BOOKS.

MR. TENNYSON'S DRAMA.* THERE can hardly be any serious divergence of opinion as to the strength and dramatic spirit of this poem. We will not say that it is Mr. Tennyson's best work, but it is among his best works. It is strong from end to end, which could not be said of nearly all his earlier poems. It is so thoroughly dramatic that it might, with an adequate cast of actors, be produced with the highest effect on the stage. Almost all the characters who play a real part in the drama, however slightly touched, are clearly defined, —Philip, whose disgust for the Queen is powerfully painted, but who remains otherwise something of a cold, cruel, and sensual

shadow, being perhaps in some degree an exception. Courtenay, Earl of Devon,—the vain and flighty Catholic Plantagenet,- " this Prince of fluff and feather," as Lord Howard in speaking to Elizabeth calls him ; Reginald Pole, the fair-weather Papal Legate, who shrinks alike from being persecuted and from perse- cuting, but is easily driven into the latter policy under fear of the former ; Bishop Gardiner, with his fierce Romanising dogmatism and his English hatred of Italian interference in English concerns,—

"His big baldness, That irritable forelock which he rubs,

His buzzard beak, and deep incavern'd eyes ;"

Bonner and his moral brutality ; Lord Paget, with the half-con- fessed Protestantism of his statesman's intellect, and yet that craving for English influence abroad which makes him support

the alliance with Spain ; Lord Howard, with his aristocratic Catholicism, his complete contempt for the vulgarity and ig- norance of the new schismatics, and yet his thoroughly-rooted antipathy to the bigotry of the sacerdotal spirit ; Sir Thomas Wyatt, with his tasteful literary cravings and the keen, audacious soldier beneath them ; Sir Ralph Bagenhall, with his bold, medi- tative insubordination and his hopelessness of active resistance ; Sir Thomas White (the Lord Mayor), with his political indecision, and his wonderful dexterity at swaying the London Guilds directly the feather's-weight has turned the scale which he is pleased to call his mind so as to decide him on his own course ; Cranmer, with his somewhat questionable faith and courage—questionable, we mean as regards historical fact, not questionable at all in Mr. Tennyson's picture,—his humility, penitence, and sweetness ; and lastly, the imaginary servants and peasants, both men and

women who are made parties to the drama,—these are all drawn with a firm hand and painted with a delicate touch. But

the great characters of the piece are, as of course they ought to be, Mary and her half-sister Elizabeth whose star declines as the Catholic Queen's rises, and rises fair again as Mary's sets. Of course the portrait of Elizabeth is comparatively slight as com- pared with that of Mary, but though much less carefully filled-in, it is to the full as dramatic and life-like. More- over, as it is intended to do, it makes by contrast the chief portrait all the more striking and characteristic. Both Mary and Elizabeth have the Tudor courage in emergencies, and flashes of what we may call that dramatic magnanimity which enables them to see how best to seem superior to suspicion and fear in a moment of danger. Mary, when she met Elimbeth at Wanstead, at the moment when her own accession was still doubtful, took her rival's hand, as Mr. Tennyson's drama reminds us, called her " sweet sister," and kissed not her alone, but all the ladies of her following, and further spoke of the Lady Jane Grey

• Queen Mary: a Drama. By Alfred Tennyson. London: Henry B. Bing end Co. as a poor innocent child who had but obeyed her father. Elizabeth, again, could so far feel with the dead Queen, whose reign had

been one long menace to her, as to half-believe in her own re- luctance to succeed her, and to be absorbed for the moment, or think herself absorbed, in pity for the sad fate which had darkened'

