BOOKS.

ALEXANDER THE GREAT.* Tins is a poem which ought to make a reputation. It will compare with Sir Henry Taylor's fine drama of Philip van Arteveldt, as well in general power as in the delicacy of the minuter elements of its workmanship. Yet at first sight, it looks almost a hopeless endeavour to weave the rather irregular leaps of Alexander's meteoric career into a single drama. A ten years' war, in which the field of interest was always military or political and always chang- ing, and which carried the conqueror through Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, then across Persia into India, and which, after the return

* Alexander he Great: a Dramatic Poem. By Aubrey de Vere. London: henry S. King and Co. to Persia, finally ended in Babylon, hardly seems to furnish the materials for the sort of poem that we connect with the drama. But the apparent difficulty of the enterprise is, when surmounted, a measure of the skill and imaginative insight of the poet; and cer- tainly in this case the enterprise appears to us to have been singularly successful. With hardly any of the common materials of dramatic interest, without any story of love that is not of the slightest kind and absolutely subordinate to religious or political obligations, with nothing but the tale of heroic ambition for the chief subject of the tragedy, Mr. de Were has yet not only rivetted our interest on his drama from the very beginning, but deepened that interest with every Act and almost every Scene, up to the truly tragic, and yet in the truest sense satisfying close. To give so profound an interest to the chronicle of even so mighty a cataract of ambition as Alexander's, would have been difficult, if not impos- sible, but for the lights and shadows of the religious ideas which Mr. de Vere has blended with the picture of the great conqueror's career. He has taken some pains to depict not merely the growth of the insatiable pride of his hero, but the reciprocal influence on each other of that insatiable pride and of his changing esti- mate of the great religions he encountered. And by making the character of Hepheation, the one friend whom be passionately loved, and at 'whose death his grief was almost a madness, a striking contrast to his own character of over-mastering pride, Mr. de Vere has contrived to provide us a standard with which to compare the dwindling awe of Alexander's mind and the grow- ing moral recklessness of his keen and politic sagacity. Of course the success or failure of a great dramatic conception of this kind depends wholly on the workmanship, and Mr. deVere's workmanship is at once delicate in execution and large in plan. He has got a most vivid and powerful conception of his hero,—whether true or false, it is, except on certain questions of external policy, now of course impossible to say,—and he has shown us this character maturing before our eyes in verse of beautiful rhythm, and often of very high imaginative power. To speak frankly, we had no conception, from our knowledge of Mr. de Vere's former poems, that so much poetic power lay in him as this drama shows, it is terse as well as full of beauty, nervous as well as rich in thought. The character of Alexander grows upon us as we read, till it fascinates us by the force of the almost unerring yet half-animal intellect, and that imperious self-will, which it displays. The only thing we miss that ought to be in the poem, is a fuller delineation of the passionate and single devotion to his friend, Hephestion, which is the key to the drama, and yet rather assumed in it than painted. The pic- ture actually painted is rather that of an Alexander in whom no such intense personal devotion to a friend would have been pos- sible. We know that that devotion was a matter of history ; on its intensity depends an essential and critical element of the drama ; and the violent passion resulting from the wound inflicted by death on that overweening devotion is very finely painted ; but the de- votion itself is not shown to us, is hardly made a visible thread in the character of the conqueror. We are told enough about it, but hardly made to see how it belongs to the character itself. In a very fine conversation, the last which takes place between Alexander and the friend who is to him what Patroclus was to Achilles, Alexander

confesses,— "I sometimes think

That I am less a person than a power, Some engine in the right hand of the gods, Some fateful wheel that, round in darkness rolling, Knows this—its work ; but not that work's far scope.

Hephestion, what is life ? My life, since boyhood, Hath been an agony of means to ends :

An ultimate end I find not. For that cause, On-reeling in the oppression of a void,

At times I welcome what I once scarce brook'd, The opprobrium of blank sleep."

