* * * *
Darkness is fled: look; look, infant morn hath drawn
Bright silver curtains 'bout the couch of night;
And now Aurora's house trots azure rings,
Breathing fair light about the firmament."
These last two lines appear feeble enough as contrasted with the beautiful intensity of imagination in Emerson's picturing of the same scene:—
"O, tenderly the haughty Day
Fills his blue urn with fire."
The most beautiful passage in Marston's plays is the lament of a father over the dead body of his son, who has been defamed. It is so apart from his usual style, as to breed the suspicion that the worthy chaplain's daughter, whom he made Mrs. Marston, must have given it to him from her purer imagination:—
"Look on those lips,
Those now lawn pillows, on whose tender softness
Chaste modest speech, stealing from out his breast,
Had wont to rest itself, as loath to post
From out so fair an inn: look, look, they seem
To stir.
And breathe defiance to black obloquy."
If among the dramatists of the period any person could be selected who in disposition was the opposite of Marston, it would be Thomas Dekkar,—a man whose inborn sweetness and gleefulness of soul carried him through vexations and miseries which would have crushed a spirit less hopeful, cheerful, and humane. He was probably born about the year 1575; commenced his career as player and playwright before 1598; and for forty years was an author by profession, that is, was occupied in fighting famine with his pen. The first intelligence we have of him is characteristic of his whole life. It is from Henslowe's Diary, under date of February, 1598: "Lent unto the company, to discharge Mr. Decker out of the counter in the powltry, the sum of 40 shillings." Oldys tells us that "he was in King's Bench Prison from 1613 to 1616"; and the antiquary adds ominously, "how much longer I know not." Indeed, Dr. Johnson's celebrated condensation of the scholar's life would stand for a biography of Dekkar:—
"Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail."
This forced familiarity with poverty and distress does not seem to have imbittered his feelings or weakened the force and elasticity of his mind. He turned his calamities into commodities. If indigence threw him into the society of the ignorant, the wretched, and the depraved, he made the knowledge of low life lie thus obtained serve his purpose as dramatist or pamphleteer. Whatever may have been the effect of his vagabond habits on his principles, they did not stain the sweetness and purity of his sentiments. There is an innocency in his very coarseness, and a brisk, bright good-nature chirps in his very scurrility. In the midst of distresses of all kinds, he still seems, like his own Fortunatus, "all felicity up to the brims"; but that his content with Fortune is not owing to an unthinking ignorance of her caprice and injustice is proved by the words he puts into her mouth:—
"This world is Fortune's ball wherewith she sports.
Sometimes I strike it up into the air,
And then create I emperors and kings;
Sometimes I spurn it, at which spurn crawls out
The wild beast multitude: curse on, you fools,
'Tis I that tumble princes from their thrones,
And gild false brows with glittering diadems;
'T is I that tread on necks of conquerors,
And when like semi-gods they have been drawn
In ivory chariots to the Capitol,
Circled about with wonder of all eyes,
The shouts of every tongue, love of all hearts,
Being swoln with their own greatness, I have pricked
The bladder of their pride, and made them die
As water-bubbles (without memory):
Whilst the true-spirited soldier stands by
Bareheaded, and all bare, whilst at his scars
They scoff, that ne'er durst view the face of wars.
I set an idiot's cap on virtue's head,
Turn learning out of doors, clothe wit in rags,
And paint ten thousand images of loam
In gaudy silken colors: on the backs
Of mules and asses I make asses ride.
Only for sport to see the apish world
Worship such beasts with sound idolatry.
She sits and smiles to hear some curse her name,
And some with adoration crown her fame."