Marlonjoe's Damnations
39 lines✦
im. I pass by the masochism here, the sadistic images here and inHero and Leafider, the weird )oke (iv. 7. 47.) about Faustus’s com-mitting incest with his father. The point is that twice at the summitsof his art Marlowe has damned himself in a particular way for thesame particular things The impression is unavoidable that he enjoyedwriting these scenes, and was excruciated. His sinister art ran exactlywith his life. Marlowe’s life and the text of his work, which reaches us rathermutilated, have been examined at length by scholarship, but literarycriticism has been oddly scanty. There was a history-of-ideas studyby Paul H. Kocher, and then a pleasant, semi-psychological study byM. Poirier of the Sorbonne translated in England last year (1951).With Harry Levin’s book, more ambitious and much better thanthese, the subject may be said to have become a going concern. Hisscholarship is careful, his range of reference wide, his quotations apt,his curiosity as to what the dramatist is up to genuine, his analysis ofhis heretical ambitiousness exemplary, and from the first page of hislaboured preface to the last page of his ninth appendix, his book con-tains nothing unconsidered. Perhaps it may seem a little forbidding tomost readers, a little fussy to some, and it has definite weaknesses.The beauty and the malice of this magnificent poet hardly appear.Instead, of one distich in a famous passage, Our soules, whose faculties can comprehendThe wondrous Architecture of the world. Levin admires “the enjambment that carries the first line so breath-lessly into the second.” But is there anything really unusual aboutthat runover^^ On the other hand, a moment later, he is rescuing fromthe contempt of Victorian critics the splendid climax of this speech (/Tamburlaine ii. 6.), which he rightly regards as blasphemous. Sowith his discussion of Hero and Leander^ from which, except forsome technical remarks and quotations, one would scarcely supposethe subject a work in verse, much less one of the finest sensuouspoems in the language, rich with passages like this sly, exquisite crea-tion of the church, which Eliot might envy as hard as Keats: So faire a church as this, had Venus none, The wals were of discoloured Jasper stone, Wherein was Proteus earned, and o’rehead; A liuelie vine of greene sea agget spread; Where by one hand, light headed Bacchus hoong . . .
✦