That, no doubt, is meant to be the picture rather of what Alexander had become, than of what he was at first. The per- son' in him had shrunk, the fateful instrument in him had grown. Of the ends of life and empire, of which he had some vague and awe-struck conception at the opening of the poem, he has less and lees, as pride swells and reverence dwindles. But still, what he is at the close completely, he is at least in tendency at the opening ; and this so much so in Mr. de Vere's picture, that we are hardly helped to understand the passionate love for Ilephes- tion of which we are informed. We think this a real defect in the scene in which Alexander and Hephestion visit the mounds over the tombs of Achilles and Patroclus, at Troy. There, at least, at the very outset of his career, Alexander should have been allowed to betray more of his true tenderness for his friend and the ground of it. If it were, as it well might have been, that Hephestion's was the one mind which, while entering com- pletely and enthusiastically into Alexander's grand conceptions, yet gave Alexander indirectly a glimpse of a world of sympathies and insights into the finer shades of which he himself had no power to pierce, then this sense of dependence on his friend for access to a delicate human sphere otherwise inaccessible to him might have been here delineated, and the source of an almost inexplicable devotion so revealed. As it is, Alexander from the very first is so much less "a person than a power," that one is a little puzzled by the one thread in his character which shows him to the last not merely a power but a person. We think Mr. de Vere would have added a fresh touch to the beauty of a noble play if he had painted Alexander's need of Hephestion more carefully in the opening scenes, and let us see the subsidence of this tender and influencing human love into a mere imperious and exclusive devotion, as the play drew on. At the close of one of the later scenes to which we have already referred, Hephes- tion says of Alexander that the King truly "knew him never ;" and that is natural, for he is made too human in every way to be understood by a great, living organon of conquest and empire like Alexander. But we think there should have been in Alex- ander a greater sense of what he might gain by knowing Hephes- tion, a greater knowledge of the deficiency in his own mind which Hephestion could supply, at the opening than at the close. The violence of the convulsive and insatiable grief caused by Hephes- tion's death would be even more natural and intelligible if de- picted as the close of a friendship which had been becoming more and more unchastened in character and unassimilated with the King's intellectual and political life up to the end, than it is in this play, where we are not made to see that Alexander had been in any way conscious of drifting away from his former sympathy with Hephestion, as, in consistency with this picture, he must really have been, though of course without losing his love for him. This is perhaps the one defect of the drama, that the link of human sympathy between Alexander and his higher-natured friend is not carefully enough painted, while the contrast between them is very finely painted. But we must turn away from this minute criticism to the fine picture of Alexander's own character. In the very opening of the play, the old General, who had trained him from his childhood, thus describes the young man's genius for war and its wonderful command of detail :— " PTOLEMY.

He owes you much.

PARMENIO.

A realm his father owed me, And knew it well. The son is reverent too, But with a difference, sir. In Philip's time My voice was Delphic on the battle-field : This young man taps the springs of my experience As though with water to allay his wino Of keener inspirations. Speak thy thought, Parmenio l' Ere my words are half-wm out He nods approval, or he smiles dissent. Still, there is like him none ! I marvell'd oft To see him breast that tempest from the north, Drowning revolt in the Danubian wave. The foe in sight, instant be know their numbers ; If distant, guess'd there whereabout—how lay The intermediate tract—if fordable The streams—the vales accessible to horse: 'Twas like the craft of beasts remote from man."

Note the last line. That almost animal power of intellect in a man who had singularly little of animal passion, is one of the notes which run through the character. It is still more finely brought out in the scene in which Parmenio's son, Philotas, tries to per- suade his father to raise the standard of revolt against Alexander, on the ground of the madness of his ambitious schemes :—

"PMILOTAS.

I grant his greatness were his godship sane ! But note his brow ; 'tis Thought's least earthly temple : Then mark, beneath, that round, not human eye,

Still glowing like a panther's ! In his body

No passion dwells; but all his mind is passion, Wild intellectual appetite and instinct

That works without a law.

PARMENIO.

But half you know him. There is a zigzag lightning in his brain That flies in random flashes, yet not errs : Chances his victories seem ; but link those chances, And under them a science you shall find, Though unauthentic, contraband, illicit, Yea, contumelious oft to laws of war.

