----"a splendid silk of foreign loom,
Where, like a shoaling sea, the lovely blue
Played into green."
I have touched here only upon Tennyson's narrative poems, because they
seemed most in order in any discussion of the author's dramatic faculty.
They cannot be said to place it in an eminent light, and they remind one
more of the courage than of the discretion embodied in _Queen Mary_.
Lovely pictures of things standing, with a sort of conscious stillness,
for their poetic likeness, measured speeches, full of delicate harmonies
and curious cadences--these things they contain in plenty, but little of
that liberal handling of cross-speaking passion and humour which, with a
strong constructive faculty, we regard as the sign of a genuine
dramatist.
The dramatic form seems to me of all literary forms the very noblest, I
have so extreme a relish for it that I am half afraid to trust myself to
praise it, lest I should seem to be merely rhapsodizing. But to be
really noble it must be quite itself, and between a poor drama and a
fine one there is, I think, a wider interval than anywhere else in the
scale of success. A sequence of speeches headed by proper names--a
string of dialogues broken into acts and scenes--does not constitute a
drama; not even when the speeches are very clever and the dialogue
bristles with "points."
The fine thing in a real drama, generally speaking, is that, more than
any other work of literary art, it needs a masterly structure. It needs
to be shaped and fashioned and laid together, and this process makes a
demand upon an artist's rarest gifts. He must combine and arrange,
interpolate and eliminate, play the joiner with the most attentive
skill; and yet at the end effectually bury his tools and his sawdust,
and invest his elaborate skeleton with the smoothest and most polished
integument. The five-act drama--serious or humourous, poetic or
prosaic--is like a box of fixed dimensions and inelastic material, into
which a mass of precious things are to be packed away. It is a problem
in ingenuity and a problem of the most interesting kind. The precious
things in question seem out of all proportion to the compass of the
receptacle; but the artist has an assurance that with patience and skill
a place may be made for each, and that nothing need be clipped or
crumpled, squeezed or damaged. The false dramatist either knocks out
the sides of his box, or plays the deuce with the contents; the real one
gets down on his knees, disposes of his goods tentatively, this, that,
and the other way, loses his temper but keeps his ideal, and at last
rises in triumph, having packed his coffer in the one way that is
mathematically right. It closes perfectly, and the lock turns with a
click; between one object and another you cannot insert the point of a
penknife.
To work successfully beneath a few grave, rigid laws, is always a strong
man's highest ideal of success. The reader cannot be sure how deeply
conscious Mr. Tennyson has been of the laws of the drama, but it would
seem as if he had not very attentively pondered them. In a play,
certainly, the subject is of more importance than in any other work of
art. Infelicity, triviality, vagueness of subject, may be outweighed in
a poem, a novel, or a picture, by charm of manner, by ingenuity of
execution; but in a drama the subject is of the essence of the work--it
_is_ the work. If it is feeble, the work can have no force; if it is
shapeless, the work must be amorphous.
_Queen Mary_, I think, has this fundamental weakness; it would be very
hard to say what its subject is. Strictly speaking, the drama has none.
To the statement, "It is the reign of the elder daughter of Henry
VIII.," it seems to me very nearly fair to reply that that is not a
subject. I do not mean to say that a consummate dramatist could not
resolve it into one, but the presumption is altogether against it. It
cannot be called an intrigue, nor treated as one; it tends altogether to
expansion; whereas a genuine dramatic subject should tend to
concentration.
Madame Ristori, that accomplished tragedienne, has for some years been
carrying about the world with her a piece of writing, punctured here and
there with curtain-falls, which she presents to numerous audiences as a
tragedy embodying the history of Queen Elizabeth. The thing is worth
mentioning only as an illustration; it is from the hand of a prolific
Italian purveyor of such wares, and is as bad as need be. Many of the
persons who read these lines will have seen it, and will remember it as
a mere bald sequence of anecdotes, roughly cast into dialogue. It is not
incorrect to say that, as regards form, Mr. Tennyson's drama is of the
same family as the historical tragedies of Signor Giacometti. It is
simply a dramatised chronicle, without an internal structure, taking its
material in pieces, as history hands them over, and working each one up
into an independent scene--usually with rich ability. It has no shape;
it is cast into no mould; it has neither beginning, middle, nor end,
save the chronological ones.
