Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne (Illustrated) (Delphi Poets Series)

by Algernon Charles Swinburne

  Francisco. How now, my noble cousin? what, in black?

  Giovanni. Yes, uncle, I was taught to imitate you In virtue, and you [? now] must imitate me In colors of your garments. My sweet mother Is —

  Francisco. How! where?

  Giovanni. Is there; no, yonder: indeed, sir, I’ll not tell you, For I shall make you weep.

  Francisco. Is dead?

  Giovanni. Do not blame me now, I did not tell you so.

  Lodovico. She’s dead, my lord.

  Francisco. Dead!

  Monticelso. Blest lady, thou art now above thy woes!

  * * * * * *

  Giovanni. What do the dead do, uncle? do they eat, Hear music, go a-hunting, and be merry, As we that live?

  Francisco. No, coz; they sleep.

  Giovanni. Lord, Lord, that I were dead! I have not slept these six nights. — When do they wake?

  Francisco. When God shall please.

  Giovanni. Good God, let her sleep ever! For I have known her wake an hundred nights When all the pillow where she laid her head Was brine-wet with her tears. I am to complain to you, sir; I’ll tell you how they have used her now she’s dead: They wrapped her in a cruel fold of lead, And would not let me kiss her.

  Francisco. Thou didst love her.

  Giovanni. I have often heard her say she gave me suck, And it should seem by that she dearly loved me, Since princes seldom do it.

  Francisco. O, all of my poor sister that remains! — Take him away, for God’s sake!

  I must admit that I do not see how Shakespeare could have improved upon that. It seems to me that in any one of even his greatest tragedies this scene would have been remarkable among its most beautiful and perfect passages; nor, upon the whole, do I remember a third English poet who could be imagined capable of having written it. And it affords, I think, very clear and sufficient evidence that Webster could not have handled so pathetic and suggestive a subject as the execution of Lady Jane Grey and her young husband in a style so thin and feeble, so shallow in expression of pathos and so empty of suggestion or of passion, as that in which it is presented at the close of “Sir Thomas Wyatt.”

  There is a perfect harmony of contrast between this and the death scene of the boy’s father: the agony of the murdered murderer is as superb in effect of terror as the sorrow of his son is exquisite in effect of pathos. Again we are reminded of Shakespeare, by no touch of imitation but simply by a note of kinship in genius and in style, at the cry of Brachiano under the first sharp workings of the poison:

  O thou strong heart! There’s such a covenant ‘tween the world and it, They’re loath to break.

  Another stroke well worthy of Shakespeare is the redeeming touch of grace in this brutal and cold-blooded ruffian which gives him in his agony a thought of tender care for the accomplice of his atrocities:

  Do not kiss me, for I shall poison thee.

  Few instances of Webster’s genius are so well known as the brief but magnificent passage which follows; yet it may not be impertinent to cite it once again:

  Brachiano. O thou soft natural death, that art joint twin To sweetest slumber! no rough-bearded comet Stares on thy mild departure; the dull owl Beats not against thy casement; the hoarse wolf Scents not thy carrion; pity winds thy corpse, Whilst horror waits on princes.

  Vittoria. I am lost forever.

  Brachiano. How miserable a thing it is to die ‘Mongst women howling! — What are those?

  Flamineo. Franciscans: They have brought the extreme unction.

  Brachiano. On pain of death, let no man name death to me; It is a word [? most] infinitely terrible.

