The shrine of Poetry is a secret one; and it is fortunate that this
should be the case; for it gives a sense of security. The cult is too
mysterious and intimate to figure upon census papers; there are no
turnstiles at the temple gates; and so, as all inquiries must be
fruitless, the obvious plan is to take for granted a good attendance of
worshippers, and to pass on. Yet, if Apollo were to come down (after the
manner of deities) and put questions--must we suppose to the
Laureate?--as to the number of the elect, would we be quite sure of
escaping wrath and destruction? Let us hope for the best; and perhaps,
if we were bent upon finding out the truth, the simplest way would be to
watch the sales of the new edition of the poems of Beddoes, which
Messrs. Routledge have lately added to the 'Muses' Library.' How many
among Apollo's pew-renters, one wonders, have ever read Beddoes, or,
indeed, have ever heard of him? For some reason or another, this
extraordinary poet has not only never received the recognition which is
his due, but has failed almost entirely to receive any recognition
whatever. If his name is known at all, it is known in virtue of the one
or two of his lyrics which have crept into some of the current
anthologies. But Beddoes' highest claim to distinction does not rest
upon his lyrical achievements, consummate as those achievements are; it
rests upon his extraordinary eminence as a master of dramatic blank
verse. Perhaps his greatest misfortune was that he was born at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, and not at the end of the
sixteenth. His proper place was among that noble band of Elizabethans,
whose strong and splendid spirit gave to England, in one miraculous
generation, the most glorious heritage of drama that the world has
known. If Charles Lamb had discovered his tragedies among the folios of
the British Museum, and had given extracts from them in the _Specimens
of Dramatic Poets_, Beddoes' name would doubtless be as familiar to us
now as those of Marlowe and Webster, Fletcher and Ford. As it happened,
however, he came as a strange and isolated phenomenon, a star which had
wandered from its constellation, and was lost among alien lights. It is
to very little purpose that Mr. Ramsay Colles, his latest editor,
assures us that 'Beddoes is interesting as marking the transition from
Shelley to Browning'; it is to still less purpose that he points out to
us a passage in _Death's Jest Book_ which anticipates the doctrines of
_The Descent of Man._ For Beddoes cannot be hoisted into line with his
contemporaries by such methods as these; nor is it in the light of such
after-considerations that the value of his work must be judged. We must
take him on his own merits, 'unmixed with seconds'; we must discover and
appraise his peculiar quality for its own sake.
He hath skill in language;
And knowledge is in him, root, flower, and fruit,
A palm with winged imagination in it,
Whose roots stretch even underneath the grave;
And on them hangs a lamp of magic science
In his soul's deepest mine, where folded thoughts
Lie sleeping on the tombs of magi dead.
If the neglect suffered by Beddoes' poetry may be accounted for in more
ways than one, it is not so easy to understand why more curiosity has
never been aroused by the circumstances of his life. For one reader who
cares to concern himself with the intrinsic merit of a piece of writing
there are a thousand who are ready to explore with eager sympathy the
history of the writer; and all that we know both of the life and the
character of Beddoes possesses those very qualities of peculiarity,
mystery, and adventure, which are so dear to the hearts of subscribers
to circulating libraries. Yet only one account of his career has ever
been given to the public; and that account, fragmentary and incorrect as
it is, has long been out of print. It was supplemented some years ago
by Mr. Gosse, who was able to throw additional light upon one important
circumstance, and who has also published a small collection of Beddoes'
letters. The main biographical facts, gathered from these sources, have
been put together by Mr. Ramsay Colles, in his introduction to the new
edition; but he has added nothing fresh; and we are still in almost
complete ignorance as to the details of the last twenty years of
Beddoes' existence--full as those years certainly were of interest and
even excitement. Nor has the veil been altogether withdrawn from that
strange tragedy which, for the strange tragedian, was the last of all.
