Books and Characters, French & English Part 11

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 G.o.ds; 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 G.o.d, Palaced within the corpse of Saturn's father.

They begin to dispute, and at last Marcello exclaims--

Aye, Prince, you have a brother--

_Orazio_. The Duke--he'll scourge you.

_Marcello_. Nay, _the second_, sir, Who, like an envious river, flows between Your footsteps and Ferrara's throne....

_Orazio_. Stood he before me there, By you, in you, as like as you're unlike, Straight as you're bowed, young as you are old, And many years nearer than him to Death, The falling brilliancy of whose white sword Your ancient locks so silverly reflect, I would deny, outswear, and overreach, And pa.s.s him with contempt, as I do you.

Jove! How we waste the stars: set on, my friends.

And so the revelling band pa.s.s onward, singing still, as they vanish down the darkened street:

Strike, you myrtle-crowned boys, Ivied maidens, strike together!...

and Marcello is left alone:

I went forth Joyfully, as the soul of one who closes His pillowed eyes beside an unseen murderer, And like its horrible return was mine, To find the heart, wherein I breathed and beat, Cold, gashed, and dead. Let me forget to love, And take a heart of venom: let me make A staircase of the frightened b.r.e.a.s.t.s of men, And climb into a lonely happiness!

And thou, who only art alone as I, Great solitary G.o.d of that one sun, I charge thee, by the likeness of our state, Undo these human veins that tie me close To other men, and let your servant griefs Unmilk me of my mother, and pour in Salt scorn and steaming hate!

A moment later he learnt that the duke has suddenly died, and that the dukedom is his. The rest of the play affords an instance of Beddoes'

inability to trace out a story, clearly and forcibly, to an appointed end. The succeeding acts are crowded with beautiful pa.s.sages, with vivid situations, with surprising developments, but the central plot vanishes away into nothing, like a great river dissipating itself among a thousand streams. It is, indeed, clear enough that Beddoes was embarra.s.sed with his riches, that his fertile mind conceived too easily, and that he could never resist the temptation of giving life to his imaginations, even at the cost of killing his play. His conception of Orazio, for instance, began by being that of a young Bacchus, as he appears in the opening scene. But Beddoes could not leave him there; he must have a romantic wife, whom he has deserted; and the wife, once brought into being, must have an interview with her husband. The interview is an exquisitely beautiful one, but it shatters Orazio's character, for, in the course of it, he falls desperately in love with his wife; and meanwhile the wife herself has become so important and interesting a figure that she must be given a father, who in his turn becomes the central character in more than one exciting scene. But, by this time, what has happened to the second brother? It is easy to believe that Beddoes was always ready to begin a new play rather than finish an old one. But it is not so certain that his method was quite as inexcusable as his critics a.s.sert. To the reader, doubtless, his faulty construction is glaring enough; but Beddoes wrote his plays to be acted, as a pa.s.sage in one of his letters very clearly shows. 'You are, I think,' he writes to Kelsall, 'disinclined to the stage: now I confess that I think this is the highest aim of the dramatist, and should be very desirous to get on it. To look down on it is a piece of impertinence, as long as one chooses to write in the form of a play, and is generally the result of one's own inability to produce anything striking and affecting in that way.' And it is precisely upon the stage that such faults of construction as those which disfigure Beddoes'

tragedies matter least. An audience, whose attention is held and delighted by a succession of striking incidents clothed in splendid speech, neither cares nor knows whether the effect of the whole, as a whole, is worthy of the separate parts. It would be foolish, in the present melancholy condition of the art of dramatic declamation, to wish for the public performance of _Death's Jest Book_; but it is impossible not to hope that the time may come when an adequate representation of that strange and great work may be something more than 'a possibility more thin than air.' Then, and then only, shall we be able to take the true measure of Beddoes' genius.

Perhaps, however, the ordinary reader finds Beddoes' lack of construction a less distasteful quality than his disregard of the common realities of existence. Not only is the subject-matter of the greater part of his poetry remote and dubious; his very characters themselves seem to be infected by their creator's delight in the mysterious, the strange, and the unreal. They have no healthy activity; or, if they have, they invariably lose it in the second act; in the end, they are all hypochondriac philosophers, puzzling over eternity and dissecting the attributes of Death. The central idea of _Death's Jest Book_--the resurrection of a ghost--fails to be truly effective, because it is difficult to see any clear distinction between the phantom and the rest of the characters. The duke, saved from death by the timely arrival of Wolfram, exclaims 'Blest hour!' and then, in a moment, begins to ponder, and agonise, and dream:

And yet how palely, with what faded lips Do we salute this unhoped change of fortune!

