|
The actors mortal, Earth the scene, the Time
The Present.
And of such stuff is it made, that
—— all sleepy Seraphs who delight
In lolling under rosy-coloured clouds
And blowing silvern trumpets,
and with them
—— all Angels
Who only turn their slothful eyes on Art
When like a naked Phryne she awakes
Celestial appetite and dainty dream,
All triflers in the blue ethereal courts,
All idle gentlemen in singing robes,
had best, so Lucifer opines, “close eyes, shut ears!” for ‘The Drama of Kings’ designs
To treat of mighty matters movingly,
—as might, indeed, have been expected from the long chant of some two dozen stanzas which stands to it as preface, and in which Auguste Comte is nine times nine times invoked as “Spirit of the great brow.”
The first play of the trilogy dramatizes for us the scene which Mr. Buchanan, confessedly taking some poetic liberties with chronology, imagines to have taken place at Erfurt in 1808, during the great Congress of Powers. The speakers in it are Stein, Arndt, and Jahn, on the one hand, and, on the other, Napoleon and Jerome, the Czar of Russia, the King of Saxony, the Prince Primate, Von Dalberg, and Louisa, Queen of Prussia. After a discussion between Stein, Arndt, and Jahn, of the state of Europe, and a good deal of choric singing, the Queen of Prussia pleads before the assembled monarchs the cause of her pillaged and murdered country, and pleads it in such effective style, that Buonaparte says to her in very self-defence—
Peace, lady—or, if thou must play the shrew,
Go back to him who sent thee here, to him
Whom ’tis thy wifely privilege to scold.
Thus chidden and repulsed, Her Majesty takes counsel with Stein, who assures her that it is “the one dark hour ere daybreak,” and entreats her to be “calm.” Follows another choric song, after which Napoleon receives and dismisses with some promptitude a Cardinal, who comes, as the Pope’s legate, with certain extravagant demands, of which the Emperor questions
—— every scratch,
Theme, title, every word and character,
First scrawl to last.
After this comes, of course, more choric singing; then a long monologue, delivered by Napoleon to his “famulus”; and then, to more choric singing, the curtain falls.
It rises, after more choric singing again, upon the Château of Wilhelmshöhe, where we find Napoleon the Third, after the battle of Sedan, in a frame of mind far from cheerful, but evidently impressed with the notion that the game is not yet played out. Upon this portion of ‘The Drama of Kings’ we commented before, when it was first given to the world under the title of ‘Napoleon Fallen’; nor do we see any reason to alter the opinion which we then expressed, and with which our readers are no doubt familiar. We leave, then, ‘Napoleon Fallen,’ and pass on to the last play of the trilogy, called ‘The Teuton against Paris,’ and in which we find ourselves in the German camp before Paris, and in the company of Prince Bismarck,—whom, by the way, Mr. Buchanan describes as ornamented with a “grizzled beard.” This unwarrantable liberty, however, we can easily forgive, as it is but fair to Mr. Buchanan to state that he carefully avoids the obvious temptation of dilating upon the horrors of the siege. Newspaper correspondents have done this, or rather overdone it, for us, with such vigour of imagination and power of fancy, that we are very grateful to Mr. Buchanan for his self-control, and are hardly impatient when the great Chancellor becomes prosy. The reader is, perhaps, by this time familiar with Mr. Buchanan’s estimate of the Napoleons. But he will certainly be astonished at the Bismarck conjured up for him in ‘The Teuton against Paris’ by the rules of “mystic realism.” That Prince Bismarck, whether in “mystic realism” or in real life, whether with a “grizzled beard” or without it, should show scant courtesy to a chorus of Sisters of the Red Cross, is natural enough. Equally natural is it that he should trample, in his own well-known fashion, upon a deputy who comes out of the beleaguered city to sue for peace, and upon a Buonapartist officer, who wishes him to pledge himself to an Imperial restoration. Natural, too, perhaps it is that he should bare himself before us in the following cynical or semi- cynical fashion:—
I love mine ease—
My wine, my mistress—all earth’s tasty things
In moderation—though I never suffer
The cup to cloud my reason and my soul,
Nor sell my manhood for a strumpet’s kiss,
As ye have done in France. Yet I believe
There are worse hues than that of blood, and Life
More pitiful than Death; and I, indeed,
Am your physician, though ye know me not.
