Chapman was also a voluminous dramatist, and of his many comedies and tragedies some sixteen were printed. It is to be feared that the last twenty years of his long and honorable life were passed in a desperate struggle for the means of subsistence. But his ideas of the dignity of his art were so inwoven into his character that he probably met calamity bravely. Poesy he early professed to prefer above all worldly wisdom, being composed, in his own words, of the "sinews and souls of all learning, wisdom, and truth." "We have example sacred enough," he said, "that true Poesy's humility, poverty, and contempt are badges of divinity, not vanity. Bray then, and bark against it, ye wolf-faced worldlings, that nothing but riches, honors, and magistracy" can content "I (for my part) shall ever esteem it much more manly and sacred, in this harmless and pious study, to sit until I sink into my grave, than shine in your vainglorious bubbles and impieties; all your poor policies, wisdoms, and their trappings, at no more valuing than a musty nut." These sentiments were probably fresh in his heart when, in 1634, friendless and poor, at the age of seventy-five, he died. Anthony Wood describes him as "a person of most reverend aspect, religious and temperate; qualities," he spitefully adds, "rarely meeting in a poet."
Chapman was a man with great elements in his nature, which were so imperfectly harmonized that what he was found but a stuttering expression in what he wrote and did. There were gaps in his mind; or, to use Victor Hugo's image, "his intellect was a book with some leaves torn out." His force, great as it was, was that of an Ajax, rather than that of an Achilles. Few dramatists of the time afford nobler passages of description and reflection. Few are wiser, deeper, manlier in their strain of thinking. But when we turn to the dramas from which these grand things have been detached, we find extravagance, confusion, huge thoughts lying in helpless heaps, sublimity in parts conducing to no general effect of sublimity, the movement lagging and unwieldy, and the plot urged on to the catastrophe by incoherent expedients. His imagination partook of the incompleteness of his intellect. Strong enough to clothe the ideas and emotions of a common poet, it was plainly inadequate to embody the vast, half-formed conceptions which gasped for expression in his soul in its moments of poetic exaltation. Often we feel his meaning, rather than apprehend it. The imagery has the indefiniteness of distant objects seen by moonlight. There are whole passages in his works in which he seems engaged in expressing Chapman to Chapman, like the deaf egotist who only placed his trumpet to his ear when he himself talked.
This criticism applies more particularly to his tragedies, and to his expression of great sentiments and passions. His comedies, though over-informed with thought, reveal him to us as a singularly sharp, shrewd, and somewhat cynical observer, sparkling with worldly wisdom, and not deficient in airiness any more than wit. Hazlitt, we believe, was the first to notice that Monsieur D'Olive, in the comedy of that name, is "the undoubted prototype of that light, flippant, gay, and infinitely delightful class of character, of the professed men of wit and pleasure about town, which we have in such perfection in Wycherly and Congreve, such as Sparkish, Witwond, Petulant, &c., both in the sentiments and the style of writing"; and Tharsalio in "The Widow's Tears," and Ludovico in "May-Day," have the hard impudence and cynical distrust of virtue, the arrogant and glorying self-unrighteousness, that distinguish another class of characters which the dramatists of the age of Charles and Anne were unwearied in providing with insolence and repartees. Occasionally we have a jest which Falstaff would not disown. Thus in "May-Day," when Cuthbert, a barber, approaches Quintiliano, to get, if possible, "certain odd crowns" the latter owes him, Quintiliano says, "I think thou 'rt newly married?" "I am indeed, sir," is the reply. "I thought so; keep on thy hat, man, 't will be the less perceived." Chapman, in his comedies generally, shows a kind of philosophical contempt for woman, as a frailer and flimsier, if fairer, creature than man, and he sustains his bad judgment with infinite ingenuity of wilful wit and penetration of ungracious analysis. In "The Widow's Tears" this unpoetic infidelity to the sex pervades the whole plot and incidents, as well as gives edge to many an incisive sarcasm. My sense, says Tharsalio, "tells me how short-lived widows' tears are, that their weeping is in truth but laughing under a mask, that they mourn in their gowns and laugh in their sleeves; all of which I believe as a Delphian oracle, and am resolved to burn in that faith." "He," says Lodovico, in "May-Day,"—he "that holds religious and sacred thought of a woman, he that holds so reverend a respect to her that he will not touch her but with a kist hand and a timorous heart, he that adores her like his goddess, let him be sure she will shun him like her slave.... Whereas nature made" women "but half fools, we make 'em all fool: and this is our palpable flattery of them, where they had rather have plain dealing." In all Chapman's comic writing there is something of Ben Jonson's mental self-assertion and disdainful glee in his own superiority to the weakness he satirizes.
In passing from a comedy like "May-Day" to a tragedy like "Bussy D'Ambois," we find some difficulty in recognizing the features of the same nature. "Bussy D'Ambois" represents a mind not so much in creation as in eruption, belching forth smoke, ashes, and stones, no less than flame. Pope speaks of it as full of fustian; but fustian is rant in the words when there is no corresponding rant in the soul; whilst Chapman's tragedy, like Marlowe's "Tamburlaine," indicates a greater swell in the thoughts and passions of his characters than in their expression. The poetry is to Shakespeare's what gold ore is to gold. Veins and lumps of the precious metal gleam on the eye from the duller substance in which it is imbedded. Here are specimens:—
"Man is torch borne in the wind; a dream
But of a shadow, summed with all his substance;
And as great seamen, using all their wealth
And skills in Neptune's deep invisible paths,
In tall ships richly built and ribbed with brass,
To put a girdle round about the world,
When they have done it (coming near their haven)
Are fain to give a warning piece, and call
A poor stayed fisherman, that never past
His country's sight, to waft and guide them in:
So when we wander furthest through the waves
Of glassy glory and the gulfs of state,
Topped with all titles, spreading all our reaches,
As if each private arm would sphere the earth,
We must to Virtue for her guide resort,
Or we shall shipwreck in our safest port."
"In a king
All places are contained. His words and looks
Are like the flashes and the bolts of Jove;
His deeds inimitable, like the sea
That shuts still as it opes, and leaves no tracks,
Nor prints of precedent for mean men's acts."
"His great heart will not down: 't is like the sea
That partly by his own internal heat,
Partly the stars' daily and nightly motion,
Their heat and light, and partly of the place
The divers frames, but chiefly by the moon
Bristled with surges, never will be won,
(No, not when th' hearts of all those powers are burst,)
To make retreat into his settled home,
Till he be crowned with his own quiet foam."
"Now, all ye peaceful regents of the night,
Silently gliding exhalations,
Languishing winds, and murmuring falls of waters,
Sadness of heart, and ominous secureness,
Enchantments, dead sleeps, all the friends of rest
That ever wrought upon the life of man,
Extend your utmost strengths; and this charmed hour
Fix like the centre."
"There is One
That wakes above, whose eye no sleep can bind:
He sees through doors and darkness and our thoughts."
"O, the dangerous siege
Sin lays about us! and the tyranny
He exercises when he hath expugned:
Like to the horror of a winter's thunder,
Mixed with a gushing storm, that suffer nothing
To stir abroad on earth but their own rages,
Is sin, when it hath gathered head above us."