What other poet in these days could give us so pure and perfect an image as that—a flower plucked, surely, from the paradise of poets? The sweetness is sent up. It rises from the martyr’s blood.
Such is an outline of this drama. The character, of course, on which
the attention fastens chiefly is that of Thomas à Becket, and we think that in the portrayal of this great character Mr. de Vere is as happy as in his Alexander. Becket is a very easy man to write about, but a most difficult one to set living and real before us. In him for a long time the layman and the clerk struggled for mastery. There is no possible doubt that up to the time of his elevation to the primacy he was a man who lived in, and to a very great extent of, the world. He rejoiced in pomp and pride, in large retinues, in splendid appointments, in ostentatious display. He was not at all averse to showing that the arm of the cleric could tilt a lance with the bravest knight. Yet through all the temptations of such a life as his he undoubtedly retained his purity of heart, a right sense of his true vocation, and an honesty of purpose that never swerved. Certain it is that, in procuring his appointment as primate, Henry thought he had, if not exactly a tool, a devoted friend and a sensible man, who would not forget the favors his monarch had showered on him, and would be troubled by no such nice scruples as vexed his predecessor, Anselm. Becket had shown himself to be a keen-eyed, resolute, active, honest minister, with no sordid touch in his nature, with an intense sense of duty to his king and country. Indeed, had he not been a Catholic cleric, in days when clerics lawfully assumed many a civil office, there can be little doubt that he would have been pronounced, even by Protestant historians, to be one of the best and truest English chancellors that ever held the seals.
At a day’s notice this man, by the express command and desire of the king, is sent back to his real
duty—the tending of Christ’s fold. He obeyed against his will, foreseeing already something of the issue. But the fashion of the world is not brushed off in a day, however changed may be the heart and conduct. To-day he is the gay and brilliant chancellor of England, highest in the favor of his king; to-morrow, primate of England, and appointed to that post, as he knew, to betray it. The man is not yet a saint—very far from it; and in his seizing of this character just as the robes of the world were falling from him and he had donned the livery of heaven; in his awakening to the new and tremendous responsibility that had fallen upon him; in the gradual taming of his fiery and impetuous spirit; in the struggle between personal love for his royal master, pity for the disasters necessarily brought upon the kingdom by his action, and his clear conception of duty throughout all; in the slow braying of this spirit in the mortar of affliction until speck by speck all the dross was shaken and cast out, and the whole man left clean and pure for the sacrifice—in all this Mr. de Vere has shown the skill of a great artist. The obvious temptation for a Catholic in treating such a theme was to make Becket a saint too soon. Mr. de Vere has not fallen into this mistake, and the result adds largely to the effect of the drama. Not till the very last scene do we feel that Becket lives already above this world, and only awaits his translation. The night before his death the flesh still urged flight when he knew that death was coming surely and swiftly. And when the curtain drops for the last time on that terrible scene of the outraged sanctuary and the murdered archbishop, then do we surely feel
that the spirit of a saint and martyr has flown to heaven.
The conception of Henry is almost equally good. The following picture of him will be remembered:
“Your king is sudden:
The tidings of his march and victory reach us
Like runners matched. That slender, sinewy frame,