Chapman’s four books or sestiads on Hero and Leander are, I believe, very seldom read in conjunction with Marlowe’s two. The whole temper of modern criticism, which loves to treat a work of art as the expression of an artist’s personality and perhaps values that personality chiefly for its difference from others, is unfavourable to a poem by two authors.1 It comes naturally to us to treat the total Hero and Leander as two separate works. Nor, of course, is there any reason why we should not do so. There are some composite works—for example, the Romance of the Rose—which are best dealt with in this way. But there are others such as our composite English Morte Darthur, where earlier English work and French work and Malory and Caxton so subtly grow together into ‘something of great constancy’ that the modern approach is baffled. I am not claiming that Hero and Leander is in that class. We know quite well which parts are by which poet, their styles are clearly distinct, there is no ‘contamination’ (in the textual sense), and pseudo-Musaeus is so far in the background that we can ignore him. Yet I think we shall be richly rewarded if we obey the apparent invitation of the old editions and read the poem, at least sometimes, as a whole. For here, as I shall try to persuade you, collaboration has produced an extremely fortunate result. Each poet has contributed what the other could not have done, and both contributions are necessary to a worthy telling of the story. For the difference in style and outlook here corresponds to the two movements of which that story consists. If we feel young while we read the first two sestiads and feel in the remaining four that youth has died away, our experience is very like Hero’s. If Venus dominates Marlowe’s narrative and Saturn that of Chapman, the same may be said of the events which each narrates. It is almost, as it ought to be, like passing from a Song of Innocence to a Song of Experience.
Of course, when we speak of ‘innocence’ in connexion with the first two sestiads we are using the word ‘innocence’ in a very peculiar sense. We mean not the absence of guilt but the absence of sophistication, the splendour, though a guilty splendour, of unshattered illusions. Marlowe’s part of the poem is the most shameless celebration of sensuality which we can find in English literature—unless we extend the category of literature to include such works as the booksellers call ‘curious’. It does not even keep within the bounds of what might be called, either in the older or the modern sense, a ‘kindly’ sensuality. It exults to see
the gods in sundrie shapes,
Committing headdie ryots, incest, rapes
(I, 143),
and the loves of Neptune in Sestiad II are what Saintsbury called ‘Greek style’. The point need not be laboured. A critical tradition which can stomach the different, but far worse, depravities of Tamberlaine, can well put up with Hero and Leander. The question which Marlowe’s sestiads invite is not a moral one. They make us anxious to discover, if we can, how Marlowe can write over eight hundred lines of almost unrelieved sensuality without ever becoming mawkish, ridiculous, or disgusting. For I do not believe this is at all easy to do.
Marlowe’s success is most easily seen if we compare him with other sixteenth-century specimens of the erotic epyllion. Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis is hardly good enough: despite its frequent beauties it is too static and too lacrimose. Drayton’s Endimion and Phoebe suffers from discordant aims and even discordant styles. We shall have to come to Venus and Adonis. And I must frankly confess that, in so far as the two works are comparable at all, Marlowe seems to me far superior to Shakespeare in this kind. Venus and Adonis reads well in quotation, but I have never read it through without feeling that I am being suffocated. I cannot forgive Shakespeare for telling us how Venus perspired (175), how ‘soft and plump’2 she was, how moist her hand,3 how Adonis pants in her face,4 and so forth. I cannot conceive why he made her not only so emphatically older but even so much larger than the unfortunate young man. She is so large that she can throw the horse’s rein over one arm and tuck the ‘tender boy’ under the other.5 She ‘governs him in strength’6 and knows her own business so badly that she threatens, almost in her first words, to ‘smother’ him with kisses. The word ‘smother’, combined with these images of female bulk and strength, is fatal: I am irresistibly reminded of some unfortunate child’s efforts to escape the voluminous embraces of an effusive female relative. It is, of course, true that there are touches of reality in Shakespeare’s poem which cannot be paralleled in Marlowe’s. But I am not sure that reality (in the sense of naturalism) is what a poem of this type demands: at any rate, naturalism such as Shakespeare gives. Shakespeare shows us far too much of Venus’ passion as it would appear to a third party, a spectator—embarrassed, disgusted, and even horrified as any spectator of such a scene would necessarily be. No doubt this unwelcome effect comes in because Shakespeare is, in general, a far profounder and more human poet than Marlowe. His very greatness prevents his succeeding in the narrow and specialized world of erotic epyllion. But it suits Marlowe exactly. He does not see beyond the erotic frenzy, but writes from within it. And that, curiously enough, is his poetic salvation.