  The very tremor of moral and physical abjection from nervous defiance into prostrate fear which seems to pant and bluster and quail and subside in the natural cadence of these lines would suffice to prove the greatness of the artist who could express it with such terrible perfection: but when we compare it, by collation of the two scenes, with the deep simplicity of tenderness, the child-like accuracy of innocent emotion, in the passage previously cited, it seems to me that we must admit, as an unquestionable truth, that in the deepest and highest and purest qualities of tragic poetry Webster stands nearer to Shakespeare than any other English poet stands to Webster; and so much nearer as to be a good second; while it is at least questionable whether even Shelley can reasonably be accepted as a good third. Not one among the predecessors, contemporaries, or successors of Shakespeare and Webster has given proof of this double faculty — this coequal mastery of terror and pity, undiscolored and undistorted, but vivified and glorified, by the splendor of immediate and infallible imagination. The most grovelling realism could scarcely be so impudent in stupidity as to pretend an aim at more perfect presentation of truth; the most fervent fancy, the most sensitive taste, could hardly dream of a desire for more exquisite expression of natural passion in a form of utterance more naturally exalted and refined.

  In all the vast and voluminous records of critical error there can be discovered no falsehood more foolish or more flagrant than the vulgar tradition which represents this high-souled and gentle-hearted poet as one morbidly fascinated by a fantastic attraction toward the “violent delights” of horror and the nervous or sensational excitements of criminal detail; nor can there be conceived a more perverse or futile misapprehension than that which represents John Webster as one whose instinct led him by some obscure and oblique propensity to darken the darkness of southern crime or vice by an infusion of northern seriousness, of introspective cynicism and reflective intensity in wrong-doing, into the easy levity and infantile simplicity of spontaneous wickedness which distinguished the moral and social corruption of renascent Italy. Proof enough of this has already been adduced to make any protestation or appeal against such an estimate as preposterous in its superfluity as the misconception just mentioned is preposterous in its perversity. The great if not incomparable power displayed in Webster’s delineation of such criminals as Flamineo and Bosola — Bonapartes in the bud, Napoleons in a nutshell, Caesars who have missed their Rubicon and collapse into the likeness of a Catiline — is a sign rather of his noble English loathing for the traditions associated with such names as Caesar and Medici and Borgia, Catiline and Iscariot and Napoleon, than of any sympathetic interest in such incarnations of historic crime. Flamineo especially, the ardent pimp, the enthusiastic pandar, who prostitutes his sister and assassinates his brother with such earnest and single-hearted devotion to his own straightforward self-interest, has in him a sublime fervor of rascality which recalls rather the man of Brumaire and of Waterloo than the man of December and of Sedan. He has something too of Napoleon’s ruffianly good-humor — the frankness of a thieves’ kitchen or an imperial court, when the last thin fig-leaf of pretence has been plucked off and crumpled up and flung away. We can imagine him pinching his favorites by the ear and dictating memorials of mendacity with the self-possession of a self-made monarch. As it is, we see him only in the stage of parasite and pimp — more like the hired husband of a cast-off Creole than the resplendent rogue who fascinated even history for a time by the clamor and glitter of his triumphs. But the fellow is unmistakably an emperor in the egg — so dauntless and frontless in the very abjection of his villany that we feel him to have been defrauded by mischance of the only two destinations appropriate for the close of his career — a gibbet or a throne.

  This imperial quality of ultimate perfection in egotism and crowning complacency in crime is wanting to his brother in atrocity, the most notable villain who figures on the stage of Webster’s latest masterpiece. Bosola is not quite a possible Bonaparte; he is not even on a level with the bloody hirelings who execute the orders of tyranny and treason with the perfunctory atrocity of Anicetus or Saint-Arnaud. There is not, or I am much mistaken, a touch of imaginative poetry in the part of Flamineo: his passion, excitable on occasion and vehement enough is as prosaic in its homely and cynical eloquence as the most fervent emotions of a Napoleon or an Iago when warmed or goaded into elocution. The one is
a human snake, the other is a human wolf. Webster could not with equal propriety have put into the mouth of Flamineo such magnificent lyric poetry as seems to fall naturally, however suddenly and strangely, from the bitter and blood-thirsty tongue of Bosola. To him, as to the baffled and incoherent ruffian Romelio in the contemporary play of “The Devil’s Law-case,” his creator has assigned the utterance of such verse as can only be compared to that uttered by Cornelia over the body of her murdered son in the tragedy to which I have just given so feeble and inadequate a word of tribute. In his command and in his use of the metre first made fashionable by the graceful improvisations of Greene, Webster seems to me as original and as peculiar as in his grasp and manipulation of character and event. All other poets, Shakespeare no less than Barnfield and Milton no less than Wither, have used this lyric instrument for none but gentle or gracious ends: Webster has breathed into it the power to express a sublimer and a profounder tone of emotion; he has given it the cadence and the color of tragedy; he has touched and transfigured its note of meditative music into a chord of passionate austerity and prophetic awe. This was the key in which all previous poets had played upon the metre which Webster was to put to so deeply different an use.

