Harold the Saxon.
The late Lord Lytton (Bulwer) gave to this period and to the closing years of Harold one of the most elaborate of his Historic Studies. He availed himself shrewdly of all the most picturesque aspects (and they were very many) in the career of Harold, and found startling historic facts enough to supply to the full his passion for exaggerated melodrama. There are brilliant passages in his book,[12] and a great wealth of archæologic material; he shows us the remnants of old Roman villas—the crude homeliness of Saxon house surroundings—the assemblage of old Palace Councils. Danish battle-axes, and long-bearded Saxon thanes, and fiery-headed Welshmen contrast with the polished and insidious Normans. Nor is there lacking a heavy and much over-weighted quota of love-making and misfortune, and joy and death. Tennyson has taken the same subject, using the same skeleton of story for his play of Harold. It would seem that he has depended on the romance of Bulwer for his archæology; and indeed the book is dedicated to the younger Lord Lytton (better known in the literary world as “Owen Meredith”). As a working play, it is counted, like all of Tennyson’s—a failure; but there are passages of exceeding beauty.
He pictures the King Harold—the hero that he is—but with a veil of true Saxon gloom lowering over him: he tells the story of his brother Tostig’s jealous wrath,—always in arms against Harold: he tells of the hasty oath, which the king in young days had sworn to William in Normandy, never to claim England’s throne: and this oath hangs like a cloud over the current of Harold’s story. The grief, and noble devotion of poor Edith, the betrothed bride of the king, whom he is compelled by a devilish diplomacy to discard—is woven like a golden thread into the woof of the tale: and Aldwyth, the queen, whom Harold did not and can never love, is set off against Edith—in Tennyson’s own unmatchable way in the last scenes of the tragedy.
We are in the camp at Hastings: the battle waits; a vision of Norman saints, on whose bones Harold had sworn that dreadful oath, comes to him in his trance:—They say—(these wraiths of saints)—
O hapless Harold! king but for an hour!
Thou swarest falsely by our blessed bones,
We give our voice against thee out of Heaven!
And warn him against the fatal arrow.
And Harold—waking—says—
Away!
My battle-axe against your voices!
And then—remembering that old Edward the Confessor had told him on his deathbed that he should die by an arrow—his hope faints.
The king’s last word—“the arrow,” I shall die:
I die for England then, who lived for England.
What nobler? Man must die.
I cannot fall into a falser world—
I have done no man wrong.…
Edith (his betrothed) comes in—
Edith!—Edith!
Get thou into thy cloister, as the king
Will’d it: … There, the great God of Truth
Fill all thine hours with peace! A lying Devil
Hath haunted me—mine oath—my wife—I fain
Had made my marriage not a lie; I could not:
Thou art my bride! and thou, in after years,
Praying perchance for this poor soul of mine
In cold, white cells, beneath an icy moon.
This memory to thee!—and this to England,
My legacy of war against the Pope,
From child to child, from Pope to Pope, from Age to Age,
Till the sea wash her level with her shores,
Or till the Pope be Christ’s.
Aldwyth, the queen, glides in, and seeing Edith, says—
Away from him! Away!
Edith says (we can imagine her sweet plaintiveness)—
I will.… I have not spoken to the king
One word: and one I must. Farewell!
And she offers to go.
But Harold, beckoning with a grand gesture of authority—
Not yet!
Stay! The king commands thee, woman!
And he turns to Aldwyth, from whose kinsmen he had expected aid—
Have thy two brethren sent their forces in?
Aldwyth—Nay, I fear not.
And Harold blazes upon her—
Then there’s no force in thee!
Thou didst possess thyself of Edward’s ear
To part me from the woman that I loved.
…
Thou hast been false to England and to me!
As—in some sort—I have been false to thee.
Leave me. No more.—Pardon on both sides.—Go!
Aldwyth—Alas, my lord, I loved thee!
O Harold! husband! Shall we meet again?
Harold—After the battle—after the battle. Go.
Aldwyth—I go. (Aside.) That I could stab her standing there!
(Exit Aldwyth.)
Edith—Alas, my lord, she loved thee.
Harold—Never! never!
Edith—I saw it in her eyes!
Harold—I see it in thine!
And not on thee—nor England—fall God’s doom!
Edith—On thee? on me. And thou art England!
Alfred
Was England. Ethelred was nothing. England
Is but her king, as thou art Harold!
Harold—Edith,
The sign in Heaven—the sudden blast at sea—
My fatal oath—the dead saints—the dark dreams—
The Pope’s Anathema—the Holy Rood
That bow’d to me at Waltham—Edith, if
I, the last English King of England——
Edith—No,
First of a line that coming from the people,
And chosen by the people——
Harold—And fighting for
And dying for the people——
Look, I will bear thy blessing into the battle
And front the doom of God.
And he did affront it bravely; and the arrow did slay him, near to the spot where the Saxon standard flew to the breeze on that fateful day.
The play from which I have quoted may have excess of elaboration and an over-finesse in respect of details: but there are great bold reaches of descriptive power, a nobility of sentiment, and everywhere tender and winning touches, which will be very sure to give to the drama of Tennyson permanence and historic dignity, and keep it always a literary way-mark in the fields we have gone over. The scene of that decisive contest is less than a two hours’ ride away from London (by the Southeastern Railway) at a village called Battle—seven miles from the coast line at Hastings—in the midst of a beautiful rolling country, with scattered copses of ancient wood and a great wealth of wild flowers—(for which the district is remarkable) sparkling over the fields.
The Conqueror built a great abbey there—Battle Abbey—whose ruins are visited by hundreds every year. A large portion of the old religious house, kept in excellent repair, and very charming with its growth of ivy and its embowering shade, is held in private hands—being the occasional residence of the Duke of Cleveland. Amid the ruins the usher will guide one to a crypt of the ancient chapel—whose solid Norman arches date back to the time of the Conqueror, and which is said to mark the very spot on which Harold fell, wounded to the death, on that memorable day of Hastings.