Swinburne And De Vere.
The dramas Bothwell[94] and Alexander the Great,[95] which have so recently come into the world side by side to challenge the attention of that portion of it that speaks, or is supposed to speak, the language of Shakespeare, offer all the contrasts that might be expected from their subjects, as well as from the known thought, tone, and tendency of their respective authors. One writer has taken for his chief character a great Christian woman whose story, look at it as we may, is at least of the saddest that was ever told; the other has chosen for his subject the wonder of pagan history, the exemplar of pagan greatness, whose short career is the condensation of all earthly glory and triumph.
It will be at once manifest that to a modern writer, as far as the materials for the construction of an historical drama go, the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, is beyond measure richer than that of Alexander. Her story is religiously and politically one of the day. She is still on trial, no longer before the narrow circles of York and Fotheringay, but before Christendom. The question of her innocence or guilt, and the consequent justice or injustice of her sentence, is debated as fiercely to-day as when alone she faced the sleuth-hounds of Elizabeth in defence of her honor and her life.
The final judgment of Christendom may be said already to be a foregone conclusion in her favor, so fast is the long-withheld evidence of her innocence accumulating. But her life-blood stains a nation and a religion, or what called itself such, and the verdict that declares her “not guilty” lays a terrible and indelible blot on them. Hence every nook and cranny of history is searched, every historical cobweb disentangled, with an eagerness and minuteness so thorough and complete that the reader is better acquainted often with the history of Mary Stuart than with that of the century in which he lives.
For a dramatist a most important point is thus at once secured. His audience is interested in advance; and there is no further care for him than to make a judicious use of the wealth of material at his disposal.
And surely to one with a soul in his body never did a more fitting subject for a tragedy offer itself than Mary, Queen of Scots. The only difficulty would seem to be a right selection from a great abundance. The scenes and characters, the very speeches often, are ready made. Time, place, circumstance, are ripe with interest. The march of events is terribly rapid. The scene is ever shifting, and with it the fortunes of the queen. All the passions are there at strife. Plot and counterplot, tragedy within tragedy, love and hate, jealousy and wrath, hope and fear, the basest betrayal and the loftiest devotion, [pg 347] surge and make war around this one woman, and are borne along with her in a frenzied whirl to the terrible end, when the curtain drops silently on that last dread scene that stands, as it will for ever stand, in startling relief, far out from the dim background of history.
The name of Alexander the Great calls up no such interest as this. His life would seem the least likely of subjects for a modern dramatist. Great captains, such as the first Napoleon, may look to him as at once their model and their envy; but happily such great men are few and far between. Alexander might indeed have formed an admirable theme for one of the lesser lights of the English Augustan era to celebrate in those sonorous heroics whose drowsy hum might serve at need as an admirable soporific. But he and those who lived and moved about him are out of our world; and whether he conquered ten empires or fifty, whether he defeated Darius or Darius him, whether he sighed for more or fewer worlds to conquer, is now all one to us. The sands of the desert have buried or wiped out his empire ages ago; the sands of time have settled down on his memory and half obliterated it; and the mighty Alexander serves to-day for little more than to point a moral.
On the other hand, every scene and incident in which Mary, Queen of Scots, figured is intense with dramatic force. She entered on her reign at what might be called the dawn of modern history—a lurid dawn presaging the storm that was to come and is not yet over. The Reformation was convulsing Europe. It had just entered Scotland before her, and the raven that croaked its fatal entrance was John Knox. In the person of this girl were centred the hopes of the Catholic party for Scotland and England. Mingled with the strife of creeds around her was the conflict of the great Scottish families, whose miserable contentions rent and wrecked the kingdom. Any chieftain who chose and thought himself strong enough drew the sword when and for what purpose pleased him. More than half of them—those of any note, at least—were in Elizabeth's pay. Treason constituted much of the political life of those days, while under and over and among the fierce strife of political parties rang and resounded the clangor and wrangle of the delirious sects that had just apostatized from Rome. Such was the period when the helm of the most distracted state in distracted Christendom was set in the hand of a gentle girl, who stood there alone to guide it over unknown seas. All the tempest gathered together its fury and broke over her head. This is the figure chosen by the author of Bothwell for the centre of his tragedy. It was a time and a scene and a tragedy worthy the philosophic mind of a Shakespeare and the terrible power of an Æschylus. Mr. Swinburne's work scarcely gives evidence of the combination of these qualities.
