CHAPTER VIII. THE DRAMAS. I HAVE reserved from the general chronological investigation of the poems the subject of the dramas. It is a wide one, it opens important questions with regard to the development of literature, and though the dramatic period of Tennyson is far removed in time from that of Browning, it seems on the whole best to view them together. It has been said that the nineteenth century has produced no great dramatist. Nearly all the more memorable poets, Byron, Shelley, Browning, Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne, have attempted dramatic composition; and in their dramas they have embodied great poetry. Yet it remains a matter of dispute whether the whole century has enriched the English language with a single play great in the sense in which scores of the Elizabethan plays are great. There is doubtless exaggeration in the unqualified censure sometimes passed upon the nineteenth century drama; yet the censure is not without foundation. For some obscure reason a fate seems to hang over the modern play-wright: either his plays will not act or they are not great poetry. Good they may be, great they very seldom are. More than one of the poets have bowed to this fate, and by their choice of the Greek model have, as it were, proclaimed that they did not intend their plays to be acted. Yet a dramatic piece which is not to be acted is in a sense a play that is no play. Others, and among them Browning and Tennyson, have written plays with the purpose that they should be acted; but they have rarely risen in them to the level of their best work. How does it come that in the Elizabethan age nearly everybody who could write at all could write dramas, while in the present century the highest powers accompanied by the best will do not ensure success? With regard to two of the three poets under consideration it might with reason be contended that the inability springs not from the age but from the individual. Their endowments, it might be argued, were not dramatic, and had they lived in an age of dramatists they would have stood out as exceptions, as Spenser did among the Elizabethans. Clearly, in the case of Arnold the personal explanation is sufficient. His own action may be interpreted as a tacit and perhaps unconscious admission of the absence of the dramatic faculty. We may detect such an admission, not merely in his choice of the Greek model, but in the fact that neither of his dramatic experiments permanently pleased him. Not only was Empedocles withdrawn before fifty copies were sold, but Merope, first published in 1858, was absent from the collected editions of Arnold's poems till 1885. His hesitation in admitting these dramas to a place among his works is instructive; and if we view the two pieces. purely as dramas we must pronounce it to be justified. There is some fine poetry in Merope, and a great deal in Empedocles, but in neither of them is the merit of a dramatic nature. They are not even dramas for the study, they are poems which have been somewhat arbitrarily thrown into the dramatic form. No character stands out vividly, the long-past age in which the action is laid does not live again. Neither Merope nor Empedocles on Etna restores the Greek drama as Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon does. The attitude and the arguments of Merope are modern rather than Greek, a fine expression of an essentially Christian rather than pagan shrinking from vengeance and bloodshed. Womanhood, and the fears of a mother, will partly explain it, but not entirely. It is not so that the women of Eschylus and Sophocles speak and think. Even more obviously modern in spirit is Empedocles. The problems which fill the mind of Empedocles are in a sense as old as civilisation, but the form they take in Arnold's drama is modern. The sphere of thought is that within which Arnold always moved, that of the Obermann poems, of Thyrsis, and of all that is most personal in his work. This is just another manner of saying that in Empedocles on Etna there is no realisation of character at all. Empedocles is Arnold, his thoughts are Arnold's thoughts, his words Arnold's words. His view of the position of man in the world could only have been taken after the rise of Christianity, and further, after the commonly received Christianity had been battered by the shocks of modern scepticism. Moreover, Empedocles is best just where the poet is himself with least disguise. Everywhere the charm of Arnold, to those who feel his charm at all, lies in the revelation of a refined, penetrating, sensitive intelligence, loaded with a melancholy due to the pressure of a world not made for the gratification of human desires. The same melancholy, due to the same pressure, is throughout evident in Empedocles. His closing confession might with a few changes have been written of the poet himself: Slave of sense I have in no wise been ;-but slave of thought? . That I have loved no darkness, Nursed no delusion, Allow'd no fear. "Far from my own soul, far from warmth and light": this is Arnold's constant lyrical refrain. And he too never grew easy in the bonds. In one point however there is a great difference between the poet and Empedocles,-in the suicide, which Arnold took from the legend, though he turned it to suit his own purpose. He held it a duty to fight his way through "the mists of despondency and gloom"; and he did it. The self-revelation of a gifted mind must be always fascinating, but what we principally seek in the drama is insight into another mind. In this Empedocles on Etna fails, and so in a