But the Bismarck with whom we all imagine ourselves familiar surely never, even in his wildest Knieph of days, “orated” thus:—
Here then I pause,
And (let me whisper it to mine own heart)
I tremble. I have played with fire; behold,
It hath devour’d God’s enemy and mine;
And tamely at my bidding croucheth now
With luminous eyes half closed. This fire is Truth,
And by it I shall rise or fall. This fire
Is very God’s—I know it; and thus far
God to my keeping hath committed it.
What next? and next?
Or thus:—
What is this thing that men call “Liberty?”
Not force, not tumult, not the wind and rain
And tempest, not the spirit of mere storm,
Not earthquake, not the lightning, not swift Fire,
Not one of these, but mightier far than these,—
The everlasting principle of things,
Out of whose silence issue all, the rock
Whereon the mountain and the crater stand,
The adamantine pillars of the earth,
Deep-based beneath the ever-varying air
And under the wild changes of the sea,
The inevitable, the unchangeable,
The secret law, the impulse, and the thought,
Whereby men live and grow.
For Bismarck to whisper, even to his own heart, that he “trembles,” is unreal enough; but for Bismarck to play the Chadband, and to say to us, ore Chadbandonico, “Let us, my friends, in a spirit of love, inquire what is Liberty? Is it force, my friends? No! Is it tumult, my friends? No! Is it wind and rain and tempest? No, my friends, it is none of these things”—this is about as true to nature as that Bismarck’s grizzled beard should glimmer under the silver radiance. But then it is barely possible that in all this there may lurk some very esoteric meaning. Indeed, Mr. Buchanan himself admits that men “may find in a poem many meanings according to their different lights,” and freely confesses that an “eminent” friend of his own found fault with the picture of Napoleon the Third given in ‘Napoleon Fallen,’ and suggested that the “moral consciousness” and “remorse” there attributed to the dethroned Emperor were unreal. And yet it seems that this same “eminent” friend had altogether misunderstood Mr. Buchanan’s drift:—
“So far (Mr. Buchanan assures us) from attempting to represent the speaker as feeling mere ‘remorse,’ I was portraying, in his final soliloquy, a mood of unutterable perversity—a line of thought only possible to a fourth-rate intellect in which the moral consciousness was virtually inert and dead. From my own point of view, so utter was the wicked hopelessness of this soliloquy, that I should certainly have altered it, had my conscience not told me that every word was dramatically true.”
With the example, then, of Mr. Buchanan’s eminent friend before out eyes, it would be mere presumption in us to do what, otherwise, would sorely tempt us,—denounce the Bismarck of ‘The Teuton against Paris’ as a very sorry and commonplace Bismarck indeed, of a most distinctly transpontine type.
We may have read into Mr. Buchanan what is not his own. We may have not read in his trilogy of tragedies what he would have us read. But none the less, we find in ‘The Drama of Kings’ but very faint “undertones” of real solid meaning. Mr. Buchanan is not, of course, an Imperialist; an Emperor or a King is an abomination to him. He looks forward in a vague, hopeless kind of way to Liberty, and he believes that she will one day return (or come), Astræa-like, to earth, and inaugurate the golden age. The city of the future he sketches in a really remarkable epode:—
Comfort, O true and free,
Soon shall there rise for ye
A city fairer far than all ye plan;
Built on a rock of strength,
It shall arise at length,
Stately and fair and vast, the City meet for man!
And he is further able to assure us that—
Woman with man shall meet
Freely in mart and street—
At the great council-board woman with man shall sit.
Or, in other words, that the city of the future will enjoy the blessings of a female suffrage, But beyond this he is dim, as befits a poet, obscure as becomes a seer, mystic and oracular to the point of incomprehensibility. Indeed, many of the choric songs are as inscrutable and as enigmatic as the ravings of Bullwig in the famous ‘Yellowplush Memoirs.’ “O, the curse of Pwometheus descends upon his wace. Wath and punishment pursue them from genewation to genewation! Wo to genius, the Heaven-scaler, the fire-stealer. Wo and thrice bitter desolation! Earth is the work on which Zeus wemorseless stwetches his withing victim—men, the vultures that feed and fatten on him.” And yet, perhaps, it is not altogether fair to say that beyond a shadowy aspiration for Liberty, Mr. Buchanan’s trilogy is devoid of any leading idea. We find floating through his verses a misty notion of the philosophy of history, and a dim conception that
The old order changeth, giving place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways.