A subject of this kind, when attempted at all, suggests painful reflections if failure, emphatic failure, is the result. A goose essaying an eagle's flight would scarcely present a more absurd figure. Mr. Swinburne has fallen immeasurably below the level of a subject whose level is greatness. Not because he has chosen to paint Mary, Queen of Scots, as a fiend, is this judgment passed on his work. Milton has proved that Satan can be converted [pg 348] by genius into the most powerful dramatic villain that ever trod the stage. Lady Macbeth may thrill us with horror, but she never causes us to yawn. The author of Bothwell was at liberty, by the license allowed to poets, to make his heroine wicked enough even to satisfy his fastidious taste, and still have given us a drama that of its own force and brilliancy and coherence would have extorted the admiration of the unfortunate queen's most ardent defenders. But even her heartiest haters could not resist the tendency to nod over the cumbrous wickedness, the very heavy villany, of Bothwell, which is simply a dilution of Froude with a tincture of Swinburne, well watered and administered in the largest possible doses, or, in plain English, a few scenes of the history of the period stitched loosely together and set to measured lines of blank verse.
Five hundred and thirty-two pages, with thirty lines to the page, in five acts and sixty scenes, make a tragedy indeed. Such is Bothwell. Yet, notwithstanding its alarming proportions, it only extends from the death of Rizzio to the battle of Langside, thus omitting the scene that of all others is the most thrilling and effective—Mary's execution. This may have been done with a purpose; for even malevolence falters there. Such an end, preceded by her long captivity, so patiently borne, were she even as wicked as Mr. Swinburne would make her, might almost expiate any crime, as it sanctifies her innocence.
The entire first act, entitled “David Rizzio,” is absorbed by the murder of the character after which it is named. As far as its necessary connection with the drama goes, it might have been entirely and very profitably omitted. It serves, indeed, to introduce many of the characters, but to no special purpose that might not have been accomplished in any of the other acts. The author forgets that he is not writing history, but a drama. We do not want the minutiæ, everything that everybody said at any time, in any place, and under any circumstances while Mary, Queen of Scots, was living, which Mr. Swinburne seems to think he was bound to give us, and in blank verse too, in Bothwell. We want the situations, the great facts. What led up to them may be told or hinted at in a few lines. Mr. Swinburne does not seem to have realized this, and, as a consequence, his drama is crowded with scenes, incidents, and personages that not only hinder, but are utterly irrelevant to, the main action of the piece, if indeed the piece can be truly said to possess any main action. Thus it takes the entire first act, consisting of five scenes and eighty-nine pages, to kill Rizzio. At last he is happily despatched, to the relief, it must be said, of the reader, who, already wearied, finds the second act entirely devoted to a similar sanguinary operation, performed on Darnley this time. With a nice sense, notwithstanding his pronounced communistic sympathies, of what is due even to second-hand royalty of the Darnley order, Mr. Swinburne, regardless of the liberal allowance of space allotted to the stabbing of Rizzio, feels it incumbent on him to devote one hundred and forty-seven pages and twenty-one scenes to the blowing up of Mary's husband. Thus, although two hundred and forty pages in all are given over mainly to the killing of these two characters, the tragedy can be scarcely said to have begun, [pg 349] there being still three dreary acts to face.
The question naturally suggests itself here, What in the name of common sense, if not of tragedy, has Mr. Swinburne been doing with his space? Perhaps we have reason to congratulate ourselves after all that he did not pursue his unhappy victim into England, and insist upon murdering her also; for it is impossible, in the contemplation of such an event, to form even a wild conception of when and where Mr. Swinburne's tragedy was likely to terminate. The truth is, he is no dramatist at all; he is a writer of speeches, good, bad, or indifferent, as may be, but no more. Livy or Sallust have almost as just a title to be styled dramatists as Mr. Swinburne; Homer far more so. Speeches form perhaps the least, certainly the easiest, portion of a drama; and the speeches in Bothwell are more or less ready made. Mr. Swinburne cannot grasp a situation; he can only write about it. He cannot picture it to us in a few telling lines. He cannot hint a future; he must foretell it in full, or wait until it comes. He cannot content himself with leaving well alone. The Earl of Leicester's historic “nod” that meant so much is of course a very amusing caricature; but the point of a caricature lies in the kernel of truth which it covers. Perhaps the most necessary of dramatic faculties is the capability of saying much in a little; and that faculty Mr. Swinburne does not possess in the slightest degree. If anything, his special tendency lies in an opposite direction; he says remarkably little in a very great deal. Instead of mastering his material, he has become hopelessly embarrassed by it, and, like the miser in the story, perishes from want in the midst of the treasures piled up around him. His characters, instead of being moved at his will, move him at theirs. When one, no matter of how great or how little importance, opens his or her mouth, not even Mr. Swinburne himself can say when it will close. Speeches pages in length are thrown into anybody's mouth on the slightest provocation, and all pitched more or less in the same key. If Mary curses—for Mr. Swinburne is more liberal than discreet in his distribution of strong language—she is not content with one good, round, blasphemous oath once in a while, but must indulge in half a dozen or so offhand. If Knox argues or preaches, he does so at as great length almost as when in the flesh. One of his speeches fills thirteen pages without a break. If the inevitable “first, second, and third citizen” enter—who, for the manner of their speeches or the matter of them, might with equal propriety be dubbed “first citizen” or “fifty-second citizen,” or anything else—they talk and talk and talk until they talk themselves off, as they would beyond all doubt talk an audience out of their seats. Almost two-thirds of the play is to the reader simply wearisome jabber, whose sense, like Gratiano's “infinite deal of nothing,” is as “two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff.”