Thou art so silent, lady; and I utter Shadows of words, like to an ancient ghost, Arisen out of h.o.a.ry centuries Where none can speak his language.

Orazio, in his brilliant palace, is overcome with the same feelings:

Methinks, these fellows, with their ready jests, Are like to tedious bells, that ring alike Marriage or death.

And his description of his own revels applies no less to the whole atmosphere of Beddoes' tragedies:

Voices were heard, most loud, which no man owned: There were more shadows too than there were men; And all the air more dark and thick than night Was heavy, as 'twere made of something more Than living breaths.

It would be vain to look, among such spectral imaginings as these, for guidance in practical affairs, or for illuminating views on men and things, or for a philosophy, or, in short, for anything which may be called a 'criticism of life.' If a poet must be a critic of life, Beddoes was certainly no poet. He belongs to the cla.s.s of writers of which, in English literature, Spenser, Keats, and Milton are the dominant figures--the writers who are great merely because of their art.

Sir James Stephen was only telling the truth when he remarked that Milton might have put all that he had to say in _Paradise Lost_ into a prose pamphlet of two or three pages. But who cares about what Milton had to say? It is his way of saying it that matters; it is his expression. Take away the expression from the _Satires_ of Pope, or from _The Excursion_, and, though you will destroy the poems, you will leave behind a great ma.s.s of thought. Take away the expression from _Hyperion_, and you will leave nothing at all. To ask which is the better of the two styles is like asking whether a peach is better than a rose, because, both being beautiful, you can eat the one and not the other. At any rate, Beddoes is among the roses: it is in his expression that his greatness lies. His verse is an instrument of many modulations, of exquisite delicacy, of strange suggestiveness, of amazing power.

Playing on it, he can give utterance to the subtlest visions, such as this:

Just now a beam of joy hung on his eyelash; But, as I looked, it sunk into his eye, Like a bruised worm writhing its form of rings Into a darkening hole.

Or to the most marvellous of vague and vast conceptions, such as this:

I begin to hear Strange but sweet sounds, and the loud rocky dashing Of waves, where time into Eternity Falls over ruined worlds.

Or he can evoke sensations of pure loveliness, such as these:

So fair a creature! of such charms compact As nature stints elsewhere: which you may find Under the tender eyelid of a serpent, Or in the gurge of a kiss-coloured rose, By drops and sparks: but when she moves, you see, Like water from a crystal overfilled, Fresh beauty tremble out of her and lave Her fair sides to the ground.

Or he can put into a single line all the long memories of adoration:

My love was much; My life but an inhabitant of his.

Or he can pa.s.s in a moment from tiny sweetness to colossal turmoil:

I should not say How thou art like the daisy in Noah's meadow, On which the foremost drop of rain fell warm And soft at evening: so the little flower Wrapped up its leaves, and shut the treacherous water Close to the golden welcome of its breast, Delighting in the touch of that which led The shower of oceans, in whose billowy drops Tritons and lions of the sea were warring, And sometimes ships on fire sunk in the blood, Of their own inmates; others were of ice, And some had islands rooted in their waves, Beasts on their rocks, and forest-powdering winds, And showers tumbling on their tumbling self, And every sea of every ruined star Was but a drop in the world-melting flood.

He can express alike the beautiful tenderness of love, and the hectic, dizzy, and appalling frenzy of extreme rage:--

... What shall I do? I speak all wrong, And lose a soul-full of delicious thought By talking. Hush! Let's drink each other up By silent eyes. Who lives, but thou and I, My heavenly wife?...

I'll watch thee thus, till I can tell a second By thy cheek's change.

In that, one can almost feel the kisses; and, in this, one can almost hear the gnashing of the teeth. 'Never!' exclaims the duke to his son Torrismond:

There lies no grain of sand between My loved and my detested! Wing thee hence, Or thou dost stand to-morrow on a cobweb Spun o'er the well of clotted Acheron, Whose hydrophobic entrails stream with fire!