But such vague shadowings of the philosophy of history as this are, if not as old as the hills, at least as old as ‘Sartor Resartus.’ And when Mr. Buchanan speaks of Goethe as “a great positivist,” we begin to doubt whether he has any definite philosophic conceptions at all—a doubt not removed by the fact that he introduces us to a Lucifer who is “not the irreclaimable and Mephistophelean type of utter evil, but a Mystic’s Devil, a spirit difficult to fathom individually, but clearly in the divine service working for good.” There is “hope for the puir De’il,” after all.
That the method of ‘The Drama of Kings’ is suggested by ‘Faust’ is painfully patent. It would be cruel, perhaps, to add that every here and there we meet with passages which very forcibly recall to our memory that celebrated jeu d’esprit, ‘Firmilian.’ Indeed, in the scene in the Hall of Mirrors, the refrain of the choir, “Cantate Deo, jubilate gentes,” is much of a piece with the memorable chant:
Nicolai sacerdotum
Decus honor gloria,
Plebem omnem clerum totum——
And the lines—
OFFICER. Your Imperial Highness
Is suffering! Take comfort, Sire.
NAPOLEON. It is nought—
Only a passing spasm at the heart—
’Tis my disease, comrade; ’tis my disease!
read almost like conscious burlesque.
But the writer upon whom Mr. Buchanan is most closely modelled is he who, like the author of ‘The Drama of Kings,’ has proclaimed himself “the storm-thrush of the days that darken,” “the petrel in the foam that bears the bark” of the great Republic “to port through night and tempest.” When we read how “the white moon draws the sea,” how “innumerable years break awfully to foam of living faces,” how God “is deep and still, subtle as Love, and sure of foot as Fate,” or when we come across such stanzas as this—
For if on any day ye would be free,
If any day with one voice like the sea
Ye do demand your freedom every one,—
Utter the word, ’tis given, all is done,
And ye share freedom with all things that be,—
or this—
All have known her, and yet none possess her;
None behold her, yet all things caress her;
The warmth of her white feet,
Where it doth fall so sweet,
Abides for ever there, and all things bless her,—
we begin to have a suspicion that a Swinburnean school is growing up. And indeed Mr. Buchanan reminds us of Mr. Swinburne in more ways than one. He loves repetitions, alliterations, and other such devices. And he is occasionally extremely unpleasant. “Ye are dull,” says the French deputy to the Chancellor of Germany:—
To ye no delicate line of law divides
Beauty from harlotry; for ye are dull,
And turn your hard-grain’d Gretchens to their use
As tamely as ye sow and reap your corn;
And unto ye all rapturous sights and sounds,
All married interchange of sense and soul,
Are perilous, for ye dread the very Sun
May come upon your kitchen Danaës
And breed ye bastards in your own despite,—
in which extraordinary piece of English Mr. Buchanan’s quaint and peculiar use of “ye” is certainly not the most startling feature. If Mr. Swinburne had written these lines, we should never have heard the last about them.
‘The Drama of Kings’ is, when all is said and done, a huge tour de force. Like all tours de force, it is wearisome and monotonous, Mr. Buchanan is “sanguine that it is not at all Greek.” It is not. He also claims “a quiet hearing,” and thinks that, if his work be perused as a whole, and then the impression left in our minds be patiently contemplated, the first feeling of repulsion at an innovation will give place in the end to a pleasanter feeling. This may be so. But we fancy that most of Mr. Buchanan’s old admirers, of whom he deserved and still has many, will regard ‘The Drama of Kings,’ with more or less of sorrow, as an ambitious failure. Mr. Buchanan can turn a lyric prettily enough; but his blank verse runs into bombast. Indeed, it takes a giant to wield blank verse with ease and majesty.
___
The Examiner (2 December, 1871)
MR BUCHANAN’S DRAMA OF KINGS.
The Drama of Kings. By Robert Buchanan. Strahan.
