ambitious attempt which Swinburne has made. The first part,
_Chastelard_, was published in 1865; the last, _Mary Stuart_, in 1881.
And what Swinburne says in speaking of the intermediate play,
_Bothwell_, may be said of them all: 'I will add that I took as much
care and pains as though I had been writing or compiling a history of
the period to do loyal justice to all the historic figures which came
within the scope of my dramatic or poetic design.' Of _Bothwell_, the
longest of the three plays--indeed, the longest play in existence,
Swinburne says: 'That ambitious, conscientious, and comprehensive piece
of work is of course less properly definable as a tragedy than by the
old Shakespearean term of a chronicle history.' Definition is not
defence, and it has yet to be shown that the 'chronicle' form is in
itself a legitimate or satisfactory dramatic form. Shakespeare's use of
it proves only that he found his way through chronicle to drama, and to
take his work in the chronicle play as a model is hardly more
reasonable than to take _Venus and Adonis_ as a model for narrative
poetry. But, further, there is no play of Shakespeare's, chronicle or
other, which might not at least be conceived of, if not on the stage of
our time, at least on that of his, or on that of any time when drama was
allowed to live its own life according to its own nature. Can we
conceive of _Bothwell_ even on the stage which has seen _Les Burgraves_?
The Chinese theatre, which goes on from morning to night without a
pause, might perhaps grapple with it; but no other. Nor would cutting be
of any use, for what the stage-manager would cut away would be largely
just such parts as are finest in the printed play.
There is, in most of Swinburne's plays, some scene or passage of vital
dramatic quality, and in _Bothwell_ there is one scene, the scene
leading to the death of Darnley, which is among the great single scenes
in drama. But there is not even any such scene in the whole of the
lovely and luxurious song of _Chastelard_ or in the severe and strenuous
study of _Mary Stuart_. There are moments, in all, where speech is as
simple, as explicit, as expressive as speech in verse can be; and no
one will ever speak in verse more naturally than this:
Well, all is one to me: and for my part
I thank God I shall die without regret
Of anything that I have done alive.
These simple beginnings are apt indeed to lead to their end by ways as
tortuous as this:
Indeed I have done all this if aught I have,
And loved at all or loathed, save what mine eye
Hath ever loathed or loved since first it saw
That face which taught it faith and made it first
Think scorn to turn and look on change, or see
How hateful in my love's sight are their eyes
That give love's light to others.
But, even when speech is undiluted, and expresses with due fire or
calmness the necessary feeling of the moment, it is nearly always mere
speech, a talking about action or emotion, not itself action or emotion.
And every scene, even the finest, is thought of as a scene of talk, not
as visible action; the writer hears his people speak, but does not see
their faces or where or how they stand or move. It is this power of
visualisation that is the first requirement of the dramatist; by itself
it can go no further than the ordering of dumb show; but all drama must
begin with the ordering of dumb show, and should be playable without
words.
It was once said by William Morris that Swinburne's poems did not make
pictures. The criticism was just, but mattered little; because they make
harmonies. No English poet has ever shown so great and various a mastery
over harmony in speech, and it is this lyrical quality which has given
him a place among the great lyrical poets of England. In drama the
lyrical gift is essential to the making of great poetic drama, but to
the dramatist it should be an addition rather than a substitute.
Throughout all these plays it is first and last and all but everything.
It is for this reason that a play like _Locrine_, which is confessedly,
by its very form, a sequence of lyrics, comes more nearly to being
satisfactory as a whole than any of the more 'ambitious, conscientious,
and comprehensive' plays. _Marino Faliero_, though an episode of
history, comes into somewhat the same category, and repeats with nobler
energy the song-like character of _Chastelard_. The action is brief and
concentrated, tragic and heroic. Its 'magnificent monotony,' its
'fervent and inexhaustible declamation,' have a height and heat in them
which turn the whole play into a poem rather than a play, but a poem
comparable with the 'succession of dramatic scenes or pictures' which
makes the vast lyric of _Tristram of Lyonesse_. To think of Byron's play
on the same subject, to compare the actual scenes which can be
paralleled in both plays, is to realise how much more can be done, in
poetry and even in drama, by a great lyric poet with a passion for what
is heroic in human nature and for what is ardent and unlimited in human
speech, than by a poet who saw in Faliero only the politician, and in
the opportunities of verse only the opportunity for thin and shrewish
rhetoric pulled and lopped into an intermittent resemblance to metre.