less degree does Merope. This is a point of far greater importance than the fact that these two dramas are really modern in tone. A drama profoundly anachronistic may nevertheless be great as a drama, but not one which does not present clearly defined and living dramatis persona. But moreover, Empedocles on Etna fails, as a drama, in balance. Empedocles is not only the dominant character, he may be said to be almost the sole character; for Pausanias and Callicles exist only for his sake, and the poet neither feels himself nor inspires in his readers any independent interest in them. We are forced to the same conclusion if we look at the question from another point of view. If success in characterisation is the first requirement of the drama, action is the second. We may doubtless have poems of high merit, dramatic in nature, yet destitute of action. But such poems are not dramas. The very meaning of the literary form of the drama is to permit the union of these two elements, action and the development of character. The Greek drama, it is true, was so constructed as to permit action to sink into a very secondary place; and perhaps Arnold's Merope, though it has not much action, is not conspicuously deficient in this respect. His Empedocles certainly is. It is practically, as he soon felt, one long pause on the verge of suicide. Action, it would seem, was as foreign to Arnold as the delineation of character. If we turn to poems of a form which, though not dramatic, normally presents this quality of action, we find confirmation of the impression produced by Empedocles. Sohrab and Rustum and Balder Dead were not written for the sake of the movement in the story. On the contrary, their charm would be destroyed, or would be totally different in kind if there were in them any sense of hurry. Rest rather than motion, reflection rather than action, constitute their beauty. They are as far as possible removed from the vigorous speed and hurry of the narratives of Scott and Byron. It seems safe then to conclude that a man who has created no great character, and who has nowhere displayed the power of reproducing rapid action, was not meant by nature to be a dramatist. In another time and amidst other surroundings other powers might have been evoked; but they certainly did not spring up spontaneously. The case of Tennyson is less clear; but the majority of his readers look upon him as deficient in dramatic talent, and quite recently an elaborate criticism of him (Mr. Stopford Brooke's) has been written without even a cursory mention of his principal dramas. In a large volume in which separate chapters, and sometimes more than one, are devoted to the principal poems, such as The Princess, In Memoriam, the Idylls of the King and Maud, the plays of Queen Mary, Harold and Becket are not only not criticised, they are, I believe, not even named. From this fact and from occasional dicta in his book it seems safe to draw the conclusion that Mr. Brooke did not consider them worth naming. This is striking, but the view is only an exaggeration of the common opinion as to the relative value of Tennyson's dramas in comparison with his other work. The poet's own history is from the point of view of the drama remarkable. His early poems were as destitute as they could well be of the dramatic spirit. His literary career had been already prolonged beyond that of most men, and his life had almost covered the allotted span, before he published his first play. Previous to Queen Mary he had never approached nearer to the dramatic form than in the "monodrama" of Maud, a piece essentially lyrical in structure as well as in spirit. After Queen Mary however he returned again and again to the drama, and this in spite of either condemnation on the part of the critics, or what was at best, as applied to Tennyson, faint praise. The most natural and obvious division of his later works is that which ranges them under the heads of dramas and non-dramatic poems; and of these the former are more bulky and in some respects more striking, though with one exception certainly less valuable than the latter. They are more striking, if only because of the surprise of finding an old man, long trained in art, and by no means inclined to undervalue training, suddenly leaving the path his own. footsteps had beaten hard and smooth, and attempting a new and difficult way. Did the impulse to do so spring from the tardy development of some power hitherto latent? or, if not, to what other cause is it to be ascribed? It is astonishing to find a development of such a kind at an age so advanced; yet a fair examination of the dramas, side by side with the contemporaneous poems, seems to reveal it. We have already seen how large a proportion of the poems is partially dramatic. One remarkable fact such an examination certainly does reveal,-that Tennyson, even after the age of seventy, still possessed, in a degree almost as marked as ever, the capacity of growth. There is, in the series of his principal dramas, a steady rise which even those who most disparage them will probably acknowledge. Whatever merit we ascribe to Queen Mary, we must ascribe more to Harold, and more still to Becket. The last is the culminating point, in the dramatic form, of Tennyson's genius. His other dramatic pieces, The Falcon, The Cup and The Promise of May, which all appeared upon the stage before Becket, and The Foresters, which is of later date, are all lighter in build and inferior in worth to it. The Falcon has little either of incident or character, and the turning point in it, the |