Pygmalion is written in the same metre as Venus and Adonis (from which poem Marston drew his inspiration)—a metre which Lodge had handled with considerable success. A poet who would approach the subject of Pygmalion and his image ought to be gifted with tact and delicacy. In our own day Mr. Morris (in The Earthly Paradise) has told the old Greek story in choice and fluent narrative verse; no poet could have treated it more gracefully. Tact and delicacy were precisely the qualities in which Marston was deficient; but the versification is tolerably smooth, and the licentiousness does not call for any special reprehension. In the Scourge of Villainy (sat. vi.) Marston pretends that
Pygmalion was written to bring contempt on the class of poems to which it belongs:—
“Hence, thou misjudging censor! know I wrote
Those idle rhymes to note the odious spot
And blemish that deforms the lineaments
Of modern poesy’s habiliments.”
But it would require keener observation than most readers possess to discover in Pygmalion any trace of that moral motive by which the poet claimed to have been inspired. Archbishop Whitgift did not approve of its moral tone, for in 1599 he ordered it to be committed to the flames with Sir John Davies’ Epigrams, Cutwode’s Caltha Poetarum, and other works of a questionable character. In Cranley’s Amanda, 1635, it is mentioned, in company with Hero and Leander and Venus and Adonis, as part of a courtezan’s library.
There is not much pleasure or profit to be derived from a perusal of Marston’s satires. The author deliberately adopted an uncouth and monstrous style of phraseology; his allusions are frequently quite unintelligible to modern readers, and even the wits of his contemporaries must have been sorely exercised. After a course of Marston’s satires Persius is clear as crystal. In the second satire there are some lines which aptly express the reader’s bewilderment:
"O darkness palpable; Egypt’s black night!
My wit is stricken blind, hath lost his sight:
My shins are broke with searching for some sense
To know to what his words have reference.”
Our sense is deafened by the tumult of noisy verbiage “as when a madman beats upon a drum.” In Marston’s satires there is little of the raciness and buoyancy that we find in the elder satirists—Skelton, Roy, and William Baldwin—who dealt good swashing blows in homely vigorous English. Persius would not have been flattered by Marston’s or Hall’s attempts at imitation: “nec pluteum cædit nec demorsos sapit ungues” would have been his comment on the spurious pseudo-classical Elizabethan satire. Hall claimed to have been the first to introduce classical satire into England. In the prologue to the first book of Virgidemiæ, 1597, he writes:—
“I first adventure with foolhardy might
To tread the steps of perilous despight:
I first adventure: follow me who list,
And be the second English satirist.”
It matters little whether Hall’s claim was well-founded or not; but it has been often pointed out that there is extant a MS. copy of Donne’s satires dated 1593. Hall, who lived to be one of the glories of the English Church, in early manhood certainly did not present an example of Christian meekness and charity. He took a very low view of contemporary writers, but never had the slightest misgivings about his own abilities. It is not easy to ascertain how his quarrel with Marston arose, but it seems clear that he was the aggressor. Pygmalion was published a year later than Virgidemiæ, but it had probably been circulated in manuscript, according to the
custom of the time, before it issued from the press. There can be little doubt that the ninth satire of book i. of Virgidemiæ, is directed against Marston. The opening lines run thus:—