This is a great experiment; and, taking into account the vastness and the extraordinary difficulty of the task, it must, on the whole, be pronounced a success. In ‘The Drama of Kings’ we have, as Mr Buchanan states, “the first serious attempt ever made to treat great contemporary events in a dramatic form, and very realistically, yet with something of the massive grandeur of style characteristic of the great dramatists of Greece.” The conflict between France and Germany is here depicted
A choric trilogy of tragedies
In the Greek fashion;
and the author’s mode of conception, so to speak, bears a close resemblance to that of the Greek tragedians. His point of view, he tells us in “A Note for the Adept,” is that of “the realistic mystic, who, seeking to penetrate deepest of all into the soul, and to represent the soul’s best and finest mood, seizes that moment when the spiritual or emotional nature is most quickened by sorrow or by self-sacrifice, by victory or by defeat.” And this is not a point of view assumed for the nonce. In this, and in all his previous works, Mr Buchanan declares “an attempt is made to combine two qualities which the modern mind is accustomed to consider apart—reality and mysticism, earthiness and spirituality.” What this “mystic realism” exactly is, almost as a matter of course, is not clearly explained in the very mystical note from which we have made the foregoing quotations; but we are informed that it is something very different from those “musings of non-mystic men,” which “assume the purely spiritual and unimaginative form,” and we may safely infer that it is as far removed from that purely realistic mode of thought which is also unimaginative. However, although we fail to understand Mr Buchanan’s prose description of “mystic realism,” and have to confess that we never suspected its presence in ‘Undertones’, ‘The Legends of Inverburn’ or ‘London Lyrics,’ there is in ‘The Drama of Kings’ something that corresponds with the attitude of mind delineated in “A Note for the Adept.” The “note” throws a light upon the “drama;” and the “drama” does, in a way, illustrate the “note.” Following the example of “the great positivist who wrote the first and second ‘Fausts,’ the greatest poetic sceptic of modern times,” than whom “no one did fuller justice to mystic truths,” Mr Buchanan has made use of supernatural machinery, “without perfect faith,” confining it, however, to the framework of prelude and epilude in which the drama is set. He has resorted to this contrivance, as he tells us, in the hope that it may serve “to keep before the reader the fact that the whole action of the drama is seen from the spiritual or divine auditorium,” and he expresses his willingness to suppress it, if “the consensus of wise criticism inclines to its condemnation as a defect.” But, notwithstanding the semi-allegorical employment of theological personifications, the Greek-like mode of thought, and the Greek form of the poem, “in minor points of detail, the author is sanguine that it is not at all Greek, nor in any sense of the word Archaic,” and this hope is well founded. The spirit and the ideas that pervade ‘The Drama of Kings’ are essentially modern; indeed, they belong to future as much as to contemporary times.
Perhaps an examination of the trilogy itself will help us, as we have already hinted, to comprehend, to some extent, the note “On Mystic Realism.” We may pass over the dedication “To the Spirit of Auguste Comte,” with the remark that the somewhat long-winded and weak stanzas of which it consists indicate sympathy with the motives rather than with the philosophy and religion of the founder of Positivism. The “Proem” does not appear to have any connection with the “Drama,” and besides it is to us unintelligible. It is with the “Prelude before the Curtain” that the work commences, if it can even be said to commence there. We have both a prelude and a prologue, which correspond to the “Prologue for the Theatre,” and the “Prologue in Heaven,” of the first part of ‘Faust,’ There is also a further resemblance to Goethe’s work in the stage directions, and in the dramatis personæ. As the “Prologue in Heaven” brings before us “The Lord, the Heavenly Hosts, and afterwards Mephistopheles,” so the “Prelude” in “the Heavenly Theatre” introduces us to the Lord, the archangels, the celestial spectators, and afterwards to Lucifer. The Lord, in the latter, however, does not take part in the dialogue, as he does in the former, and Mr Buchanan takes occasion to explain that Lucifer is “the Mystic’s Devil, a spirit difficult to fathom individually, but clearly in the divine service working for good,” and that he does not belong to “the irreclaimable and Mephistophelian type of utter evil.” The “Prelude” opens with a mediæval-like chorus that reminds the reader of Dante, and at its close “Clouds rise,” and “Lucifer appears on the stage,” in the character of Choragus, and tells the audience the name of the tragedy, its scene, and time. It is reserved for “Time,” however, who delivers the “Prologue,” to intimate the nature of the plot. “Do ye hear,” he says to the audience in the Heavenly Theatre,
That wind of human voices anguishing
Afar off, like the wind Euroclydon
Moaning around Mount Ida. Hark again!
