of Alfieri; but that noble tragic writer could hardly have
put such fervor of austere passion into the rigid utterance, or touched
the note of emotion with such a glowing depth of rapture. That "bitter
and severe delight"--if I may borrow the superb phrase of Landor--which
inspires and sustains the imperial pride of self-immolation might have
found in his dramatic dialect an expression as terse and as sincere: it
could hardly have clothed itself with such majestic and radiant
solemnity of living and breathing verse. The rapid elliptic method of
amoebaean dialogue is more in his manner than in any English poet's
known to me except the writer of this scene; but indeed Marston is
in more points than one the most Italian of our dramatists. His
highest tone of serious poetry has in it, like Alfieri's, a note of
self-conscious stoicism and somewhat arrogant self-control; while as a
comic writer he is but too apt, like too many transalpine wits, to
mistake filth for fun, and to measure the neatness of a joke by its
nastiness. Dirt for dirt's sake has never been the apparent aim of any
great English humorist who had not about him some unmistakable touch of
disease--some inheritance of evil or of suffering like the congenital
brain-sickness of Swift or the morbid infirmity of Sterne. A poet of so
high an order as the author of "Sophonisba" could hardly fail to be in
general a healthier writer than such as these; but it cannot be denied
that he seems to have been somewhat inclined to accept the illogical
inference which would argue that because some wit is dirty all dirt
must be witty--because humor may sometimes be indecent, indecency must
always be humorous. "The clartier the cosier" was an old proverb among
the northern peasantry while yet recalcitrant against the inroads of
sanitary reform: "the dirtier the droller" would seem to have been
practically the no less irrational motto of many not otherwise
unadmirable comic writers. It does happen that the drollest character in
all Marston's plays is also the most offensive in his language--"the
foulest-mouthed profane railing brother"; but the drollest passages in
the whole part are those that least want washing. How far the example of
Ben Jonson may have influenced or encouraged Marston in the indulgence
of this unlovely propensity can only be conjectured; it is certain that
no third writer of the time, however given to levity of speech or
audacity in the selection of a subject,