Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/108

88 But Chapman is more of a philosopher and less of a dramatist than Marlowe. His turbid style is lightened by magnificent flashes of poetry, but never burns with the clear and lovely radiance of Marlowe's finest passages. His heroes, both rebels such as Bussy and Byron, and Senecan men such as Clermont in the Revenge, Cato, and Chabot, are all philosophers, reasoning in language which is often harsh, obscure, and bombastic, but which is often also intense and glowing, of "fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute." Their motives are not elucidated in the sympathetic manner in which Marlowe delineates the ambition, the lust of gold and beauty, the hates and loves of his characters. From all the thunder and cloud and lightning of the speeches of Bussy or Byron it is not easy to gather what they would be at or why. Their deeds are not in proportion to their words; they may be violent but are not great. What remains in the mind is the sentiments of men of dauntless courage and unyielding resolution rising superior to all material and prudential considerations.

A more interesting and important figure in the history of the drama than Chapman is the poet who alone of his compeers has enjoyed the honour of being at any time set in rivalry to Shakespeare. When the century opened, when the latter had perfected the romantic drama created