steadily down to the miserable close. But while both had the Tudor instinct in emergencies, in Mary it was, as a rule, entirely subordinated to personal emotions, like her irrational passion for the Spanish prince she had never seen, her fixed hatred for the counsellors who were forward in advocating her mother's divorce, and her superstitious craving for the blood of the enemies of the Church. On the contrary, in Elizabeth, personal feeling was, as a rule, subordinated to her strong instinct of policy, so that her personal wilfulness flashed up almost as capriciously in her as the Tudor sagacity did in Mary's less sober mind. The masterly sketch of Elizabeth which Mr. Tennyson puts into Cecil's mouth at the close of the play,—a sketch which ends it with a Shakespearian strength and pithiness that make Cram.- mer's somewhat hyperbolic and certainly by no means discrimi- nating doge of Elizabeth, at the close of the play of Henry sound flat as well as flattering in the comparison,—is a key to Mr. Tennyson's drift throughout his delineation of Mary. We' may be excused for giving the closing passage of the play twat, on the ground that the critic who wants to point out the move- ment of the poet's thought in the drama to those who have not yet read it, cannot follow the gradually opening purpose of the play itself, but must make the end clear from the beginning. This is Cecil's brief picture of Elizabeth :— "Much it is To be nor mad, nor bigot—have a mind— Nor let priests' talk, or dream of worlds to be, ?discolour things about her—sudden touches For him, or him—sunk rocks; no passionate faith-

But—if let be—balance and compromise; Brave, wary, sane to the heart of her—a Tudor School'd by the shadow of death—a Boleyn, too, Glancing across the Tudor—not so well."

It is against this background, as it were, of the ideal Tudor char- acter, that Mr. Tennyson paints, with great power and many flashes of striking detail, the break-down of Mary's reign,—the picture of the woman who, with momentary intervals of true English feeling and true Tudor sagacity, yet sacrificed her realm to a hopeless and capricious passion which even her most devoted ecclesiastical advisers discouraged ; who was, in addition, mad with bigotry ; who let "priests' talk miscolour things about her" while dream- ing of worlds to be ; who had a passionate prejudice which she supposed to be faith forbidding all "balance and compromise;" who, with all her courage and self-devotion, was neither "sane" nor " wary ;" and who, instead of having been "schooled" by the shadow of death, had been rendered by it fierce, wild, and vindictive. The personal caprices of the Tudors were almost always dangerous and evil ; it was only the power that lay in them of subordinating the personal to the national feeling on matters which most deeply affected the nation, which made them great Sovereigns ; and Mary Tudor either had not this power, or cast it away from her in the heat of her Spanish passion and gloomy superstition. The fitful ascendancy of these personal impulses over the political instincts which were never quite wanting to Mary, is finely delineated in an early scene:- [" MARY with Pamir's miniature. ALICE..

MARY (kissing the miniature).

Most goodly, kinglike and an Emperor's son,— A king to be,—.is he not noble, girl ?

ALICE.

Goodly enough, your Grace, and yet, methinks, I have seen goodlier.

MARY.

Ay ; some waxen doll Thy baby eyes have rested on, belike ; All red and white, the fashion of our land. But my good mother came (God rest her soul) Of Spain, and I am Spanish in myself,

And in my likings.

AL/CE.

By your Grace's leave' Your royal mother came of Spain, but took To the English red and white. Your royal father (For so they say) was all pure lily and rose In his youth, and like a lady.

MARY. 0, jnst God !

Sweet mother, you had time and cause enough To sicken of his lilies and his roses.

Cast off, betray'd, defamed, divorced, forlorn And then the king—that traitor past forgiveness, The false archbishop fawning on bim, married The mother of Elizabeth—a heretic

Ev'n as she is; but God hath sent me here To take such order with all heretioe

That it shall be, before I die, as tho' My father and my brother had not lived.

What west thou saying of this Lady Jane, Now in the Tower? Amu.

Why, Madam, she was passing Some chapel down in Essex., and with her Lady Anne Wharton, and the Lady Anne Bow'd to the Pyx ; but Lady Jane stood up Stiff as the very backbone of heresy.

And wherefore bow ye not, says Lady Anne, To him within there who made Heaven and Earth?

I cannot, and I dare not, tell your• Grace What Lady Jane replied.

MARY.

But I will have it.

ALICE.

She said—pray pardon me, and pity her—

She bath bearken'd evil counsel—ah ! she said, The baker made him.

MARY.

Monstrous! blasphemous !

She ought to burn. Hence, thou (Exit ALICE). No—

being traitor Her head will fall: shall it? she is but a child.

We do not kill the child for doing that His father whipt him into doing—a head So full of grace and beauty ! would that mine Were half as gracious ! 0, my lord to be, My love, for thy sake only.