A work of this sort may have a great many merits (those of _Queen Mary_
are numerous), but it cannot have the merit of being a drama. We have,
indeed, only to turn to Shakespeare to see how much of pure dramatic
interest may be infused into an imperfect dramatic form. _Henry IV._ and
the others of its group, _Richard III._, _Henry VIII._, _Antony and
Cleopatra_, _Julius Caesar_, are all chronicles in dialogue, are all
simply Holinshed and Plutarch transferred into immortal verse. They are
magnificent because Shakespeare could do nothing weak; but all
Shakespearian as they are, they are not models; the models are _Hamlet_
and _Othello_, _Macbeth_ and _Lear_. Tennyson is not Shakespeare, but in
everything he had done hitherto there had been an essential perfection,
and we are sorry that, in the complete maturity of his talent, proposing
to write a drama, he should have chosen the easy way rather than the
hard.
He chose, however, a period out of which a compact dramatic subject of
the richest interest might well have been wrought. For this, of course,
considerable invention would have been needed, and Mr. Tennyson had
apparently no invention to bring to his task. He has embroidered
cunningly the groundwork offered him by Mr. Froude, but he has
contributed no new material. The field offers a great stock of dramatic
figures, and one's imagination kindles as one thinks of the multifarious
combinations into which they might have been cast. We do not pretend of
course to say in detail what Mr. Tennyson might have done; we simply
risk the affirmation that he might have wrought a somewhat denser
tissue. History certainly would have suffered, but poetry would have
gained, and he is writing poetry and not history. As his drama stands,
we take it that he does not pretend to have deepened our historic light.
Psychologically, picturesquely, the persons in the foreground of Mary's
reign constitute a most impressive and interesting group. The
imagination plays over it importunately, and wearies itself with
scanning the outlines and unlighted corners. Mary herself unites a dozen
strong dramatic elements--in her dark religious passion, her unrequited
conjugal passion, her mixture of the Spanish and English natures, her
cruelty and her conscience, her high-handed rule and her constant
insecurity. With her dark figure lighted luridly by perpetual
martyr-fires, and made darker still by the presence of her younger
sister, radiant with the promise of England's coming greatness; with
Lady Jane Grey groping for the block behind her; her cold fanatic of a
husband beside her, as we know him by Velasquez (with not a grain of
fanaticism to spare for her); with her subtle ecclesiastical cousin Pole
on the other side, with evil counsellors and dogged martyrs and a
threatening people all around her, and with a lonely, dreary,
disappointed and unlamented death before her, she is a subject made to
the hand of a poet who should know how to mingle cunningly his darker
shades. Tennyson has elaborated her figure in a way that is often
masterly; it is a success--the greatest success of the poem. It is
compounded in his hands of very subtle elements, and he keeps them from
ever becoming gross.
The Mary of his pages is a complex personage, and not what she might so
easily become--a mere picturesque stalking-horse of melodrama. The art
with which he has still kept her sympathetic and human, at the same time
that he has darkened the shadows in her portrait to the deepest tone
that he had warrant for, is especially noticeable. It is not in Mr.
Tennyson's pages that Mary appears for the first time in the drama; she
gives her name to a play of Victor Hugo's dating from the year 1833--the
prime of the author's career. I have just been reading over _Marie
Tudor_, and it has suggested a good many reflections. I think it
probable that many of the readers of _Queen Mary_ would be quite unable
to peruse Victor Hugo's consummately unpleasant production to the end;
but they would admit, I suppose, that a person who had had the stomach
to do so might have something particular to say about it.
If one had an eye for contrasts, the contrast between these two works is
extremely curious. I said just now that Tennyson had brought no
invention to his task; but it may be said, on the other side, that
Victor Hugo has brought altogether too much. If Tennyson has been unduly
afraid of remodelling history, the author of _Marie Tudor_ has known no
such scruples; he has slashed into the sacred chart with the shears of a
_romantique_ of 1830. Although Tennyson, in a general way, is an
essentially picturesque poet, his picturesqueness is of an infinitely
milder type than that of Victor Hugo; the one ends where the other
begins. With Victor Hugo the horrible is always the main element of the
picturesque, and the beautiful and the tender are rarely introduced save
to give it relief. In _Marie Tudor_ they cannot be said to be introduced
at all; the drama is one masterly compound of abominable horror; horror
for horror's sake--for the sake of chiaroscuro, of colour, of the
footlights, of the actors; not in the least in any visible interest of
human nature, of moral verity, of the discrimination of character.
