BOOKS.

ULYSSES.* WE dealt last week with Mr. Stephen Phillips's new play as it appears when interpreted at Her Majesty's Theatre by Mr. Tree and his company. To-day we deal with the printed book, and, therefore, more especially with the literary side of the work. And, first, as to the prologue on Olympus.

In our view, the technique of this scene is extremely brilliant. To make it stand out from the rest of the play, it is written in dramatic heroic couplets, and such couplets as only .a master of the English language and of English prosody could produce. Even Dryden in the great passage in " Aurungzebe" which begins " When we consider life " hardly obtains verse fraught with a rhythm more magnificent.

Take, as an example, Athene's appeal to Zeus, in which she reminds him that Ulysses alone of the Grecian heroes has not been allowed to return home :— " Yet he, When all the other captains bad won home, Was whirled about the wilderness of foam ; For the wind and the wave have driven him evermore Mocked by the green of some receding shore; Yet over wind and wave he had his will, Blistered and buffeted, unbaffied still.

Ever the snare was set, ever in vain ; The Lotus Island and the Siren strain; Through Scylla and Charybdis hath he run, Sleeplessly plunging to the setting sun. Who hath so suffered, or so far hath sailed, So much encountered, and so little quailed ? "

Equally good is Poseidon's fierce claim of vengeance:—

"Father of Gods, this man hath stricken blind My dear son Polyphemus, and with wind, With tempest and a roaring wall of waves, I fling him backward from the shore he craves. Sire ! if this insolence unpunished go We soon shall lack all reverence below;

• Ulysses: a Drama in a Prologue and Throe Acts. By Stephen Phillips. London : John Lane. [4s. 6d. net.]

It will be said, The arm of Zeus doth shake, Let none henceforward at his thunder quake !' This man is mine ! By me let him be hurled From sea to sea, and dashed about the world !"

Again, how splendid in its volume of sound is the final decree of Zeus :— "But, daughter, 'tie not I that do impose Upon Ulysses this the last of woes. I to no higher wisdom make pretence Than to expound eternal sapience. It is that power which rules us as with rods,

Lord above lords and god behind the gods I

Fate hath decreed Ulysses should abide More toils and fiercer than all men beside: Heavily homeward must he win his way Through lure, through darkness, anguish, and delay."

With what strength, and yet certainty, fall the hammer- strokes of the verse. Marlowe in his " Hero and Leander acclaims " the adamantine destinies," but that tremendous invocation is not more soul-shaking than this reference to the unalterable decrees of fate.

But though we speak so highly of Mr. Phillips's couplets, it must not for a moment be supposed either that we place the couplet above blank verse, or that we think that Mr. Phillips can handle the lesser and easier metre and not that which is incomparably higher,—perhaps the greatest metre that the world of verse has ever known. On the contrary, we find Mr. Phillips a very excellent master in blank verse. He does not, of course, reach Shakespearian or Mamie heights, nor has he yet attained to that exquisite cadence which marks the idyllic and elegiac blank verse of Tennyson at its best. As Dryden said so majestically in speaking of the youthful poet whom he named the Marcellus of our tongue, "Nature never gives the young" the full harmonies of verse, but it is hardly too much to say that, save in the case of Keats, no youthful poet has written blank verse of greater promise than Mr. Phillips. Take, for example, the exquisite speech of Penelope which comes after the minstrel's song :— " MINSTREL. 0 set the sails, for Troy, for Troy is fallen, And Helen cometh home ; O set the sails, and all the Phrygian winds Breathe us across the foam !

0 set the sails unto the golden Wtst !

It is o'er, the bitter strife.

At last the father cometh to the son, And the husband to the wife !

And she shall fall upon his heart

With never a spoken word—

Pax. Cease, minstrel, cease, and sing some other song ; Thy music floated up into my room, And the sweet words of it have hurt my heart.

Others return, the other husbands, but Never for me that sail on the sea-line, Never a sound of oars beneath the moon, Nor sudden step beside use at midnight: Never Ulysses ! Either he is drowned Or his bones lie on the mainland in the rain."

In the last line Mr. Phillips has used a cadence worthy of Webster, who perhaps of all the Elizabethans most excelled in the art of breaking the drumming beat of the decasyllabic iambic line, and so saving himself from the monotony of a too regular rhythm. People sometimes imagine that poets write such blank-verse lines as—

"Cover her face : mine eyes dazzle, she died young,"

because they are easier than regular iambics. In truth, of course, the poet's difficulty is not to write correct iambics— "Lord Fanny spins a thousand such a day "—but to escape from the fatal facility with which our language falls into empty, correct, and therefore intolerable iambics. The shuddering cadence of—

"Or his bones lie on the mainland in the rain" is an admirable example of the way in which the necessary rhetoric of the passage should vary the metre. The line is measured and melodious—no one could ever take it for prose— and yet it avoids the " damned iteration" of blank verse, such as that of Dr. Johnson's " Irene " or Congreve's "Mourning Bride."

As should the metre in all great poetry, Mr. Phillips's verse rises and falls, alters and develops, with his subject. The rhythm of the verse in the scene in Hades is appropriate, and, therefore, utterly different from that in the scenes on Calypso's island. When Agamemnon speaks, the movement of the verse well indicates the king of men. And with his fierce outburst of horror and the tale of his blood-stained home-coming we must leave Mr. Phillips's play. Not even Lander himself made Agamemnon in the Shades speak more appropriately and with a more kingly gloom of utter disillusionment :--

" Amax. Ulysses, fear thy wife ! Fear to return. Mars. What? What ? 0 speak!

Thy wife awaits thee now Coiled like a snake to strike thee with her fangs. ITLys. Unthinkable !

ROAM. She weaveth death for thee UL'rs. Horrible !

AGAM. Look on me, me whom my wife False Clytemnestra lured unto the bath And struck me here where now thou see'st the wound.

I that first night did bathe in my own blood, The first night, the sweet night of my return.

TILTS. 0 Agamemnon !

Ausx. She while I did fight About Troy city for Egisthus burned, She snared, she slew me, then with him she slept.

17Lys. Penelope ! I'll kiss thee and fear not. Acma. Never so sweet was Clytemmestra's kiss As on that night, her voice, never so soft."

We have said enough to show the quality of Mr. Phillips's work. Let those who think we may have praised him unduly go to the play itself and decide the issue. We are not afraid of the ordeal either for our critical estimate or for Mr. Phillips's play.