And may this intervening earth be snow, And my step burn like the mid coal of Aetna, Plunging me, through it all, into the core, Where in their graves the dead are shut like seeds, If I do not--O, but he is my son!

Is not that tremendous? But, to find Beddoes in his most characteristic mood, one must watch him weaving his mysterious imagination upon the woof of mortality. One must wander with him through the pages of _Death's Jest Book_, one must grow accustomed to the dissolution of reality, and the opening of the nettled lips of graves; one must learn that 'the dead are most and merriest,' one must ask--'Are the ghosts eaves-dropping?'--one must realise that 'murder is full of holes.' Among the ruins of his Gothic cathedral, on whose cloister walls the Dance of Death is painted, one may speculate at ease over the fragility of existence, and, within the sound of that dark ocean,

Whose tumultuous waves Are heaped, contending ghosts,

one may understand how it is that

Death is mightier, stronger, and more faithful To man than Life.

Lingering there, one may watch the Deaths come down from their cloister, and dance and sing amid the moonlight; one may laugh over the grotesque contortions of skeletons; one may crack jokes upon corruption; one may sit down with phantoms, and drink to the health of Death.

In private intercourse Beddoes was the least morbid of human beings. His mind was like one of those Gothic cathedrals of which he was so fond--mysterious within, and filled with a light at once richer and less real than the light of day; on the outside, firm, and towering, and immediately impressive; and embellished, both inside and out, with grinning gargoyles. His conversation, Kelsall tells us, was full of humour and vitality, and untouched by any trace of egoism or affectation. He loved discussion, plunging into it with fire, and carrying it onward with high dexterity and good-humoured force. His letters are excellent: simple, spirited, spicy, and as original as his verse; flavoured with that vein of rattling open-air humour which had produced his school-boy novel in the style of Fielding. He was a man whom it would have been a rare delight to know. His character, so eminently English, compact of courage, of originality, of imagination, and with something coa.r.s.e in it as well, puts one in mind of Hamlet: not the melodramatic sentimentalist of the stage; but the real Hamlet, Horatio's Hamlet, who called his father's ghost old truepenny, who forged his uncle's signature, who fought Laertes, and ranted in a grave, and lugged the guts into the neighbour room. His tragedy, like Hamlet's, was the tragedy of an over-powerful will--a will so strong as to recoil upon itself, and fall into indecision. It is easy for a weak man to be decided--there is so much to make him so; but a strong man, who can do anything, sometimes leaves everything undone. Fortunately Beddoes, though he did far less than he might have done, possessed so rich a genius that what he did, though small in quant.i.ty, is in quality beyond price. 'I might have been, among other things, a good poet,' were his last words. 'Among other things'! Aye, there's the rub. But, in spite of his own 'might have been,' a good poet he was. Perhaps for him, after all, there was very little to regret; his life was full of high n.o.bility; and what other way of death would have befitted the poet of death? There is a thought constantly recurring throughout his writings--in his childish as in his most mature work--the thought of the beauty and the supernal happiness of soft and quiet death. He had visions of 'rosily dying,' of 'turning to daisies gently in the grave,'

of a 'pink reclining death,' of death coming like a summer cloud over the soul. 'Let her deathly life pa.s.s into death,' says one of his earliest characters, 'like music on the night wind.' And, in _Death's Jest Book_, Sibylla has the same thoughts:

O Death! I am thy friend, I struggle not with thee, I love thy state: Thou canst be sweet and gentle, be so now; And let me pa.s.s praying away into thee, As twilight still does into starry night.

Did his mind, obsessed and overwhelmed by images of death, crave at last for the one thing stranger than all these--the experience of it? It is easy to believe so, and that, ill, wretched, and abandoned by Degen at the miserable Cigogne Hotel, he should seek relief in the gradual dissolution which attends upon loss of blood. And then, when he had recovered, when he was almost happy once again, the old thoughts, perhaps, came crowding back upon him--thoughts of the futility of life, and the supremacy of death and the mystical whirlpool of the unknown, and the long quietude of the grave. In the end, Death had grown to be something more than Death to him--it was, mysteriously and transcendentally, Love as well.

Death's darts are sometimes Love's. So Nature tells, When laughing waters close o'er drowning men; When in flowers' honied corners poison dwells; When Beauty dies: and the unwearied ken Of those who seek a cure for long despair Will learn ...

What learning was it that rewarded him? What ghostly knowledge of eternal love?