What Good Is Life?

Without living

Doctor Faustus and Edward II by Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlowe with George Chapman, Messiah by Alexander Pope, Selected Poems by Lord Byron and Poems by Heinrich Heine, translated by Julian Fane

The story of Faustus, of course, we all know. How he sold his soul for what, precisely? It certainly wasn’t immortality. It was capacity. Some boring people might call it competence, agency. What would you do if you had ten times as much agency as you do? That’s a question people who think they’re intelligent ask in job interviews. If you had ten times as much agency as you do, what would you have to have done to get it? That’s a better question.

Sold your soul to the devil, is Marlowe’s answer. And of course, Marlowe himself had something of the night about him. Not exactly the School of Night – the supposed meeting-place of all the notorious atheists of Elizabeth’s reign. (How many of them were atheists, in the true since? Surely none, or close to none. Was it really a group, like a school of fish? Surely not.) No, Marlowe is of course better known for two things: for apparently, once, at some remove and according to no one credible, having been a spy. And for perishing in a fight in a pub, the knife entering his head and his fine brain just above one of his eyes. For one of the greatest writers in our impoverished language, that is a meagre legacy.

Naturally, one could write – and many have – of the translations, which some do not like. While Marlowe’s plays are models of economy and plain language compared to Shakespeare’s richness and infinite variety, his Latin verses are, more than one student of the classics has told me, almost the opposite of that. Where do we find the message of Marlowe’s works?

Edward II shows, or appears to show, what wreck and ruin can be accomplished by love, or the absence of love. Does Edward, abandoned by his own family to the tender mercies of the torturers, think of how he loved them in the past, gave them what they asked for, did what he could in his modest, mortal way – all for naught? It would seem that Marlowe is telling us love is not blind so much as blinding. That it brings out the worst in us. Faustus tells us a similar thing. In hoping to love others, hoping to be beloved of others, we make bad deals and compacts whose results we may not wish to contemplate. And yet ‘time runs’ – and fate cannot be indefinitely delayed. Hero and Leander tells us a similar thing – although Marlowe did not live long enough for his poem to reach its most vivid tragical conclusion.

One of the more beautiful of Julian Fane’s translations of Heine has Edith Swanneck, the mistress of Harold Godwinson, king of England, scouring the battlefield at Hastings for the body of her beloved. Such is left after a life, no matter how significant, Heine seems to imply: people mourning for some petty time and little more.

Byron has some lines about the futility of effort even in a good cause and the certainty that doing a bad thing will receive its appointed punishment. My favourite has always been ‘If a Man Hath No Freedom to Fight for at Home.’ It instructs: ‘When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home, / Let him combat for that of his neighbours; / Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome, / And get knock'd on the head for his labours.’

For while ‘To do good to mankind is the chivalrous plan, / And, is always as nobly requited; / Then battle for freedom wherever you can, / And, if not shot or hang'd, you'll get knighted.’ What point of effort there, if the only thing determining if an effort be worthwhile and morally upstanding happens afterward: finding out whether one is or is not on the winning side?

The reader gets very little sense out of Alexander Pope, even when he is not being satiric. He says one thing and seems so clearly, so very obviously, to mean another. What is one to do with someone like that? How can one build on such poor foundations, on quicksand?

Milton would have us believe that there is still justice, just as there is salvation. ‘They also serve who only stand and wait,’ he concludes, ever so movingly, one of his sonnets. But for the damned like Faustus, or those condemned yet while alive, as Edward II was, what good is having lived at all? If it is all to be made and fit only for what comes, this fate.