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part that catches the imagination most sharply and leaves
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| bet | 9/23 | | Sana | 31.05.2024 | | Hajmi | 0,64 Mb. | | #258565 |
Bog'liq temurlaine
part that catches the imagination most sharply and leaves
the deepest impression, is too full of hard, clear colour, of
the clash and jingle of armour and the beating of a tropic
sun on burning metal to carry with it the implication of
poetry, except in so far as poetry seems inherent in any-
thing surcharged with energy and with exultation. The
sources of the impulse whose apotheosis it attempts do not
always bear investigation ; too much crude destruction is
involved in the exaltation of this supreme and uncreative
egoist. Beauty, we feel, is too often beaten down in the
service of what is, after all, a lesser beauty, ' the sweet
fruition of an earthly crown ', for the play to stand finally
as a type of noble poetry. We may be deafened for a time
by Tamburlaine's swift passion, so simply conceived, so
clearly spoken, as his armies ' March in triumph through
Persepolis ' on ' Brave horses bred on the white Tartarian
hills ' the while he, its soul and its cause, still holds ' the
Fates fast bound in iron chains '. But upon often pondering
we demand something more.
And something more is there, not germane to the main
theme, often childishly at variance with it, but something
without which Tamhurlaine would be only one of many
plays that glorified power, wealth and conquest and held
the eyes and ears of their audiences with thundering lines
INTRODUCTION 59
and astounding martial swagger and heroic gesture. With-
out this other element, in which Marlowe saw the essential
Tamburlaine (this element of poetic vision which, had
it been the main quality of the historical Timiir, would
have unfitted him for his career of conquest) we should not
have in the poet of Tamburlaine the poet also of Faustus,
Edward II, and Hero and Leander. For Marlowe is gloriously
mistaken in Tamburlaine. The story he chose to hold his
idea, the character in whom he thought to embody it, belong
eventually to another world ; only youth and high spirits
serve to carry their creator through the presentation of
that career of earthly conquest. But if the story and the
figure of Timur had, at his first meeting it, suggested this
career and nothing beyond this to Marlowe, he would not
have used them for his first play. We cannot but believe
that Marlowe saw in the spirit of Tamburlaine secret springs
of desire that were not there, or did not continue, in the
historical figure and that could not co-exist with the career
of Timur with which he invested his Tamburlaine. The
true image of Marlowe's first conception is hidden perhaps
even from the most sympathetic of his readers, for it gradu-
ally faded even in the imaginative working out of the
character and the career. But the sense of stir and expecta-
tion in the great speeches of the earlier play all promise
the discovery and disclosure of some profound truth of
man's spirit, of some hitherto hidden source of his aspiration ;
the capturing of an ideal, shadowy vision, part sense and
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