The drama is so interminable that we can only call attention to the chief character, which is not Bothwell, as the title would seem to imply, but Mary, whose alleged amours with Bothwell form the groundwork of the piece. As this article does not pretend to enter into an historical investigation, this is not the place to advance reasons for disagreeing with Mr. [pg 350] Swinburne's estimate of Mary. One or two words, however, may be permitted.
The story that forms the foundation of this play has been torn to shreds by writers of every shade of opinion. Its truth, based mainly on the “casket letters,” was never accepted even at the English court. Elizabeth herself was compelled to acquit her cousin of all such scandalous charges. Yet on this Mr. Swinburne, with the chivalry of a poet and the honesty of a man who must have read history, builds his nauseous drama. Again, Mary was, by all concession, a lady. High and royal spirit she had indeed, of which in some notable instances she gave ample proof; but she has never been accused of indulging in language unworthy the royal woman she was, or savoring in any sense of coarseness. She was also a consistent and practical Catholic, who knew her religion and how to hold it, even against that fierce Calvinistic wolf, John Knox, to whom it were a happiness had his insulted sovereign only meted out the measure he persistently advocated for all Catholics. But she was too gentle-natured to adopt means of enforcing silence and obedience more congenial to the spirit of her English cousin, who had a very summary manner of dealing with theological difficulties. This much being premised, let us now look at the Mary of Mr. Swinburne.
Here we have her in the very first scene of the first act. Rizzio is pleading with her the recall of Murray:
Queen. “What name is his who shall so strengthen me?”
Rizzio. “Your father gave him half a brother's name.”
Queen. “I have no brother; a bloodless traitor he is,
Who was my father's bastard-born. By heaven!
I had rather have his head loose at my foot
Than his tongue's counsel rounded in mine ear.”
This is only her fourth speech in the play. It does not seem to have impressed Rizzio sufficiently; for, turning a page, we find her still railing at the subject of her wrath in this vigorous style:
... “By my hand,
Too little and light to hold up his dead head,
It was my hope to dip it in his life
Made me ride iron-mailed and soldieress.”
With occasional spurts of this nature the queen enlivens her somewhat tedious colloquy of thirteen pages with Rizzio concerning Murray. She is candid enough to say in one place of her half-brother, whom the Mary of history really believed in too long and too blindly for her own happiness:
“I am gay of heart, light as a spring south wind,
To feed my soul with his foretasted death....”
And again:
“Oh! I feel dancing motions in my feet
And laughter moving merrily at my lips,
Only to think him dead, or hearsed, or hanged—That
were the better. I could dance down his life.
Sing my steps through, treading on his dead neck,
For love of his dead body and cast-out soul.”
Verily, a real Highland fling! And lest there should be any possible doubt as to the meaning of “cast-out soul,” this gentle lady pursues it to its place, and gloats over its eternal torments in this Christian fashion:
“He shall talk of me to the worm of hell,
Prate in death's ear and with a speechless tongue
Of my dead doings in days gone out....”
It is surely punishment enough to be condemned to carry on a conversation of any kind with the worm of hell and in the ear of death; but to compel even a cast-out soul to perform this unpleasant duty “with a speechless tongue” is punishment that passes ordinary comprehension. Doubtless, however, matters are or will be altered for Mr. Swinburne's special convenience [pg 351] in the lower regions. Abandoning the wretched Murray to his destiny, we look for other revelations of Mary's character, although something of her mettle may be gathered from the passages already given, which have been taken almost at random from the first twenty-eight pages of the five hundred and thirty-two. They are by no means the liveliest specimens to be found.
It would display a lamentable lack of knowledge of nature supposed to be human to imagine for a moment that the woman—if the expression is allowable—revealed in these passages is likely to be at all squeamish or foolishly coy about the profession of what Mr. Swinburne would probably call her love for Bothwell. The insignificant facts that her own husband, Darnley, and Bothwell's wife, Jane Gordon, were still living, would naturally weigh lightly as feathers in the balance against her desire. Most of the scenes between the queen and Bothwell might be shortly described as “linked foulness long drawn out.” Were they even word for word true, it would still be a wonder and a shame to honest manhood that they could be dwelt upon and gloated over by any writer at all. Horace boasted of belonging to the “Epicurean herd.” Were he living now, he would, we honestly believe, feel conscientious scruples at admitting Mr. Swinburne into the company. Only such passages are quoted here as are presentable and necessary to endorse our judgment of this drama.