In reading Venus and Adonis we see lust: in reading Marlowe’s sestiads we see not lust but what lust thinks it sees. We do not look at the passion itself: we look out from it upon a world transformed by the hard, brittle splendour of erotic vision. Hence all that sickly weight and warmth which makes unrestrained appetite in the real world so unpleasant to the spectator or even, perhaps, in retrospect to the principals themselves, does not appear at all. Instead of Shakespeare’s sweating palms and poutings and pantings and duckings and ‘lustful language broken’7 and ‘impatience’ that ‘chokes the pleading tongue’8 we have a gigantic insolence of hyperbole. The real world, which Shakespeare cannot quite forget, is by Marlowe smashed into bits, and he makes glory out of the ruin. Hero has been offered Apollo’s throne. The brightness of her neck makes a collar of pebbles shine like diamonds by reflection. The sun will not burn her hands. The ladies of Sestos, walking in procession, make the street a ‘firmament of breathing stars’.9 In that world there are boys so beautiful that they can never drink in safety from a fountain: the water nymphs would pull them in.
If you compare these hyperboles with one of Shakespeare’s you will easily see the difference. His Venus promises Adonis that her hand will ‘dissolve or seem to melt’ in his.10 That, of course, is hyperbolical, but it is in touch with fact—with the fact that hands may be hot, moist, and soft. But Marlowe’s hyperboles are so towering that they become mythopoeic. They have, none the less, their own wild consistency and co-operate in building up such a world as passion momentarily creates, a topsy-turvy world where beauty is omnipotent and the very laws of nature are her willing captives. This mythopoeic quality is reinforced by Marlowe’s use of what may be called the aetiological conceit, as in his passage about Mercury and the fates at the end of I, or his explanation why ‘Since Heroes time hath halfe the world beene blacke’.11 Though the whole two sestiads celebrate the flesh, flesh itself, undisguised, rarely appears in them for long. Leander’s beauty is presented half mythically: he is a prize like the golden fleece, his body is as ‘straight as Circes wand’,12 and the description of him shines with the names of Nectar, Pelops, Jove, and the cold Cinthia.
With this style there go two other characteristics. One, of course, is the metre—a ringing and often end-stopped couplet, compared with which the stanza of Venus and Adonis is unprogressive and the enjambed couplets of Endymion invertebrate. I suspect that the masculine quality of the verse, in fruitful tension with the luxury of the matter, plays an important part in making so much pure honey acceptable: it is a beautiful example of Wordsworth’s theory of metre. The other is the total absence of tenderness. You must not look in Marlowe for what Dryden called ‘the softnesses of love’. You must, indeed, look for love itself only in the narrowest sense. Love here is not ‘ful of pittie’13 but ‘deaffe and cruell’:14 his temple is a blaze of grotesques. Leander woos like ‘a bold sharpe Sophister’.15 The male and immortal lover who first tries to ravish him, ends by trying to kill him. Hero is compared to diamonds, and the whole work has something of their hardness and brightness. Marlowe sings a love utterly separated from kindness, cameraderie, or friendship. If female spiders, whose grooms (I am told) do ‘coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’, wrote love-poetry, it would be like Marlowe’s. But, however shocking, this treatment is an artistic success. We know from some terrible scenes in Keats’s Endymion how dangerous it is to attempt the mixture of tenderness and sensuality in verse. Licentious poetry, if it is to remain endurable, must generally be heartless: as it is in Ovid, in Byron, in Marlowe himself. If it attempts pathos or sweetness an abyss opens at the poet’s feet. Marlowe never comes near that abyss. His poem, though far from morally pure, has purity of another sort—purity of form and colour and intention. We may feel, as we come to the end of the Second Sestiad, that we have been mad, but we do not feel that we have been choked or contaminated. And yet I believe that the final impression left on an adult’s mind is not one of madness or even of splendour, but, oddly enough, of pathos. If we had caught Marlowe striving after that effect in such a poem we should perhaps have turned from him with contempt. But it is not so. What moves us is simply our knowledge that this passionate splendour, so insolent, so defiant, and so ‘unconscious of mortality’, is ‘desperately mortal’.
