Читать книгу History of English Literature (Vol. 1-3) - Taine Hippolyte - Страница 56

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Thus was this theatre produced; a theatre unique in history, like the admirable and fleeting epoch from which it sprang, the work and the picture of this young world, as natural, as unshackled, and as tragic as itself. When an original and national drama springs up, the poets who establish it carry in themselves the sentiments which it represents. They display better than other men the feelings of the public, because those feelings arc stronger in them than in other men. The passions which surround them, break forth in their heart with a harsher or a juster cry, and hence their voices become the voices of all. Chivalric and Catholic Spain had her interpreters in her enthusiasts and her Don Quixotes: in Calderon, first a soldier, afterwards a priest; in Lope de Vega, a volunteer at fifteen, a passionate lover, a wandering duelist, a soldier of the Armada, finally, a priest and familiar of the Holy Office; so full of fervor that he fasts till he is exhausted, faints with emotion while singing mass, and in his flagellations stains the walls of his cell with blood. Calm and noble Greece had in her principal tragic poet one of the most accomplished and fortunate of her sons:[422] Sophocles, first in song and palaestra; who at fifteen sang, unclad, the pæan before the trophy of Salamis, and who afterwards, as ambassador, general, ever loving the gods and impassioned for his state, presented, in his life as in his works, the spectacle of the incomparable harmony which made the beauty of the ancient world, and which the modern world will never more attain to. Eloquent and worldly France, in the age which carried the art of good manners and conversation to its highest pitch, finds, to write her oratorical tragedies and to paint her drawing-room passions, the most able craftsman of words, Racine, a courtier, a man of the world; the most capable, by the delicacy of his tact and the adaptation of his style, of making men of the world and courtiers speak. So in England the poets are in harmony with their works. Almost all are Bohemians; they sprang from the people,[423] were educated, and usually studied at Oxford or Cambridge, but they were poor, so that their education contrasts with their condition. Ben Jonson is the step-son of a bricklayer, and himself a bricklayer; Marlowe is the son of a shoemaker; Shakespeare of a wool merchant; Massinger of a servant of a noble family.[424] They live as they can, get into debt, write for their bread, go on the stage. Peele, Lodge, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Heywood, are actors; most of the details which we have of their lives are taken from the journal of Henslowe, a retired pawnbroker, later a money-lender and manager of a theatre, who gives them work, advances money to them, receives their manuscripts or their wardrobes as security. For a play he gives seven or eight pounds; after the year 1600 prices rise, and reach as high as twenty or twenty-five pounds. It is clear that, even after this increase, the trade of author scarcely brings in bread. In order to earn money, it was necessary, like Shakespeare, to become a manager, to try to have a share in the property of a theatre; but such success is rare, and the life which they lead, a life of actors and artists, improvident, full of excess, lost amid debauchery and acts of violence, amidst women of evil fame, in contact with young profligates, among the temptations of misery, imagination and license, generally leads them to exhaustion, poverty, and death. Men received enjoyment from them, but neglected and despised them. One actor, for a political allusion, was sent to prison, and only just escaped losing his ears; great men, men in office, abused them like servants. Heywood, who played almost every day, bound himself, in addition, to write a sheet daily, for several years composes at haphazard in taverns, labors and sweats like a true literary hack, and dies leaving two hundred and twenty pieces, of which most are lost. Kyd, one of the earliest in date, died in misery. Shirley, one of the last, at the end of his career, was obliged to become once more a schoolmaster. Massinger dies unknown; and in the parish register we find only this sad mention of him: "Philip Massinger, a stranger." A few months after the death of Middleton, his widow was obliged to ask alms of the City, because he had left nothing. Imagination, as Drummond said of Ben Jonson, oppressed their reason; it is the common failing of poets. They wish to enjoy, and give themselves wholly up to enjoyment; their mood, their heart governs them; in their life, as in their works, impulses are irresistible; desire comes suddenly, like a wave, drowning reason, resistance—often even giving neither reason nor resistance time to show themselves.[425] Many are roisterers, sad roisterers of the same sort, such as Musset and Murger, who give themselves up to every passion, and "drown their sorrows in the bowl"; capable of the purest and most poetic dreams, of the most delicate and touching tenderness, and who yet can only undermine their health and mar their fame. Such are Nash, Decker, and Greene; Nash, a fantastic satirist, who abused his talent, and conspired like a prodigal against good fortune; Decker, who passed three years in the King's Bench prison; Greene, above all, a pleasing wit, copious, graceful, who took a delight in destroying himself, publicly with tears confessing his vices,[426] and the next moment plunging into them again. These are mere androgynes, true courtesans, in manners, body, and heart. Quitting Cambridge, "with good fellows as free-living as himself," Greene had travelled over Spain, Italy, "in which places he sawe and practizde such villainie as is abhominable to declare." You see the poor man is candid, not sparing himself; he is natural; passionate in everything, repentance or otherwise; above all of ever-varying mood; made for self-contradiction; not self-correction. On his return he became, in London, a supporter of taverns, a haunter of evil places. In his "Groatsworth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance" he says:

"I was dround in pride, whoredom was my daily exercise, and gluttony with drunkenness was my onely delight.... After I had wholly betaken me to the penning of plaies (which was my continuall exercise) I was so far from calling upon God that I sildome thought on God, but tooke such delight in swearing and blaspheming the name of God that none could thinke otherwise of me than that I was the child of perdition. These vanities and other trifling pamphlets I penned of love and vaine fantasies was my chiefest stay of living; and for those my vaine discourses I was beloved of the more vainer sort of people, who being my continuall companions, came still to my lodging, and there would continue quaffing, carowsing, and surfeting with me all the day long.... If I may have my disire while I live I am satisfied; let me shift after death as I may.... 'Hell!' quoth I; 'what talke you of hell to me? I know if I once come there I shall have the company of better men than myselfe; I shall also meete with some madde knaves in that place, and so long as I shall not sit there alone, my care is the lesse.... If I feared the judges of the bench no more than I dread the judgments of God I would before I slept dive into one carles bagges or other, and make merrie with the shelles I found in them so long as they would last.'"

A little later he is seized with remorse, marries, depicts in delicious verse the regularity and calm of an upright life; then returns to London, spends his property and his wife's fortune with "a sorry ragged queane," in the company of ruffians, pimps, sharpers, courtesans; drinking, blaspheming, wearing himself out by sleepless nights and orgies; writing for bread, sometimes amid the brawling and effluvia of his wretched lodging, lighting upon thoughts of adoration and love, worthy of Rolla;[427] very often disgusted with himself, seized with a fit of weeping between two merry bouts, and writing little pieces to accuse himself, to regret his wife, to convert his comrades, or to warn young people against the tricks of prostitutes and swindlers. He was soon worn out by this kind of life; six years were enough to exhaust him. An indigestion arising from Rhenish wine and pickled herrings finished him. If it had not been for his landlady, who succored him, he "would have perished in the streets." He lasted a little longer, and then his light went out; now and then he begged her "pittifully for a penny pott of malmesie"; he was covered with lice, he had but one shirt, and when his own was "awashing," he was obliged to borrow her husband's. "His doublet and hose and sword were sold for three shillinges," and the poor folks paid the cost of his burial, four shillings for the winding sheet, and six and fourpence for the burial.

In such low places, on such dunghills, amid such excesses and violence, dramatic genius forced its way, and amongst others, that of the first, of the most powerful, of the true founder of the dramatic school, Christopher Marlowe.

Marlowe was an ill-regulated, dissolute, outrageously vehement and audacious spirit, but grand and sombre, with the genuine poetic frenzy; pagan moreover, and rebellious in manners and creed. In this universal return to the senses, and in this impulse of natural forces which brought on the Renaissance, the corporeal instincts and the ideas which hallow them, break forth impetuously. Marlowe, like Greene, like Kett,[428] is a sceptic, denies God and Christ, blasphemes the Trinity, declares Moses "a juggler," Christ more worthy of death than Barabas, says that "yf he wer to write a new religion, he wolde undertake both a more excellent and more admirable methode," and "almost in every company he commeth, perswadeth men to Athiesme."[429] Such were the rages, the rashnesses, the excesses which liberty of thought gave rise to in these new minds, who for the first time, after so many centuries, dared to walk unfettered. From his father's shop, crowded with children, from the straps and awls, he found himself studying at Cambridge, probably through the patronage of a great man, and on his return to London, in want, amid the license of the green-room, the low houses and taverns, his head was in a ferment, and his passions became excited. He turned actor; but having broken his leg in a scene of debauchery, he remained lame, and could no longer appear on the boards. He openly avowed his infidelity, and a prosecution was begun, which, if time had not failed, would probably have brought him to the stake. He made love to a drab, and in trying to stab his rival, his hand was turned, so that his own blade entered his eye and his brain, and he died, cursing and blaspheming. He was only thirty years old.