Without even an attempt at disguise, Mary and Bothwell discuss the best means of getting rid of Darnley. As a wife, expecting soon to be a mother, and as a Christian woman, it is only natural that she should urge on the not unwilling Bothwell in this style:
“Would I were God!
Time should be quicker to lend help and hand
To men that wait on him. . . . Were I a man,
I had been by this a free man.”
In the course of the second act she falls sick, as she believes, to death. She makes her dying confession to the Bishop of Ross, who, it is to be presumed, knew his religion. That being the case, it was somewhat rash in Mr. Swinburne to put into his mouth a gross error. He assures the dying queen that
“The man that keeps faith sealed upon his soul
Shall through the blood-shedding of Christ be clean.
And in this time of cursing and flawed faith
Have you kept faith unflawed.
Have no fear, therefore, but your sins of life
Shall fall from off you as a vesture changed.
And leave your soul for whiteness as a child's.”
Of course there is a sense in which this may be taken as correct. The man that really keeps his “faith sealed upon his soul” and “unflawed,” acts up to his faith and lives its life. But this is not what Mr. Swinburne means. In several passages he is at pains to show that it is not. His meaning simply is that because Mary held to the profession of the Catholic faith the bishop assured her that her sins would be remitted. That faith alone was sufficient for salvation was the heresy of Luther. We do not know whether those useful little compendiums of Christian doctrine commonly known as catechisms were much in vogue at the time. Had they been, Mary would have found in hers the following question and answer, which would have shamed the Bishop of Ross: “Will faith alone save us?” “No; it will not without good works.”
It must be remembered, however, that Mr. Swinburne, and not the bishop, is the real father confessor to his own penitent, and a very indulgent [pg 352] one he makes. The queen says:
“I would have absolution ere I die,
But of what sins I have not strength to say
Nor hardly to remember.”
After all that has gone before, that reads remarkably like a wilful lie, as Mr. Swinburne's bishop might have hinted, particularly as she has memory enough left to enumerate her virtues, which conclude with this:
“I have held mine own faith fast, and with my lips
Have borne him [God] witness if my heart were whole.”
Whereupon the worthy bishop takes occasion to repeat his blunder. Glossing beautifully over her sins in a graceful sentence or two, the queen proceeds to “remit all faults against her done,” and ends in this edifying strain:
“I will not take death's hand
With any soil of hate or wrath or wrong
About me, but, being friends with this past world,
Pass from it in the general peace of love.”
Just at this happy moment, by what would doubtless be considered “a stroke of genius,” Murray is made to enter and announce the arrival of Darnley, the unfortunate individual whose crime it is to persist in being Mary's lawful husband when she is in love with one who, by her own command, was somebody else's lawful husband. As may be supposed from what we know of her already, the contrite queen greets the announcement as contrite queens in similar situations are wont to do, thus:
“By heaven! I had rather death had leave than he.
What comes he for? To vex me quick or dead
With his lewd eyes and sodden, sidelong face,
That I may die with loathing of him?
By God, as God shall look upon my soul,
I will not see him.”
After this there is clearly nothing left for the bishop to do but administer the last sacraments and bid the Christian soul depart in peace. Luckily, however, at this critical juncture, and by another “stroke of genius,” the well-known tramp of Bothwell's heel falls on the ear of the dying queen, who immediately feels better, and bids her attendants “bring him in.”
One more passage, and we have done with Mr. Swinburne's Mary. Darnley is not yet murdered; Bothwell is not yet divorced from Jane Gordon; he who became James I. of England is about to be born; the queen has in the preceding scene made the “confession” noticed above; the time, therefore, was ripe for her to make the following declaration to Bothwell:
“I purge me now and perfect my desire,
Which is to be no more your lover—no,
But even yourself, yea, more than body and soul,
One and not twain, one utter life, one fire,
One will, one doom, one deed, one spirit, one God:
For we twain grown and molten each in each,
Surely shall be as God is, and no man.”
Were there such a thing as love in delirium tremens, surely this would be an instance; only that Mary is perfectly cool and collected in making so plain and definite a statement. And Bothwell is just the kind of man to understand and appreciate the pleasant prospect held out for them both. He responds cheerily, hopefully, and prayerfully withal:
“God speed us, then, till we grow up to God!”
The reader has probably seen enough of Mr. Swinburne's Mary Stuart. It will be clear to any impartial mind that beheading was far too easy a fate for such a character.
In one thing at least has the author succeeded. He set out to paint a monster, and a monster indeed he has painted in Mary. The question for the reader to determine is whether his very full-armed Minerva be an emanation from the brain of this modern Jove or one who was a real, living [pg 353] woman. A woman ravenous for blood, lost to all shame, hating even her unborn offspring, blasphemous as Satan, cruel and pitiless as hell, brawling as a drunkard, full of oaths and coarse expressions as a trooper—if this be a true picture of Mary, Queen of Scots, of the woman who in her day drew, as she still continues to draw, the hearts of all true men and honest women to her side, then has the author done his work well and literature a service. But if she be the opposite of all this—a woman cruelly murdered and systematically wronged, at mention of whose name the heart of that chivalry which is never dead, and will never die while Christian manhood lives, leaps up—one is at a loss to father the writer's monster on any other than himself. Viewed in this light, it can only be looked upon as the product of an imagination diseased, an intellect debauched, and a mind distorted—the work of a man whose moral nature has gone astray, and to whom consequently all that is true, pure, womanly, manly, godly, has lost its significance and value.