‘Liberty! Liberty!’ the wild voice cries,
‘Liberty!’ now,—and ever ‘Liberty!’
But whom they mean by that mysterious name
I say not, nor can any angel say,
Nor one thing under God. God knows and hears
That one word and none other hath been cried
By men from the beginning. I have heard
The sound so long, I smile; but at the same
Kingdoms have fallen like o’er-ripened fruit,
Realms withered, heaven rain’d blood and earth yawn’d graves, &c.
Liberty, then, is the burthen of the drama, which is to show how two mighty nations, “dimly, darkly, for the great Idea,” struggled and fought together, while “one by one came leaders veil’d to each”—“bloody men who juggled with the mystic word of God”—and led them to ruin, “each saying ‘In the name of Liberty.’” When Time is proceeding to tell “how from sorrow came mysterious good,”
Seeing man’s wrong’d Soul hoarded its deep strength
In silence,
he is interrupted by a confused noise. The drama has begun. After hurriedly muttering that Germania overthrown,
Mad, stricken, lies upon her back and glares
At heaven from a bloody battle-field,
And dimly sees in the dark void above her
A dark shape, a dim-footed phantasy,
And deemeth ’tis the mighty truth men seek,
and after disclosing that he is one with Death, and yet deathless, Time quits the stage. From this prologue, we learn that it is one of the objects, if not the chief object, of the drama to exhibit the operation of man’s passion for liberty in the series of events that culminated in the capitulation of Paris, the annexation of Alsace and Lorraine to Prussia, and the unification of Northern Germany. This inextinguishable but often deceived and often defeated passion for liberty performs a similar function in Mr Buchanan’s ‘Drama of Kings’ to that performed by Destiny in the tragedies by Æschylus.
There is an artistic unity in this “drama.” The story itself has an essential unity, and it has certainly not been broken into fragments by Mr Buchanan’s treatment of it. On the contrary, he has striven to bring into prominence the underlying relations of its several incidents. Each of the three parts of the “drama” consists of a single scene. The unities of time and place have been strictly respected, and, in consequence, certain liberties have been taken with historic fact, but these are comparatively trivial and unimportant. “Buonaparte, or France against the Teuton,” is the title of the first act, the scene of which is laid at Erfurt, in October, 1808, during the great Congress o£ Powers. The conqueror of Germany, fresh from the field of Jena, is riding through the town, with the Czar of Russia by his side, and the kings or princes of Prussia, Wurtemburg, Saxony, Bavaria, Westphalia, Hesse, Baden, &c., following in his train. Stein, Jahn, and Arndt, representing the patriotism of Germany, deplore, curse, and satirise the prevailing sycophancy of their countrymen, and discuss together the prospects of the future. Stein is the more hopeful of the three, because he sees the cause of German weakness most clearly, and knows the remedy for it. “Ours,” he says:
Ours too long hath been a mighty house
Divided in itself against itself.
* * * * *
And we indeed are stricken at this day
Because we follow’d in an evil hour
Blind leaders who, affrighted for their crowns,
Led us against the house Republican,
Built by our brethren in the fields of France.
For, mark me, they who follow and fight for crowns
Fight for a figment merely and a sign,
And should the dwellers in a nation say
Within our chambers there shall sit no kings,
They err who blindly for the sake of kings
Would carry thither sword and flaming fire.
A people is a law unto itself,
The law of God will shape that lesser law,
And if there come a time when kings are doom’d,
Why let them like a feast-day pageant pass,
And be forgotten, or, like some old tale,
Become a goodly theme for the fireside.
Here we may remark that the characters of the “drama” are so highly sublimated that they retain none of the accidental marks of their individuality. This will be a stumbling-block in the way of many readers. But this stripping off of the accidental and revealing the higher, essential, and predominating elements of character dissociated from their commonplace accompaniments, is precisely what Mr Buchanan means by “mystic realism.” The author of ‘The Drama of Kings’ is not the originator of this method, and it cannot be said that he will absolutely have to create the taste that will appreciate his work, but he will assuredly have to develop and cultivate that taste.