Think what poetry could emanate from a life so passionate, and occupied in such a manner! First, exaggerated declamation, heaps of murder, atrocities, a pompous and furious display of tragedy bespattered with blood, and passions raised to a pitch of madness. All the foundations of the English stage, "Ferrex and Porrex, Cambyses, Hieronymo," even the "Pericles" of Shakespeare, reach the same height of extravagance, magniloquence and horror.[430] It is the first outbreak of youth. Recall Schiller's "Robbers," and how modern democracy has recognized for the first time its picture in the metaphors and cries of Charles Moor.[431] So here the characters struggle and roar, stamp on the earth, gnash their teeth, shake their fists against heaven. The trumpets sound, the drums beat, coats of mail file past armies clash, men stab each other, or themselves; speeches are full of gigantic threats and lyrical figures;[432] kings die, straining a bass voice; "now doth ghastly death with greedy talons gripe my bleeding heart, and like a harpy tires on my life." The hero in "Tamburlaine the Great"[433] is seated on a chariot drawn by chained kings; he burns towns, drowns women and children, puts men to the sword, and finally, seized with an inscrutable sickness, raves in monstrous outcries against the gods, whose hands afflict his soul, and whom he would fain dethrone. There already is the picture of senseless pride, of blind and murderous rage, which passing through many devastations, at last arms against heaven itself. The overflowing of savage and immoderate instinct produces this mighty sounding verse, this prodigality of carnage, this display of splendors and exaggerated colors, this railing of demoniacal passions, this audacity of grand impiety. If in the dramas which succeed it, "The Massacre at Paris," "The Jew of Malta," the bombast decreases, the violence remains. Barabas the Jew maddened with hate, is henceforth no longer human; he has been treated by the Christians like a beast, and he hates them like a beast. He advises his servant Ithamore in the following words:

"Hast thou no trade? then listen to my words,

And I will teach thee that shall stick by thee:

First, be thou void of these affections,

Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear;

Be mov'd at nothing, see thou pity none,

But to thyself smile when the Christians moan.

... I walk abroad a-nights,

And kill sick people groaning under walls;

Sometimes I go about and poison wells....

Being young, I studied physic, and began

To practice first upon the Italian;

There I enrich'd the priests with burials,

And always kept the sexton's arms in ure

With digging graves and ringing dead men's knells....

I fill'd the jails with bankrouts in a year,

And with young orphans planted hospitals;

And every moon made some or other mad,

And now and then one hang himself for grief,

Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll

How I with interest tormented him."[434]

All these cruelties he boasts of and chuckles over, like a demon who rejoices in being a good executioner, and plunges his victims in the very extremity of anguish. His daughter has two Christian suitors; and by forged letters he causes them to slay each other. In despair she takes the veil, and to avenge himself he poisons his daughter and the whole convent. Two friars wish to denounce him, then to convert him; he strangles the first, and jokes with his slave Ithamore, a cut-throat by profession, who loves his trade, rubs his hands with joy, and says:

"Pull amain,

'Tis neatly done, sir; here's no print at all.

So, let him lean upon his staff; excellent! he stands as if he were

begging of bacon."[435] "O mistress, I have the bravest, gravest, secret, subtle, bottlenosed knave to my master, that ever gentleman had."[436]

The second friar comes up, and they accuse him of the murder.

"Barabas. Heaven bless me! what, a friar a murderer! When shall you see a Jew commit the like? Ithamore. Why, a Turk could ha' done no more. Bar. To-morrow is the sessions; you shall do it— Come Ithamore, let's help to take him hence. Friar. Villains, I am a sacred person; touch me not. Bar. The law shall touch you; we'll but lead you, we: 'Las, I could weep at your calamity!"[437]

We have also two other poisonings, an infernal machine to blow up the Turkish garrison, a plot to cast the Turkish commander into a well. Barabas falls into it himself, and dies in the hot caldron,[438] howling, hardened, remorseless, having but one regret, that he had not done evil enough. These are the ferocities of the Middle Ages; we might find them to this day among the companions of Ali Pacha, among the pirates of the Archipelago; we retain pictures of them in the paintings of the fifteenth century, which represent a king with his court, seated calmly round a living man who is being flayed; in the midst the flayer on his knees is working conscientiously, very careful not to spoil the skin.[439]