That it was doomed, for Hero and Leander, to end in misery Marlowe of course knew well. He wrote only the first movement of the story, the ascending movement; how he would have handled the descent we do not know. If he was to do it successfully, he would have had to use powers not found in the first two sestiads: would have had to ‘change his notes to tragic’. The necessity of this change, even had he lived, renders tolerable the still greater change, the change to another author, which now meets us at the beginning of the Third Sestiad. If ever one poet were to ‘take over’ from another, no happier juncture could be found. At the very moment when the theme begins to demand a graver voice, a graver voice succeeds.
In his Dedicatory Epistle Chapman describes himself as drawn ‘by strange instigation’ to continue Marlowe’s work. From a line in the Third Sestiad (195), when he describes himself as ‘tendering’ Marlowe’s ‘late desires’, some conclude that Marlowe had asked Chapman to finish the poem. But it is not at all clear why this should be called ‘strange instigation’. Perhaps Chapman poetically feigned, or (quite as probable) actually believed, that he had been strangely instigated by Marlowe since Marlowe’s death. I am certainly inclined to think that when, in the same passage, he sends his own genius (‘thou most strangely-intellectual fire’) to ‘confer’ with Marlowe’s ‘free soule’ in the ‘eternall Clime’, he is speaking seriously: believing, like Scaliger and others, that a man’s genius is a personal, immortal creature, distinct from himself. But the question is not of great importance. The poetic impulse which moved Chapman to write is quite clear from his own sestiads as a whole, and especially from the opening lines of the Third. And it was essentially an impulse to continue, to finish. We cannot doubt that he had entered into Marlowe’s erotic poetry with the fullest (temporary) sympathy. But, to his graver mind, it cried out for its sequel. As he says
Joy grauen in sence, like snow in water wasts.
(III, 35)
It had fallen to Marlowe to tell of joy graven in sense, it fell to him to tell of the wasting. Love, or such love as Hero’s and Leander’s, is in Chapman’s eyes ‘a golden bubble full of dreames’ (III, 231): he will show how it burst.
I do not think we should regard this as a ‘cauld clatter of morality’ officiously and unpoetically added to a poem which does not require it. There are several reasons against doing so. The most obvious is the fact, already mentioned, that the myth itself already contained a tragic ending. The second is that the picture of headlong love presented by Marlowe demands some nemesis poetically no less than morally. Every man who sees a bubble swell, will watch it, if he can, till it bursts. A story cannot properly end with the two chief characters dancing on the edge of a cliff: it must go on to tell us either how, by some miracle, they were preserved, or how, far more probably, they fell over. I do not mean that Chapman would have put it to himself quite like that. Conceiving poetry as a kind of philosophy, he would have been content with a purely ethical justification for his sestiads. I mean that even if we banish, as he would not have banished, all moral considerations, our aesthetic interests would still demand a second, downward, movement. Finally, we must remind ourselves that the particular moral content which Chapman put into his part of the poem was not nearly so platitudinous for him as it would have been for a nineteenth-century poet.
Chapman’s sestiads are a celebration of marriage in contrast to, and condemnation of, the lawless love between Hero and Leander. We are in danger of taking this as a thing of course. It was not so in Chapman’s day. When writers like Lyly and Greene fall into a fit of moralizing they are quite likely not to make a distinction between lawless and wedded love, but to attack love and women altogether in the old ascetic, misogynistic manner which goes back to St Jerome. When Sidney’s heroes struggle against love they too are concerned less with the distinction between lawful and unlawful than with the baseness or unmanliness of the passion itself as something contrary to the heroic ideal. In taking the line he does, which is the same as Spenser’s, Chapman is therefore doing something not without importance. It may have given him more trouble than it gave Spenser, for there are passages in his plays which suggest that the old conceptions of courtly love still come to life in his mind. His part of Hero and Leander is to be taken as the product of serious thought.
It is especially to be noted that his doctrine is no facile warning against enchantments which he could not feel. This is one of those things which a poet can show only by the actual quality of his writing, and Chapman does so. Time and again he writes lines of an extravagant sweetness which Marlowe could not surpass. As this:
Musick vsherd th’odorous way,
And wanton Ayre in twentie sweet forms danst
After her fingers.
(V, 42)
Or when the Athenian maidens have been carried off by robbers and, at the same hour the stars are coming out,
the yellow issue of the skie
Came trouping forth, ielous of crueltie
To their bright fellowes of this vnder heauen.
(V, 171)
When Hymen hands the lily to Eucharis,
As two cleere Tapers mixe in one their light,
So did the Lillie and the hand their white.
