It may be well at this point to attempt to do justice to the delicacy and quite exceptional strength of Tennyson’s sense of history. I must explain clearly what I mean by sense of history. I do not refer to the critical faculty of the historian, but to the gift bestowed upon few, of living over again in imagination the emotions of a century long gone to dust. It was thus that Michelet was present at the doing to death of Joan of Arc; Macaulay at the flight of James II. and at the trial of Warren Hastings; Carlyle at the taking of the Bastille, at the return from Varennes, and at the battle of Marston Moor. Had the men and the scenes been really painted upon their retina, the effect upon the brain could not have been stronger. This intellectual vision of theirs is worth a hundred times more than the actual physical vision of such men as Holinshed and Ayala.
This rare gift belonged to Tennyson, and took in him that feminine acuteness which was in harmony with all his poetical faculties. As evidence of this, take the by-play in his historical dramas,—that is to say, all that is not essential in them, the mere accessories, illustrations of manners, minute traits of character, scraps of history; for instance, the account of the marriage of Philip and Mary, and that of the execution of Lady Jane Grey by Bagenhall, in Queen Mary, and in Becket the sarcasm directed against the Church of Rome by Walter Map, the witty precursor of the bitter and sombre Langland.
A Bulwer or a Tom Taylor may be able to cut out bits from the Chronicles, and introduce historic utterances into their flabby and declamatory prose, but beyond and underneath these words, will they be able, like Tennyson, to set before us un état d’âme, and plunge us into the depth of the life of olden days?
I am fully aware, of course, that this is not everything, or rather that it is nothing, unless the poet possesses also the dramatic faculty. Is there a dramatic idea underlying Becket, Queen Mary, and Harold? I shall reply after the manner of the Gentlemen of the Jury: No, to the first question; Yes, to the second and third.
It is true that Becket achieved a startling success in the summer of 1892. But three-fourths of the success were due to Irving. Those who have been long familiar with the great actor, know how episcopical he is—hieratical, pontifical. Mediæval asceticism is one of the forms of life which his artistic personality fills most perfectly, and fits into most easily; I know of only one other man who could have represented Becket nearly as well, and that was Cardinal Manning. It was well worth one’s while to travel far, and put up with hours of boredom, to be present at that symbolical game of chess, in which the struggle between the bishop and the king foreshadowed the whole piece; to hear that absorbing dialogue in which Becket recounts to his confidential friend his tragic career and his prophetic dreams, and that stormy discussion, too, at Northampton, when the archbishop puts his signature to the famous constitutions and then cancels it; and to witness the scene of the murder. A scene which follows history, step by step, and which, by the way, might have been carried through by dumb show without words at all.
Those who saw Irving, mitred and crozier in hand, totter under the blow, and fall upon the altar steps, whilst the chanting of the monks came in gusts from the church above—mingled with the cries of the people beating against the door, and the rumbling of the thunder shaking the great edifice to its foundation—experienced one of the strongest emotions any spectacle ever gave.
And yet there is no drama in the piece, for a drama involves a situation which develops and changes, a plot which works out. The duel between the king and prelate in the play, no less than in our history books, is merely a succession of indecisive encounters. The metamorphosis of the courtier-soldier into the bishop-martyr is indicated hardly at all by the poet. And what is one to say of the love idyll appended to the historical drama, in spite of history, in spite of the drama itself? All Ellen Terry’s tact did not suffice to save this insipid Rosamund. The complications surrounding the mysterious retreat of this young woman savour more of farce even than of melodrama, and as for the facetious details by which this episode is enlivened, they form so common and flat a piece of comic relief, that one listens to them ashamed and ill at ease. I may observe silence on this point, in order to avoid the ungrateful function of ridiculing a man of genius, but I cannot refrain from protesting against the irreparable error Tennyson committed in dragging Becket into this shady intrigue, and giving him the king’s mistress to care for at the very time when he is holding the king in check with so much hardihood.
I have not the same objections to make against Queen Mary and Harold. In the first piece, the human psychological drama, which is half submerged in history, but not so as to be out of sight, is the development of the character and of the sad destiny of this unfortunate queen; the road, strewn first with flowers and then paved with sharp-edged stones and lined with thorns, along which she passed, in so brief a period, from a protracted youth to a premature old age, from irrepressible joyousness to agonising solitude, misfortune, and despair. Here was a life thrice bankrupt. As queen, she dreamt of the greatness of her country, and left it under the blow of a national humiliation, the loss of Calais. As a Catholic, she strove to restore her religion, and, far from succeeding, she dug a chasm between Rome and her people which the centuries have not sufficed to fill. As a woman, she loved a man of marble, an animated stone: her heart was crushed by him, and broke. She was to learn before her death the failure of all her projects; she read contempt and disgust in the eyes of the man she worshipped, the man to whom she had offered human sacrifices to win his favour. This is the drama Tennyson sketched out, if he did not quite complete it, in Queen Mary.
The subject of Harold stands out more clearly, in stronger relief. It is the struggle of religious faith against patriotism and ambition. All the feelings that are at variance, are indicated with a power worthy of the great master of the drama in the successive scenes which take place at the Court of William when Harold is a prisoner. After the political aspect of things has been set forth by the old Norman lord, there comes the episode in which Wulfuoth, Harold’s young brother, describes to him the slow tortures of the prison-life, the living death of the prisoner, deprived of all that he loves best,—of the sight of the green fields, of the blue of sky and sea, as of the society of men; his name gone out of memory, eaten away by oblivion, as he, in his dungeon, is being eaten away by the loathsome vermin of the earth.
When Harold has yielded, it is moving to see him bow down with Edith in a spirit of Christian resignation, and sacrifice, as ransom of his violated oath, his personal happiness to his duty as a king. The dilemma changes, and its two new aspects are personified by two women, whose rivalry has in it nothing of the banality, or of the vulgar outbursts of jealousy, to which we are too often treated in the theatre.