of your State in freedom,' &c.; with the implied and essential proviso that recourse to the law of the beasts must never be carried beyond the need. I say justifies on moral grounds. For when Mr. Morley asks, presenting the Machiavellian precept to us as a counsel of despair, If moral force and spiritual force are exhausted, with what hope can you look for either good soldiers or good rulers?' he leads our minds down a wrong turning. For by many signs the truth seems to be that moral and spiritual force is coming into existence by development, not going out by exhaustion. And as the nations rise from barbarism, how they can be protected from destruction by ruder and less scrupulous rivals, so that their spiritual growths may continue, strengthen, and propagate their kind, if not by the only means by which aggression can be foiled or repelled? Moral influences, or any supposed awe that they may shed, will not do it. And (to quote myself) unless the free existence of such a community is upheld through a long period of moral development, and upheld till other States reciprocate the bias to a higher morality, the only way of bringing mankind into the rule of none but moral and spiritual forces is fatally interrupted. Provide against the interruption, and there is hope; at least so I make out, as follows. The morality of a State may be considered as a trinity in unity. There is that which goes to the perfecting of citizenship, that which goes to the perfecting of individual character, and that which makes for the extension of civic relations or amenities to other States. Through the perfecting of individual character, the perfecting of citizenship; through the perfecting of both, the extension of the obligations and amenities of citizenship to groups of nations.' That is the natural order; the third process depending on the other two. In one way or another Patriotism constitutes nearly the whole morality of citizenship, and in nearly every sense is a determination to maintain the existence and freedom of the State. It cannot be got rid of without destroying the State itself; and with the ruin of the State the evolutionary process breaks down at some point before the perfecting of citizenship and individual character has prepared a possibility of including groups of nations in civic obligations and amenities.' There has been no time to await and establish a reciprocal bias to a higher system of morality. All goes, and again. and again similar beginnings come to the same end. Here, it seems to me, is clear justification of the Machiavellian precept on moral grounds. Of course it can be misconceived, misconstrued, transformed by arbitrary interpretation, and that cannot be helped. But there will be agreement on one point. If Machiavelism is detestable in foreign affairs, it is not less so in domestic affairs. Doubt about keeping a nation in existence if it may only be done by unveracity, false profession, breach of faith, is not well counte nanced by the practice of these arts in an infinitely more immoral way to keep a party in office. And if, as appears certain, the best hope of evicting the Law of the Beasts from international affairs is by the elevation of political sentiment in the several States of the world, it is plain that their rulers have a double duty in harmonising their scruples to the tune of Morality begins at home. FREDERICK GREENWOOD. JOHN DAY ONE of the very greatest poets that ever glorified the world has left on record his wish that Beaumont and Fletcher had written poems instead of plays; and his wish has been echoed by one of the finest and surest critics of poetry, himself an admirable and memorable poet, unequalled in his own line of terse and pathetic narrative or allegory. I am reluctant if not ashamed, and sorry if not afraid, to differ from Coleridge and Leigh Hunt; yet I cannot but think that it would have been a pity, a mistake, and a grievous loss to poetic or creative literature, if the great twin brethren of our drama had not given their whole soul and their whole strength to the stage. I cannot imagine that any poetry they might have left us, had they gone astray after Spenser with the kinsmen of the elder of the two, could have been worth Philaster or The Spanish Curate, The Maid's Tragedy or The Knight of Malta. But I do sincerely regret that a far humbler labourer in the same Elysian field should have wasted the treasure of a sweet bright fancy and the charm of a true lyrical gift on work too hard and high for him. John Day should never have written for the stage of Shakespeare. The pretty allegory of his Peregrinatio Scholastica, a really charming example of that singular branch of medieval literature which had yet to find its last consummate utterance in the Pilgrim's Progress of a half inspired but wholly demented and demoralised Christomaniac, is perhaps better reading than his comedies; and it is not the least of our many debts to the industrious devotion of Mr. Bullen that we owe to him the publication of this long buried and forgotten little work of kindly and manly and rather pathetic fancy. There is nothing in it of such reptile rancour as hisses and spits and pants with all the recreant malignity of a fangless viper, through the stagnant and fetid fenlands of The Return from Parnassus. We are touched and interested by the modest plea-it is rather a plea than a plaint-of the poor simple scholar; but perhaps we only realise how hard and heavy must have been the pressure of necessity or mischance on his gentle and fanciful genius when we begin to read the first extant play in which he took a fitful and indistinguishable part. And