(V, 221)
A girl’s skin is ‘softer than soundest sleep’.16 Leander, dripping from his swim, runs to his sister ‘singing like a shower’,17 and as the white foam drops off him
all the sweetened shore as he did goe,
Was crownd with odrous roses white as snow.
(III, 81)
I am not saying that the quality in all these is exactly like Marlowe’s. Chapman has his own slower movement and his own type of conceit; he is nearer than Marlowe to the metaphysical manner. But they are not less rapturous and exalted than Marlowe’s. If Chapman does not permanently abandon himself to ‘golden bubbles’, it is not because he could not. He knows what he rejects.
This rejection is not in any way that I can discover based on Christian grounds. And this is not to be explained by the fact that the story is Pagan and involves the Pagan deities. That would have presented no difficulties to a medieval or Elizabethan poet if he had wished to christianize it. The gods and goddesses could always be used in a Christian sense, as they are in Comus or in Reason and Sensuality. If Chapman had wished to theologize, chastity embodied in Diana or divine reason in Minerva would have descended to rebuke Leander. The figure who actually appears to him is someone quite different—the goddess Ceremonie. To a modern Englishman, I suspect, no abstraction will seem less qualified for personification and apotheosis. We do not—at least that class of Englishmen who study literature do not—perform ceremonies gracefully, nor attend them with much enthusiasm, and we doubt whether any ceremony can modify the nature of the act which it accompanies. The Elizabethan sentiment was very different. About ceremonies in the Church there might be some dispute: but even there the Puritans objected to them not so much because they desired a pure, individual inwardness as because they thought that a Divine positive law excluded certain ceremonies. In secular life ceremony reigned undisputed. The chroniclers describe ceremonies at length as if they were equal in importance to the gravest political events. And so perhaps they were. Pageant, masque, tournament, and emblem book taught men to expect a visible and formalized expression of every rank, emotion, attitude, and maxim. One quarrelled, loved, dined, and even played by ceremonial rule. The Ciceronian in Latin and the Euphuist in English made prose a ceremony. The universe itself with its noble and base metals, its sublunary and translunary regions, and the nicely graded hierarchy of planetary intelligences, was a vast ceremony proceeding in all space and all time. It is in ceremony that Shakespeare’s ‘Degree’ and Spenser’s ‘Concord’ are manifested.18
Chapman condemns the loves of Hero and Leander not because the pair were ill matched, nor because they lacked the consent of parents, nor because he admires virginity, nor by the Christian law, but only because, being hasty and not waiting for marriage, they had defied Time and Ceremonie. Time must, of course, here be understood as meaning ‘the right time’, ‘timeliness’, the Latin opportunitas: it is very close to Elyot’s virtue of maturitie (Boke named the Gouernour, I, xxii), and its connexion with Ceremonie becomes plainer if we remember that it is one of the virtues which, in Elyot’s scheme, we learn from dancing. Chapman takes great pains to make us understand his point of view. Ceremonie, for him, is what distinguishes a fully human action from an action merely necessary or natural. As he says, no praise goes to the food which ‘simply kils our hunger’19 or the dress that ‘clothes but our nakedness’.20 We reserve praise for ‘Beautious apparell and delicious cheere’.21 Thus unexpectedly the goddess Ceremonie, who forbids lawless luxuria, is from another point of view almost the patroness of luxury—the ordered, humane luxury of evening dress, and choice wines, and good cookery. The embraces of Hero and Leander were, after all, only a coarse meal snatched by ravenous hunger ‘with ranke desire’ (III, 49). Here, as everywhere else, it is the humanised and ‘orderd’ procedure that ‘still giues pleasure freenes to aspire’22 and
Vpholds the flowrie bodie of the earth
In sacred harmonie.
(III, 61)
The whole ‘bench of Deities’23 (the planets) hang in the hair of this goddess. Devotion, Order, State, Reuerence, Societie, and Memorie, are her shadows. Chapman sees her as our defence against utter ruin and brutality: as Shakespeare sees Degree. And, as in the Dunciad the enemies are always creeping on, so here we see Confusion, and (close on her heels)
Barbarisme, and Auarice,
That followd eating earth, and excrement
And humane lims.
