MR. STEPHEN PHILLIPS'S " NERO."

IN the play which was produced at His Majesty's Theatre on Thursday evening Mr. Stephen Phillips has made a clear advance in knowledge of stagecraft. In many respects Nero contains less poetry than Herod or Ulysses, but it is incomparably better drama. There is a keener perception of character, a firmer grasp on life, and a general subordination of other interests to the dramatic effect. Mr. Phillips is not merely making phrases or composing beautiful speeches; be is trying to develop against a dazzling background the complex tragedy of a human soul. To be sure, we still have much incidental fine writing, sometimes too full of Miltonic and Wordsworthian echoes to be quite satisfactory, some- times really imaginative and original, as in the wonderful description of the listless Navy in the beginning of Act III. But his characters no longer say "Lo ! let us make a speech," and proceed to some euphuistic soliloquy. They are swept along in the full tide of action, component parts of a great tragic movement, and not isolated rhapsodists. Much, of course, is due to the nature of the subject. The story of Nero has the dramatic completeness, the swift hurrying to a destined end, which makes it the finest material for tragedy. The very monstrousness of the acts, and the greatness of the actors, claim the attention from the start. There is no halt in the relentless speed with which Nemesis follows upon sin and folly. The tale has, indeed, all the qualities which Aris- totle sought for in tragic drama. The protagonists are more than human in their Zgpic, and more than human is the fate which overtakes them. On the whole, Mr. Phillips has risen

to the height of his great argument, and his daring has been justified. Our one serious criticism concerns the versification. We have no objection to a daring prosody, but in this case the daring is not always justified by success. Many lines are flat and undistinguished, and often the music of a fine passage is spoilt by a rush of redundant syllables. Says Nero of Britannicus's compositions

Why not a line will seam

To the true ear; and what variety,

I ask you all—what flow or what resource Is shown? A safe monotony of rhythm!"

Mr. Phillips is rarely monotonous, but he is often unartf ally unrhythmical.

The play begins with a scene in the Palace of the Caesars, where Agrippina, having murdered Claudius, waits with

Seneca and BUlT118 to raise her son to the throne. Nero enters, a victor from the chariot races; is acclaimed Emperor, and delivers a fine speech, full of a sense of the grandeur cola crushing responsibility of his fate. He falls asleep, and the ghosts of the dead Emperors flit past him,—

" All bloody, and all pacing that same path."

It is the crisis of his life, for he has still before him the choice of Hercules. In the next act the choice has been made. The Emperor has become a half-demented aesthete, tangled in the net of Poppaea, jealous as a child about his art, leaving tho conduct of affairs to the bold hands of his mother. Seneca and Tigellinus persuade him that Agrippina is conspiring against Lim, he banishes her, then calls her back, and the act closes with the murder of Britannicus and mother and son staring at each other in mutual repulsion. In the third act the plot thickens. Poppaea is induced to use her charms upon Nero to urge him to get rid of Agrippina. The scenes dealing with the incitation to the murder are contrived with great skill, and Nero is only persuaded when the circumstances of the act are so devised as to satisfy his artistic sense So mighty is she that her proper doom

Could come but by some elemental aid,

Her splendid trouble asketh but the sea For sepulchre; her spirit limitless

A multitudinous and roaring grave. Here's nothing sordid, nothing vulgar. I

Consign her to the uproar whence she came.

Be the crime vast enough it seems not crime.

I, as befits me, call on great allies.

I make a compact with the elements.

And here my agents are the very winds,

The waves my servants, and the night my friend."

The ship of death is prepared, and in a long and brilliant scene Nero is reconciled with his mother, and his affection is so rekindled that he forgets the part he is playing. Then Agrippina departs across the bay, the ship founders, she swims ashore, and is murdered by some of Anicetus's emissaries. The remorse of .bloodguiltiness falls upon the Emperor ; he rejoices for a moment to hear that she has escaped; and even as he rejoices the far trumpet sounds which tells of her death. In the last act the powers of all hell are unloosed. Poppaea dies in the arms of Acte, the slave-girl who is represented as Nero's better genius, her passion for life burning bright to the last

" And this hair— Rolling about me like a lighted sea

Which was my glory and the theme of the earth — Look ! must this go? The grave shall have these eyes Which were the bliss of burning Emperors.

After what time, what labour the high gods Builded the body of this beauty up !

Now at a whim they shatter it! More light!

I'll catch the last of the sun."

Nero arrives, hag-ridden by the thought of his mother's ghost, to be met by evil news from all parts of his Empire, and the final tidings that Rome is in flames and the populace in revolt. His madness reaches its height, for he sees in the fire the work of his mother's spirit, glutting her fury on the city.

He thinks it will purify him of her blood, and climbing on the battlements he sings a wild hymn to the destroyer. Mr. Phillips has shown a true instinct in letting the curtain go down on the culminating point of his madness rather than upon his death. The moment of tragedy is the passing of the soul, and not of the 'body.

The character of Nero is finely conceived and skilfully developed. Tainted with the hereditary madness of the Claudian house, and endowed with all the morbid self- consciousness of the artist, he begins life as a high-spirited Prince, under the thumb of his terrible mother. Soon vanity eats up his manhood, he becomes cruel out of mere petulance and lust, but be does not sin easily, for he 'has an imagination, if not a conscience. The artistic temperament, gifted with omnipotence, must lead to madness, as Seneca

sees from the start, for the essence of art is horizons, and he has none :— "Q wine of the world, the odour and gold of it! There is no thirst which I may not assuage— There is no hunger which I may not sate! Naught is-forbidden me under heaven!

(With a cry) I shall go mad—I shall go mad!"

He has affections, but they are only for dreams ; and his mis- deeds are revenged, not through his heart, but through the terrible keenness of his imagination. In sheer raving terror he proceeds to the last act of brutality. This conception seems to us at once more dramatic and more true to life than the other, which makes of him only a cruel dilettante. For the rest, the three women—Agrippina, Poppaea, and Aete—are finely drawn, and the final scene between the last two is perhaps the most poetically conceived in the play. The others—Seneca, Burrus, and their fellows—are only shadows, the instruments of the fate which broods over the Emperor. Here, again, Mr. Phillips has shown a true instinct. The figure of Nero demands the white glare of isolation to reveal its tragedy.

Of the performance at His Majesty's Theatre we have left ourselves little space to write. On the whole, Mr. Tree did justice to the part of the Imperial aesthete—

"The implacable, beautiful tyrant, Rose-crowned, having death in his hands."

In the great quarrel scene with his mother in the second act the conflict of two unbridled furies was finely reproduced. Anything less like a Roman matron than Mrs. Tree it would be hard to imagine, but there was both subtlety and power in her conception of Agrippina. The play is staged with great magnificence, and, so far as we could judge, without anachronisms. Our only criticism on this point con- cerns the pageant of the Triumph before the final act, which adds unnecessarily to the length of a very long play, and, to our thinking, is in itself a little comic. One merit the actors showed which is all too rare on the English stage. They realised that they were speaking poetry, and strove to give the full cadence of the verse. Mr. Tree, in especial, rolled out Nero's dithyrambics with a gusto which would have redeemed a far inferior performance.