Readers of Miss Edgeworth's letters may remember that her younger sister
Anne, married a distinguished Clifton physician, Dr. Thomas Beddoes.
Their eldest son, born in 1803, was named Thomas Lovell, after his
father and grandfather, and grew up to be the author of _The Brides'
Tragedy_ and _Death's Jest Book_. Dr. Beddoes was a remarkable man,
endowed with high and varied intellectual capacities and a rare
independence of character. His scientific attainments were recognised by
the University of Oxford, where he held the post of Lecturer in
Chemistry, until the time of the French Revolution, when he was obliged
to resign it, owing to the scandal caused by the unconcealed intensity
of his liberal opinions. He then settled at Clifton as a physician,
established a flourishing practice, and devoted his leisure to politics
and scientific research. Sir Humphry Davy, who was his pupil, and whose
merit he was the first to bring to light, declared that 'he had talents
which would have exalted him to the pinnacle of philosophical eminence,
if they had been applied with discretion.' The words are curiously
suggestive of the history of his son; and indeed the poet affords a
striking instance of the hereditary transmission of mental qualities.
Not only did Beddoes inherit his father's talents and his father's
inability to make the best use of them; he possessed in a no less
remarkable degree his father's independence of mind. In both cases, this
quality was coupled with a corresponding eccentricity of conduct, which
occasionally, to puzzled onlookers, wore the appearance of something
very near insanity. Many stories are related of the queer behaviour of
Dr. Beddoes. One day he astonished the ladies of Clifton by appearing at
a tea-party with a packet of sugar in his hand; he explained that it was
East Indian sugar, and that nothing would induce him to eat the usual
kind, which came from Jamaica and was made by slaves. More extraordinary
were his medical prescriptions; for he was in the habit of ordering cows
to be conveyed into his patients' bedrooms, in order, as he said, that
they might 'inhale the animals' breath.' It is easy to imagine the
delight which the singular spectacle of a cow climbing upstairs into an
invalid's bedroom must have given to the future author of _Harpagus_ and
_The Oviparous Tailor_. But 'little Tom,' as Miss Edgeworth calls him,
was not destined to enjoy for long the benefit of parental example; for
Dr. Beddoes died in the prime of life, when the child was not yet six
years old.
The genius at school is usually a disappointing figure, for, as a rule,
one must be commonplace to be a successful boy. In that preposterous
world, to be remarkable is to be overlooked; and nothing less vivid than
the white-hot blaze of a Shelley will bring with it even a distinguished
martyrdom. But Beddoes was an exception, though he was not a martyr. On
the contrary, he dominated his fellows as absolutely as if he had been a
dullard and a dunce. He was at Charterhouse; and an entertaining account
of his existence there has been preserved to us in a paper of school
reminiscences, written by Mr. C.D. Bevan, who had been his fag. Though
his place in the school was high, Beddoes' interests were devoted not so
much to classical scholarship as to the literature of his own tongue.
Cowley, he afterwards told a friend, had been the first poet he had
understood; but no doubt he had begun to understand poetry many years
before he went to Charterhouse; and, while he was there, the reading
which he chiefly delighted in was the Elizabethan drama. 'He liked
acting,' says Mr. Bevan, 'and was a good judge of it, and used to give
apt though burlesque imitations of the popular actors, particularly Kean
and Macready. Though his voice was harsh and his enunciation offensively
conceited, he read with so much propriety of expression and manner, that
I was always glad to listen: even when I was pressed into the service as
his accomplice, his enemy, or his love, with a due accompaniment of
curses, caresses, or kicks, as the course of his declamation required.
