THE followers of the Father Christian Rosencrux, says the old
tradition, wrapped his imperishable body in noble raiment and laid it
under the house of their order, in a tomb containing the symbols of all
things in heaven and earth, and in the waters under the earth, and set
about him inextinguishable magical lamps, which burnt on generation
after generation, until other students of the order came upon the
tomb by chance. It seems to me that the imagination has had no very
different history during the last two hundred years, but has been laid
in a great tomb of criticism, and had set over it inextinguishable
magical lamps of wisdom and romance, and has been altogether so nobly
housed and apparelled that we have forgotten that its wizard lips
are closed, or but opened for the complaining of some melancholy and
ghostly voice. The ancients and the Elizabethans abandoned themselves
to imagination as a woman abandons herself to love, and created great
beings who made the people of this world seem but shadows, and great
passions which made our loves and hatreds appear but ephemeral and
trivial phantasies; but now it is not the great persons, or the great
passions we imagine, which absorb us, for the persons and passions in
our poems are mainly reflections our mirror has caught from older poems
or from the life about us, but the wise comments we make upon them, the
criticism of life we wring from their fortunes. Arthur and his Court
are nothing, but the many-coloured lights that play about them are as
beautiful as the lights from cathedral windows; Pompilia and Guido are
but little, while the ever-recurring meditations and expositions which
climax in the mouth of the Pope are among the wisest of the Christian
age. I cannot get it out of my mind that this age of criticism is
about to pass, and an age of imagination, of emotion, of moods, of
revelation, about to come in its place; for certainly belief in a
supersensual world is at hand again; and when the notion that we are
‘phantoms of the earth and water’ has gone down the wind, we will trust
our own being and all it desires to invent; and when the external
world is no more the standard of reality, we will learn again that the
great Passions are angels of God, and that to embody them ‘uncurbed
in their eternal glory,’ even in their labour for the ending of man’s
peace and prosperity, is more than to comment, however wisely, upon the
tendencies of our time, or to express the socialistic, or humanitarian,
or other forces of our time, or even ‘to sum up’ our time, as the
phrase is; for Art is a revelation, and not a criticism, and the life
of the artist is in the old saying, ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth,
and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh
and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the spirit.’
1895.
_THE RETURN OF ULYSSES_
I
M. MAETERLINCK, in his beautiful _Treasure of the Humble_, compares
the dramas of our stage to the paintings of an obsolete taste; and the
dramas of the stage for which he hopes, to the paintings of a taste
that cannot become obsolete. ‘The true artist,’ he says, ‘no longer
chooses Marius triumphing over the Cimbrians, or the assassination
of the Duke of Guise, as fit subjects for his art; for he is well
aware that the psychology of victory or murder is but elementary and
exceptional, and that the solemn voice of men and things, the voice
that issues forth so timidly and hesitatingly, cannot be heard amidst
the idle uproar of acts of violence. And therefore will he place on his
canvas a house lost in the heart of the country, a door open at the end
of a passage, a face or hands at rest.’ I do not understand him to mean
that our dramas should have no victories or murders, for he quotes
for our example plays that have both, but only that their victories
and murders shall not be to excite our nerves, but to illustrate the
reveries of a wisdom which shall be as much a part of the daily life of
the wise as a face or hands at rest. And certainly the greater plays
of the past ages have been built after such a fashion. If this fashion
is about to become our fashion also, and there are signs that it is,
plays like some of Mr. Robert Bridges will come out of that obscurity
into which all poetry, that is not lyrical poetry, has fallen, and even
popular criticism will begin to know something about them. Some day
the few among us, who care for poetry more than any temporal thing,
and who believe that its delights cannot be perfect when we read it
alone in our rooms and long for one to share its delights, but that
they might be perfect in the theatre, when we share them friend with
friend, lover with beloved, will persuade a few idealists to seek
out the lost art of speaking, and seek out ourselves the lost art,
that is perhaps nearest of all arts to eternity, the subtle art of
listening. When that day comes we will talk much of Mr. Bridges; for
did he not write scrupulous, passionate poetry to be sung and to be
spoken, when there were few to sing and as yet none to speak? There
is one play especially, _The Return of Ulysses_, which we will praise
for perfect after its kind, the kind of our new drama of wisdom, for
it moulds into dramatic shape, and with as much as possible of literal
translation, those closing books of the Odyssey which are perhaps the
most perfect poetry of the world, and compels that great tide of song
to flow through delicate dramatic verse, with little abatement of its
own leaping and clamorous speed. As I read, the gathering passion
overwhelms me, as it did when Homer himself was the singer, and when
I read at last the lines in which the maid describes to Penelope the
battle with the suitors, at which she looks through the open door, I
tremble with excitement.
‘_Penelope_: Alas! what cries! Say, is the prince still safe?
_The Maid_: He shieldeth himself well, and striketh surely;
His foes fall down before him. Ah! now what can I see?
Who cometh? Lo! a dazzling helm, a spear
Of silver or electron; share and swift
The piercings. How they fall! Ha! shields are raised
In vain. I am blinded, or the beggar-man
Hath waxed in strength. He is changed, he is young. O strange!
He is all in golden armour. These are gods
That slay the suitors. (_Runs to Penelope._) O lady, forgive me.
’Tis Ares’ self. I saw his crispèd beard;
I saw beneath his helm his curlèd locks.’
The coming of Athene helmed ‘in silver or electron’ and her
transformation of Ulysses are not, as the way is with the only modern
dramas that popular criticism holds to be dramatic, the climax of an
excitement of the nerves, but of that unearthly excitement which has
wisdom for fruit, and is of like kind with the ecstasy of the seers,
an altar flame, unshaken by the winds of the world, and burning every
moment with whiter and purer brilliance.
Mr. Bridges has written it in what is practically the classical manner,
as he has done in _Achilles in Scyros_—a placid and charming setting
for many placid and charming lyrics—
‘And ever we keep a feast of delight
The betrothal of hearts, when spirits unite,
Creating an offspring of joy, a treasure
Unknown to the bad, for whom
The gods foredoom
The glitter of pleasure
And a dark tomb.’
The poet who writes best in the Shakespearian manner is a poet with
a circumstantial and instinctive mind, who delights to speak with
strange voices and to see his mind in the mirror of Nature; while Mr.
Bridges, like most of us to-day, has a lyrical and meditative mind, and
delights to speak with his own voice and to see Nature in the mirror of
his mind. In reading his plays in a Shakespearian manner, I find that
he is constantly arranging his story in such and such a way because he
has read that the persons he is writing of did such and such things,
and not because his soul has passed into the soul of their world and
understood its unchangeable destinies. His _Return of Ulysses_ is
admirable in beauty, because its classical gravity of speech, which
does not, like Shakespeare’s verse, desire the vivacity of common
life, purifies and subdues all passion into lyrical and meditative
ecstasies, and because the unity of place and time in the late acts
compels a logical rather than instinctive procession of incidents; and
if the Shakespearian _Nero: Second Part_ approaches it in beauty and in
dramatic power, it is because it eddies about Nero and Seneca, who had
both, to a great extent, lyrical and meditative minds. Had Mr. Bridges
been a true Shakespearian, the pomp and glory of the world would have
drowned that subtle voice that speaks amid our heterogeneous lives of
a life lived in obedience to a lonely and distinguished ideal.