Probably the Chorus, Semi-Chorus I., and Semi-Chorus II. represent “the divine agencies” which Mr Buchanan tells us are at work throughout the “drama.” These may correspond to what Mr Buckle called “great general causes,” especially those that directly influence the intelligence and hearts of men. But occasionally the chorus would seem to utter the vague aspirations of the people after liberty. This is evidently the case in the fine lyric from which the following stanzas are taken,—a lyric celebrating the revival of hope after defeat:
We see thee and know thee now by the white immortal brow;
By the eyes
Dim from death’s divine eclipse; by the melancholy lips
Sweetly wise.
We have named thee by a name sweeter far than Lore or Fame,
Or all breath,
Thy name is Liberty, and another name of thee
Hath been Death.
By the blood that we have shed, by the lost and by the dead,
By our wrong,
By our anguish, by our tears, by the leaden load of years,
Come along.
The interview between Buonaparte and a Cardinal in the first part of the trilogy forms a fine contrast with an interview in the second part between Napoleon and a Bishop. To be sure the uncle is in the height of his prosperity, and the nephew is a prisoner at Wilhelmshohe, but this difference in circumstances does not fully explain the difference in their attitudes towards Rome. The nephew is plainly imitating the uncle, but he has not strength enough to perform the part effectively. When the Cardinal threatens, in the name of the Pope, to interpose his spiritual authority against Buonaparte’s sword, the latter replies:
Thou comest a few centuries too late,
To interpose against the might of kings
A shadow, such a shadow, the mere ghost
Seen by a shivering coward in the dark.
Old man, the world and I have wholly lost
Our faith in spectres, and philosophers
Aver this thing ye christen soul, to awe
The world by, is but lustre given out
By bodies, like the phosphorescent light
Shed forth by certain jellies in the sea.
Be that pure fiction or a dim-seen truth
We fear no terror incorporeal,
Which, like your own in Rome, abides unseen,
Silent and physically impotent.
But there are other powers working against Buonaparte, which echo the curse of Rome. The Semi-Chorus seeks to hearten and advise the people. If, it sings,
If it will cheer your hearts while ye wait here,
Pray, but of cursing comes no sort of cheer.
God works within all wrongs, and wastes indeed
The secret force on which they live and feed.
And answering the query, “Shall not our curses drag him down?” this practical minded Semi-Chorus replies:
Nay, but arise, if so your hearts aspire,
Arise and strike him down with sword and fire.
God gave ye hands for that, God made ye strong,
Body and soul, to rise and right your wrong;
But on the burning flame of your desire
Fear falls like salt. What shall avail your sighs
And imprecations if ye will not rise,
Lords of your living wills and hands of might?
Man knows no wrong but man himself may right.
Being a Titan, who sits down and cries
Like a sick weary child upon the ground,
And knoweth not his strength and gazeth round
On water, earth, and heaven, with blind sick stare:
Though to a glorious kingdom he is heir,
And all things free await to see him crowned!
When the first part of the “drama” closes, the spirit of Liberty is troubling the soul of Buonaparte—could he dream that she “could live and dwell on earth and rear the race,” he would find out means to wed her to the Titan—but doubt and his own ambition lay the thought, and he is meditating divorce from Josephine, and marriage with some royal bride in order to perpetuate his dynasty.
“Napoleon Fallen,” the second part of the trilogy, has been greatly improved since it was first published, at the end of last year, and reviewed in the Examiner on January 7th. Even in its altered form, however, it is the least satisfactory part of the drama, although, taken in connection with the whole poem, it is by no means lacking in grandeur. Our space does not permit of our noticing it in detail, and we shall pass on at once to the Choric Interlude, which separates “Napoleon Fallen” from “The Teuton against Paris,” to quote two stanzas from a “Choric Epode,” as a specimen of one of the best lyrical pieces in the “drama:”
Where is the perfect State
Early most blest and late,
Perfect and bright?
’Tis where no Palace stands
Trembling on shifting sands
Morning and night.
’Tis where the soil is free,
Where, far as eye may see,
Scatter’d o’er hill and lea,
Homesteads abound;
Where clean and broad and sweet
(Market, square, lane, and street,
Belted by leagues of wheat),
Cities are found.
