Mary. He hath awaked! he hath awaked! Oh, Philip, husband! now thy love to mine Will cling more close, and those bleak manners thaw, The second Prince of Peace The great unborn defender of the Faith, The stormy Wyatts and Northumberlands, Before my star! The light of this new learning wanes and dies: His sceptre shall go forth from Ind to Ind! His sword shall hew the heretic peoples down! All the motions of this strong nature thwarted—its rancorous hate, its morbid fondness, its stubborn pride, and its desperate courage, are rendered in their turn, separately or in fusion, till the woman stands out, and amid the despair of the last act she is brought visibly before us, in the scene where she takes the lute from her ladies and sings her song, which ranks high among Tennyson's lyrics. Hapless doom of woman happy in betrothing! Beauty passes like a breath and love is lost in loathing: Love will hover round the flowers when they first awaken; Take it away? not low enough for me! Mary. How dare you say it? Even for that he hates me. A low voice A voice of shipwreck on a shoreless sea! A low voice from the dust and from the grave. (Sitting on the ground.) There, am I low enough now? There was an old-world tomb beside my father's I do not know anything in Tennyson that gives a more vivid picture to the eye than this passage. But that is a merit of the poet rather than of the playwright, and from the dramatic point of view the play, I think, would always be a failure (apart from the succès d'estime), because the chief character is essentially one to excite pity without sympathy— an emotion much too complex to hold an audience. Harold is in many ways a better piece of work than Queen Mary. It is simpler, better knit together, and runs more smoothly to its conclusion. Yet somehow I should not rate it so highly as the earlier drama. Everything in it, every action, every speech and character, is coherent, probable, and plausible, but neither word nor action seems inevitable and entirely convincing. It is a question whether an artist should make his work turn upon a motive with which he has no possible sympathy. Certainly the action of Harold is in no way altered by the oath which he swore to William on the covered bones of the saints; if a curse is to come on him, he disregards it and makes the best headway that he can against disastrous chances. Yet the whole atmosphere of the play is charged with the curse; in the fine opening scene all men's minds are full of the comet that glares over England, a menace of divine wrath, and Harold, the one man who disregards superstition and defies augury, is forthwith thrown into a plight where all the machinery of the Church is employed to play upon a conscience, already uneasy over a promise given with no purpose of fulfilment, and to instil into it a dread of the supernatural. It does not seem to me that the half-rationalizing, half-credulous attitude which Harold is made to assume fits with the man or the times; it reads throughout like a nineteenth-century comment on the beliefs of eight centuries ago. There is no single character in the play drawn with the subtlety that marks the portrait of Mary, and no scene at all so really dramatic as Cranmer's declaration of faith on the scaffold at St. Mary's. Actors have, I think, shown their wisdom in abstaining from attempts to produce Harold; and there are few things in the language so nearly excellent throughout that are so uninteresting to read. The conflict of Norman and Saxon is shown, not as the victory of a higher civilization over a lower, but as the triumph of forces united under a single will over a kingdom distracted by too many princelings. Tennyson is even so insular as to imply throughout a preponderance of moral virtues among the Saxons; the libertine Normans are coming to debauch the modest women of England. This is carrying the habit of British self-righteousness an amazingly long way back. There remains to be considered the last, and in my opinion by far the best of these plays, the drama of Becket. Here you have a great theme— the struggle of church and throne for supremacy— put into terms of human passion; for it is really a long duel of two personalities, Becket's and Henry's, each using all his advantages, moral and material, to break the will of the other. The conflict of wills is foreshadowed in the prologue, where the king and his chancellor face each other over the chess-board, and it continues to the end. The two men are strongly drawn; their words and actions do not seem dictated in accordance with a formula in the poet's mind, but spring from nature itself. Eleanor the Queen, too, is conceived with great subtlety of portraiture; hers is the jealousy that outlives love and finds itself allied with other passions. She hates Rosamund not because she is Henry's paramour-to that she Iwould be indifferent but because she has won a love which Eleanor herself never held; and she hates her too because a woman whom the king loves may be a power in the state. She hates her, moreover, because Becket protects her, and she herself would gladly find favour in Becket's eyes. Rosamund is pretty and pathetic, the scenes between her and Henry should be affecting on the stage; but it is hard to forgive the passion for propriety which made Tennyson complicate his plot with the unreasonable invention that Rosamund was ignorant of the king's marriage. To be so she must have been guileless indeed, and Tennyson writes to represent her as a woman with intelligence as well as devotion, who has sacrificed her maiden honour with her eyes open for the sake of the man she loves. And it is no ignorant girl that turns thus upon the Queen at the threat of death: And I will fly with my sweet boy to heaven, And shriek to all the saints among the stars: But the strength of the play lies in the characters of Becket and the King, each admirably rendered. Nothing shows Tennyson's religious bias more strongly than the persistency with which he enlists our sympathy for Henry's side of the argument. The case for secular control of the clerics is put at its very strongest, the answer is left on a merely theological ground: Shall hands that do create the Lord be bound Intensely English as Tennyson is, he is even more intensely anti-Roman; and the cause which Becket defended was the claim of a foreign power to interfere in our national affairs, and of the priest to be supreme in all matters relating to conduct. Yet while his sympathies are against the cause of Becket, he is in love with the large humanity of the man. This tonsured layman, suddenly promoted to an archbishopric, has little of the priest about him. He sighs for wife and child: The more or less of daily labour done,— And more openly still, when the cloud of murder hovers near over him-for, says he, The drowning man, they say, remembers all he speaks his mind, saying to John of Salisbury— how much we lose, we celibates, Lacking the love of woman and of child, and recalls the memory of a "little fair-haired Norman maid", who till she died of leprosy was "the world's lily", as Rosamund is the world's rose. These are scarcely the touches that a poet of Becket's church would use to paint the canonized martyr; and perhaps a devout Catholic would hold that Tennyson's Becket allied the question of the |