whose misfortune it is to fall between two stools-to halt between two courses. It is certain that he never thoroughly mastered either the cavalry drill of Shakespeare or the infantry drill of Jonson. But it is no less certain that the few finest passages which attest the power and the purity of his genius as a poet are above comparison with any such examples of tragic poetry as can be attributed with certainty or with plausibility to the hand which has left us no acknowledged works in that line except Sejanus his Fall and Catiline his Conspiracy. It is superfluous to add that Volpone was an achievement only less far out of his reach than Hamlet. But this is not to say or to imply that he does not deserve an honourable place among English poets. His savage and unblushing violence or vehemence of satire has no taint of gloating or morbid prurience in the turbid flow of its fitful and furious rhetoric. The restless rage of his invective is as far as human utterance can find itself from the cynical infidelity of an Iago. Of him we may say with more rational confidence what was said of that more potent and more truculent satirist : An honest man he is, and hates the slime We may wish that he had not been so much given to trampling and stamping on that slime as to evoke such malodorous exhalations as infect the lower and shallower reaches of the river down which he proceeds to steer us with so strenuous a hand. But it is in a spirit of healthy disgust, not of hankering delight, that he insists on calling the indignant attention of his readers to the baser and fouler elements of natural or social man as displayed in the vicious exuberance or eccentricity of affectation or of self-indulgence. His real interest and his real sympathies are reserved for the purer and nobler types of womanhood and manhood. In his first extant tragedy, crude and fierce and coarse and awkward as is the general treatment of character and story, the sketch of Mellida is genuinely beautiful in its pathetic and subdued simplicity; though certainly no such tender and gentle figure was ever enchased in a stranger or less attractive setting. There is an odd mixture of care and carelessness in the composition of his plays which is exemplified by the fact that another personage in the first part of the same dramatic poem was announced to reappear in the second part as a more important and elaborate figure; but this second part opens with the appearance of his assassin, red-handed from the murder: and the two parts were published in the same year. And indeed, except in Parasitaster and The Dutch Courtesan, a general defect in his unassisted plays is the headlong confusion of plot, the helterskelter violence of incident, which would hardly have been looked for in the work of a professional and practised hand. What you Will is modestly described as a slight-writ play: but slight and slovenly are not the same thing; nor is simplicity the VOL. XXIV.-No. 140. PP equivalent of incoherence. Marston is apt to be heaviest when he aims at being lightest; not, like Ben Jonson, through a laborious and punctilious excess of conscience which is unwilling to let slip any chance of effect, to let pass any detail of presentation; but rather, we are tempted to suspect, through a sardonic sense of scorn for the perfunctory task on which his ambitious and impatient hand is for the time employed. Now and then, however-or perhaps it would be more accurate to say once or twice-a gayer note is struck with a lighter touch than usual: as for instance in the excellent parody of Lyly put into the mouth of an idiot in the first scene of the fifth act of the first part of Antonio and Mellida. "You know, the stone called lapis, the nearer it comes to the fire, the hotter it is; and the bird which the geometricians call avis, the further it is from the earth, the nearer it is to the heaven; and love, the nigher it is to the flame, the more remote (there's a word, remote !) the more remote it is from the frost.' Shakespeare and Scott have condescended to caricature the style or the manner of the inventor of euphuism: I cannot think their burlesque of his elaborate and sententious triviality so happy, so humorous, or so exact as this. But it is not on his capacity as a satirist or humourist, it is on his occasionally triumphant success as a serious or tragic poet, that the fame of Marston rests assuredly established. His intermittent power to rid himself for awhile of his besetting faults, and to acquire or assume for a moment the very excellences most incompatible with these, is as extraordinary for the completeness as for the transitory nature of its successful effects. The brief fourth act of Antonio and Mellida is the most astonishing and bewildering production of belated human genius that ever distracted or discomfited a student. Verses more delicately beautiful followed by verses more simply majestic than these have rarely if ever given assurance of eternity to the fame of any but a great master in song. Conceit you me: as having clasped a rose And roam in progress through the bounds of heaven, The soul itself gallops along with them As chieftain of this winged troop of thought, Whilst the dull lodge of spirit standeth waste Then follows a passage of sheer gibberish; then a dialogue of the noblest and most dramatic eloquence; then a chaotic alternation of sense and nonsense, bad Italian and mixed English, abject farce and dignified rhetoric, spirited simplicity and bombastic jargon. It would be more and less than just to take this act as a sample or a symbol of the author's usual way of work; but I cannot imagine that a parallel to it, for evil and for good, could be found in the works of any other writer. The Muse of this poet is no maiden of such pure and august beauty as enthralls us with admiration of Webster's; she has not the gipsy brightness and vagrant charm of Dekker's, her wild soft glance, and flashing smiles and fading traces of tears; she is no giddy girl, but a strong woman with fine irregular features, large and luminous eyes, broad intelligent forehead, eyebrows so thick and c ose together that detraction might call her beetle-browed, powerful mouth and chin, fine contralto voice (with an occasional stammer), expression alternately repellent and attractive, but always striking and sincere. No one has ever found her lovely; but there are times when she has a fascination