From the Christian heroine to the pagan hero we turn with a feeling of relief. The very title of Mr. de Vere's drama challenges criticism. To write about Alexander the Great is one thing; to make Alexander speak for himself is another. The world, fashionable as it is to abuse its taste, is discriminating in the conferring of titles that are universal. Local magnates of greater or less magnitude are common enough; but men whom all civilized nations in all ages have agreed to crown with greatness are very few and very far between. From the number of these the son of Philip of Macedon probably stands out pre-eminent In his brief career he accomplished more than any human conqueror ever accomplished, and he succeeded in leaving more after him. So complete and marvellous was his success, and so gigantic his projects, while his means were proportionately limited, that, beyond all possibility of doubt, the man, young as he was, must have been a marvellous genius. Being so, he must not only have done great deeds, but thought great thoughts. He must have been fitted in every way to be a leader of men. This, perhaps the most marvellous character in human history, is the one of all others whom Mr. de Vere, with a courage which, if not justified by the result, can only be looked upon as either rashness or folly, has undertaken to set living and real before us, speaking the speech, thinking the thoughts, scheming the schemes, dreaming the dreams of Alexander. Greatness thus becomes one of the necessary standards by which we must judge Mr. de Vere's work. If his chief character is not great in thought and word, as we know him to have been in deed, he is not Alexander, and this work can only be regarded as a more pretentious failure than the other. If he is great in thought and speech, where are the elements of his greatness to be found? In the brain of the author, in the conception of the poet—nowhere else. For in this case the speeches are not, as they were in the other, ready made and to hand. The record of Alexander's deeds we have; but Alexander we must imagine for ourselves. What manner of man, then, is this that Mr. de Vere has given us? is the first and most natural question to be asked.
Friend and foe alike are busy about him. At the opening of the play Parmenio, the testy but honest-hearted [pg 354] veteran of Philip, before Alexander has yet made his appearance, in words where the admiration of the soldier and the irritability and jealousy of old age are admirably blended, says:
“A realm his father owed me,
And knew it well. The son is reverent too,
But with a difference, sir. In Philip's time
My voice was Delphic on the battle-field.
This young man taps the springs of my experience,
As though with water to allay his wine
Of keener inspirations. ‘Speak thy thought,
Parmenio!’ Ere my words are half-way out
He nods approval or he smiles dissent.
Still, there is like him none! I marvell'd oft
To see him breast that tempest from the north,
Drowning revolt in the Danubian wave.
The foe in sight, instant he knew their numbers;
If distant, guess'd their whereabout—how lay
The intermediate tract—if fordable
The streams—the vales accessible to horse:
'Twas like the craft of beasts remote from man.”
Antisthenes, the rhetorician, describes the man of action as a rhetorician might:
“This king is valued past his worth:
He nothing says that's sage, like Ptolemy,
Or keen-edged, like Craterus. This I grant him:
Sagacity supreme in observation;
He sees with eye inspired. Seeing with him
Is Act and Thought, not sense.”
Arsinoë, the daughter of Darius, thinks that “he neither loves nor hates.” He is royal-faced, “albeit too eager-eyed.” And Hephestion, the strong friend on whom alone of all men Alexander leans, tells her of him:
“He loves not many, and himself the least:
His purposes to him are wife and child.”
“Free him from that conceit,” says Parmenio later on, “that he's a god,”
“The man of men were he:
None like him we have had since Marathon.”
Philotas. “I grant his greatness were his god-ship sane,
But note his brow: 'tis Thought's least earthly temple
Then mark, beneath, that round, not human eye,
Still glowing like a panther's! In his body
No passion dwells; but all his mind is passion,
Wild, intellectual appetite, and instinct
That works without a law.”
Parmenio. “But half you know him.
There is a zigzag lightning in his brain
That flies in random flashes, yet not errs.
Chances his victories seem; but link those chances,
And under them a science you shall find,
Though unauthentic, contraband, illicit,
Yes, contumelious oft to laws of war.
Fortune, that as a mistress smiles on others,
Serves him as duty-bound; her blood is he,
Born in the purple of her royalties.”