What Victor Hugo has here made of the rigid, strenuous, pitiable English
queen seems to me a good example of how little the handling of sinister
passions sometimes costs a genius of his type--how little conviction or
deep reflection goes with it. There was a Mary of a far keener tragic
interest than the epigrammatic Messalina whom he has portrayed; but her
image was established in graver and finer colours, and he passes
jauntily beside it, without suspecting its capacity. Marie Tudor is a
lascivious termagant who amuses herself, first, with caressing an
Italian adventurer, then with slapping his face, and then with dabbling
in his blood; but we do not really see why the author should have given
his heroine a name which history held in her more or less sacred
keeping; one's interest in the drama would have been more comfortable if
the persons, in their impossible travesty, did not present themselves as
old friends. It is true that the "Baron of Dinasmonddy" can hardly be
called an old friend; but he is at least as familiar as the Earl of
Clanbrassil, the Baron of Darmouth in Devonshire, and Lord South-Repps.
_Marie Tudor_, then has little to do with nature and nothing with either
history or morality; and yet, without a paradox, it has some very strong
qualities. It is at any rate a genuine drama, and it succeeds thoroughly
well in what it attempts. It is moulded and proportioned to a definite
scenic end, and never falters in its course. To read it just after you
have read _Queen Mary_ brings out its merits, as well as its defects;
and if the contrast makes you inhale with a double satisfaction the
clearer moral atmosphere of the English work, it leads you also to
reflect with some gratitude that dramatic tradition, in our modern era,
has not remained solely in English hands.
Mr. Tennyson has very frankly fashioned his play upon the model of the
Shakespearian "histories." He has given us the same voluminous list of
characters; he has made the division into acts merely arbitrary; he has
introduced low-life interlocutors, talking in archaic prose; and
whenever the fancy has taken him, he has culled his idioms and epithets
from the Shakespearian vocabulary. As regards this last point, he has
shown all the tact and skill that were to be expected from so approved a
master of language. The prose scenes are all of a quasi-humourous
description, and they emulate the queer jocosities of Shakespeare more
successfully than seemed probable; though it was not to be forgotten
that the author of the "Palace of Art" was also the author of the
"Northern Farmer." These few lines might have been taken straight from
_Henry IV._ or _Henry VIII._:
"No; we know that you be come to kill the Queen, and we'll pray for
you all on our bended knees. But o' God's mercy, don't you kill the
Queen here, Sir Thomas; look ye, here's little Dickon, and little
Robin, and little Jenny--though she's but a side cousin--and all,
on our knees, we pray you to kill the Queen farther off, Sir
Thomas."
The poet, however, is modern when he chooses to be:
"Action and reaction,
The miserable see-saw of our child-world,
Make us despise it at odd hours, my Lord."
That reminds one less of the Elizabethan than of the Victorian era. Mr.
Tennyson has desired to give a general picture of the time, to reflect
all its leading elements and commemorate its salient episodes. From this
point of view England herself--England struggling and bleeding in the
clutches of the Romish wolf, as he would say--is the heroine of the
drama. This heroine is very nobly and vividly imaged, and we feel the
poet to be full of a retroactive as well as a present patriotism. It is
a plain Protestant attitude that he takes; there is no attempt at
analysis of the Catholic sense of the situation; it is quite the old
story that we learned in our school-histories as children. We do not
mean that this is not the veracious way of presenting it; but we notice
the absence of that tendency to place it in different lights, accumulate
_pros_ and _cons_, and plead opposed causes in the interest of ideal
truth, which would have been so obvious if Mr. Browning had handled the
theme. And yet Mr. Tennyson has been large and liberal, and some of the
finest passages in the poem are uttered by independent Catholics. The
author has wished to give a hint of everything, and he has admirably
divined the anguish of mind of many men who were unprepared to go with
the new way of thinking, and yet were scandalised at the license of the
old--who were willing to be Catholics, and yet not willing to be
delivered over to Spain.
Where so many episodes are sketched, few of course can be fully
developed; but there is a vivid manliness of the classic English type in
such portraits as Lord William Howard and Sir Ralph Bagenhall--poor Sir
Ralph, who declares that
"Far liefer had I in my country hall
Been reading some old book, with mine old hound
Couch'd at my hearth, and mine old flask of wine
Beside me,"
than stand as he does in the thick of the trouble of the time; and who
finally is brought to his account for not having knelt with the commons
to the legate of Charles V. We have a glimpse of Sir Thomas Wyatt's
insurrection, and a portrait of that robust rebel, who was at the same
time an editor of paternal sonnets--sonnets of a father who loved
"To read and rhyme in solitary fields,
The lark above, the nightingale below,
And answer them in song."