I am eleven years older than he is.

But will he care for that ?

No, by the holy Virgin, being noble, But love me only ; then the bastard sprout, My sister, is far fairer than myself.

Will he be drawn to her?

No, being of the true faith with myself. Paget is for him—for to wed with Spain Would treble England—Gardiner is against him ; The Council, people, Parliament against him ; But I will have him 1 Lily hard father hated me ; My brother rather hated me than loved ; My sister cowers and bates me. Holy Virgin, Plead with thy blessed son ; grant me m prayer ; Give me my Philip; and we two will lead The living waters of the Faith again Back thro' their widow'd channel here, and watch The parch'd banks rolling incense, as of old, To heaven, and kindled with the palms of Christ !"

Then comes the picture of infatuated and almost mad hope for the birth of a son in which Mary indulges, in the childish belief that that event, without any other change of character or policy, will bring her Philip's love, and restore the nation's pride in her,—the self-will of the Tudor caprice clouding her brain more and more, and the cool Tudor sympathy with English policy showing itself less and less, indeed, only when her advisers urge her to something conspicuously opposed to all the'currents of national feeling, like the execution of Elizabeth, or when the open detesta- tion felt for her proposed marriage, and the perils of a great revolt call her out of herself into that world of action in which she was always most of a Tudor and least of a brooding fanatic. One of the finest scenes iu the play, is the one in which the two morbid veins of Mary's nature, her religious fanaticism and the passion for Philip, including the power of persuading herself that her son is quick within her, beat with the fullest pulse of hope, and ex- tinguish for the time all the latent sagacity of the Tudor monarch. Cardinal Pole's ingratiating professional quotation from the Song of Solomon, as he places Mary between himself and Philip, and the grim, ill-omened jokes with which he garnishes his conver- sation on the happy occasion of his inauguration at Lambeth, lend the additional force of a fine contrast to the fierce intensity of Mary's brooding hopes :— "Ah, gentle cousin, since your Herod's death, How oft hath Peter knock'd at Mary's gate ! And Mary would have risen and let him in, But, Mary, there were those within the house Who would not have it.

MARY.

True, good cousin Pole ; And there were also those without the house Who would not have it.

POLE.

I believe so, cousin.

State-policy and church-policy are conjoint, But Janus-faces looking diverse ways.

I fear the Emperor much misvalned me, But all is well; 'twas ev'n the will of God, Who, waiting till the time had ripon'd, now, Makes me his month of holy greeting. 'Hail, Daughter of God, and saver of the faith. Sit benedictus fructus ventris tui I' MART.

Ab, heaven ! Pont.

Unwell, your Grace ?

No, cousin, happy—

Happy to see you ; never yet so happy Since I was erown'd. POLE.

Sweet cousin, you forget That long low minater where you gave your hand To this great Catholic King.

PHILIP. Well said, Lord Legate.

NARY.

Nay, not well said ; I thought of you, my liege, Ev'n as I spoke. PHILIP.

Ay, Madam ; my Lord Paget Waits to present our Council to the Legate.

Sit down here, all ; Madam, between us you.

POLE.

Lo, now you are enclosed with boards of cedar, Our little sister of the Song of Songs You are doubly fenced and shielded sitting here Between the two most high-set thrones on earth, The Emperor's highness happily symboll'd by The King your husband, the Pope's Holiness By mine own self.

MARY.

True, cousin, I am happy. When will you that we summon both our houses To take this absolution from your lips, And be regather'd to the Papal fold?

• Pol.& In Britain's calendar the brightest day Beheld our rough forefathers break their Gods, And clasp the faith in Christ ; but after that Might not St. Andrew's be her happiest day ?

MARY.

Then these shall meet upon St. Andrew's day.

[Enter PAGET, who presents the Council. Dumb show

POLE.

I am an old man wearied with my journey, Ev'n with my joy. Permit me to withdraw.

To Lambeth?

PHILIP.

Ay, Lambeth has ousted Cranmer. It was not meet the heretic swine should live In Lambeth.

MARY.

There or anywhere, or at all. PHILIP.

We have had it swept and garnish'd after him.

POLE.

Not for the seven devils to enter in ?

Pump.