of her own which fairer and more famous singers might envy her; and the friends she makes are as sure to be constant as she, for all her occasional roughness and coarseness, is sure to be loyal in the main to the nobler instincts of her kind and the loftier traditions of her sisterhood. A. C. SWINBURNE. SINS OF BELIEF AND SINS OF UNBELIEF. How are we to regard the action of our emotions and our will upon our judgments? Is it right that we should allow them so to act, or is it wrong? or is it sometimes right and sometimes wrong according to the circumstances of each case? Should we always endeavour to eliminate the influence of our sentiments, or should we sometimes not only tolerate but even welcome their influence? These are questions the replies to which are as important as they are interesting. They are questions also to which I have lately called attention, though I could then only treat them in a very cursory and incomplete manner. It was, however, my hope to be able to draw out more fully and clearly what I regard as their true solution, and to indicate what may, as it seems to me, be respectively considered sins of belief and sins of unbelief. I have before ventured to refer to what I termed 'the sin 1 See Nineteenth Century for December 1887, p. 869, note 34. In that article I purposely reserved my reasons for accepting Christianity, because I was replying to Sir James Stephen. It would obviously have been absurd to discuss the proofs of revelation with one who did not even accept natural religion. My critic's rejoinder was no surprise or disappointment to me. I was far from expecting to effect a change in his views. He is evidently quite unable to consider the question of religion otherwise than from the Protestant standpoint. He has declared that he would not attack any one who professed to adhere to a religion, not from reason, but on account of his feelings! Neither would I, because of the profound contempt I entertain for so inane a thing as a 'religion of emotion,' though I would try, with all kindness, to convince its adherent of his extreme folly. 2 Ibid. July 1887, p. 35. Therein the following passage also occurs: 'Doubt has acquired, for men of science who are Theists, a distinctly religious character. Few things seem to them more shocking than to be called upon to give assent to propositions which are not only neither self-evident nor certainly proved, but are even declared to be possibly untrue. Every man of science worthy of the name must not only refuse to give such assent, but must declare that he holds even things he considers proved only in such a way as to be ready to examine and weigh whatever seemingly important evidence may be freshly brought to light against them. For he doubts in obedience to a sense of duty, and must regard as nothing less than a blasphemy the assertion that God can possibly approve of any trifling with the highest faculty He has bestowed upon us, and for the right use of which we are responsible. Such a man will deem the acceptance of any irrational belief in compliance with an emotional temptation, to be fully as culpable as the harbouring of an irrational scepticism due to some other unworthy motive.' of rashness of assent,' declaring it to be no less evidently our duty to withhold assent from things inadequately proved than to affirm what is evidently true, and pointing out the sacred character which doubt might assume in the mind of a Theistic man of science. Nevertheless I was careful also to declare not only that our sentiments and volitions have, as a fact, a certain influence on our beliefs, but also that they may exercise such an influence legitimately.3 It is this circumstance alone which renders it possible that any merit or demerit can attach to our convictions. It is this very circumstance, some of my readers will exclaim, which renders such merit or demerit impossible. The beliefs of each person, they will go on to say, are the outcome of the peculiar constitution of his mind and the circumstances of his environment. They are just that and no more, and therefore (they will conclude) there can be no such things as sins either of belief or unbelief. But this objection really goes much further than it may at first sight appear to do, and amounts to a denial that we have any power of control over our actions, thoughts, or feelings. It is really an affirmation of Determinism—that is, of the doctrine that a man has no more choice as to any of his actions, words, or aspirations, than a piece of paper thrown into the fire has a choice. as to whether it will or will not burn. Persons who affirm this may very logically deny the possibility of sins of belief or unbelief, since, if they are right, there can be no such things as 'sins' at all of any sort or kind! But the present article is not addressed to that section of a 'mad world' which altogether denies any freedom or responsibility to the human will-the question having been treated of elsewhere.1 My purpose now is assuming that there are such things as sins, duties, and responsibilities-to endeavour to make plain the statement (at first somewhat paradoxical in appearance) that though it is the exclusive business of the intellect to decide and judge about all truths brought before it, yet the sentiments and the will have nevertheless a certain legitimate influence in bringing about such judgments. Fully admitting that no two minds are absolutely and intrinsically alike and that no two human beings are alike in their circumstances; entirely granting that the intellect has no power of choice, but must decide as the balance of evidence seems to it to incline, I none the Nineteenth Century for December 1887, pp. 851 and 869. The words were: 'I would by no means be understood as denying the influence of the will on religious belief. I do not mean that the will either has or ought to have any direct control over our intellectual perceptions; I mean only that experience has intimately convinced me that the attitude of the will towards ethical precepts has a great, though indirect and unconscious, effect upon a man's convictions' (p. 851). In our intellectual acts a certain amount of volition and feeling have each also their part,' which given conditions will inevitably and most legitimately intensify' (p. 869). See Lessons from Nature (John Murray), chapter v., (Burns & Oates), chapter v. and Nature and Thought |
