Figures of Several Centuries Part 8

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 subst.i.tute.

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 n.o.bler 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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sing 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 n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sage from beginning to end. Here and there the lines become lyric, as in

Thou rose, Why did G.o.d 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.

G.o.d 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. G.o.d 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. G.o.d 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 Oth.e.l.lo 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 pa.s.sages 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. G.o.d, whoe'er G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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: