‘In thee Ben Jonson still held Shakspeare’s style’;
or that he possest
‘Lucan’s bold heights match’d to staid Virgil’s care,
Martial’s quick salt, joined to Musæus’ tongue.’
This superabundance of eulogy, when we remember the men and the age from which it comes, tempts one to form such a conception of Cartwright as, indeed, the portrait prefixed to his works (ed. 1651) gives us; the offspring of an over-educated and pedantic age, highly stored with everything but strength and simplicity; one in whom genius has been rather shaped (perhaps cramped) than developed: but genius was present, without a doubt, under whatsoever artificial trappings; and Ben Jonson spoke but truth when he said, ‘My son Cartwright writes all like a man.’ It is impossible to open a page of ‘The Lady Errant,’ ‘The Royal Slave,’ ‘The Ordinary,’ or ‘Love’s Convert,’ without feeling at once that we have to do with a man of a very different stamp from any (Massinger perhaps alone excepted) who was writing between 1630 and 1640. The specific gravity of the poems, so to speak, is far greater than that of any of his contemporaries; everywhere is thought, fancy, force, varied learning. He is never weak or dull; though he fails often enough, is often enough wrong-headed, fantastical, affected, and has never laid bare the deeper arteries of humanity, for good or for evil. Neither is he altogether an original thinker; as one would expect, he has over-read himself: but then he has done so to good purpose. If he imitates, he generally equals. The table of fare in ‘The Ordinary’ smacks of Rabelais or Aristophanes: but then it is worthy of either; and if one cannot help suspecting that ‘The Ordinary’ never would have been written had not Ben Jonson written ‘The Alchemist,’ one confesses that Ben Jonson need not have been ashamed to have written the play himself: although the plot, as all Cartwright’s are, is somewhat confused and inconsequent. If he be Platonically sentimental in ‘Love’s Convert,’ his sentiment is of the noblest and the purest; and the confest moral of the play is one which that age needed, if ever age on earth did.
‘’Tis the good man’s office
To serve and reverence woman, as it is
The fire’s to burn; for as our souls consist
Of sense and reason, so do yours, more noble,
Of sense and love, which doth as easily calm
All your desires, as reason quiets ours. . . .
Love, then, doth work in you, what Reason doth
In us; here only lies the difference,—
Ours wait the lingering steps of Age and Time;
But the woman’s soul is ripe when it is young;
So that in us what we call learning, is
Divinity in you, whose operations,
Impatient of delay, do outstrip time.’
For the sake of such words, in the midst of an evil and adulterous generation, we will love young Cartwright, in spite of the suspicion that, addressed as the play is to Charles, and probably acted before his queen, the young rogue had been playing the courtier somewhat, and racking his brains for pretty sayings which would exhibit as a virtue that very uxoriousness of the poor king which at last cost him his head. The ‘Royal Slave,’ too, is a gallant play, right-hearted and lofty from beginning to end, though enacted in an impossible court-cloud-world, akin to that in which the classic heroes and heroines of Corneille and Racine call each other Monsieur and Madame.
As for his humour; he, alas! can be dirty like the rest, when necessary: but humour he has of the highest quality. ‘The Ordinary’ is full of it; and Moth, the Antiquary, though too much of a lay figure, and depending for his amusingness on his quaint antiquated language, is such a sketch as Mr. Dickens need not have been ashamed to draw.
The ‘Royal Slave’ seems to have been considered, both by the Court and by his contemporaries, his masterpiece. And justly so; yet our pleasure at Charles’s having shown, for once, good taste, is somewhat marred by Langbaine’s story, that the good acting of the Oxford scholars, ‘stately scenes, and richness of the Persian habits,’ had as much to do with the success of the play as its ‘stately style,’ and ‘the excellency of the songs, which were set by that admirable composer, Mr. Henry James.’ True it is, that the songs are excellent, as are all Cartwright’s; for grace, simplicity, and sweetness, equal to any (save Shakspeare’s) which the seventeenth century produced: but curiously enough, his lyric faculty seems to have exhausted itself in these half-dozen songs. His minor poems are utterly worthless, out Cowleying Cowley in frigid and fantastic conceits; and his varied addresses to the king and queen are as bombastic and stupid and artificial as anything which bedizened the reigns of Charles II. or his brother.
Are we to gather from this fact that Cartwright was not really an original genius, but only a magnificent imitator; that he could write plays well, because others had written them well already, but only for that reason; and that for the same reason, when he attempted detached lyrics and addresses, he could only follow the abominable models which he saw around him? We know not; for surely in Jonson and Shakspeare’s minor poems he might have found simpler and sweeter types; and even in those of Fletcher, who appears, from his own account, to have been his especial pattern. Shakspeare however, as we have seen, he looked down on; as did the rest of his generation.
Cartwright, as an Oxford scholar, is of course a worshipper of Charles, and a hater of Puritans. We do not wish to raise a prejudice against so young a man by quoting any of the ridiculous, and often somewhat abject, rant with which he addresses their majesties on their return from Scotland, on the queen’s delivery, on the birth of the Duke of York, and so forth; for in that he did but copy the tone of grave divines and pious prelates; but he, unfortunately for his fame, is given (as young geniuses are sometimes) to prophecy; and two of his prophecies, at least, have hardly been fulfilled. He was somewhat mistaken when, on the birth of the Duke of York, he informed the world that