Who take the Golden Road to Samarkand.”
R. P. C., JR.
The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall. By Thomas Hardy.
“The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall” is, in Mr. Hardy’s own words, “a new version of an old story”. And yet this version, it would seem, lies closer to Gottfried of Strasburg and the traditional Celtic story of “Tristram and Iseult” than many we have had of late, closer in spirit at least if not in actual incident. This authenticity of spirit might have been expected, though, for the realm of the tragic queen “at Lintagel in Lyonnesse” lies within Mr. Hardy’s own special province of Wessex, and Queen Iseult and Iseult the Whitehanded are after all but a step removed from the heroines of the Wessex novels.
Mr. Hardy has chosen for his play, with an admirable sense of the dramatic, that point in the story of the “twain mismated” when for the last time the paths of their lives converged, when for the last time Tristram came from Brittany—to see his Iseult the Fair and after a brief moment of bitterness and ecstacy to fall at her feet, stabbed in the back by her husband, King Mark. The spirit of Mr. Hardy’s play and the spirit of Mr. Hardy’s characters are, I have said, essentially that of the thirteenth century chronicler. There is a certain rudeness and strength and withal a certain other-worldliness against which the slender flame of the passion of Tristram and Iseult burns with exceeding brilliancy. There is a certain subtlety in the painting of such emotions as the jealousy of the Queen Iseult and of Iseult the Whitehanded in such a line as the Queen Iseult’s—
“Love, others’ somewhile dainty,
Is my starved, all-day meal!”
—which gives to these figures of legend an unsuspected glow of life. But through it all there is the firmness of touch and the strange broken felicity of expression which we have found so characteristic of Mr. Hardy.
“... the seas sloped like houseroofs all the way.”