(III, 138)
We are told that they would soon storm the palace of the gods ‘were Ceremonie slaine’.24 It is tempting to say that Ceremonie is simply Chapman’s name for civilization. But that word has long been prostituted, and if we are to use it we must do so with a continual reminder that we mean not town-planning, and plumbing and ready-cooked foods but etiquette, ball-rooms, dinner-parties, judges’ robes and wigs, Covent Garden, and coronations in Westminster Abbey. In a word, we must realize that what we should regard as the externals of civilization are, for Chapman, essential and vital. The simplest way of doing this is not to use the word civilization at all but to retain his own word ceremonie, remembering what he meant by it.
It is early in the Third Sestiad that Ceremonie appears to Leander. The remainder of that sestiad and the whole of the next are concerned with Hero’s remorse and deterioration—a passage to which I must presently return. Up to the end of the Fourth, Chapman is occupied with his negative theme, the condemnation of lawless, unceremonial, love. In the Fifth we have the positive side, the celebration of the lawful and ceremonial alternative, marriage. The contrast is pointed for us first by the fact that Hero (who has now resolved on a life of consistent hypocrisy) exercises her priestly function by marrying two young lovers and afterwards attending their marriage feast. To this feast, apparently unbidden, there comes a very curious person. She is called a nymph but has rather the characteristics of a sixteenth-century English fairy. She is a ‘little Siluane’,25 known as Apollo’s ‘Dwarfe’, a haunter of ‘greene Sestyan groues’,26 a prophetess. Her name is Teras: that is monstrum, portent, prodigy. From that point of view she continues, in a personified form, the sinister omens which have harassed Hero in the preceding sestiad; and her function at the banquet is fulfilled when she left the company and
the turning of her back
Made them all shrieke, it looks so ghastly black.
(V, 489)
Seen from the front she had been beautiful: in other words, the one omen that had appeared to be good turns out to be bad, and Hero’s fate is sealed. But between her pleasing entry and her terrifying exit she has exercised another function. Perched on an altar she has entertained the marriage party with the tale of another marriage, which marriage in its turn (this sestiad is constructed like a Chinese nest of boxes) was between Marriage himself, Hymen, and Eucharis, was in fact the archetypal marriage. Much of it is concerned with mystical explanations of Pagan marriage ceremonies: a sort of learning dear to the Elizabethans. The only thing in it which calls for comment is the part played by the girl Adolesche—Garrulity, or Chatterbox, who had a face
Thin like an iron wedge, so sharpe and tart,
As twere of purpose made to cleaue Loues hart.
(V, 299)
This unpleasant young woman hurried off to Athens to spread the news of the love between Hymen and Eucharis, but arrived just as their marriage feast was ending and found no market for her scandal. She sank beneath her disappointment and was promptly metamorphosed into a parrot. The meaning of this little fable is, I suppose, obvious. Adolesche tries to play the part played by the tale-bearer or losengier in an affair of courtly love, but fails because marriage comes in between her and her hopes. Chapman is pointing out that marriage settles the old problem of the losengier. From this tale Teras, her terrible back still hidden, turns to sing her Epithalamion: in a sense the heart, though not the climax, of Chapman’s story, and perhaps the finest lyric he ever wrote. He never praised Night more deliciously:
O come soft rest of Cares, come night,
Come naked vertues only tire,
The reaped haruest of the light,
Bound vp in sheaues of sacred fire.27
This summary is intended to make clear that Chapman’s part of Hero and Leander is, as we should expect, a doctrinal and philosophical poem, very seriously meant by the poet. Much invention has gone to the creation of a new mythology which embodies his doctrine. Venus’ motive for treating so sternly an offence which she, of all goddesses, might be expected to have pardoned is too trivial and too merely mythological for so grave a story: but with that exception the ‘plot’ (if one may so call it) is watertight and enables Chapman to say what he wanted to say. But, of course, all this will be unavailing if the actual texture of the writing fails to please.
It must be admitted that Chapman has his bad moments. The worst is when, in Sestiad VI, 197, Neptune suddenly jumped up and ‘for haste his forehead hit Gainst heauens hard Christall’. We might at least have been spared the adjective hard; it is for most of us too painfully, and therefore too comically, reminiscent. Of course, what Chapman means is to tell us, in conceited language, that the waves rose heaven-high. The influence at work here is, I have little doubt, that of Du Bartas. Chapman is trying the Bartasian technique which consists in representing things great and superhuman in the most humdrum and anthropomorphic terms. I do not think we should continue to laugh at that technique as our fathers did. The French poet, after all, bequeathed it to our admired Metaphysicals. Marvell’s vigilant patrol of stars,28 Donne’s liberated soul that ‘baits not at the Moone’,29 Herbert’s representation of Christ as an innkeeper,30 are all Bartasian in character. Elsewhere Chapman is more successfully Bartasian. To tell us that the moon rose, he says:
The Saffron mirror by which Phoebus loue,
Greene Tellus decks her, now he held aboue
The clowdy mountaines.
