Part 10
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, Caesar, 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 Caesar 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. CAESAR. Thou hast said it. ALEX. Dost thou think To live, and look upon me? CAESAR. Some while yet. ALEX. I would there were a God--that he might hear. CAESAR. 'Tis pity there should be--for thy sake--none. ALEX. Wilt thou slay me? CAESAR. Why? ALEX. Am I not thy sire? CAESAR. And Christendom's to boot. ALEX. I pray thee, man, Slay me. CAESAR. And then myself? Thou art crazed, but I Sane. ALEX. Art thou very flesh and blood? CAESAR. They say, Thine. ALEX. If the heaven stand still and smite thee not, There is no God indeed. CAESAR. 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 Zauberfloete_ 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 Caesar, 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 Caesar-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 Mallarme 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.
Dreams are precise; it is only when we awake, when we go outside, that they become vague. In a certain sense Rossetti, with all his keen practical intelligence, was never wholly awake, had never gone outside that house of dreams in which the only real things were the things of the imagination. In the poetry of most poets there is a double kind of existence, of which each half is generally quite distinct; a real world, and a world of the imagination. But the poetry of Rossetti knows but one world, and it inhabits a corner there, like a perfectly contented prisoner, or like a prisoner to whom the sense of imprisonment is a joy. The love of beauty, the love of love, because love is the supreme energy of beauty, suffices for an existence in which every moment is a crisis; for to him, as Pater has said, 'life is a crisis at every moment': life, that is to say, the inner life, the life of imagination, in which the senses are messengers from the outer world, from which they can but bring disquieting tidings.
The whole of this poetry is tragic, though without pathos or even self-pity. Every human attempt to maintain happiness is foredoomed to be a failure, and this is an attempt to maintain ecstasy in a region where everything which is not ecstasy is pain. In reading every other poet who has written of love one is conscious of compensations: the happiness of loving or of being loved, the honour of defeat, the help and comfort of nature or of action. But here all energy is concentrated on the one ecstasy, and this exists for its own sake, and the desire of it is like thirst, which returns after every partial satisfaction. The desire of beauty, the love of love, can but be a form of martyrdom when, as with Rossetti, there is also the desire of possession.