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And drunk to me half this Musaean story,
Inscribing it (a deathless memory;
Confer with it, and make my pledge as deep
That neither1 s draught be consecrate to sleep:
Tell it how much his late desires 1 tender
{If yet it know not), and to light surrender
My sours dark offspring.”
When Chapman is inspired he is not always articulate. In this apostrophe to the “free
soul” of Marlowe we cannot fail to be moved by the impassioned fervour of the
language; but when we come to re-read the passage, and ask ourselves what is the
meaning of the italicised lines, we are beset with some difficulties. It is certain that
the words “late desires “cannot refer to any deathbed utterance of Marlowe; for we
know that his end was fearfully sudden. But if it has any meaning at all, the line, “And
drunk to me half this Musaean story,” implies that Marlowe had shown his unfinished
poem to Chapman. It would not be rash to assert that Chapman had encouraged
Marlowe to proceed with the poem, or that it had been originally undertaken at
Chapman's request. The words “his late desires “refer to some conversation that had
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passed between the two poets. Marlowe must have expressed a desire that in the event
of his death Chapman should edit and complete the poem, a duty which Chapman
solemnly pledged himself to perform. In my judgment the passage shows that
Chapman not only had a profound admiration for Marlowe, but had been on terms of
intimate friendship with him. Dyce remarks that “as to the conclusion of the passage,'
and to light surrender,' &c., I must confess that I am far from understanding it
clearly.” But the meaning seems intelligible: his “soul's dark offspring “is the
continuation of the poem, the four last sestiads as yet undisclosed to public view; and
“to light surrender” merely means to set forth in print to the gaze of the world.
Among all the Elizabethan poets there was none whose genius fitted him to complete
the poem of Hero and Leander. The music of Marlowe's rhymed heroics was all his
own; he was a master without pupils. In Michael Drayton's Heroical Epistles, which
need fear no comparison with Ovid's Heroides, we find fluency and freedom and
sweetness; but the clear, rich, fervent notes of Hero and Leander were heard but once.
No less truly than finely does Mr. Swinburne say that the poem “stands out alone
amid all the wild and poetic wealth of its teeming and turbulent age, as might a small
shrine of Parian sculpture amid the rank splendour of a tropic jungle.” In Chapman's
continuation, as in everything that Chapman wrote, there are fine passages in
abundance; but the reader is wearied by tedious digressions, dull moralising, and
violent conceits. There are couplets in the Tale of Teras (Fifth Sestiad) that for purity
of colour and perfection of form are hardly excelled by anything in the first two
sestiads; such passages, however, are few. Malone stated that Marlowe left in addition
to the two first sestiads “a hundred lines of the third,” but he afterwards retracted the
statement.
Hero and Leander sprang at once into popularity. Shakespeare, as everybody knows,
quoted in As You Like It the line, “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
apostrophising the ill-fated poet, not without a touch of pity, as “dead shepherd;” Ben
Jonson introduced passages of the poem into Every Man in his Humour; Henry
Petowe, a feeble versifier but a sincere admirer of Marlowe's genius, had the audacity
to write and in 1598 to publish The Second part of Hero and Leander; Nashe in
Lenten Stuffe speaks of “divine Musaeus and a diviner Muse than him, Kit Marlowe;”
Taylor the water-poet tells how he used to sing couplets of Hero and Leander as he
plied his sculls on the Thames. Sometimes the poem is mentioned m company with
Venus and Adonis. “1 have conveyed away,” says Harebrain in Middleton's A mad
World my Masters,”all her wanton
pamphlets; as Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis: O two luscious marrow-bone
pies for a young married wife.”
Marlowe's translation of the First Book of Lucan was entered in the Stationers' Books
on 28th September 1593, but no earlier edition than the quarto of 1600 is now known
to exist. Lucan's name stood much higher in Elizabethan times than in our own day.
His grandiloquence, his artificiality, his frigid rhetoric have blinded modern readers to
the genuine power which the author of the Pharsalia undoubtedly possessed.
Quintilian's judgment was well expressed—” Lucanus ardens et con-citatus et
sententiis clanssimus et, ut dicam quod sentio, magis oratoribus quam poetis
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imitandus.” Lucan was not a born poet; there was no spontaneity in his verse, and
even in his best passages he merely keeps on the border-land between poetry and
rhetorical prose. But he could rap out telling lines, and he had an imposing
vocabulary. Marlowe's version of the first book of the Pharsalia is a piece of close
translation, more poetical in some passages than the original, but not doing justice to
Lucan in single lines. In the description of the prodigies observed at Rome after
Caesar's passage of the Rubicon the advantage is undoubtedly Marlowe's, but on the
other hand Lucan's pregnant antitheses and telling phrases are often insufficiently
rendered, as where the famous line
“Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni,”
is Englished by
“Caesar's cause Tiie gods abeited, Cato liked the other.”
Dyce was so struck with the want of “variety of pause “in the versification, that he
was inclined on first thoughts to consider the translation an early essay. But I venture
to think that the lines are not wan ting in variety of pause to any very noticeable
extent. In judging of epic blank verse, it is difficult to avoid a reference to Milton; and
of course if we compare the rhythm of Marlowe's translation with the rhythm of
Paradise Lost—cadit quaestio. But let us dismiss Milton from our minds, and let us
select some of the strongest lines from the translation:—
“Strange sights appeared; the angry threatening gods
Filled both the earth and seas with prodigies.
Great store of strange and unknown stars were seen
Wandering about the north, and rings of fire
Fly in the air, and dreadful bearded stars,
And comets that presage the fall of kingdoms;
The flattering sky glittered in often flames,
And sundry fiery meteors blazed in heaven,
Now spear-like long, now like a spreading touch;
Lightning in silence stole forth without clouds,
And, from the northern climate snatching fire,
Blasted the Capitol; the lesser stars,
Which wont to run their course through empty night,
At noon-day mustered; Phoebe, having filled
Her meeting horns to match her brother's light,
Struck with th' earth's sudden shadow, waxed pale;
Titan himself, throned in the midst of heaven,
His burning chariot plunged in sable clouds,
And whelmed the world in darkness, making men
Despair of day; as did Thyestes' town,
Mycenae, Phoebus flying through the east.
Fierce Mulciber unbarred Aetna's gate,
Which flamèd not on high, but headlong pitched
Her burning head on bending Hespery.
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Coal-black Charybdis whirled a sea of blood.
Fierce mastives howled. The vestal fires went out;
The flame in Alba, consecrate to Jove,