(V, 407)
It should be noticed that the lines which I quoted a moment ago from the Epithalamion are really of the same sort:
The reaped haruest of the light,
Bound vp in sheaues of sacred fire.
The image, when we work it out, is Bartasian; daylight is mowed like a field at evening and the harvest is tied up into those sheaves which we call stars.
Of course, Chapman is not more conceited than Marlowe had been: he is conceited in a different way. His style admirably exemplifies the transition from the pure Elizabethan manner to that of the Metaphysicals. It can, as earlier quotations have perhaps shown, display on occasion all the old abandonment and sweetness. But in general it is slower, weightier, more difficult. And Chapman, when he first comes on the stage at the opening of Sestiad III, very wisely explains the difference so that, with a little goodwill, one may take it as a change arising from the story itself and not merely from change of authorship.
More harsh (at lest more hard) more graue and hie
Our subiect runs, and our sterne Muse must flie.
Loues edge is taken off . . .31
The last phrase is curiously happy, for it applies not only to the experience of Hero and Leander but to that change in English poetry with which Chapman’s succession to Marlowe coincides. The old love for a poetry of pure deliciousness was, indeed, losing its edge. Honey began to pall. That is why a movement either to the more violent and knotty poetry of Donne or to the harder and severer poetry of Milton was necessary. In that way the composite Hero and Leander is a kind of bridge. The English Muse herself loses her innocence in the process of telling how Hero lost hers.
The new effect ‘more hard, more graue and hie’ depends on several changes. The most obvious is that of metre. Marlowe uses some enjambment, but I think he is happiest, most irresistibly himself, when he is most end-stopped: here, as in his plays, the superb single line is his characteristic glory—‘The sweet fruition of an earthly crowne’,32 ‘To entertaine diuine Zenocrate’,33 ‘Who euer lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?’34 When there is a run-over it seldom adds much music. But Chapman can write true verse paragraphs in couplets, and the pauses are well managed. There is also a far greater intrusion of philosophical and reflective matter: fifteen lines on optics in the Third (235 et seq.), nine on the nature of beauty (99 et seq.), and eighteen on the properties of numbers (323 et seq.) in the Fifth. These will be unwelcome to the modern reader, but the last is relevant to Chapman’s intention, and if we cared as much as our ancestors did for Arithmosophy (so to call it), it might please. We can also find in Chapman passages of a saturnine realism which, in their own way, strengthen and, as it were, thicken the poem: the sketch of Adolesche has already been mentioned. You may add the description of women talking at a funeral in the tale of Teras (V, 185 et seq.). Yet after all, these detachable passages count for less than that habitual cast—by no means a pale cast—of thought, which mixes with the normal flow of the narrative. A phrase like ‘forme-giuing Cyprias siluer hand’ (V, 314) is typical. Silver connects it with the old style of Marlowe: but forme-giuing lets in the whole doctrine of the archetypal Uranian Venus and the influence of the third heaven. Chapman is taking his Venus more seriously than Marlowe would have done. When he has to describe a woman yielding to a wholly legitimate love, he says
The bribde, but incorrupted Garrison
Sung Io Hymen.
(V, 253)
There is a concentration of thought in ‘bribde but incorrupted’ which it would be hard to find in Spenser, Sidney, or the young Shakespeare. If we could purge the word ‘cleverness’ of the sneering overtones that it has unfortunately acquired, I should say that Chapman’s poetry is almost everywhere cleverer than Marlowe’s: his imagination not less stimulated by the senses but more stimulated by ideas. The following describes the moment at which Hero’s remorse weakens and a reaction in favour of Leander begins.
And all this while the red sea of her blood
Ebd with Leander: but now turnd the flood,
And all her fleete of sprites came swelling in
With childe of saile, and did hot fight begin
With those seuere conceits, she too much markt,
And here Leanders beauties were imbarkt.
He came in swimming painted all with ioyes,
Such as might sweeten hell: his thought destroyes
All her destroying thoughts.