All this is pretty strong, you will say; these people kill too readily, and too quickly. It is on this very account that the painting is a true one. For the specialty of the men of the time, as of Marlowe's characters, is the abrupt commission of a deed; they are children, robust children. As a horse kicks out instead of speaking, so they pull out their knives instead of asking an explanation. Nowadays we hardly know what nature is; instead of observing it we still retain the benevolent prejudices of the eighteenth century; we only see it humanized by two centuries of culture, and we take its acquired calm for an innate moderation. The foundations of the natural man are irresistible impulses, passions, desires, greeds; all blind. He sees a woman,[440] thinks her beautiful; suddenly he rushes towards her; people try to restrain him, he kills these people, gluts his passion, then thinks no more of it, save when at times a vague picture of a moving lake of blood crosses his brain and makes him gloomy. Sudden and extreme resolves are confused in his mind with desire; barely planned, the thing is done; the wide interval which a Frenchman places between the idea of an action and the action itself is not to be found here.[441] Barabas conceived murders, and straightway murders were accomplished; there is no deliberation, no pricks of conscience; that is how he commits a score of them; his daughter leaves him, he becomes unnatural, and poisons her; his confidential servant betrays him, he disguises himself, and poisons him. Rage seizes these men like a fit, and then they are forced to kill. Benvenuto Cellini relates how, being offended, he tried to restrain himself, but was nearly suffocated; and that in order to cure himself, he rushed with his dagger upon his opponent. So, in "Edward the Second," the nobles immediately appeal to arms; all is excessive and unforeseen: between two replies the heart is turned upside down, transported to the extremes of hate or tenderness. Edward, seeing his favorite Gaveston again, pours out before him his treasure, casts his dignities at his feet, gives him his seal, himself, and, on a threat from the Bishop of Coventry, suddenly cries:

"Throw off his golden mitre, rend his stole,

And in the channel christen him anew."[442]

Then, when the queen supplicates:

"Fawn not on me, French strumpet! get thee gone....

Speak not unto her: let her droop and pine."[443]

Furies and hatreds clash together like horsemen in battle. The Earl of Lancaster draws his sword on Gaveston to slay him, before the king; Mortimer wounds Gaveston. These powerful loud voices growl; the noblemen will not even let a dog approach the prince, and rob them of their rank. Lancaster says of Gaveston:

"... He comes not back,

Unless the sea cast up his shipwrack'd body.

Warwick. And to behold so sweet a sight as that, There's none here but would run his horse to death."[444]

They have seized Gaveston, and intend to hang him "at a bough"; they refuse to let him speak a single minute with the king. In vain they are entreated; when they do at last consent, they are sorry for it; it is a prey they want immediately, and Warwick, seizing him by force, "strake off his head in a trench." Those are the men of the Middle Ages. They have the fierceness, the tenacity, the pride of big, well-fed, thorough-bred bull-dogs. It is this sternness and impetuosity of primitive passions which produced the Wars of the Roses, and for thirty years drove the nobles on each other's swords and to the block.

What is there beyond all these frenzies and gluttings of blood? The idea of crushing necessity and inevitable ruin in which everything sinks and comes to an end. Mortimer, brought to the block, says with a smile:

"Base Fortune, now I see, that in thy wheel

There is a point, to which, when men aspire,

They tumble headlong down: that point I touch'd,

And, seeing there was no place to mount up higher,

Why should I grieve at my declining fall?—

Farewell, fair queen; weep not for Mortimer,

That scorns the world, and, as a traveller,

Goes to discover countries yet unknown."[445]

Weigh well these grand words; they are a cry from the heart, the profound confession of Marlowe, as also of Byron, and of the old sea-kings. The northern paganism is fully expressed in this heroic and mournful sigh: it is thus they imagine the world so long as they remain on the outside of Christianity, or as soon as they quit it. Thus, when men see in life, as they did, nothing but a battle of unchecked passions, and in death but a gloomy sleep, perhaps filled with mournful dreams, there is no other supreme good but a day of enjoyment and victory. They glut themselves, shutting their eyes to the issue, except that they may be swallowed up on the morrow. That is the master-thought of "Doctor Faustus," the greatest of Marlowe's dramas: to satisfy his soul, no matter at what price, or with what results:

"A sound magician is a mighty god....

How am I glutted with conceit of this!...

I'll have them fly to India for gold,

Ransack the ocean for orient pearl....