We have a very touching report of Lady Jane Grey's execution, and we
assist almost directly at the sad perplexities of poor Cranmer's
eclipse. We appreciate the contrast between the fine nerves and
many-sided conscience of that wavering martyr, and the more comfortable
religious temperament of Bonner and Gardiner--Bonner, apt "to gorge a
heretic whole, roasted, or raw;" and Gardiner, who can say,
"I've gulpt it down; I'm wholly for the Pope,
Utterly and altogether for the Pope,
The Eternal Peter of the changeless chair,
Crowned slave of slaves and mitred king of kings.
God upon earth! What more? What would you have?"
Elizabeth makes several appearances, and though they are brief, the poet
has evidently had a definite figure in his mind's eye. On a second
reading it betrays a number of fine intentions. The circumspection of
the young princess, her high mettle, her coquetry, her frankness, her
coarseness, are all rapidly glanced at. Her exclamation--
"I would I were a milkmaid,
To sing, love, marry, churn, brew, bake, and die,
And have my simple headstone by the church,
And all things lived and ended honestly"--
marks one limit of the sketch; and the other is indicated by her reply
to Cecil at the end of the drama, on his declaring, in allusion to Mary,
that "never English monarch dying left England so little":
"But with Cecil's aid
And others', if our person be secured
From traitor stabs, we will make England great!"
The middle term is perhaps marked by her reception of the functionary
who comes to inform her that her sister bids her know that the King of
Spain desires her to marry Prince Philibert of Savoy:
"I thank you heartily, sir,
But I am royal, tho' your prisoner,
And God hath blessed or cursed me with a nose--
Your boots are from the horses."
The drama is deficient in male characters of salient interest. Philip is
vague and blank, as he is evidently meant to be, and Cardinal Pole is a
portrait of a character constitutionally inapt for breadth of action.
The portrait is a skilful one, however, and expresses forcibly the pangs
of a sensitive nature entangled in trenchant machinery. There is a fine
scene near the close of the drama in which Pole and the Queen--cousins,
old friends, and for a moment betrothed (Victor Hugo characteristically
assumes Mary to have been her cousin's mistress)--confide to each other
their weariness and disappointment. Mary endeavours to console the
Cardinal, but he has only grim answers for her:
"Our altar is a mound of dead men's clay,
Dug from the grave that yawns for us beyond;
And there is one Death stands beside the Groom,
And there is one Death stands beside the Bride."
_Queen Mary_, I believe, is to be put upon the stage next winter in
London. I do not pretend to forecast its success in representation; but
it is not indiscrete to say that it will suffer from the absence of a
man's part capable of being made striking. The very clever Mr. Henry
Irving has, we are told, offered his services, presumably to play either
Philip or Pole. If he imparts any great relief to either figure, it will
be a signal proof of talent. The actress, however, to whom the part of
the Queen is allotted will have every reason to be grateful. The
character is full of colour and made to utter a number of really
dramatic speeches. When Renard assures her that Philip is only waiting
for leave of the Parliament to land on English shores she has an
admirable outbreak:
"God change the pebble which his kingly foot
First presses into some more costly stone
Than ever blinded eye. I'll have one mark it
And bring it me. I'll have it burnished firelike;
I'll set it round with gold, with pearl, with diamond.
Let the great angel of the Church come with him,
Stand on the deck and spread his wings for sail!"
Mary is not only vividly conceived from within, but her physiognomy, as
seen from without, is indicated with much pictorial force:
"Did you mark our Queen?
The colour freely played into her face,
And the half sight which makes her look so stern
Seemed, through that dim, dilated world of hers,
To read our faces."
In the desolation of her last days, when she bids her attendants go to
her sister and
"Tell her to come and close my dying eyes
And wear my crown and dance upon my grave,"
Mary, to attest her misery, seats herself on the ground, like Constance
in "King John"; and the comment of one of her women hereupon is
strikingly picturesque:
"Good Lord! how grim and ghastly looks her Grace,
With both her knees drawn upward to her chin.
There was an old-world tomb beside my father's,
And this was opened, and the dead were found
Sitting, and in this fashion; she looks a corpse."
The great merit of Mr. Tennyson's drama, however, is not in the
quotableness of certain passages, but in the thoroughly elevated spirit
of the whole. He desired to make us feel of what sound manly stuff the
Englishmen of that Tudor reign of terror needed to be, and his verse is
pervaded by the echo of their deep-toned refusal to abdicate their
manhood. The temper of the poem, on this line, is so noble that the
critic who has indulged in a few strictures as to matters of form feels
as if he had been frivolous and niggardly. I nevertheless venture to
add in conclusion that _Queen Mary_ seems to me a work of rare ability
rather than great inspiration; a powerful _tour de force_ rather than a
labour of love. But though it is not the best of a great poet's
achievement, only a great poet could have written it.