(III, 323)
The splendour of the first line and a half has been praised before. What I would rather draw your attention to is the manner in which, throughout, the ideas and images catch fire from one another: how the ebb leads to the flood, and then the flood no longer exists for itself but carries a fleet, and the swelling of its sails leads to ‘with childe of saile’ and thence to a sea fight, and thence back to Leander, now swimming again; but all this not for ornament, as it might be in a long-tailed epic simile, but closely presenting the movement of Hero’s mind.
This passage comes among the lines—there are nearly five hundred of them—which Chapman devotes to Hero in her solitude, in the Third and Fourth Sestiads. This is on the whole the high-light of his poem. The process of her degeneration is well conceived. It begins in blank despair, at first neither hopeful nor desirous of concealment, then passes to a long stillness, then to the reaction which I have just quoted which leads at once to the delusive belief that all will yet (somehow) be well. After that comes the resolution to be a hypocrite. It is, as I say, well conceived: but it is presented not after the fashion of the novelist nor even as Chaucer would have done it. It reaches us through an intricate pattern of conceit, symbol, and myth, much commented on and generalized. The method seems to me highly successful. The first despair is expressed in a tragic conceit which could not be bettered—
She was a mother straight and bore with paine
Thoughts that spake straight and wisht their mother slaine.
(III, 227)
The prolonged and static misery which follows is not directly described at all. What we are actually shown is simply Hero’s dress and Hero’s pose—the robe of black ‘Cypres’, ‘exceeding large’,35 the left hand clasping it at her breast, the bent head, the knees ‘Wrapt in vnshapeful foulds’.36 It is a method proper to painting but equally proper to narrative poetry: we respond to it with our muscular as well as with our visual imagination. In the next sestiad we see her tricked out again in her priestly garments and working with her needle. We are told little about what she felt during this period of false hope, but we are made to feel it for ourselves because every picture her needle makes is truer than her conscious mind will confess—
These omenous fancies did her soule expresse,
And euery finger made a Prophetesse.
(IV, 108)
After that comes the ill-omened sacrifice, the resolve to act a part, and the apparition of Venus. Out of Hero’s torn robe and torn hair there rises up in the altar fire a new creation, a ‘mayd most faire’,37 girdled with snakes and ending in a scorpion’s tail. It is Eronusis, Dissimulation. The thing that Hero’s mind has conceived now stands before her, like Athene sprung from Jove’s head or Sin from Satan’s. We are in the world of nightmare. Yet still
Betwixt all this and Hero, Hero held
Leanders picture as a Persian shield.
(IV, 345)
The truth and unexpectedness of this conclusion are surely admirable.
It will be seen that Chapman has his own, highly personal, technique for narrative poetry. It stands about midway between the continuous allegory of Spenser and the phantasmagoric poetry of the moderns. He can mingle at will direct psychological description, full-blown allegory, and emblematic picture. Once we accept it, we do not find ourselves confused. For me at least it has great potency. I do not know that I can find exactly the same sort of power anywhere else.
I must, of course, be careful not to claim too much. Neither Marlowe’s nor Chapman’s part of Hero and Leander is anything like a faultless poem. Here, as always (most inexcusably in his Homer), Chapman is too digressive: he is often obscure, always mannered, sometimes ridiculous. He clogs his lines with consonants. He indulges in that curious sort of false rhyme to which Mr Simpson38 devoted an article. As for Marlowe’s part, it is, after all, a beautiful monstrosity: a thing which, even if no moral objections are felt, can win admission to the mind only in a particular mood. Even in that mood we shall admit, if we are quite honest, that it lasts just a little too long. But heaven forbid that we should never read—and praise—any poems less than perfect. Marlowe’s part, with all its limitations, is a very splendid and wonderful expression of accepted sensuality: Chapman’s a very grave and moving reply—an antithesis, yet arising naturally, almost inevitably, out of the thesis. My main concern is not to assess the absolute merit of either but to suggest the propriety of reading the composite poem as a whole. I first made that experiment twenty, or it may be nearer thirty, years ago: repeating it the other day, I found my old delight renewed and even deepened. Hence this lecture. I ask you to admire the lucky accident, if it was no more, which, at that particular moment in the history of poetry, brought together upon that particular story two poets so necessary to one another for enabling us to live through the process which that story embodies. I recommend all who have not done so to read the old book, for once, in the spirit of children to whom a book is an ultimate and who, never thinking even of one author, would not care whether two or twenty-two had written it.