One play in particular, Marlowe's _Tragedy of Dr. Faustus_, excited my
admiration in this way; and a liking for the old English drama, which I
still retain, was created and strengthened by such recitations.' But
Beddoes' dramatic performances were not limited to the works of others;
when the occasion arose he was able to supply the necessary material
himself. A locksmith had incurred his displeasure by putting a bad lock
on his bookcase; Beddoes vowed vengeance; and when next the man appeared
he was received by a dramatic interlude, representing his last moments,
his horror and remorse, his death, and the funeral procession, which was
interrupted by fiends, who carried off body and soul to eternal
torments. Such was the realistic vigour of the performance that the
locksmith, according to Mr. Bevan, 'departed in a storm of wrath and
execrations, and could not be persuaded, for some time, to resume his
work.'
Besides the interlude of the wicked locksmith, Beddoes' school
compositions included a novel in the style of Fielding (which has
unfortunately disappeared), the beginnings of an Elizabethan tragedy,
and much miscellaneous verse. In 1820 he left Charterhouse, and went to
Pembroke College, Oxford, where, in the following year, while still a
freshman, he published his first volume, _The Improvisatore_, a series
of short narratives in verse. The book had been written in part while he
was at school; and its immaturity is obvious. It contains no trace of
the nervous vigour of his later style; the verse is weak, and the
sentiment, to use his own expression, 'Moorish.' Indeed, the only
interest of the little work lies in the evidence which it affords that
the singular pre-occupation which eventually dominated Beddoes' mind
had, even in these early days, made its appearance. The book is full of
death. The poems begin on battle-fields and end in charnel-houses; old
men are slaughtered in cold blood, and lovers are struck by lightning
into mouldering heaps of corruption. The boy, with his elaborate
exhibitions of physical horror, was doing his best to make his readers'
flesh creep. But the attempt was far too crude; and in after years, when
Beddoes had become a past-master of that difficult art, he was very much
ashamed of his first publication. So eager was he to destroy every trace
of its existence, that he did not spare even the finely bound copies of
his friends. The story goes that he amused himself by visiting their
libraries with a penknife, so that, when next they took out the precious
volume, they found the pages gone.
Beddoes, however, had no reason to be ashamed of his next publication,
_The Brides' Tragedy_, which appeared in 1822. In a single bound, he had
reached the threshold of poetry, and was knocking at the door. The line
which divides the best and most accomplished verse from poetry
itself--that subtle and momentous line which every one can draw, and no
one can explain--Beddoes had not yet crossed. But he had gone as far as
it was possible to go by the aid of mere skill in the art of writing,
and he was still in his twentieth year. Many passages in _The Brides'
Tragedy_ seem only to be waiting for the breath of inspiration which
will bring them into life; and indeed, here and there, the breath has
come, the warm, the true, the vital breath of Apollo. No one, surely,
whose lips had not tasted of the waters of Helicon, could have uttered
such words as these:
Here's the blue violet, like Pandora's eye,
When first it darkened with immortal life
or a line of such intense imaginative force as this:
I've huddled her into the wormy earth;
or this splendid description of a stormy sunrise:
The day is in its shroud while yet an infant;
And Night with giant strides stalks o'er the world,
Like a swart Cyclops, on its hideous front
One round, red, thunder-swollen eye ablaze.
The play was written on the Elizabethan model, and, as a play, it is
disfigured by Beddoes' most characteristic faults: the construction is
weak, the interest fluctuates from character to character, and the
motives and actions of the characters themselves are for the most part
curiously remote from the realities of life. Yet, though the merit of
the tragedy depends almost entirely upon the verse, there are signs in
it that, while Beddoes lacked the gift of construction, he nevertheless
possessed one important dramatic faculty--the power of creating detached
scenes of interest and beauty. The scene in which the half-crazed
Leonora imagines to herself, beside the couch on which her dead daughter
lies, that the child is really living after all, is dramatic in the
highest sense of the word; the situation, with all its capabilities of
pathetic irony, is conceived and developed with consummate art and
absolute restraint. Leonora's speech ends thus:
... Speak, I pray thee, Floribel,
Speak to thy mother; do but whisper 'aye';
Well, well, I will not press her; I am sure
She has the welcome news of some good fortune,
And hoards the telling till her father comes;
... Ah! She half laughed. I've guessed it then;
Come tell me, I'll be secret. Nay, if you mock me,
I must be very angry till you speak.