And so they go on describing him, each in his own way; for, with felicitous art, the presence of Alexander is made to permeate the drama, yet so unobtrusively and unconsciously to all seeming that the mind of the reader, though held fast on the chief character throughout, never wearies of him. The extracts given, culled from here and there, point all in one direction. They are consistent, however they may vary in expression, about the man they describe. He is not like other men; he towers above them; he stands alone. But even this only tells us what men say of him. It may mean no more than any young-lady novelist's description of her hero, whose biting sarcasm and brilliant wit are gifts that it was thought were buried with Sheridan. All which we are willing to concede, only that by some untoward accident the brilliant wit and biting sarcasm never appear on the surface. How does Alexander speak for himself?
In literature, as in life, very much depends on the impression a man makes on his introduction. Alexander's introduction is happy and suggestive. He meets us first at Troy when setting out on his expedition. Around him rise the temples of the memorable dead who died in the Ten Years' War. He is in search of the fane of Achilles, his ancestor, as he claims. Aphrodite and Helen have no attractions for him, upon whose mind “the wise Stagirite” had impressed the high code of pagan morals, that the passions were “a yoke which Action's strenuous sons should scorn to bear.” He stands on ground where heroes fought and [pg 355] strove for ten long years together, and the question comes at once to his earnest mind,
“That ten years' war, what fruit thereof remains?
What empire lives, its witness and its crown?
What shall we say? That those were common men
Made large by mists of Time? Or shall we rather
Conclude them real, and our age a fraud?”
His friend Hephestion is reminded by the fanes around, not of the greatness, but of the littleness, of man and of the common ashes to which we come at last. In what, had he the ear to hear it, had been for his leader a solemn warning, he cries out:
“Alas! how small an urn
Suffices for the earth-o'erstriding dust
Which one time shook the world!”
But Alexander cannot contemplate the end of men and things in this calm fashion. To him, as to Achilles, death is “malign and intercepting.” It bears no thought of peace or rest. He describes it as “that frustrate, stagnant, ineffectual bourn where substance melts to shadow.” Far away in “the dimness of the dolorous realm” he sees, though sad, “the unvanquishable youth” of Achilles surviving and lamenting—
“Despite the embalm'd, purpureal airs and gleam
Immeasurable of amaranthine meads,
The keen, reviving, strenuous airs of earth,
And blasts from battle-fields”—
that is the very breath of his nostrils—earth, life, action, with a purpose in it, and the keen intoxication of occasional “blasts from battle-fields.”
But he is not a mere genius errant, a Don Quixote of conquerors, wasting himself on windmills and flocks of sheep. He has a clear, resolute purpose before his mind, to which he shapes all things. It is to make the world one empire, which Grecian intellect should rule. The Governor of Sardis, when the Granicus is won, he bids:
“Tell those realms
Betwixt the Euxine and Pamphylian Seas,
That Grecian galaxy of Lesser Asia,
That Argive choir in eastern exile sad,
That Doric garland on base Persia's brow,
We came not here to crush them, but exalt;
This hand shall lift them to their first estate,
And lodge them mid the skyey heights of Greece.”
Such is his plan; and whatever crosses him must break before or bend to that. Kings, empires, mighty cities, religion, customs and traditions, commerce, all must yield before his indomitable will. Nothing is sacred to Alexander, save what is sacred to Alexander's plan. All things were fashioned to his purpose, and existed only to be made subservient to him. He gazes from the sea-shore on Tyre of the ships, with its wealth, its energies, its possibilities, and the little it has done with them, and bursts forth:
“Wings without body! such—no more—is commerce
Which rests not upon empire! Commerce, ruling,
Disperses man's chief energies, but, ruled
By spirit heroic, increase yields of thoughts
That give to greatness wider basis. Tyre!
How soon thy golden feathers forth shall fly
Upon the storm of War!”
Lacking the “spirit heroic,” Tyre's opportunities and life have hitherto been thrown away, as were thrown away the letters that Phœnicia gave, useless to the inventors. He goes on:
“Men stumble thus on glories not for them,
The rightful appanage of the capable.
The empire I shall found shall tread the earth,
Yet over it go flying. From its vans
The twin-born beams of Grecian Song and Science
Shall send perpetual dawn.”
Mr. de Vere's verse is tempting to quote; but we must hasten on. Some idea of his Alexander may be gathered from the passages given; but, as we said, he permeates the book, and we must leave it to the reader himself to trace the slow growth and development of this singularly-rounded yet most difficult conception. We do not believe that the author in this instance has fallen below the level of his subject, high and remote as that level was. [pg 356] A strong, resolute, far-seeing character, possessed with the very passion of empire, speaks to us in every line of Alexander. Many of his sayings have almost the wisdom and the brevity of proverbs. “Time takes still the conqueror's side,” he tells Hephestion; and when that great-souled character puts the deep and solemn question, “Is there forgiveness for conquerors?”—his answer is:
“Aye; but for half-conquerors, none.”
Here is his policy told in a line:
“Strong hand makes empire; hand that heals retains it.”
