Page:The Age of Shakespeare - Swinburne (1908).djvu/136

 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 humour 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