Fortune, that as a mistress smiles on others,

Serves him as duty-bound : her blood is he,

Born in the purple.of her royalties. On me long time she frown'd: these mailed fists Smote her on breast and brow for thirty years, From Athos westward to the Illyrian coasts,

Ero yet she leanAl to love me. He too loves me ! Though jealous of mg fame."

How this "zigzag lightning in his brain" leads Alexander with unerring precision to all that concerns the command of armies and States, all that affects man in the average, whether that be the heroic in character or that "agony of means to ends" which helps him to master so completely the military details of a battle or a campaign, or the policy to be pursued towards a vanquished people, and yet utterly fails to guide him in that region where something higher than political or military sagacity holds sway, something that overrules statecraft and dissolves the power of armies, is very finely brought out in one scene after another. Take this outbreak of the never-ending issue between Church and State, as showing Mr. de Vere's conception of the point where Alexander's political sagacity fell short of true spiritual wisdom. Alexander had been developing his scheme for making Asiatics and Greeks truly equal in his Empire, and had maintained, with the practised intellect educated by Aristotle, that this rule would give its full influence to the keen Greek brain :—

" HEPIIESTIOM.

Greek and Asian equall'd, The Greek supremacy has died at birth.

ALEXANDER.

You see but half. Equality, when based On merit, means supremacy of Greek ; For mind is merit, and the great Greek mind

In nature's right, supreme. Our Greece shall rule

Like elemental gods with nature blent, Yet not in nature merged."

To this Hephestion urges that the Persian faith is higher than the. Greek, and yet that Alexander is not willing to give it its equal

chance :— "Hurnusnox.

Touching the gods, I mark in you a change : At first you honour'd much this Persian Faith, A Faith that soar'd, and yet went deep, insisting For ever on the oppugnancy divine 'Twixt Good and Ill, unlike those nymph-like Fancies That, draped in Faith's grave garb, yet loosely zoned, But glide above the surfaces of things, And tutor us with smiles. That time is past.

Egyptian rites and Asian still you honour, Persia's distrust. ALEXANDER.

The man that Empire founds Must measure all things by the needs of Empire : This Magian Faith will prove refractory : That truth it claims to hold, and hold alone,

Burns in its eye, and eyes of them that serve it

A portion of their never-quenched Fire : Its spirit is the spirit of domination : I'll own no Persian worship.

HEPHESTION.

Is this just ?

You smile on Persia's court, upon its camp, Its nobles, and its merchants, and its peasants ; Upon the noblest thing it hath you frown.

ALEXANDER.

'Tis so. I ever make my choice of foes Not less than friends. I know this Faith must hate me Like it there's none : the rest at heart are brothers ; Their priests alike contented to be ruled, Their rites not hard to reconcile."

Here we see Alexander's mind shrinking from admitting even the possibility of that loyalty to absolute and eternal truth which it is so inconvenient for statesmen to encounter, and against which so. many strong governments have been shivered. It is the growth of his overweening pride and ambition which steels him against a creed whose sublimity he had at first willingly recognised. Nor is the Persian religion referred to, merely intellectually painted. The very beautiful and delicate women of the drama are in- troduced on purpose to show us how near to the religious senti- ment of Christianity the Persian light-worship and faith in the eternal conflict of good and evil might have been able to carry a naturally devout mind.

Again, Mr. de Vere skilfully avails himself of a tradition of Josephus that Alexander, when in Palestine, visited Jerusalem, as an excuse for supposing that he was there told by the high priest of Daniel's prophecy as to his divine task, and that for a time he partially recognised the moral limits imposed on him by Providence, till in the pride of his conquests he learned to think his power all but limitless, and not given him from above, but self-created. This is, of course, a mere poetic device for delineating more in detail the character of Alexander's pride and its tendency to grow into self-idolatry, as Mr. de Vere conceives it. But it is a truly poetic device, for, as it is managed, it introduces. a new atmosphere of religious awe, not only into the career of conquest itself, but especially into the noble death-scene ; and

though it can hardly be said to rest on a historical basis, this is eminently such a device as a great dramatist would not scruple to use who wished to bring out his conception of the spiritual flaw in the great conqueror's character. Thus, as Alexander conquers kingdom after kingdom, the faith in all beings really above men, by whom human power is given and from whom derived, begins to vanish from his mind, till he produces to his friend, first, a bold theory of the natural selection of gods from heroes, and after- wards this Macedonian equivalent for the " agnostic " position of the great Secularists of to-day :— "ALEXANDER.