* * * * *
Where is the perfect State
Unvexed by Wrath and Hate,
Quiet and just?
Where to no form of creed
Fetter’d are thought and deed,
Reason and trust?
’Tis where the great free mart
Broadens, while from its heart
Forth the great ships depart,
Blown by the wind;
’Tis where the wise men’s eyes,
Fixed on the earth and skies,
Seeking for signs, devise
Good for mankind.
The most prominent character in the third part of the trilogy is, of course, Count Bismarck, and he is introduced at the close of a chorus of French Sisters of the Red Cross, who are lamenting the misfortunes of Paris. The Chancellor has little sympathy with the wail, and here, and at a later stage of the action, in an interview with a deputy from the City, insists at great length on the necessity of punishing and humiliating France for the social and political mischief she has wrought. Acknowledging that “this thing that men call ‘Liberty’” is “the everlasting principle,” “the secret law, the impulse and the thought whereby men live and grow,” Bismarck, nevertheless, dares, still holding by “this thing whereof the foolish rave,” to declare himself in favour of the Hierarchy:
God above all, and next to God
The Son and Holy Spirit, and beneath
These twain the great anointed Kings of Earth,
And underneath the Kings, the Wise and Good,
And underneath the Wise, the merely Strong,
And least of all, clay in the hands of all,
The base, the miserable, and the weak.
To this, the chorus—not, we presume, of Red Cross Sisters—replies in a powerful, satiric strain, from which we can give but a short extract.
Because one foolish King hath slain
Another foolish King;
Because a half-born nation’s brain
With dizzy joy doth ring;
Because at the false shepherd’s cry
The silly sheep still throng to die.
* * * * *
Because man’s blood again bathes bright
The purple and the throne,
And gray fools gladden at the sight,
And maiden choirs intone;
Because once more the puppet Kings
Dance, while Death’s lean hand pulls the strings;
Because these things have been and are,
And oft again may be,
Doth this man swear by sun and star,
And oh our God by Thee,
Framing to cheat his own shrewd eyes
His fair cosmogony of lies.
O Lord our God whose praise we sing,
Behold he deemeth Thee
A little nobler than the King,
And greater in degree,
Set just above the monarch’s mind,
Greater in sphere but like in kind!
To our mind, one of the grandest passages in the whole “drama” is that in which Mr Buchanan gives his rendering of the religious services held by the Emperor of Germany in celebration of his victory. In this part, and in other parts of the poem, we are reminded of Mr Swinburne, but Mr Buchanan is not an imitator. His parody has a deep purpose, and is the natural and appropriate vehicle of the grim, scornful humour with which he regards the theme on which it is employed. Piercing through the conventional language of the worshippers, he boldly represents the Priest invoking the blessing of heaven, and of the people, on the Sword. “Hush!” sings the Priest,
Hush! In the name of the Lord,
Kneel ye and bless the Sword.
* * * * *
Bless it, the Sword! bless the Sword!
Yea, in the name of the Lord.
With the submission of Paris to the triumphal passage of the German army through her streets, ‘The Drama of Kings’ ends. But the play is followed by an “Epilogue,” spoken by “Time” upon the stage, and an “Epilude,” before the curtain. In the former, “Time” points the moral of the “drama.” This is not the end.
Thus far of evil there has issued forth
This good—a lesser evil: and the air
Is clearer for the thunders ye have heard,
Shaking the thrones of Europe, and appalling
The foolish-hearted people.
The “sandstone Church of Rome, that lie of lies,” has been seen to be slowly decomposing, and “Cæsar’s last ghost,” Imperialism, that “second lie of lies,” has perished for ever. In the “Epilude,” the actor who played Buonaparte, Napoleon, and the Chancellor, who turns out to be Lucifer himself, comes and kneels, with his company, before the Lord. All receive thanks, but Lucifer is especially commended. “Never,” saith the Lord:
Never since the earthly play began
Hast thou, mine evil Angel wrought for good,
Spoke the dark speech Divine more willingly.
Then Lucifer asks the Lord to listen to a song describing the millennial city or state, which formed part of “Napoleon Fallen” as it was originally printed, and with that song the trilogy ends. That ‘The Drama of Kings’ is a great poem we hope will be apparent from the imperfect outline and from the extracts we have made. It has defects undoubtedly, judged even according to its author’s own design, but it is, nevertheless, a work of extraordinary and original genius.