Now this is silly; some of these young boys
Have dressed the cushions with her clothes in sport.
'Tis very like her. I could make this image
Act all her greetings; she shall bow her head:
'Good-morrow, mother'; and her smiling face
Falls on my neck.--Oh, heaven, 'tis she indeed!
I know it all--don't tell me.
The last seven words are a summary of anguish, horror, and despair, such
as Webster himself might have been proud to write.
_The Brides' Tragedy_ was well received by critics; and a laudatory
notice of Beddoes in the _Edinburgh_, written by Bryan Waller
Procter--better known then than now under his pseudonym of Barry
Cornwall--led to a lasting friendship between the two poets. The
connection had an important result, for it was through Procter that
Beddoes became acquainted with the most intimate of all his
friends--Thomas Forbes Kelsall, then a young lawyer at Southampton. In
the summer of 1823 Beddoes stayed at Southampton for several months,
and, while ostensibly studying for his Oxford degree, gave up most of
his time to conversations with Kelsall and to dramatic composition. It
was a culminating point in his life: one of those moments which come,
even to the most fortunate, once and once only--when youth, and hope,
and the high exuberance of genius combine with circumstance and
opportunity to crown the marvellous hour. The spade-work of _The Brides'
Tragedy_ had been accomplished; the seed had been sown; and now the
harvest was beginning. Beddoes, 'with the delicious sense,' as Kelsall
wrote long afterwards, 'of the laurel freshly twined around his head,'
poured out, in these Southampton evenings, an eager stream of song. 'His
poetic composition,' says his friend, 'was then exceedingly facile: more
than once or twice has he taken home with him at night some unfinished
act of a drama, in which the editor [Kelsall] had found much to admire,
and, at the next meeting, has produced a new one, similar in design, but
filled with other thoughts and fancies, which his teeming imagination
had projected, in its sheer abundance, and not from any feeling, right
or fastidious, of unworthiness in its predecessor. Of several of these
very striking fragments, large and grand in their aspect as they each
started into form,
Like the red outline of beginning Adam,
... the only trace remaining is literally the impression thus deeply cut
into their one observer's mind. The fine verse just quoted is the sole
remnant, indelibly stamped on the editor's memory, of one of these
extinct creations.' Fragments survive of at least four dramas,
projected, and brought to various stages of completion, at about this
time. Beddoes was impatient of the common restraints; he was dashing
forward in the spirit of his own advice to another poet:
Creep not nor climb,
As they who place their topmost of sublime
On some peak of this planet, pitifully.
Dart eaglewise with open wings, and fly
Until you meet the gods!
Eighteen months after his Southampton visit, Beddoes took his degree at
Oxford, and, almost immediately, made up his mind to a course of action
which had the profoundest effect upon his future life. He determined to
take up the study of medicine; and with that end in view established
himself, in 1825, at the University at Göttingen. It is very clear,
however, that he had no intention of giving up his poetical work. He
took with him to Germany the beginnings of a new play--'a very
Gothic-styled tragedy,' he calls it, 'for which I have a jewel of a
name--DEATH'S JEST-BOOK; of course,' he adds, 'no one will ever read
it'; and, during his four years at Göttingen, he devoted most of his
leisure to the completion of this work. He was young; he was rich; he
was interested in medical science; and no doubt it seemed to him that he
could well afford to amuse himself for half-a-dozen years, before he
settled down to the poetical work which was to be the serious occupation
of his life. But, as time passed, he became more and more engrossed in
the study of medicine, for which he gradually discovered he had not only
a taste but a gift; so that at last he came to doubt whether it might
not be his true vocation to be a physician, and not a poet after all.