I'll have them read me strange philosophy,

And tell the secrets of all foreign kings;

I'll have them wall all Germany with brass,

And make swift Rhine circle fair Wertenberg....

Like lions shall they guard us when we please;

Like Almain rutters with their horsemen's staves,

Or Lapland giants, trotting by our sides;

Sometimes like women, or unwedded maids,

Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows

Than have the white breasts of the queen of love."[446]

What brilliant dreams, what desires, what vast or voluptuous wishes, worthy of a Roman Cæsar or an Eastern poet, eddy in this teeming brain! To satiate them, to obtain four-and-twenty years of power, Faustus gave his soul, without fear, without need of temptation, at the first outset, voluntarily, so sharp is the prick within:

"Had I as many souls as there be stars,

I'd give them all for Mephistophilis.

By him I'll be great emperor of the world,

And make a bridge thorough the moving air....

Why shouldst thou not? Is not thy soul thine own?"[447]

And with that he gives himself full swing: he wants to know everything, to have everything; a book in which he can behold all herbs and trees which grow upon the earth; another in which shall be drawn all the constellations and planets; another which shall bring him gold when he wills it, and "the fairest courtezans"; another which summons "men in armour" ready to execute his commands, and which holds "whirlwinds, tempests, thunder and lightning" chained at his disposal. He is like a child, he stretches out his hands for everything shining; then grieves to think of hell, then lets himself be diverted by shows:

"Faustus. O this feeds my soul! Lucifer. Tut, Faustus, in hell is all manner of delight. Faustus. Oh, might I see hell, and return again, How happy were I then!..."[448]

He is conducted, being invisible, over the whole world: lastly to Rome, amongst the ceremonies of the pope's court. Like a schoolboy during a holiday, he has insatiable eyes, he forgets everything before a pageant, he amuses himself in playing tricks, in giving the pope a box on the ear, in beating the monks, in performing magic tricks before princes, finally in drinking, feasting, filling his belly, deadening his thoughts. In his transport he becomes an atheist, and says there is no hell, that those are "old wives' tales." Then suddenly the sad idea knocks at the gates of his brain.

"I will renounce this magic, and repent...

My heart's so harden'd I cannot repent:

Scarce can I name salvation, faith, or heaven,

But fearful echoes thunder in mine ears,

'Faustus, thou are damn'd!' then swords and knives,

Poison, guns, halters, and envenom'd steel

Are laid before me to despatch myself;

And long ere this I should have done the deed,

Had not sweet pleasure conquer'd deep despair.

Have not I made blind Homer sing to me

Of Alexander's love and Œnon's death?

And hath not he, that built the walls of Thebes

With ravishing sound of his melodious harp,

Made music with my Mephistophilis?

Why should I die, then, or basely despair?

I am resolv'd; Faustus shall ne'er repent.—

Come Mephistophilis, let us dispute again,

And argue of divine astrology.

Tell me, are there many heavens above the moon?

Are all celestial bodies but one globe,

As is the substance of this centric earth?..."[449] "One thing... let me crave of thee To glut the longing of my heart's desire.... Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss! Her lips suck forth my soul: see, where it flies!— Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again. Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips, And all is dross that is not Helena.... O thou art fairer than the evening air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!"[450]

"Oh, my God, I would weep! but the devil draws in my tears. Gush forth blood, instead of tears! yea, life and soul! Oh, he stays my tongue! I would lift up my hands; but see, they hold them, they hold them; Lucifer and Mephistophilis...."[451]

"Ah, Faustus,

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,

And then thou must be damn'd perpetually!

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,

That time may cease, and midnight never come....

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,

The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd.

Oh, I'll leap up to my God!—Who pulls me down?—

See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!

One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ,

Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ,

Yet will I call on him....

Ah, half the hour is past! 'twill all be past anon....

Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,

A hundred thousand, and at last be sav'd....

It strikes, it strikes....

Oh soul, be chang'd into little water-drops,

And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found!"[452]

There is the living, struggling, natural, personal man, not the philosophic type which Goethe has created, but a primitive and genuine man, hot-headed, fiery, the slave of his passions, the sport of his dreams, wholly engrossed in the present, moulded by his lusts, contradictions, and follies, who amidst noise and starts, cries of pleasure and anguish, rolls, knowing it and willing it, down the slope and crags of his precipice. The whole English drama is here, as a plant in its seed, and Marlowe is to Shakespeare what Perugino was to Raphael.