  Walking in a valley greene, Spred with Flora summer queene: Where shee heaping all hir graces, Niggard seem’d in other places: Spring it was, and here did spring All that nature forth can bring.

  (Tullies Loue, p. 53, ed. 1589.)

  Nights were short, and daies were long; Blossoms on the Hauthorns hung: Philomele (Night-Musiques King) Tolde the comming of the spring.

  (Grosart’s Barnfield , p. 97.)

  On a day (alack the day!) Love, whose month is ever May, Spied a blossom passing fair Playing in the wanton air.

  (Love’s Labor’s Lost, act iv., sc. iii.)

  And now let us hear Webster.

  Hearke, now every thing is still, The Scritch-Owle, and the whistler shrill, Call upon our Dame, aloud, And bid her quickly don her shrowd: Much you had of Land and rent, Your length in clay’s now competent. A long war disturb’d your minde, Here your perfect peace is sign’d. Of what is’t, fooles make such vaine keeping? Sin their conception, their birth, weeping: Their life, a generall mist of error, Their death, a hideous storme of terror. Strew your haire with powders sweete: Don cleane linnen, bath[e] your feete, And (the foule feend more to checke) A crucifixe let blesse your necke: ’Tis now full tide ‘tweene night and day, End your groane, and come away.

  (The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy: 1623: sig. K, K 2.)

  The toll of the funereal rhythm, the heavy chime of the solemn and simple verse, the mournful menace and the brooding presage of its note, are but the covering, as it were, or the outer expression, of the tragic significance which deepens and quickens and kindles to its close. Aeschylus and Dante have never excelled, nor perhaps have Sophocles and Shakespeare ever equalled in impression of terrible effect, the fancy of bidding a live woman array herself in the raiment of the grave, and do for her own living body the offices done for a corpse by the ministers attendant on the dead.

  The murderous humorist whose cynical inspiration gives life to these deadly lines is at first sight a less plausible, but on second thoughts may perhaps seem no less possible a character than Flamineo. Pure and simple ambition of the Napoleonic order is the motive which impels into infamy the aspiring parasite of Brachiano: a savage melancholy inflames the baffled greed of Bosola to a pitch of wickedness not unqualified by relenting touches of profitless remorse, which come always either too early or too late to bear any serviceable fruit of compassion or redemption. There is no deeper or more Shakespearean stroke of tragic humor in all Webster’s writings than that conveyed in the scornful and acute reply — almost too acute perhaps for the character — of Bosola’s remorseless patron to the remonstrance or appeal of his instrument against the insatiable excess and persistence of his cruelty: “Thy pity is nothing akin to thee.” He has more in common with Romelio in “The Devil’s Law-case,” an assassin who misses his aim and flounders into penitence much as that discomfortable drama misses its point and stumbles into vacuity: and whose unsatisfactory figure looks either like a crude and unsuccessful study for that of Bosola, or a disproportioned and emasculated copy from it. But to him too Webster has given the fitful force of fancy or inspiration which finds expression in such sudden snatches of funereal verse as this:

  How then can any monument say “Here rest these bones till the last day,” When Time, swift both of foot and feather, May bear them the sexton kens not whither? What care I, then, though my last sleep Be in the desert or the deep, No lamp nor taper, day and night, To give my charnel chargeable light? I have there like quantity of ground, And at the last day I shall be found.