The form of _Locrine_ has something in common with the form of _Atalanta
in Calydon_, with a kind of sombre savagery in the subject which recurs
only once, and less lyrically, in _Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards_. It
is written throughout in rhyme, and the dialogue twists and twines,
without effort, through rhyme arrangements which change in every scene,
beginning and ending with couplets, and passing through the sonnet,
Petrarchan and Shakespearean, ottava rima, terza rima, the six-line
stanza of crossed rhymes and couplet, the seven-line stanza used by
Shakespeare in the _Rape of Lucrece_, a nine-line stanza of two rhymes,
and a scene composed of seven stanzas of chained octaves in which a
third rhyme comes forward in the last line but one (after the manner of
terza rima) and starts a new octave, which closes at the end in a stanza
of two rhymes only, the last line but one turning back instead of
forward, to lock the chain's circle. No other English poet who ever
lived could have written dialogue under such conditions, and it is not
less true than strange that these fetters act as no more than a beating
of time to the feet that dance in them. The emotion is throughout at
white heat; there is lyrical splendour even in the arguments: and a
child's prattle, in nine-line stanzas of two rhymes apiece, goes as
merrily as this:
That song is hardly even as wise as I--
Nay, very foolishness it is. To die
In March before its life were well on wing,
Before its time and kindly season--why
Should spring be sad--before the swallows fly--
Enough to dream of such a wintry thing?
Such foolish words were more unmeet for spring
Than snow for summer when his heart is high:
And why should words be foolish when they sing?
Swinburne is a great master of blank verse; there is nothing that can be
done with blank verse that he cannot do with it. Listen to these lines
from _Mary Stuart_:
She shall be a world's wonder to all time,
A deadly glory watched of marvelling men
Not without praise, not without noble tears,
And if without what she would never have
Who had it never, pity--yet from none
Quite without reverence and some kind of love
For that which was so royal.
There is in them something of the cadence of Milton and something of the
cadence of Shakespeare, and they are very Swinburne. Yet, after reading
_Locrine_, and with _Atalanta_ and _Erechtheus_ in memory, it is
difficult not to wish that Swinburne had written all his plays in
rhyme, and that they had all been romantic plays and not histories.
_Locrine_ has been acted, and might well be acted again. Its rhyme would
sound on the stage with another splendour than the excellent and
well-sounding rhymes into which Mr. Gilbert Murray has translated
Euripides. And there would be none of that difficulty which seems to be
insuperable on the modern stage: the chorus, which, whether it speaks,
or chants, or sings, seems alike out of place and out of key.
The tragic anecdote which Swinburne has told in _Rosamund, Queen of the
Lombards_, is told with a directness and conciseness unusual in his
dramatic or lyric work. The story, simple, barbarous, and cruel--a story
of the year 573--acts itself out before us in large clear outlines, with
surprisingly little of modern self-consciousness. The book is a small
one, the speeches are short, and the words for the most part short too;
every speech tells like an action in words; there is scarcely a single
merely decorative passage from beginning to end. Here and there the
lines become lyric, as in
Thou rose,
Why did God give thee more than all thy kin,
Whose pride is perfume only and colour, this?
Music? No rose but mine sings, and the birds
Hush all their hearts to hearken. Dost thou hear not
How heavy sounds her note now?
But even here the lyrical touch marks a point of 'business.' And for the
most part the speeches are as straightforward as prose; are indeed
written with a deliberate aim at a sort of prose effect. For instance:
ALMACHILDES.
God must be
Dead. Such a thing as thou could never else
Live.
ROSAMUND.
That concerns not thee nor me. Be thou
Sure that my will and power to serve it live.
Lift now thine eyes to look upon thy lord.
Compare these lines with the lines which end the fourth act:
ALMACHILDES.
I cannot slay him
Thus.
ROSAMUND.
Canst thou slay thy bride by fire? He dies,
Or she dies, bound against the stake. His death
Were the easier. Follow him: save her: strike but once.
ALMACHILDES.
I cannot. God requite thee this! I will. [_Exit._
ROSAMUND.
And I will see it. And, father, thou shalt see. [_Exit._
In both these instances one sees the quality which is most conspicuous
in this play--a naked strength, which is the same kind of strength that
has always been present in Swinburne's plays, but hitherto draped
elaborately, and often more than half concealed in the draperies. The
outline of every play has been hard, sharp, firmly drawn; the characters
always forthright and unwavering; there has always been a real precision
in the main drift of the speeches; but this is the first time in which
the outlines have been left to show themselves in all their sharpness.
