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.