Engulfed among the students of Göttingen, England and English ways of
life, and even English poetry, became dim to him; 'dir, dem Anbeter der
seligen Gottheiten der Musen, u.s.w.,' he wrote to Kelsall, 'was
Unterhaltendes kann der Liebhaber von Knochen, der fleissige Botaniker
und Phisiolog mittheilen?' In 1830 he was still hesitating between the
two alternatives. 'I sometimes wish,' he told the same friend, 'to
devote myself exclusively to the study of anatomy and physiology in
science, of languages, and dramatic poetry'; his pen had run away with
him; and his 'exclusive' devotion turned out to be a double one,
directed towards widely different ends. While he was still in this state
of mind, a new interest took possession of him--an interest which worked
havoc with his dreams of dramatic authorship and scientific research: he
became involved in the revolutionary movement which was at that time
beginning to agitate Europe. The details of his adventures are unhappily
lost to us, for we know nothing more of them than can be learnt from a
few scanty references in his rare letters to English friends; but it is
certain that the part he played was an active, and even a dangerous one.
He was turned out of Würzburg by 'that ingenious Jackanapes,' the King
of Bavaria; he was an intimate friend of Hegetschweiler, one of the
leaders of liberalism in Switzerland; and he was present in Zurich when
a body of six thousand peasants, 'half unarmed, and the other half armed
with scythes, dungforks and poles, entered the town and overturned the
liberal government.' In the tumult Hegetschweiler was killed, and
Beddoes was soon afterwards forced to fly the canton. During the
following years we catch glimpses of him, flitting mysteriously over
Germany and Switzerland, at Berlin, at Baden, at Giessen, a strange
solitary figure, with tangled hair and meerschaum pipe, scribbling
lampoons upon the King of Prussia, translating Grainger's _Spinal Cord_
into German, and Schoenlein's _Diseases of Europeans_ into English,
exploring Pilatus and the Titlis, evolving now and then some ghostly
lyric or some rabelaisian tale, or brooding over the scenes of his
'Gothic-styled tragedy,' wondering if it were worthless or inspired, and
giving it--as had been his wont for the last twenty years--just one more
touch before he sent it to the press. He appeared in England once or
twice, and in 1846 made a stay of several months, visiting the Procters
in London, and going down to Southampton to be with Kelsall once again.
Eccentricity had grown on him; he would shut himself for days in his
bedroom, smoking furiously; he would fall into fits of long and deep
depression. He shocked some of his relatives by arriving at their
country house astride a donkey; and he amazed the Procters by starting
out one evening to set fire to Drury Lane Theatre with a lighted
five-pound note. After this last visit to England, his history becomes
even more obscure than before. It is known that in 1847 he was in
Frankfort, where he lived for six months in close companionship with a
young baker called Degen--'a nice-looking young man, nineteen years of
age,' we are told, 'dressed in a blue blouse, fine in expression, and of
a natural dignity of manner'; and that, in the spring of the following
year, the two friends went off to Zurich, where Beddoes hired the
theatre for a night in order that Degen might appear on the stage in the
part of Hotspur. At Basel, however, for some unexplained reason, the
friends parted, and Beddoes fell immediately into the profoundest gloom.
'Il a été misérable,' said the waiter at the Cigogne Hotel, where he was
staying, 'il a voulu se tuer.' It was true. He inflicted a deep wound in
his leg with a razor, in the hope, apparently, of bleeding to death. He
was taken to the hospital, where he constantly tore off the bandages,
until at last it was necessary to amputate the leg below the knee. The
operation was successful, Beddoes began to recover, and, in the autumn,
Degen came back to Basel. It seemed as if all were going well; for the
poet, with his books around him, and the blue-bloused Degen by his
bedside, talked happily of politics and literature, and of an Italian
journey in the spring. He walked out twice; was he still happy? Who can
tell? Was it happiness, or misery, or what strange impulse, that drove
him, on his third walk, to go to a chemist's shop in the town, and to
obtain there a phial of deadly poison? On the evening of that day--the
26th of January, 1849--Dr. Ecklin, his physician, was hastily summoned,
to find Beddoes lying insensible upon the bed. He never recovered
consciousness, and died that night. Upon his breast was found a pencil
note, addressed to one of his English friends. 'My dear Philips,' it
began, 'I am food for what I am good for--worms.' A few testamentary
wishes followed. Kelsall was to have the manuscripts; and--'W. Beddoes
must have a case (50 bottles) of Champagne Moet, 1847 growth, to drink
my death in ... I ought to have been, among other things,' the gruesome
document concluded, 'a good poet. Life was too great a bore on one peg,
and that a bad one. Buy for Dr. Ecklin one of Reade's best
stomach-pumps.' It was the last of his additions to Death's Jest Book,
and the most _macabre_ of all.
Kelsall discharged his duties as literary executor with exemplary care.
The manuscripts were fragmentary and confused. There were three distinct
drafts of _Death's Jest Book_, each with variations of its own; and from
these Kelsall compiled his first edition of the drama, which appeared in
1850. In the following year he brought out the two volumes of poetical
works, which remained for forty years the only record of the full scope
and power of Beddoes' genius. They contain reprints of _The Brides'
Tragedy_ and _Death's Jest Book_, together with two unfinished
tragedies, and a great number of dramatic fragments and lyrics; and the
poems are preceded by Kelsall's memoir of his friend. Of these rare and
valuable volumes the Muses' Library edition is almost an exact reprint,
except that it omits the memoir and revives _The Improvisatore_. Only
one other edition of Beddoes exists--the limited one brought out by Mr.
Gosse in 1890, and based upon a fresh examination of the manuscripts.
Mr. Gosse was able to add ten lyrics and one dramatic fragment to those
already published by Kelsall; he made public for the first time the true
story of Beddoes' suicide, which Kelsall had concealed; and, in 1893, he
followed up his edition of the poems by a volume of Beddoes' letters. It
is clear, therefore, that there is no one living to whom lovers of
Beddoes owe so much as to Mr. Gosse. He has supplied most important
materials for the elucidation of the poet's history: and, among the
lyrics which he has printed for the first time, are to be found one of
the most perfect specimens of Beddoes' command of unearthly pathos--_The
Old Ghost_--and one of the most singular examples of his vein of
grotesque and ominous humour--_The Oviparous Tailor_. Yet it may be
doubted whether even Mr. Gosse's edition is the final one. There are
traces in Beddoes' letters of unpublished compositions which may still
come to light. What has happened, one would like to know, to _The Ivory
Gate_, that 'volume of prosaic poetry and poetical prose,' which Beddoes
talked of publishing in 1837? Only a few fine stanzas from it have ever
appeared. And, as Mr. Gosse himself tells us, the variations in _Death's
Jest Book_ alone would warrant the publication of a variorum edition of
that work--'if,' he wisely adds, for the proviso contains the gist of
the matter--'if the interest in Beddoes should continue to grow.'
'Say what you will, I am convinced the man who is to awaken the drama
must be a bold, trampling fellow--no creeper into worm-holes--no reviver
even--however good. These reanimations are vampire-cold.' The words
occur in one of Beddoes' letters, and they are usually quoted by
critics, on the rare occasions on which his poetry is discussed, as an
instance of the curious incapacity of artists to practise what they
preach. But the truth is that Beddoes was not a 'creeper into
worm-holes,' he was not even a 'reviver'; he was a reincarnation.