  The villanous laxity of versification which deforms the grim and sardonic beauty of these occasionally rough and halting lines is perceptible here and there in “The Duchess of Malfy,” but comes to its head in “The Devil’s Law-case.” It cannot, I fear, be denied that Webster was the first to relax those natural bonds of noble metre “whose service is perfect freedom” — as Shakespeare found it, and combined with perfect loyalty to its law the most perfect liberty of living and sublime and spontaneous and accurate expression. I can only conjecture that this greatest of the Shakespeareans was misguided out of his natural line of writing as exemplified and perfected in the tragedy of Vittoria, and lured into this cross and crooked by-way of immetrical experiment, by the temptation of some theory or crotchet on the score of what is now called naturalism or realism; which, if there were any real or natural weight in the reasoning that seeks to support it, would of course do away, and of course ought to do away, with dramatic poetry altogether: for if it is certain that real persons do not actually converse in good metre, it is happily no less certain that they do not actually converse in bad metre. In the hands of so great a tragic poet as Webster a peculiar and impressive effect may now and then be produced by this anomalous and illegitimate way of writing; it certainly suits well with the thoughtful and fantastic truculence of Bosola’s reflections on death and dissolution and decay — his “talk fit for a charnel,” which halts and hovers between things hideous and things sublime. But it is a step on the downward way that leads to the negation or the confusion of all distinctions between poetry and prose; a result to which it would be grievous to think that the example of Shakespeare’s greatest contemporary should in any way appear to conduce.

  The doctrine or the motive of chance (whichever we may prefer to call it) is seen in its fullest workings and felt in its furthest bearings by the student of Webster’s masterpiece. The fifth act of “The Duchess of Malfy” has been assailed on the very ground which it should have been evident to a thoughtful and capable reader that the writer must have intended to take up — on the ground that the whole upshot of the story is dominated by sheer chance, arranged by mere error, and guided by pure accident. No formal scheme or religious principle of retribution would have been so strangely or so thoroughly in keeping with the whole scheme and principle of the tragedy. After the overwhelming terrors and the overpowering beauties of that unique and marvellous fourth act, in which the genius of this poet spreads its fullest and its darkest wing for the longest and the strongest of its flights, it could not but be that the subsequent action and passion of the drama should appear by comparison unimpressive or ineffectual; but all the effect or impression possible of attainment under the inevitable burden of this difficulty is achieved by natural and simple and straightforward means. If Webster has not made the part of Antonio dramatically striking and attractive — as he probably found it impossible to do — he has at least bestowed on the fugitive and unconscious widower of his murdered heroine a pensive and manly grace of deliberate resignation which is not without pathetic as well as poetical effect. In the beautiful and well-known scene where the echo from his wife’s unknown and new-made grave seems to respond to his meditative mockery and forewarn him of his impending death, Webster has given s
uch reality and seriousness to an old commonplace of contemporary fancy or previous fashion in poetry that we are fain to forget the fantastic side of the conception and see only the tragic aspect of its meaning. A weightier objection than any which can be brought against the conduct of the play might be suggested to the minds of some readers — and these, perhaps, not too exacting or too captious readers — by the sudden vehemence of transformation which in the great preceding act seems to fall like fire from heaven upon the two chief criminals who figure on the stage of murder. It seems rather a miraculous retribution, a judicial violation of the laws of nature, than a reasonably credible consequence or evolution of those laws, which strikes Ferdinand with madness and Bosola with repentance. But the whole atmosphere of the action is so charged with thunder that this double and simultaneous shock of moral electricity rather thrills us with admiration and faith than chills us with repulsion or distrust. The passionate intensity and moral ardor of imagination which we feel to vibrate and penetrate through every turn and every phrase of the dialogue would suffice to enforce upon our belief a more nearly incredible revolution of nature or revulsion of the soul.