.....
If I should find
Her name among the friends of Cassius?
Ah no, Faustina, not such perfidy!
The gods must blush at it! Am I grown grey
And learnt no wisdom? Though it should be so—
Though yet it cannot be—what's that to me?
Am I wronged by it? Yet it cannot be,
With that frank brow. I've loved you faithfully;
It could not be so....
... I will not know
More than I must of unprofitable things,
Lest they should, in the garden of my soul,
Nourish rank weeds of hate and bitterness;
I will not hate that which I cannot change.
(He drops the papers into a tripod.)
Burn! Go into oblivion! The gods
Permit themselves to pity good and bad,
Giving to each the sunshine and sweet rain,
And hiding all things in the mist of years.
May I not do as gods do? Burn away,
Consume all hate and evil into smoke!
I will not know of them; assuredly
For me such ills exist not——
(The body of Faustina is brought in.)
The same combination of dramatic elements will be found in the crucial scenes of Manin and Belisarius. In Manin it is especially notable, because of the curious nature of the crisis. This would seem, on the face of it, almost calculated to inhibit the dramatic impulse: to tend to negative the dynamic properties of character and circumstance. Manin, the defender of Venice, has held his city against the Austrian enemy by sheer force of character. His courage and confidence and determination have heartened the Venetians to continue their resistance; and his statesmanship has been diligent in trying to secure the intervention of France or England, or military aid from Kossuth. But help is refused from every quarter; the garrison is small and weak; the people are starving, and ravaged by disease. Nevertheless, inspired by their leader, they are willing and eager to resist to the end, although they know that this must bring on them the hideous penalties with which the Austrians notoriously punished that kind of patriotism.
The crux of the drama lies in the problem thus presented to Manin. It is essentially a spiritual struggle: between wisdom on the one hand and patriotic ardour on the other; between foresight and courage; between the long, weary, unattractive processes that make for life and the blind impetuosity that makes for death; between, in his personal career, a prospect of humiliation in exile and the glory of a hero's end. Given the character of Manin, victory in the conflict was bound to lie with reason against passion, with sagacity against recklessness; but the victory in this case meant defeat—physical and apparently moral. It would mean to the world, and even to his own people, that, with the surrender of the town, he yielded up the very principles for which he stood. Therein, of course, lies the unusual nature of this crisis. The dramatic instinct has somehow to vitalize a dead weight of failure. To see how that is done—and it is done, finely—one must turn to the scene in Act III, which is the core of the play. There the poet creates an external conflict between Manin and the people which embodies, as it were, the spiritual struggle; and, translating it into action, visibly reveals Manin as a conqueror. Quotations hardly do justice to the poet here, but there are two speeches, one before and one after Manin has won the people to the proposed surrender, which indicate the skill of the art at this point.
The first expresses the agony of failure in Manin's mind, resulting from his decision to yield to the enemy. It is in answer to his faithful friend and secretary, Pezzato, who has been trying to comfort him with a prediction that the freedom of their city and their land is only deferred, that it must ultimately come. Manin replies:
I shall not see it.
I shall be blind beneath my coffin lid
There in a foreign land; I shall not see
The glory and the splendour of St. Mark's
When our Italian flag salutes the sun;
I shall be deaf, and never hear the peal
Of our triumphant bells, and volleying guns;
I shall be dumb, I shall be dumb that day,
And never say "My people, for this hour
I saved you when I sacrificed you most."
The second passage burns with the fire of triumph, tragical but prophetic, which has been kindled in Manin by his struggle with the opposing will of the people and his victory over it: