THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3614, 19 June 1923, Page 60

THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

[All Rights Rkserved.j

HALF HOURS IN A LIBRARY.

By

A. H. Grinling.

XIII.—ON SWINBURNE’S TRAGEDIES. Ne\ er mind where it happened ; at least it was not in Christchurch ; there was an inquiry after copies ot Swinburne’s tragedies. The intelligent assistant in one bookseller’s shop declared with emphasis that Swinburne had written no tragedies. This appearing conclusive the inquirer hied her to another bookseller, where an equally intelligent assistant exclaimed ‘‘Swinburne’s Tragedies! Who are they byßetter results were secured at a third establishment for the sale of books, the polite purveyor regretting that Swinburne’s Tragedies were out of stock, but he would be most happy to order a set from London. The immediate reason for the inquiry was an amateur performance of Mr John Drink water's poetical play “Mary Stuart,” the lady selected to enact the tide role being anxious to study Swinburne’s conception of a character which has puzzled historians and perplexed bio grapnel’s, provided endless opportunities lor poets, novelists and playwrights, besides giving rise to the keenest oi religious and political controversies. Mr Drinkwaters play has been conceived and written under Swinburne’s influence as a perusal of Mr Drinkwater’s “Estimate” of Swinburne plainly goes to prove. Mr James Agate, author of that clever but little read story “Responsibility,” and of that entertaining Look of essays “Alarums and Excursions” has added to his tormer collection of dramatic critiques “Buzz, Buzz,” a second collection entitled “At Half-Past Eight,” comprising a. number of the theatrical notices he contributed as dramatic critic to the Satuiday Review during 1821-1922. One of these sketches, headed “Alary, Queen of Drinkwater,” is a notice of Mr Drink-water's play of “Alary Stuart” when first produced at the Everyman Theatre in London. Air Agate accuses Air Drinkwater of not being able to resist “white-wash” in his conception of Mary. “As soon as his eye lights upon an historical figure,” says Air Agate of Air Drinkwater, “it is filled with the gleam proper to the blanching cf sepulchres. ‘Here’s a great man; let’s whitewash him,’ is the unspoken word. ‘Here’s Cromwell; we must have a big bucket for him ! Abraham Lincoln? AVell, another little coat won’t do him any harm. Here’s Alary Stuart; let’s make her into a Lady Jane Grc-y.’ Mr Drinkwater is a dab hand with the brush.” At the same time Mr Agate admits that no character in history has been more debated than Alary Stuart’s, and he asks the question, “Was she murderess as well as wanton ?’ ’ It is generally conceded that no literary man lias made a closer and mere careful study of the character of Mary Stuart and of the influences which went to the development of her character than has Swinburne. Seeing that Swinburne’s great dramatic trilogy was the outcome of that study, it is instructive to glance at one or two circumstances in connection therewith.

Swinburne was Jacobite born; in the verses to Victor Hugo—in “Poems and Ballads; First Series,” he exclaims, “I, born cf exiles, hail thv banished head and in the “Adieus a Marie Stuart” —included in the volumes of “Selections from Swinburne,” which, edited by Air Edmund Gosse and Air Thomas J. Wise, appeared four years ago—the post sings : —I can only quote the opening ar.d the closing stanzas : Queen, for whose house my father fought With holies that rose and fell, Red star of boyhood’s fiery thought, F arewell. Afore bright than stars or moon that vary, Sun kindling heaven and hell, Here after ail these years, Queen Alary, F arewell. These “Adieux” were altered when Swinburne came to the end of his trilogy of tragedies “Chastelard,” “Bothwell” and “Alary Stuart,” to which “The Queen Alot’her” —his first dramatic attempt, written in 1860 —was a prologue. To appreciate Swinburne’s conception, a sentence or two may- be quoted from the preface to his “Aliscellanies,” where the poet writes : The question with regard to Alary Stuart is not whether it is better of worse to commit murder and adultery than to be a coward and a fool, but whether a person brought tip where adultery and murder were regarded less as mortal than as venial sins, and less as venial sins than as social distinctions, is likely to be unaffected by the atmosphere of such an education, or is as culpably responsible for its results as either a woman or a man would be for absolute and scandalous deficiency in well nigh the only virt- ■ which even in that society was unanimously exacted and esteemed. To confound the statement of this question with acceptance or approval of the views on ethical matters which were there and these prevalent would be the veriest lunacy of rabid error; to affect such a misconstruction and to use it as a plea or handle for disingenuous attack, would he the veriest dotage of drivelling insolence. Reserving always as unquestionable and indisputable the primal and instinctive truths of sesthelics as of ethics, of art as of character, of poetry as of conduct, we are bound under penalty of preposterous failure, of self-convicted and self-conscious injustice, to fitke into full and fair account the circumstances of time and accident which affected for better or for worse ibe subjects of our moral or critical sentence. The last and the greatest, are not alone, or beyond the need of such consideration; and some due allowance of it, not sufficient to disturb the balance of our judgment or derange the verdict of our conscience, should possibly be extended to the meanest and the worst. There were two strains in Swinburne’s ancestry, of which the poet was inordinately proud, the Viking strain and the

Borderer strain; from the first flowed his enthusiastic love for the sea, so apparent in all his and of the second came that innate Jacob it ism which inspired the little group of poems included in the third series of “Poems and Ballads,” notably “A Jacobite’s Farewell” and “A Jacobite’s Exile.” Swinburne himself alludes to “the fervent and fatal devotion of his forefathers to the cause of the Stuarts, ’ and boasts of “a family which in every Catholic rebellion from the days of my own Queen Alary to those of Charles Edward had given their blood like water and their lands like dust for the Stuarts.” There is extant a letter written by the poet from The Pines, Putney, to his mother, under date December 8, 1882, the sentiments expressed therein making clear at least one reason why Queen Victoria, placed her veto on the proposal to make Swinburne poet laureate on the death of her beloved Tennyson. Swinburne recalls an evening spent in the company of i.ouis Blanc, when I had the honour of converting that eminent Republican and Socialist leader to Jaeobitism (which I always boast of) by llio surely unanswerable argument that if we had succeeded in bringing back the Stuarts and driving out the Gueiphs, England would now be a Re public. For we never could have been quite such servile idiots as to recall the llancver rats—if we had once driven thorn cut—and we certainly should have had to get rid of the Stuarts a third time and we could not have stood more than 20 or 30 yea is more of their govern meat —arid faute c!e mioux fas Royalists say)—faute de pis, as I should say we m ust have proclaimed the commonwealth of England—tills time without the Puritanism ancl Militarism which made the ruin of Cromwell’s Government inevitable as soon as the personal influence of the great usurper and dictator was removed by Hi s death. Swinburne was greatly gratified when in 1381 he was invited to contribute the article on Mary Queen of Scots to the new edition of the Encyclopedia Britanniea. He wrote to Professor Churton Collins: “I am greatly set up by the compliment of being chosen for that office above all the historians and other folk whose services might have been secured and their authority preferred to that cf a mere poet like yours very sincerely, A. C. Swinburne.” If it he true that from his earliest boyhood Swinburne had steeped himself in Shakespeare—“ Having from wellnigh the first years I can remember, made of the study of Shakespeare the chief intellectual business of my whole life” is his own way of describing it—-it is equally true that he absorbed himself in the character and career of Marv Stuart. “No one will ever know,” says Air Gosse, “how many times between 1858 and 1865 Chastelard was destroyed and recast, polished ar.d cast aside in despair.” And again, “It is difficult to realise, in face of the smoothness and simplicity of ‘Chastelard’ that it took seven years to compose it to its author’s liking. This was the earliest of the numerous studies of the character and life of Alary Queen of Scots, which he. was to produce in prose and verse.” Air Gosse, after describing at length the sources and influences which were combined in Swinburne’s conception, and which involved an enormous amount of patient and painstaking research, makes a characteristic comparison between Swinburne and Tennyson.— The dramatic movement of Chastelard and its curious facility of style make it unique in the poetry of the nineteenth century. It has not the weight of “Bothwell” nor the ethical intensity of “Eroctheus,” but as a piece of literature for the study it has the extraordinary merits of speed and lightness. There are no heavy passages, or very few. and it proceeds on its flowery and fatal course without interruption. Of all Swinburne’s drama it is the easiest to read, the most amusing, the most lucid. Nevertheless it has never been favoured by the critics nor appreciated by the public. The reason is probably to be found in its altitude towards life and morals. It is well known that it was objected to from the first on the ground that it was “immoral” in tendency and this charge was brought against it not in consequence of any coarseness in the language, but because the whole tune of it was cut of s empathy with the sentimental conception of love that prevailed in the English literature of its time. The reading public was satisfied with the way in which Tennyson, particularly in the “Idylls of the King,” treated the emotions in the rude stories of a mythical antiquity which he rehearsed, and as it were adapted, for a strictly modern use. 11 is Elaines and Enids were conventional women cf the re’gn of Victoria, travestied against a romantic background of semibarbarian romance, but preserving ail their later-day prejudices. Swinburne, on the other hand, having scleeied for his background the strange mixture of refinement and brutality which characterised Franco-Scot tish court life in the sixteenth century, determined io present his characters as faithfully as he dared, without any concessions to semimentality. . . “Swinburne’s work,” remarks Air John Drinkwater, “began ar.d ended with the drama. His first volume of poetry, published in 1860. was ‘The Queen Alother and Rosamund,’ his last, published in 1908, was ‘The Duke of Oandia.’ ” Swinburne’s ambition was to write for the stage -. hence it was unfortunate, from the popular point of view, that so early in his dramatic career he should in “Chastelard” have “created a figure which shocked the British public in 1665. and has been unsympathetic ever since.” Air Gosse writes, “In ‘Chastelard,’ to use the well-known phrase of Cornielle, love is not the ■ornament’ as it is in most British plays, hut the ‘body’ of the tragedy. All relates to it, all else is molten in the breath of it; all sentiments, all responsibilities, all ties of religion and patriotism and duty wither where it blows.” This, however, is not the chief reason why Swinburne has failed as a playwright; Air Drinkwater gets nearer to the truth when he points out that Swinburne’s Tragedies were unsuitable for the British stage because the British stage in Swinburne’s time was not capable of

producing Swinburne’s Tragedies, a disability under which Tennyson, Browning, .Morns, Shelley, Hardy and Stephen Phillips have suffered in turn, and which Mr Drinkwater himself has been the first since Shakespeare to surmount. Air Drinkwater’s chapter on the dramas of Swinburne is a fine exposition of this theme, as, for instance, when he writes: AA hen Swinburne was writing, the theatre that we associate with great dramatic literature did not exist in England. Had he and his fellow-poets chosen to create it they mi Sht have done so and seen a new race of dramatists, for at ieast four of them, Browning, Tennyson. Atoms, and Swinburne himself, had in them elements of dramatic poetry, that, united with this other element of great drama, might nave made—or shall wo say hastened — a nev golden age to be set, with its own distinction, beside the Elizabethan. But save for a few desultory excursions with fashionable and famous actors as their guides, they were wholly incurious about a stage that, as it then was had nothing to attract a poet. bo they attempted the hopeless task of substituting a model, shaped under conditions of which their creative impulse knew next to nothing, for the discipline of direct experience and partial failure at least was the inevitable penally. It has been prophesied that as the EJizai bethan era was the age cf the drama and i the nineteenth century the age of the novel, so the twentieth century is destined to be tile age of poetry and especially of the poetic play. I remember in July, ISI4, the revival in the Savoy Theatre, London, under the management cf the late 11. B. Irving, of Stephen Phillips’s “The Sin of David.” It was a fine perj formance, splendidly staged and brilliantly acted; the dialogue was impressive and the situations tense, yet it failed to gain popular approval, and was withdrawn after a brief season. That was before the war, since when Air Drinkwater has scored successive triumphs with “Abraham : Lincoln,” “Oliver Cromwell” and “Alary ! Smart,” although in the latter instance he was compelled to shorten and alter the play to adapt it to stage requirements. The story cf the attempts of the great poets of the last century to gain dramatic recognition makes melancholy reading. Henry Irving did his best for Tennyson, but the performances of “The Falcon,” “The Cup” and “Beckett” were never more than costly experiments, and since | the death of Irving, while sustaining the J character of Beckett, no attempt has been I made to revive Tennyson on the stage. ! Shelley’s “The Cenei,” written and pubj lished in 1820, was never staged until | last year in commemoration of the cenj tenarv of the poet’s death. Even then | the Daily Alail informed its million readers : that “the Censor having removed his pre- ! deeessor’s ban, Aliss Sybil Thorndike 1 would, at the New Theatre, produce Shel- ; ley’s dull and dirty’ play.” In the “thirties,” when Browning 1 essayed to write for the stage the British | drama was at its low est ebb. A A’hen in j 1836 Browning proposed to write a j tragedy. Afarread.y made this entry in his i diary : “It would indeed be some recompense for the miseries, the humiliations, 1 tile heart-sickening disgusts which I have ! endured in my profession if by its exercise I had awakened a spirit of poetry where influence would elevate, ennoble and adorn j our degraded drama.” In Alay, 1837, Maci ready produced “Stafford,” and it ran for j five nights. Undaunted by this first failure ! Browning persevered, and in February, 1843, “A Blot in the Scutcheon” was played at Drury Lane, where it ran for three nights. Browning wrote no more for the stage. There is no record that Morris’s drama “Sir l’eter Harpdon’s End” or his morality “Love is Enough” were ever j adapted for stage representation, but it is i possible that with the exercise of a little cai’e Alorris might have made the former play possible of representation. Air Drinkwater writes:—• r J he historian of English drama during the second half of the nineteenth century might, it he were unwary, omit AA'tlliam Alorris from his reckoning.. If he were astute enough to remember him it would probablv be as the author of “Love is Enough.” And yet at a time when some curious spell seems to have fallen on the Poets whenever they (urned their thoughrs to the stage. “Sir Peter Harpdon s End” reminds us of one at least to whom the union of drama and noetry was not impossible. Alorris himself would seem to nave been unoonsein”s r.f the fact, for not only was he careless in this instance, when the exercise of a little care would have marie his success strikinglv oomnletr. but henceforth he neglected this side of his faculty, exercising it on but one other occasion, and then in a more or less experimental mood. Writing to Watts-Dunton in JnJv. 1875. | m reference to Tennvson’s “Queen Alary.” a p.eiformance of which he had witnessed i at the Lyceum, Swinburne says: ‘T am , very much nli'mied at the advent of this conquering rival, and I am very sorry | W "oor Irving.” At the time he wrote | s’wMiburne was contemplating the adap- ; tation of his own nlay “Bothwell” for production at the Lyceum to follow the poet Laureate’s “Queen Mary.” According to Afessrs Hake and Compton Rickett “there never were two poets, whether ‘conquerin'’’ rivals’ or not. than were Swinburne and Tennyson, more desirous at this n ;d A ietorian period, of bringiurr about ibe ‘staging’ of their poetic plays.” Swinburne sought the acquaintance of Henry Irving, and was invited by the famous a tor to n luncheon at the’Garrick Club for a serious talk about the production of his recently published tragedy. The introduction was brought about bv AAA Us Dnnton, who afterwards declared that Swinburne did all the talking. Irving’s mood being never more taciturn. The actor was all attention, “struck dumb with admiration.” so Wafcts-Dunton declared, by the brilliancy of Swinburne’s discourse on Hie Elizabethan dramatists. Swinburne avowed that his pin vs were written lor peiformance in the Elizabethan theatres, on which Air Drinkwater comments:— It is just possible that “Chastelard” would have survived the ordeal, though improbable; “Bothwell” and “Mary

Stuart, apart from fragments, certainly voidd not have done so. ’the first superficial objection to he made to the trilogy is that it is too long as a whole, ar.d in its parts. A great audience is eager for poetry, but not for speech after speech varying from fifty to five hundred lines. • . . This is the chief manifestation of the defect that does destroy the fitness of these plays for the theatre, even our imagined Elizabethan or mid-twentieth century theatre, ancl so distroys their linal artistic integrity. Swinburne was not a great theatre-goer; indeed he disliked the theatre winch partly explains the failure of his plays to secure representation. It was not until 18 t-\ that ‘'Bothwell” was published, and as. Edward Thomas says, ’ That lie read it aloud to his friends without causing any suffering that has yet become famous is a superb testimony to his voice, to his character, and to” his friends.” Besides the famous trilogy Swinburne wrote Alarino Faliero, ’ in which lie gave vent to his hate o: (}od and king and priest ! an d his love of Alan, Liberty, Tyrannicide, I Mazzcni and the Sett. “Loerine,” | ' l!ie Sisters ’ and “The Duke of Gandia” | complete the list of his tragedies. The j P T vs written in the Greek fashion, I A talar, ta in Calydon,” and “Ereetheus,” ! " i °’ ,l ' ! make matter for a seperatc article. Mr Gosse writes— and the incident is fitting finale to what has gone before: No work fit Swinburne’s later years .nun so much satisfaction us “Botliwo.l It. was his constant pleasure to read it aloud, and he often forgot i:i doing how quickly the time passed, i lirough one burning afternoon in the summer of 1873 Lord Alorley tells me he listened for five solid hours to a reading of “Bothwell,” and I, myself, whose leisure was cf less value, spent one evenn?.? of the same year from dinner time till midnight, in company with Edward Burne-Jones end Arthur O'Shaughnessy, at the round table at 5 Great Janies street, while Swinburne, lighted bv the two groat serpentine, candlesticks he had brought with him from the Lizard, shrieked, thundered. whispered ami fluted the whole of the enormous second act.