, one of the Powers in whom William believed. He is a man ordained ‘to further every action to the best’. He kills his son for his cowardice, but that cowardice is a sign of the difference between such ‘scum and tartar of the elements’ and his own body in which an incorporeal spirit of Jove’s own mould moves. He also is ‘truly from the Deity’, just as William saw. The verses in which he proposes to ride through Samarkand as emperor look forward to his spirit’s ascension through the milk-white way to meet Jove, his great exemplar. His captains implore the gods to preserve his life by invocation of their sanctity:

If you retain desert of holiness,

As your supreme estates instruct our thought;

the physicians warn him of danger because a substance more divine and pure than the elements is almost extinguished in him. They would not perhaps have held him different from other men in this, but their science here confirms the general view of Tamburlaine. He and Theridamas admire each other so inevitably that when Theridamas deserts the Persian King he only seems to show the magnanimity ‘that nobly must admit necessity’. The emperor’s personal appearance is described in similar terms: his face has a pallor ‘wrought in him with passion’. It is the misfortune of the world’s lowness that he appears in it as a conqueror; he was meant for deeds of ‘bounty and nobility’. His thoughts are pure and fiery, and among those thoughts are his description of the nature of the souls of men and his meditations on Zenocrate.

His own soul can begin to comprehend the wondrous architecture of the world. It is such a faculty of comprehension which leads him to question himself upon the nature of his love. But the speech in which he does so is almost a document of aesthetics, for it is a statement of man’s apprehension of beauty. Zenocrate herself is in distress at the battle between her husband’s and her father’s armies, and Tamburlaine is troubled by her tears. Her sorrows shake him more than his armies Damascus, her father’s city. So far the speech is no more than a magniloquent description of a conventional state. But from now on the inquiry becomes more passionately abstract. Beauty (of course) sits in Zenocrate’s face, ‘and comments volumes with her ivory pen’; she was to do as much and more in Love’s Labour’s Lost when Berowne was eloquent on women’s eyes. But where Berowne was to be mostly aware of the increased power which beauty, and love arising from beauty, give to all capacities, Tamburlaine is aware of something not only different but opposite. The beauty of Zenocrate arouses in him something which no hostile army had ever stirred, a sense of defeat, a ‘conceit of foil’. It is a physical sensation of extreme force; kings have not troubled him ‘so much, by much’. It might be held from what we have been told and seen earlier, that no king had ever troubled him with any conceit of foil at all, but Marlowe was not then bothering about consistency. The ‘so much, by much’ does its work, and we are made aware of the defeat which Beauty causes in his and our spirits, and even of the distress by which that sensation of overthrow is accompanied. Man beholds Beauty, endures this conceit of foil, and inevitably and immediately demands to know its nature. ‘What is beauty? saith my sufferings then.’ Tamburlaine, soaring into the poetic heaven of Marlowe’s mind, answers himself by a sudden consideration not only of beauty but of poetry. For (he says) man’s mind is most expressed in poetry; there, as in a mirror, we behold the highest reaches of a human wit. Forms and substances, in fact, exist there in the most sublime state. William and Christopher would have adored each other.

We understand in poetry the greatest extent of our knowledge; that knowledge which can comprehend the world’s architecture, as he had told us before. But here is something it cannot comprehend. Our souls that can measure the wandering planets’ courses and climb after knowledge infinite, and poetry which mirrors all our knowledge, are here defeated. There is something in Beauty which poetry cannot express, and which the poets—and Tamburlaine and we—know they cannot express. The quintessence of all poetry in one poem, could it be so collected, would still leave something untold. This is the answer given to the question his suffering is compelled to ask; this, then, is why he suffers. Beauty inflicts on man everlasting defeat because in the end man cannot discover and express it in poetry, therefore not at all. The mind of man discovers that it is not equivalent to the nature of Beauty.

At this point Tamburlaine begins to recall himself to his own nature, and, as it were, away from Marlowe’s. But the identification of himself with Marlowe is not entirely lost; the invocation of the poetry has been too strong. He reminds himself of his sex, his ‘discipline of arms and chivalry’; in spite of that conceit of foil he forbids himself to harbour ‘thoughts effeminate and faint’. Nevertheless, Beauty, ‘with whose instinct the soul of man is touched’, affects warriors; all who are rapt with love of fame, valour, and victory must of necessity endure also this experience of Beauty. They must have it ‘beat on their conceits’, and the word recalls its earlier use; their very conceits must know their conceit of foil. This sensation of defeat and contemporaneous refusal of effeminate thoughts combine in the next lines:

I thus conceiving and subduing both

That which hath stoopt the tempest of the gods

To feel the lovely warmth of shepherds’ flames,

And march in cottages of strowed weeds—

It is still Beauty; it is Beauty which has itself subdued a divine tumult into the comfort of huts and domestic fires. But it is Beauty not among cottages and shepherds’ flames but in itself which this Tamburlaine-Marlowe, this warrior-poet, will subdue. He will ‘conceive’ it; that is, among his own conceits he will apprehend this overthrow of himself by a wonder impossible for any virtue of words to express, and then he will conquer it. And in that conquest of Beauty, herself the conquering mistress of the tempest of the gods, it will be seen

That virtue solely is the sum of glory

And fashions men with true nobility.

He then departs to battle.

He has been speaking as a warrior. But the lines about poetry are a part of the whole speech, and were not written only for the anthologies in which they have, very naturally, so often appeared. It was into words that no virtue could digest the full wonder of Beauty, and the virtue which, sixteen lines later, concludes the speech is not certainly an entirely different power. The sum of glory for the Tamburlaine of the play may have been the virtue of conquest and royalty. It was his business to win battles. But it was Marlowe’s to write poems. The sum of glory for that ‘pure elemental wit’ (as Thomas Thorpe called him) who wrote the play was the conceiving and subduing beauty in words. The nobility of the poets is their refusal to harbour thoughts effeminate and faint; it is, in fact, their courage to write poetry. Courage is a virtue not generally attributed to poets, yet it is a necessity of their nature. It requires courage to dare the abyss from which Wordsworth beheld the power of Imagination arise, to contemplate it till the forms and substances are exactly discovered. In that abyss they are to conceive and subdue ‘that which hath stoopt the tempest of the gods’, to control their greatest idea of the greatest power. Marlowe declared that it could not be done, but, on the other hand, he declared also that it was the poet’s virtue to do it.

The speech then, to some extent, illumines the poets’ business. They are to ‘conceive’ the complete power of Beauty, with all its continual inexpressible wonders, and to express it. But they do not do it in quite the straightforward way in which Tamburlaine proceeded to defeat the army of the Sultan, or Marlowe described that defeat. The direct attack on Beauty has a tendency to lead to rhetoric and even to rant. In order to achieve its end, English poetry has had to go a long way round; in order to digest all Beauty’s graces into words it has had to digest some remarkably strange food. It has had to discover defeats more terrible than the exquisitely painful and joyous overthrow of man’s spirit by Beauty, and sufferings less immediately recompensed than those. In such defeat and suffering the virtue and nobility of the poets has had every opportunity to make itself known.

But to explore the process by which poetry exalted Reason and conceived the perfection of Beauty, we may begin with a poem which limited itself severely in its devotion to both, with Pope’s Essay on Man.