No, for we trust they parted in the swine.

POLE.

True, and I am the Angel of the Pope. Farewell, your Graces.

PHILIP.

Nay, not here—to mo ; I will go with you to the waterside.

POLE.

Not be my Charon to the counter side ?

PHILIP.

No, my Lord Legate, the Lord Chancellor goes.

POLE.

And unto no dead world ; but Lambeth palace, Henceforth a centre of the living faith.

[Exeunt PHILIP, POLE, PAGET, tc,, Monet MARY.

He hath awaked! he bath awaked !

He stirs within the darkness !

Oh, Philip, husband ! now thy love to mine Will cling more close, and those bleak manners thaw, That make me shamed and tongue-tied in my love.

The second Prince of Peace—

The great unborn defender of the Faith,

Who will avenge me of mine enemies—

He comes, and my star rises.

The stormy Wyatts and Northumberland a, The proud ambitions of Elizabeth, And all her fieriest partisans—are pale Before my star Tho light of this new learning wanes and dies: The ghosts of Luther and Zuinglius fade Into the deathless hell which is their doom Before my star His sceptre shall go forth from Ind to Ind His sword shall hew the heretic peoples down His faith shall clothe the world that will be his, Like universal air and sunshine ! Open, Ye everlasting gates! The King is here !—

My star, my son I [Enter PHILIP, Dime OF ALVA, 4c. Oh, Philip, come with ;

Good news have I to tell you, news to make Both of us happy—ay, the Kingdom too. Nay come with me—one moment !

Fiume (to Az.v.a).

More than that : There was one here of late—William the Silent They call him—he is free enough in talk, But tells me nothing. You will be, we trust, Sometime the viceroy of those provinces— Ho must deserve his surname better.

ALVA.

Ay, sir,

Inherit the Great Silence.

PHILIP.

True, the provinces Are hard to rule and must be hardly ruled ; Most fruitful, yet, indeed, an empty rind, All hollow'd out with stinging heresies ; And for their heresies, Alva, they will fight : You must break them or they break you.

ALVA (proudly). The first.

PHILIP.

Good

Well, Madam, this new happiness of mine. [Exeunt."

Except the close, this is, we think, the finest portion of the play. The scene in which Pole absolves the Estates of the Kingdom assembled in Parliament for their heresy, and receives them back into the Catholic Church, the quarrel in the Council as to the revival of the statutes against Lollardism, and the scene of Mary's cold refusal to spare Cranmer even after his retractation, are scenes of a fair lever of power, but tame as compared with many in the book. Especially it is not made clear why Philip takes his wife's part in urging and flattering Cardinal Pole into the policy of bitter persecution to which the Legate was opposed, and to which it seems probable that, in England at least, where he de- sired popularity for the sake of the political help it might bring him against his enemies abroad, Philip also was opposed. Nor does Lord Paget, who is eager for a policy of tolerance, though probably as much from sympathy with the Protestants as from pure statesmanship, give Cardinal Pole the sort of support we might have expected, or avail himself, as so shrewd a statesman would, both of the Cardinal's influence and of his own former good service in forwarding the Queen's marriage, to bring the Queen to her senses as regards the violent policy proposed. On the whole, the scene of the quarrel in the Council as to the re- vival of the Lollard Acts is the tamest in the play, and that in which Mary declines to spare Cranmer is, perhaps, the next to it in deficiency of colour. In that scene we might have expected signs of a fiercer struggle between the Tudor Queen with hea keen instinct for the true policy, and the Spanish fanatic with her frantic thirst for revenge on the author of her mother's divorce. With the scenes of Cranmer's martyrdom the fire of the play revives, though Mr. Tennyson's view of Cranmer is, we suspect, a good deal too heroic. Yet he permits himself, as we suppose, one sarcasm at Cranmer's expense :—

" CRANMER.

Last night, I dream'd the faggots were alight, And that myself was fasten'd to the stake, And found it all a visionary flame, Cool as the light in old decaying wood ; And then King Harry look'd from out a cloud, And bad me have good courage ; and I heard An angel cry, There is more joy in heaven,'— And after that, the trumpet of the dead."