This only know we—

We walk upon a world not knowable Save in those things which knowledge least deserve, Yet capable, not less, of task heroic. My trust is in my work : on that I fling me, Trampling all questionings down."

Yet Alexander's mind reverts to the superstition of his descent from Jupiter as he lies dying,—a legend he had once laughed at, —and he bids Ptolemy bury him in the temple of Jupiter Ammon. There is no anachronism in such seeming anticipations of the controversies of to-day, except the anachronism inherent in the educated reason of all time, which is always strangely reverting to the past and strangely anticipating the future :—and, indeed, in no time was reason more educated than in that of the great pupil of Aristotle who ploughed up the civilisations of centuries with so mighty a hand, that the problems discussed by his master must have taken a strangely concrete form in his imagination.

Nothing is more beautiful in this play than the contrast between the night-scene in which the quasi-Christian aspirations of the Persian princess Arsinoe, whom Alexander marries, are pre- sented to us, and the night of frustrated passion in which Alex- ander's own great career ends. The delirium of his last fever, the fierce dreams of failure by which he is haunted, the blood-red sunset of his life at Babylon, are put in close connection with the yearnings of .A.rainoe for some revelation of milder and diviner light than even that of her own early faith, and the effect of the parallel between the scene of tender and wistful trust, and that of the fitful and moody struggle of a powerful spirit against fate, is exceedingly striking. We must give the dream in which Alexander's mind paints for itself the auguries of a wasted career of conquest :— " PTOLEMY.

Immortal gods!

To this high sufferer grant the balm of sleep !

ALEE.A.NDER.

Sleep ! Can you guard me 'gainst ill dreams in slumber?

I'll tell you one. I died ; and lay in death A century 'mid those dead Assyrian kings In their old tomb by yonder stagnant lake.

Then came a trumpet-blast that might have waked Methought a sleeping world. It woke not them.

I could not rise : I could not join the battle: Yet I saw all.

PTOLEMY.

What saw you, sire ?

ALEEANDEIL

Twelve tents, Each with my standard. On twelve hills they stood Which either on their foreheads blazon'd wore, Or from my fancy's instinct took, great name; CitIncron, Humus, Taurus, Libanus, Parapomisus, and huge Caucasus, With other five, and Athos in the midst.

Then from my royal tents on those twelve hills, Mail'd in mine arms, twelve Alexanders crown'cl With all their armies, rush'd into a plain, Which quaked for fear, and dash'd across twelve floods, Euphrates, Issue, Tigris, Indus, Oxus,

And others with great names. They met—those Twelve—

And, meeting, swelled in stature to tho skies, And grappled, breast to breast, and fought, and died, Save four that, bleeding, each on other stared, And lean'd upon their swords. As thus they stood,

Slow from that western heaven which domes the accursed—

Rome's bandit brood—there moved a cloud night-black, Which, onward-gathering, masted all the East, And o'er it rain'd a rain of fire. The earth Split, and the rivers twelve in darkness sank ; The twelve great mountains crumbled to the plain; The bones of those twelve armies ceased from sight. Then from the sun that died, and dying moon, And stars subverted, fell great drops of blood, Large as their spheres, till all the earth was blood; And o'er that blood-sea rang a female cry, The Royal House is dead."

Let us add that one or two exquisite lyrics are interspersed in the drama, and that the most beautiful and musical paraphrase of the psalm, "By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept," which we ever read, is contained in it. Mr. de Pere has produced a play which ought to ensure for his name a permanent place among the more refined and intellectual of our dramatists. Popular, Alexander the Great will hardly be. But it is never- theless the work of a true poet, and of a fine artist, in whom there is nothing vulgar, and nothing weak.