Development or experiment, whichever it may be, this resolute simplicity
brings a new quality into Swinburne's work, and a quality full of
dramatic possibilities. All the luxuriousness of his verse has gone, and
the lines ring like sword clashing against sword. These savage and
simple people of the sixth century do not turn over their thoughts
before concentrating them into words, and they do not speak except to
tell their thoughts. Imagine what even Murray, in _Chastelard_, a
somewhat curt speaker, would have said in place of Almachildes's one
line, a whole conflict of love, hate, honour, and shame in eight words:
I cannot. God requite thee this! I will.
Dramatic realism can go no further than such lines. The question remains
whether dramatic realism is in itself an altogether desirable thing, and
whether Swinburne in particular does not lose more than he gains by such
self-restraint.
The poetic drama is in itself a compromise. That people should speak in
verse is itself a violation of probability; and so strongly is this felt
by most actors that they endeavour, in acting a play in verse, to make
the verse sound as much like prose as possible. But, as it seems to me,
the aim of the poetic drama is to create a new world in a new
atmosphere, where the laws of human existence are no longer recognised.
The aim of the poetic drama is beauty, not truth; and Shakespeare, to
take the supreme example, is great, not because he makes Othello
probable as a jealous husband, or gives him exactly the words that a
jealous husband might have used, but because he creates in him an image
of more than human energy, and puts into his mouth words of a more
splendid poetry than any one but Shakespeare himself could have found to
say. Fetter the poetic drama to an imitation of actual speech, and you
rob it of the convention which is its chief glory and best opportunity.
A new colour may certainly be given to that convention, by which a
certain directness, rather of Dante than of Shakespeare, may be employed
for its novel kind of beauty, convention being still recognised as
convention. No doubt that is really Swinburne's aim, and to have
succeeded in it is to show that he can master every form, and do as he
pleases with language. And there are passages in the play, like this
one, which have a fervid colour of their own, fully characteristic of
the writer who has put more Southern colouring into English verse than
any other English poet:
This sun--no sun like ours--burns out my soul.
I would, when June takes hold on us like fire,
The wind could waft and whirl us northward: here
The splendour and the sweetness of the world
Eat out all joy of life or manhood. Earth
Is here too hard on heaven--the Italian air
Too bright to breathe, as fire, its next of kin,
Too keen to handle. God, whoe'er God be,
Keep us from withering as the lords of Rome--
Slackening and sickening toward the imperious end
That wiped them out of empire! Yea, he shall.
The atmosphere of the play is that of June at Verona, and the sun's heat
seems to beat upon us all through its brief and fevered action.
Swinburne's words never make pictures, but they are unparalleled in
their power of conveying atmosphere. He sees with a certain generalised
vision--it might almost be said that he sees musically; but no English
poet has ever presented bodily sensation with such curious and subtle
intensity. And just as he renders bodily sensation carried to the point
of agony, so he is at his best when dealing, as here, with emotion
tortured to the last limit of endurance. Albovine, the king, sets bare
his heart, confessing:
The devil and God are crying in either ear
One murderous word for ever, night and day,
Dark day and deadly night and deadly day,
Can she love thee who slewest her father? I
Love her.
Rosamund, his wife, meditating her monstrous revenge, confesses:
I am yet alive to question if I live
And wonder what may ever bid me die.
... There is nought
Left in the range and record of the world
For me that is not poisoned: even my heart
Is all envenomed in me.
And she recognises that
No healing and no help for life on earth
Hath God or man found out save death and sleep.
The two young lovers, caught innocently in a net of intolerable shame,
can but question and answer one another thus:
HILDEGARD.
Hast thou forgiven me?
ALMACHILDES.
I have not forgiven God.
And at the end Narsetes, the old councillor, the only one of the persons
of the drama who is not the actor or the sufferer of some subtle horror,
sums up all that has happened in a reflection which casts the
responsibility of things further off than to the edge of the world:
Let none make moan. This doom is none of man's.
As in the time of the great first volume of _Poems and Ballads_,
Swinburne is still drawn to
see
What fools God's anger makes of men.
He has never been a philosophical thinker; but he has acquired the
equivalent of a philosophy through his faithfulness to a single outlook
upon human life and destiny. And in this brief and burning play, more
than in much of his later writing, I find the reflection of that unique
temperament, to which real things are so abstract, and abstract things
so coloured and tangible; a temperament in which there is almost too
much poetry for a poet--as pure gold, to be worked in, needs to be
mingled with alloy.