Everything that we know of him goes to show that the laborious and
elaborate effort of literary reconstruction was quite alien to his
spirit. We have Kelsall's evidence as to the ease and abundance of his
composition; we have the character of the man, as it shines forth in his
letters and in the history of his life--records of a 'bold, trampling
fellow,' if ever there was one; and we have the evidence of his poetry
itself. For the impress of a fresh and vital intelligence is stamped
unmistakably upon all that is best in his work. His mature blank verse
is perfect. It is not an artificial concoction galvanized into the
semblance of life; it simply lives. And, with Beddoes, maturity was
precocious, for he obtained complete mastery over the most difficult and
dangerous of metres at a wonderfully early age. Blank verse is like the
Djin in the Arabian Nights; it is either the most terrible of masters,
or the most powerful of slaves. If you have not the magic secret, it
will take your best thoughts, your bravest imaginations, and change them
into toads and fishes; but, if the spell be yours, it will turn into a
flying carpet and lift your simplest utterance into the highest heaven.
Beddoes had mastered the 'Open, Sesame' at an age when most poets are
still mouthing ineffectual wheats and barleys. In his twenty-second
year, his thoughts filled and moved and animated his blank verse as
easily and familiarly as a hand in a glove. He wishes to compare, for
instance, the human mind, with its knowledge of the past, to a single
eye receiving the light of the stars; and the object of the comparison
is to lay stress upon the concentration on one point of a vast
multiplicity of objects. There could be no better exercise for a young
verse-writer than to attempt his own expression of this idea, and then
to examine these lines by Beddoes--lines where simplicity and splendour
have been woven together with the ease of accomplished art.
How glorious to live! Even in one thought
The wisdom of past times to fit together,
And from the luminous minds of many men
Catch a reflected truth; as, in one eye,
Light, from unnumbered worlds and farthest planets
Of the star-crowded universe, is gathered
Into one ray.
The effect is, of course, partly produced by the diction; but the
diction, fine as it is, would be useless without the phrasing--that art
by which the two forces of the metre and the sense are made at once to
combat, to combine with, and to heighten each other. It is, however,
impossible to do more than touch upon this side--the technical side--of
Beddoes' genius. But it may be noticed that in his mastery of
phrasing--as in so much besides--he was a true Elizabethan. The great
artists of that age knew that without phrasing dramatic verse was a dead
thing; and it is only necessary to turn from their pages to those of an
eighteenth-century dramatist--Addison, for instance--to understand how
right they were.
Beddoes' power of creating scenes of intense dramatic force, which had
already begun to show itself in _The Brides' Tragedy_, reached its full
development in his subsequent work. The opening act of _The Second
Brother_--the most nearly complete of his unfinished tragedies--is a
striking example of a powerful and original theme treated in such a way
that, while the whole of it is steeped in imaginative poetry, yet not
one ounce of its dramatic effectiveness is lost. The duke's next
brother, the heir to the dukedom of Ferrara, returns to the city, after
years of wandering, a miserable and sordid beggar--to find his younger
brother, rich, beautiful, and reckless, leading a life of gay
debauchery, with the assurance of succeeding to the dukedom when the
duke dies. The situation presents possibilities for just those bold and
extraordinary contrasts which were so dear to Beddoes' heart. While
Marcello, the second brother, is meditating over his wretched fate,
Orazio, the third, comes upon the stage, crowned and glorious, attended
by a train of singing revellers, and with a courtesan upon either hand.
'Wine in a ruby!' he exclaims, gazing into his mistress's eyes:
I'll solemnize their beauty in a draught
Pressed from the summer of an hundred vines.
Meanwhile Marcello pushes himself forward, and attempts to salute his
brother.
_Orazio_. Insolent beggar!
_Marcello_. Prince! But we must shake hands.
Look you, the round earth's like a sleeping serpent,
Who drops her dusky tail upon her crown
Just here. Oh, we are like two mountain peaks
Of two close planets, catching in the air:
You, King Olympus, a great pile of summer,
Wearing a crown of gods; I, the vast top
Of the ghosts' deadly world, naked and dark,
With nothing reigning on my desolate head
But an old spirit of a murdered god,
Palaced within the corpse of Saturn's father.