thirty. He was taxed with atheism, but on inadequate grounds, as it appears to me. That he was said to have written a tract against the Trinity, for which a license to print was refused on the ground of blasphemy, might easily have led to the greater charge. That he had some opinions of a kind unusual then may be inferred, perhaps, from a passage in his "Faust.” Faust asks Mephistopheles how, being damned, he is out of hell. And Mephistopheles answers, "Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it." And a little farther on he explains himself thus: "Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed In one self place; for where we are is hell, All places shall be hell that are not heaven." Milton remembered the first passage I have quoted, and puts nearly the same words into the mouth of his Lucifer. If Marlowe was a liberal thinker, it is not strange that in that intolerant age he should have incurred the stigma of general unbelief. Men are apt to blacken opinions which are distasteful to them, and along with them the character of him who holds them. This at least may be said of him without risk. of violating the rule of ne quid nimis, that he is one of the most masculine and fecundating natures in the long line of British poets. Perhaps his energy was even in excess. There is in him an Oriental lavishness. He will impoverish a province for a simile, and pour the revenues of a kingdom into the lap of a description. In that delightful story in the book of Esdras, King Darius, who has just dismissed all his captains and governors of cities and satraps, after a royal feast, sends couriers galloping after them to order them all back again, because he has found a riddle under his pillow, and wishes their aid in solving it. Marlowe in like manner calls in help from every the remotest corner of earth and heaven for what seems to us as trivial an occasion. I will not say that he is bombastic, but he constantly pushes grandiosity to the verge of bombast. His contemporaries thought he passed it in his "Tamburlaine.” His imagination flames and flares, consuming what it should caress, as Jupiter did Semele. That exquisite phrase of Hamlet, "the modesty of nature,” would never have occurred to him. Yet in the midst of the hurly-burly there will fall a sudden hush, and we come upon passages calm and pellucid as mountain tarns filled to the brim with the purest distillations of heaven. And, again, there are single verses that open silently as roses, and surprise us with that seemingly accidental perfection, which there is no use in talking about because itself says all that is to be said and more. There is a passage in "Tamburlaine" which I remember reading in the first course of lectures I ever delivered, thirty-four years ago, as a poet's feeling of the inadequacy of the word to the idea: "If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, Yet should there hover in their restless heads One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, Marlowe made snatches at this forbidden fruit with vigorous leaps, and not without bringing away a prize now and then such as only the fewest have been able to reach. Of fine single verses I give a few as instances of this: "Sometimes a lovely boy in Dian's shape, Here is a couplet notable for dignity of poise describing Tamburlaine : "Of stature tall and straightly fashioned, Like his desire, lift upward and divine." "For every street like to a firmament "Unwedded maids Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows Than have the white breasts of the queen of Love." This from "Tamburlaine" is particularly characteristic: "Nature Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds. One of these verses reminds us of that exquisite one of Shakespeare where he says that Love is Still climbing trees in the Hesperides.” But Shakespeare puts a complexity of meaning into his chance sayings, and lures the fancy to excursions of which Marlowe never dreamt. But, alas, a voice will not illustrate like a stereopticon, and this tearing away of fragments that seem to bleed with the avulsion is like breaking off a finger from a statue as a specimen. The impression he made upon the men of his time was uniform; it was that of something new and strange; it was that of genius, in short. Drayton says of him, kindling to an unwonted warmth, as if he loosened himself for a moment from the choking coils of his Polyolbion for a larger breath: "Next Marlowe bathèd in the Thespian springs Which rightly should possess a poet's brain." And Chapman, taking up and continuing Marlowe's half-told story of Hero and Leander, breaks forth suddenly into this enthusiasm of invocation : "Then, ho! most strangely intellectual fire That, proper to my soul, hast power to inspire Surely Chapman would have sent his soul on no such errand had he believed that the soul of Marlowe was in torment, as his accusers did not scruple to say that it was, sent thither by the manifestly divine judgment of his violent death. Yes, Drayton was right in classing him with. "the first poets," for he was indeed such, and so continues, that is, he was that most indefinable thing, an original man, and therefore as fresh |