Figures of Several Centuries Part 9

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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d.

And at the end Na.r.s.etes, 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 G.o.d'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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 ign.o.bly 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 G.o.ds came back, drunk and debauched with their long exile under the earth, and the garden-G.o.d a.s.sumed 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 pa.s.sing 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 surpa.s.sed by the terrible and magnificent scene leading up to the death of Darnley--a scene itself only surpa.s.sed, 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 G.o.d--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 G.o.d indeed.

CaeSAR. Nor thou nor I Know.

ALEX. I could pray to G.o.d that G.o.d 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 Sh.e.l.ley, 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 Zauberflote_ 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, n.o.ble 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, Vicarious Christ, and cast as flesh away This grief from off thy G.o.dhead.

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 l.u.s.t 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 G.o.d, who made me and my sire and thee, May take the charge upon him.

1899-1908.