success was significant. It is only such a transcendent genius as that of Dr. Newman that can overleap the barriers which prejudice has set around the Catholic name. It is still true, though less so than formerly, that the grand old name of “Catholic” blazoned on a literary scutcheon is regarded as a bar sinister by the non-Catholic press. Yet even this difficulty of caste was overcome by Mr. de Vere, and his Alexander the Great was hailed by critics of every class and kind of thought to be a return to the palmy days of English drama, and a welcome addition to English literature.
Two years have passed, and a new drama is presented to us by the same author. From Alexander the Great to Thomas à Becket is a long stride and a trying one. It is a passage from the height of paganism to the height of Christianity. The hero of the one is the personification of the pride and the pomp, the glory and shame, the greatness and essential littleness, of paganism. The hero of the other is one of those men who throughout the Christian era, even up to our own times, have been found to stand up in the face of the princes of this world, and, if need be, pour out their hearts’ blood in confessing
Christ and upholding his kingdom on earth.
We may as well say at once that in the new drama we miss many things which in Alexander the Great won our admiration. We miss the sustained magic of those lines, almost every one of which is poetry of the highest order, yet so skilfully adapted that whosoever speaks them speaks naturally and in keeping with his character. In no place in Alexander the Great could one say, “Here speaks the poet,” “Here the rhetorician,” “Here the dramatist.” This much, indeed, is true of Thomas à Becket. We miss, too, the brilliant epigrams, the proverbial wisdom of the brief sayings thrown so liberally into the mouths of this character and that. We miss the sharp contact and contrast of character so perfectly worked out among the different types of Greeks. There is no place in the later drama for such a conception as Alexander himself, the slow growth and development under our eyes of his many-sided character, with his strong resolve, his dreams, his daring hopes, his insane ambition, his thorough, practical manner of dealing with things as they pass, his slow-coming doubts, his wonder at the world, at his own mission in it, and at the unseen power that rules them both from somewhere. Indeed, we cannot call to mind a like conception to this in any drama.
The reason for the absence of such features as these is plain. In the one case the poet was freer to follow the workings of his own imagination; in the other he is more closely bound down to history, to facts, to the very words often spoken by his characters. And how thoroughly he has studied his subject may be seen in the preface to the drama, which is an admirable,
though condensed, history of the whole struggle between St. Thomas and Henry II. But in compensation for what we miss we find a robustness, an off-hand freedom betokening real strength, a truth and naturalness of coloring, a noble manner of dealing with noble things, a straightforward honesty that winks at no faults, on whichever side they lie, a boldness and vigor that never flag from the first line to the last. There is less art than in the other, but much more of nature’s happy freedom. Moreover, the interest of the drama is none the less really of to-day because it represents men who lived and events which occurred seven centuries ago. Has this century seen no Henries or his like? Who shall say that we have no Beckets? Are there no men to-day ready to stand up in the face of princes calling themselves Christian, to risk land and life and all they have in the cause of Christ, at the same time that they obey their princes, be they Catholic or non-Catholic, “saving their order” and “saving God’s honor”?
The whole world makes sad reply. And though in these scientific days it is not the fashion to dash the brains of God’s priests out in the sanctuary, a method equally effectual is adopted to quench, if possible, the spirit within them. They are drained of such means as belong to their offices by fine upon fine; every effort is made to compel them, as was the case with St. Thomas, to betray their trust, to recognize rebellious, apostate, and recreant priests. And at length, when there is not a penny left, they are either driven into exile, as was St. Thomas, or cast into prisons where their martyrdom consists of a thousand petty insults and deprivations,
and where, to take up recent examples, they are regaled on soup which is scientifically bad. After all, does there not seem something more magnanimous in the fierce brutality of the Plantagenet and his men?
The whole drama of Thomas à Becket turns on the struggle between the archbishop and the king, and there is no hesitation on the author’s part in deciding which side to take in the contest. Mr. de Vere has certainly the courage of his convictions, and he is bold in their expression in days when St. Thomas is still regarded by the great majority of English readers as a mischievous and meddlesome prelate who courted, if he did not richly deserve, his fate. Let us, with Mr. de Vere’s permission, picture to ourselves a moment his lost opportunity of making himself infamously famous. Had he, with his great gifts and acknowledged place in the ranks of literati, only taken the other side; had he painted St. Thomas according to the orthodox Protestant reading, how his book would have been devoured, and what reviews written of it down all the line of the anti-Catholic army of writers! What comfort Mr. Gladstone would have found in such a convert in his next tilt with the Rock! Were it not a thing simply natural in any honorable man to adhere to the side of truth, and, more, to satisfy himself of the truth where doubts were raised, we should call it noble in Mr. de Vere thus to spurn the example of so many gifted writers of his time whose great ambition seems to be to pander to the vices around them. Indeed, not the least interest attached to this drama lies in the treatment, by a calm, poetic, yet deeply philosophic mind, of the
momentous struggle which it portrays—the struggle ever old yet ever new between church and state.