yet there is good matter in The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, however VOL. XLII-No. 248 549 PP hasty and headlong be the management or conduct of the huddled and muddled combination or confusion of plots. The scene in which poor Bess, driven toward suicide by the villany of her guardian and the infidelity of her betrothed, first comes across her disguised and unrecognised father, and turns all her own sorrow into pity for him and devotion to the needs of a suffering stranger, is a good example of that exquisite simplicity in expression of pathetic fancy which was common to all the dramatic poets of the divine Shakespearean generation, and peculiar to them. Art thou blind, sayest thou? Let me see thy face: O, let me kiss it too, and with my tears I called thee father-ay, thou shalt be my father; He'd tell thee that his daughter held him dear; It would seem that the very existence and presence of Shakespeare on English earth must have infected with a celestial contagion of incomparable style the very lowliest of his followers in art and his fellows in aspiration. It would also seem that the instinct of such emotion, the capacity of such expression, had died out for ever with the after-glow of his sunset. Even the grateful and joyful appreciation of the legacies bequeathed to us by the poets of that transcendent age is now no natural and general property of all Englishmen who can read, but the exceptional and eccentric quality of a few surviving students who prefer old English silver and gold to new foreign brass and copper. Shakespeare and Marlowe to the vile seem vile: Themselves, that is, and their Ibsens. Like lips, like lettuce.' There is some good simple fun too in this homely and humble old play the Norfolk yeomen are not all unworthy compatriots of Tennyson's immortal Northern Farmers; there is something in young Tom's reflection, Well, I see I might ha' kept company with honest men all the days o' my life ere I should ha' learned half this knavery." Worse jests than this have found wider echoes of laughter; and Tom approves himself a good fellow, and a living creature of a real creator, when he risks his life for the blind old beggar: I'll take up my lodging on God's dear ground ere thou shalt take any harm.' It is a pity we have lost the double sequel to this play; I for one, at all events, should rejoice to read the second part of Strowd' and 'the third part of Tom Strowd.' His evident popularity does credit to the honest and wholesome taste of his audience. It is a curious sign of the times that Day and his comrade Chettle should have ventured and found it profitable to venture a trespass on ground preoccupied already by Marlowe, if not by Shakespeare; and we can only wonder whether Duke Humphrey and Cardinal Beaufort reappeared and renewed their tragic wrangling on the stage of the second or the third part of a story transported from the traditional date of Henry the Third to the theatrically popular date of Henry the Sixth. It is perhaps needless to remind any reader that the blind beggar who played his part on the Bethnal Green of our old balladmongers was supposed to be the surviving son of the great Earl Simon, blinded. and left for dead on the battle-field of Evesham. A quaint and primitive little play, The Maid's Metamorphosis, printed in the year which Henslowe gives as the date of the production of The Blind Beggar, who was not to see the light of print till fifty-nine years later, has been conjecturally and plausibly assigned by Mr. Gosse to the hand of Day. The fluent simplicity of rhyming verse is sometimes sweet as well as smooth. In the first scene of the second act there is so singular an instance of the crude and childish licence which allowed an actor in the play to address the audience, that I should have expected to find it a familiar quotation in the notes or commentaries of editors who were scholars, and not such impudently ignorant impostors as have sometimes undertaken a work of which they did not understand the simplest and most elementary conditions. (He speaks to the people). Well, I pray you look to my master, for here I leave him amongst you.' There are touches of pleasant fancy and joyous music in this evidently juvenile poem which may recall to a modern reader the lighter moods of Keats. Its author, like the author of Doctor Dodipoll, must have had Shakespeare on the brain; no reader of either play can miss or can mistake the gracious influence of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love's Labour's Lost, and The Comedy of Errors. The pun on the words Pan and pot anticipates a jest unconsciously borrowed and worked to death by the typically Caledonian humour of Carlyle. Any form of tribute to the memory of Sir Philip Sidney, any kind of witness to the popularity of the Arcadia, does honour to his lovers in the past and gives pleasure to its lovers in the present; but one at least of these latter must express a wish that the playwrights would have left that last and loveliest of chivalrous and pastoral romances reverentially and lovingly alone. The prologue to The Isle of Gulls is a bright and amusing little sample of dramatic satire; its three types of critic, the lover of libel, the lover of ribaldry, and the lover of fustian, are outlines of figures not unworthy of Ben Jonson. But there is little or rather nothing in the five acts thus ingeniously introduced of the peculiar charm which pervades the whole atmosphere of the Arcadia: Day's young princes are mere puppets, with no trace of likeness to the noble original figures of Pyrocles and Musidorus; not for a moment can his light and loose |