To Be Continued.
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.