When, in a light moment, he asks his generals, were gods their slaves, what fortunes would they choose, and all cry out, “A kingdom!” he says aside:
“Note this, Hephestion:
Imagination is economist,
And vastest ends move less the appetite
Than small things near and easier of access.”
Here is a truth for conquerors to ponder. In the height of his conquest he is convinced that
“The vanquish'd must connive, or victory's self
Its own grave digs in the end.”
All the littleness of greatness, all those surroundings that to small minds stamp, if they do not constitute, greatness, are for him emptiness.
“To breathe applauses is to breathe that air
By breath of men defiled: I stand, and stood,
On the mountain-tops, breathing the breath of gods.”
There is another aspect to his character at which we must glance. We have called attention at the beginning to his jealous hatred of death. Life and death are to him constant enigmas, to which he sees no solution. The only, or at least the great, obstacle that he sees in the way of accomplishing his dream and passion of empire is death. No human foe he fears; but the fates. Time, he passionately says, is no friend of his. He has to build his empire in few years. He is running a constant race with time, and something seems to whisper to him ever that his years are few. In this, too, lies an humbling fact. He, like others, is human and subject to death. This inward struggle and rebellion against his humanity is constantly going on. The thought, What am I? What do I? Who am I? Whence come I? Where go I?—all these things for ever trouble him. He would be a god; but he finds his loftiest aspirations bounded by a wall of flesh, and beyond that—a blank.
With keen dramatic instinct and happy thought the author gives him the opportunity of answering for himself these questionings. He visits the temple at Jerusalem, and converses with the high-priest. The truth is unfolded to him, and the true God made known. He hesitates, and finally rejects the truth. It clashes with his purpose.
“O'er all the earth my empire shall be just,
Godlike my rule,”
he promises the high-priest; whose answer is the solemn rebuke:
“Young man, beware! God's prophet
Awards thee Persia's crown, but not the world's:
He who wears that should be the Prince of Peace.
Thy portion lies in bounds. Limit and Term
Govern the world.”
This revelation tells on his character throughout the rest of the play. He has no longer that blind confidence in himself, though his mind like a vise holds to its resolution of founding the empire he was warned he could not found. His iron will and indomitable energy overcome all obstacles; but time is creeping on, and he feels it. To unite Persian and Greek together, in order to win the Persian, he must be proclaimed a god; and a god he is proclaimed. But the emptiness and mockery of the title are shown with intense force in the [pg 357] workings of the king's mind up to this madness. He strives to argue himself up to godhead only by arguing godhead down to him:
“A race of gods hath fallen:
Then Zeus in turn may fall. I find for gods
No thrones secure; to man's advance no limit;
No certain truth amid contending rites;
No base for faith.”
He remembers the warning about limit and term, only to say scornfully,
“That's for others:
To grasp a world for me is feasible;
To keep a half-world, not.”
He turns further and further away from faith of any kind; his creed resembles that of more modern conquerors:
“The man that empire founds
Must measure all things by the needs of empire.”
And the final outcome of his thoughts is this:
“This only know we—
We walk upon a world not knowable,
Save in those things which knowledge least deserve,
Yet capable, not less, of task heroic.
My trust is in my work: on that I fling me,
Trampling all questionings down.”
And yet the next moment he cries out:
“I sometimes think
That I am less a person than a power.
Some engine in the right hand of the gods,
Some fateful wheel that, round in darkness rolling,
Knows this—its work, but not that work's far scope.
Hephestion, what is life? My life, since boyhood,
Hath been an agony of means to ends;
An ultimate end I find not. For that cause,
On-reeling in the oppression of a void,
At times I welcome what I once scarce brook'd—
The opprobrium of blank sleep.”
There are many scenes of strong dramatic power in this drama—the death of Darius, the quarrel with Parmenio, the rebellion of the Greeks, the last scene with Philotas, and others; but the power and intensity deepen at the close, when death at last creeps into the veins of the conqueror. He has lost Hephestion earlier in the drama, and this loss rends his heart. There is much truth in his singular, almost selfish love for his great-souled friend, who stood to Alexander as a wife would stand to another man. But he to whom “his purposes were wife and child” could not lean on a woman. It must be a man, strong, brave, keen-eyed as himself, but calmer, larger hearted, humbler, greater souled. Such was Hephestion, and his strong yet sweet character is not only admirably drawn, but affords an excellent foil throughout to the eager, impetuous, fiery nature and fiery words of the king.
Omens thicken around him, and the end comes at Babylon. The fever that burns at his heart seizes on his body while sailing on the Lake of Pallacopas. As the royal barge passes, a strain rises up from the waters:
“We sate beside the Babylonian river:
Within the conqueror's bound, weeping we sate:
We hung our harps upon the trees that quiver
Above the rushing waters desolate.
“If I forget thee, Salem, in thy sadness,
May this right hand forget the harper's art!
If I forget thee, Salem, in my gladness,
My tongue dry up and wither, like my heart!”
It is a relic of the Babylonian captivity. The song forces from Alexander the sad confession, significant to all conquerors:
“The ages pass, like winds;
The old wrong remains, rooted like tombs, and moves not:
All may be done through Time; yet Time does naught.
Let kings look well to that.”
The end is on him. Though “maimed, and tamed, and shamed,” he is resolute still, but impotent, and the empire lacks completion, he confesses, while
“The years, the months,
The hours, like ravening wolves that hunt a stag,
Come up upon my haunches.”
Fighting time to the last, he succumbs; but he will not even die as other men. In his half-delirium he tells Ptolemy:
“I have a secret—one for thee alone:
'Twas not the mists from that morass disastrous
Nor death of him that died, nor adverse gods,
Nor the Fates themselves; 'twas something mightier yet,
And secreter in the great night, that slew me.”
And thus, surrounded by his warriors and his generals, with success within his grasp, but that grasp nerveless, his last moments troubled with awful visions and ill dreams, resentful to the last against what slew him, in doubt and in fear, in youth and glory and empire, in the fatality of success, staring with strained eyes into the dread void beyond that no ray of faith illumines, he whose nod was life or death to nations, Alexander, the god, passes away and dies—of a little slow fever that has entered and claimed for its own the clay of which he was made.
Mr. de Vere has written at once a magnificent poem and a powerful drama. We have devoted our attention in both instances to the chief characters, and thus many scenes and personages in Alexander the Great on which in reading we have dwelt with much pleasure and admiration must pass unnoticed. The author, if we may say so, has surprised us by the strength and finish of this work. The action of the piece is rapid; the characters, small and great, rounded and full; the scenes most varied and dramatically set. The clew to the play we take to be that old whisper which first allured our parents from their allegiance, and tempts forever the race of man: Ye shall be as gods. The whisper runs through the piece from the first line to the last, and lends to it a purpose and a plan of its own. The dramatist has taken the man who in human history came the nearest to exemplifying its truth to prove its utter and miserable falsehood, and to read with a new force the old and eternal command that alone can order the life of man wisely and well: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.”
When he died, Alexander was nearly thirty-three. With him really, though remnants lingered after him, his scheme and his empire passed away; and when to-day we look for what is left of the world's conqueror, of Alexander the god, we must search in musty tomes and grope in desert sands. Nothing is left of him, save some words and histories; and even were they lost also, and his very memory blotted out with them, the world to-day would in reality be little or none the loser.
Some centuries later there died Another at the age of thirty-three. He came into life silently; he went out of life ignominiously. He led no army; he had no following of any note; he was the son of a carpenter, and born of a despised race. He was born, he lived, he died, in poverty, sorrow, and suffering, a social outcast even from his own people. The last three years of his life he spent in preaching in and about Jerusalem. His doctrines were strange and startling. They were utterly subversive of all human glory and greatness. Like Alexander, he proclaimed himself divine, and claimed to be the Son of God. Like Alexander, he too died, but a death of ignominy. Before his name had spread far beyond Jerusalem, men rose up, Jew and Gentile, king and priest, church and state, together hanged him on a tree, nailed him there, tortured and slew him, and when he was dead sealed up the tomb in which he was buried. And there, humanly speaking, was an end to him and his.
To the world what had he left? A memory—nothing more. Men said that he had wrought wonders, that virtues flowed out of him, that [pg 359] his hands rained mercies, that the blind saw, the lame walked, the lepers were cleansed, the very dead rose again. Idle rumors! like that other of his bursting the tomb and rising again, walking in the flesh and ascending into the heaven from which he said he had come. And this was “the Expected of the nations,” “the Prince of Peace,” who was to accomplish what the high-priest warned Alexander was not for him, with all his power, to accomplish—to unite all the nations under one yoke. A likely prospect with the material he had left!
He left behind him no empire, no record, not a line of writing. He left a few words, a few maxims, a few rules of life, a few prayers, a few promises, a few men who timidly believed in him, a few commands. The world, its belief and non-belief alike, its customs, maxims, tendencies, he condemned as wrong. He commanded it to remodel itself according to the few rules he had left—rules singularly comprehensive, simple, and clear: to believe in him, to obey him as the son of God and God, to believe and obey those, and those only, whom he sent forth in his name, armed with the powers he gave them, fighting with the weapon of the cross. And what is the result? Who is the conqueror of the world now? Jesus Christ, in whose name every knee shall bow, or Alexander the Great? Here is a mystery surely that men should ponder. What shall explain the victory over the world, over sin, and over death, of Him whom they nailed to the tree nineteen centuries ago? Nothing but the words of Peter—“Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God.” Thou art he that was to come, and we look for no other. “And he was clothed with a garment sprinkled with blood: and his name is called The Word of God. And he hath on his garment and on his thigh written King of kings and Lord of lords.”