That notion of the self-willed, bloody, and cruel King Henry as the ministering angel who raises the old Archbishop's courage, even though it was only in his dreams, ought to be intended as a bitter satire on the pliant ecclesiastic's former subservience. No whitewashing will ever turn Henry VIII. into an angel of light, and it can hardly be doubted that Mr. Tennyson here allows himself the only sneer at Cran- mer's worldliness and servility which the play contains. After Cranmer's withdrawal of his retractation, there follows a dialogue between two countrywomen, Tib and Joan, which brings out the popular feeling about Gardiner and the burning of Cranmer, and which is admirably dramatic of its-kind,—and after it the gloom of the play grows rapidly towards its tragic end. The scene in which Mary,—with her reason already on the verge of delirium,—hears of the loss of Calais, and in which her despair pours itself forth in the one exquisite lyrical wail of the drama, is as fine as anything in modern literature. Take this passage, for instance, where Mary, among her ladies, picks up one of the seditious papers strewn about the palace, which Cardinal Pole had intended but failed to remove :— "MARY (seeing the paper th.opt by POLE). a There, there another paper ! Said you not Many of these were loyal? Shall I try If this be one of such?

LADY CLARENCE.

Let it be, let it be.

God pardon me ! I have never yet found one. [Aside.

MARY (reads).

' Your people hate you as your husband hates you.' Clarence, Clarence, what have I done? what sin Beyond all grace, all pardon? Mother of God, Thou knoweat never woman meant so well, And fared so ill in this disastrous world.

My people hate me and desire my death.

LADY CrAaraca.

No, Madam, no. MARY.

My husband hates me, and desires my death.

LADY CLARENCE.

No, Madam ; these are libels.

MARY.

I hate myself, and I desire my death.

LADY CLARENCE.

Long live your Majesty ! Shall Alice sing you One of her pleasant songs ? Alice, my child,

Bring us your lute (ALICE goes). They say the gloom of

Saul Was lighten'd by young David's harp.

MARY. Too young !

And never knew a Philip (re-enter Arms). Give me the

lute.

He hates me ! (She sings.)

'Hapless doom of woman happy in betrothing! Beauty passes like a breath, and love is lost in loathing:

Low, my lute; speak low, my lute, but say the world is nothing—

Low, lute, low!

Love will hover round the flowers when they first awaken; Love will fly the fallen leaf, and not be overtaken;

Low, my lute! oh low, my lute! we fade and are forsaken—

Low, dear late, low

Take it away ! not low enough for me!

ALICE.

Your Grace hath a low voice.

MARY.

How dare you say it?

Even for that he hates me. A low voice

Lost in a wilderness where none can hear!

A voice of shipwreck on a shoreless sea!

A low voice from the dust and from the grave (sitting on

the ground), There, am I low enough now ?

ALICE.

Good Lord! how grim and ghastly looks her Grace, With both her knees drawn upward to her chin.

There was an old-world tomb beside my father's, And this was open'd, and the dead were found Sitting, and in this fashion ; she looks a corpse."

Such gloom as that can hardly be said to deepen even in the final scene, but it spreads. The reader is made to see the hatred in which the Queen's policy is held out of doors, and the confusion which it has introduced within. The disgrace of Pole, too, gives a fresh element of darkness to the scene, and the vague ringing in his brain of the words uttered by Cranmer before his martyrdom concerning "the bubble world, whose colours in a moment break and fly,"—words whose authorship of course he does not recall,— adds a fine touch to the moral nemesis of the play.

On the whole, we think we may say that this is a play which will compare with something more than advantage with Shake- speare's Henry VIII. Of course that is by no means the finest even of the historical plays of Shakespeare,—and we only mention it because it, too, contains a study of the good and of the evil qualities of the Tudor character,—but then no play of any modern poet's would be likely to rank with any of the greater plays of Shakespeare. Certainly we should be surprised to hear that any true critic would rate Queen Mary, whether in dramatic force or in general power, below Henry VIII., and our own impression is that it is a decidedly finer work of dramatic art. The morbid passions of Mary, the brief intervals of her lucid and ener- getic action, the gloom of her physical decay, and the despair of her moral desolation, together make up a picture which it would be impossible for any one who can enter into it, ever to forget.