There is, perhaps, no more terrible story in the later history of the
world, no actual tragedy more made to the hand of the dramatist, than
the story of the Borgias. In its entirety it would make another _Cenci_,
in the hands of another Shelley, and another Censor would prohibit the
one as he prohibits the other. We are not permitted to deal with some
form of evil on the stage. Yet what has Shelley said?
There must be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient
to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose. The highest moral
purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama is the
teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies,
the knowledge of itself.
A great drama on the story of the Borgias could certainly have much to
teach the human heart in the knowledge of itself. It would be moral in
its presentation of the most ignobly splendid vices that have swayed the
world; of the pride and defiance which rise like a strangling serpent,
coiling about the momentary weakness of good; of that pageant in which
the pagan gods came back, drunk and debauched with their long exile
under the earth, and the garden-god assumed the throne of the Holy of
Holies. Alexander, Cæsar, Lucrezia, the threefold divinity, might be
shown as a painter has shown one of them on the wall of one of his own
chapels: a swinish portent in papal garments, kneeling, bloated,
thinking of Lucrezia, with fingers folded over the purple of his rings.
Or the family might have been shown as Rossetti, in one of the
loveliest, most cruel, and most significant of his pictures, has shown
it: a light, laughing masquerade of innocence, the boy and girl dancing
before the cushioned idol and her two worshippers.
Swinburne in _The Duke of Gandia_ has not dealt with the whole matter of
the story--only, in a single act of four scenes, with the heart or
essence of it. The piece is not drama for the stage, nor intended to be
seen or heard outside the pages of a book; but it is meant to be, and
is, a great, brief, dramatic poem, a lyric almost, of hate, ambition,
fear, desire, and the conquest of ironic evil. Swinburne has written
nothing like it before. The manner of it is new, or anticipated only in
the far less effectual _Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards_; the style,
speech, and cadence are tightened, restrained, full of sullen
fierceness. Lucrezia, strangely, is no more than a pale image passing
without consciousness through some hot feast-room; she is there, she is
hidden under their speech, but we scarcely see her, and, like her
historians, wonder if she was so evil, or only a scholar to whom learned
men wrote letters, as if to a pattern of virtue. But in the father and
son live a flame and a cloud, the flame rising steadily to beat back and
consume the cloud. It is Cæsar Borgia who is the flame, and Alexander
the Pope who fills the Vatican and the world with his contagious clouds.
The father, up to this moment, has held all his vices well in hand; he
has no rival; his sons and his daughter he has made, and they live about
him for their own pleasure, and he watches them, and is content. Now one
steps out, the circle is broken; there is no longer a younger son, a
cardinal, but the Duke of Gandia, eldest son and on the highest step of
the Pope's chair. It is, in this brief, almost speechless moment of
action, as if the door of a furnace had suddenly been thrown open and
then shut. One scene stands out, only surpassed by the terrible and
magnificent scene leading up to the death of Darnley--a scene itself
only surpassed, in its own pitiful and pitiless kind, by that death of
Marlowe's king in the dungeons of Berkeley Castle, which, to all who can
endure to read it, 'moves pity and terror,' as to Lamb, 'beyond any
scene ancient or modern.' And only in _Bothwell_, in the whole of
Swinburne's drama, is there speech so adequate, so human, so full of
fear and suspense. Take, for instance, the opening of the great final
scene. The youngest son has had his elder brother drowned in the Tiber,
and after seven days he appears calmly before his father.
ALEX. Thou hast done this deed.
CÆSAR. Thou hast said it.
ALEX. Dost thou think
To live, and look upon me?
CÆSAR. Some while yet.
ALEX. I would there were a God--that he might hear.
CÆSAR. 'Tis pity there should be--for thy sake--none.
ALEX. Wilt thou slay me?
CÆSAR. Why?
ALEX. Am I not thy sire?
CÆSAR. And Christendom's to boot.
ALEX. I pray thee, man,
Slay me.
CÆSAR. And then myself? Thou art crazed, but I
Sane.
ALEX. Art thou very flesh and blood?
CÆSAR. They say,
Thine.
ALEX. If the heaven stand still and smite thee not,
There is no God indeed.
CÆSAR. Nor thou nor I
Know.
ALEX. I could pray to God that God might be,
Were I but mad. Thou sayest I am mad: thou liest:
I do not pray.
There, surely, is great dramatic speech, and the two men who speak face
to face are seen clearly before us, naked to the sight. Yet even these
lines do not make drama that would hold the stage. How is it that only
one of our greater poets since the last of Shakespeare's contemporaries,
and that one Shelley, has understood the complete art of the playwright,
and achieved it? Byron, Coleridge, Browning, Tennyson, all wrote plays
for the stage; all had their chance of being acted; Tennyson only made
even a temporary success, and _Becket_ is likely to have gone out with
Irving. Landor wrote plays full of sublime poetry, but not meant for the
stage; and now we have Swinburne following his example, but with an
unexampled lyrical quality. Why, without capacity to deal with it, are
our poets so insistent on using the only form for which a special
faculty, outside the pure poetic gift, is inexorably required?
A poet so great as Swinburne, possessed by an ecstasy which turns into
song as instinctively as the flawless inspiration of Mozart turned into
divine melody, cannot be questioned. Mozart, without a special genius
for dramatic music, wrote _Die Zauberflöte_ to a bad libretto with as
great a perfection as the music to _Don Giovanni_, which had a good one.
The same inspiration was there, always apt to the occasion. Swinburne is
ready to write in any known form of verse, with an equal facility and
(this is the all-important point) the same inspiration. Loving the form
of the drama, and capable of turning it to his uses, not of bending it
to its own, he has filled play after play with music, noble feeling,
brave eloquence. Here in this briefest and most actual of his plays--an
act, an episode--he has concentrated much of this floating beauty, this
overflowing imagination, into a few stern and adequate words, and made a
new thing, as always, in his own image. It is the irony that has given
its precise form to this representation of a twofold Satan, as Blake
might have seen him in vision, parodying God with unbreakable pride. The
conflict between father and son ends in a kind of unholy litany. 'And
now,' cries Cæsar, fresh from murder,
Behoves thee rise again as Christ our God,
Vicarious Christ, and cast as flesh away
This grief from off thy godhead.
And the old man, temporising with his grief, answers:
Thou art subtle and strong.
I would thou hadst spared him--couldst have spared him.
And the son replies:
Sire,
I would so too. Our sire, his sire and mine,
I slew him not for lust of slaying, or hate,
Or aught less like thy wiser spirit and mine.
But Cæsar-Satan has already said the epilogue to the whole
representation, when, speaking to his mother, he bids her leave the
responsibility of things:
And God, who made me and my sire and thee,
May take the charge upon him.
1899-1908.
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
Rossetti's phrase about poetry, that it must be 'amusing'; his
'commandment' about verse translation, 'that a good poem shall not be
turned into a bad one'; his roughest and most random criticisms about
poets, are as direct and inevitable as his finest verse. Only Coleridge
among English poets has anything like the same definite grasp upon
whatever is essential in poetry. And it is this intellectual sanity
partly, this complete knowledge of the medium in which he worked, that
has given Rossetti a position of his own, a kind of leadership in art.
And, technically, Rossetti has done much for English poetry. Such a line
as
And when the night-vigil was done,
is a perfectly good metrical line if read without any displacement of
the normal accent in speaking, and the rhyme of 'of' to 'enough' is as
satisfying to the ear as the more commonly accepted rhyme of 'love' and
'move.' Rossetti did nothing but good by his troubling of many rhythms
which had become stagnant, and it is in his extraordinary subtlety of
rhythm, most accomplished where it seems most hesitating, that he has
produced his finest emotional effects, effects before his time found but
rarely, and for the most part accidentally, in English poetry.
Like Baudelaire and like Mallarmé in France, Rossetti was not only a
wholly original poet, but a new personal force in literature. That he
stimulated the sense of beauty is true in a way it is not true of
Tennyson, for instance, as it is true of Baudelaire in a way it is not
true of Victor Hugo. In Rossetti's work, perhaps because it is not the
greatest, there is an actually hypnotic quality which exerts itself on
those who come within his circle at all; a quality like that of an
unconscious medium, or like that of a woman against whose attraction one
is without defence. It is the sound of a voice, rather than anything
said; and, when Rossetti speaks, no other voice, for the moment, seems
worth listening to. Even after one has listened, not very much seems to
have been said; but the world is not quite the same. He has stimulated a
new sense, by which a new mood of beauty can be apprehended.