___
The Saturday Review (23 December, 1871 - Vol. 32, p. 818-819)
THE DRAMA OF KINGS.*
SOME months ago we reviewed a “Lyrical Drama,” as its author, Mr. Robert Buchanan, called it, under the name of Napoleon Fallen. Which part of it was lyrical and which part dramatic we never clearly ascertained. Looked upon as a whole it appeared to us as wonderfully short of sense as it was long in words. We did not hesitate to express our opinion freely, and we should have been glad if we had found that, when once the excitement of the great war was over, our lyrical dramatist had himself tacitly acknowledged that Napoleon Fallen, like many other utterances of that time, was full rather of sound than sense, and had let it quietly lie forgotten. But, hard as it is to convince a child who has received a present of a toy drum that the din he makes is as unmeaning as it is unpleasant, still harder is it to convince a poet. Moreover, as the self-satisfied child soon gathers round him an admiring knot of other children, who delight in his noise and only wish that they had the means of joining in it, pronouncing his drumming music, so also your poet has his circle of devoted followers and admiring critics, who, deluding themselves into the belief that his volumes of sounds are the inspirations of the Muses, by their applause urge him on, who needed no urging, to the utmost limits that loud-sounding wordiness can attain. Accordingly Mr. Buchanan’s Napoleon Fallen, which in the spring of the year formed a volume that for a poet was almost moderate, is now republished in a book of nearly five hundred pages. It is not all Napoleon Fallen, for that eccentric performance now forms only one part of a great trilogy. Mr. Buchanan’s predecessor in obscure utterances, one of the first of mystic-realists, when she had to get rid of her Sibylline verses, pursued a contrary and, in our judgment, a wiser plan. For when a poem does not meet ready acceptance with the public, we should certainly think it more prudent to divide it by three than to increase it threefold. However, Mr. Buchanan must know his own business best, and we must admit that in no period in the history of literature has absence of meaning in poetry commanded a higher price than at present. Matters are greatly changed since the days when the poet, as Horace tells us, became obscure because he aimed at brevity. Poets nowadays manage to be obscure, and at the same time to be the very opposite of brief. Mr. Buchanan thinks it needful almost to apologize for “the mere form of the poem and its resemblances to the Greek.” In like manner Snug the Joiner thought it necessary to apologize for his resemblance to a lion. In neither case was the apology necessary, for if Mr. Buchanan and his predecessor in noise, the honest Joiner, even when each “in wildest rage doth roar,” had only kept their own counsel, the one would have been as little suspected of resembling the Greek as the other of resembling the king of animals. Mr. Buchanan goes on to say that “it is the first serious attempt ever made to treat great contemporary events in a dramatic form and very realistically, yet with something of the massive grandeur of style characteristic of the great dramatists of Greece.” Till we had read “the note for the adept” in which this passage occurs, and which unfortunately is placed at the end of the volume, we should have applied a much homelier name to Mr. Buchanan’s writings. What our forefathers called fustian seems to be called now, in the language of mystic-realism, massive grandeur of style. “In minor points of detail,” however, as he goes on to inform us, “the author is sanguine that it is not at all Greek, nor in any sense of the word archaic.” As it is somewhat difficult to decide where minor points of detail begin, we should be glad to know whether the following lines are characteristic of the great dramatists of Greece or are in no sense of the word archaic. We take them from a speech of Professor Jahn, one of the personages in the first part of the Drama of Kings, who is reading a letter received from Marshal Blücher:—
“Thieves!” “cowards!” “windbags!” “men of straw!” “geese!” “swine!”
(The strength of Blücher lies in expletives
And sword-thrusts) with such words hurl’d out like blows,
He cries concluding with a trooper’s curse,
A round “God-damn-his-soul-to-hell-fire” oath
On the French Satan. As for your singing-men,
Your lute-players, your festal Matthissons,
They buzz in their own fashion, in the old
Blue-bottle fashion. While the blue-flies hum,
The curs yelp gladly. I have heard they eat
Dog-pie in China as a delicacy:—
O to be cook to Cæsar for a day!
To mince John Müller and dish Zachokke up,
As dainties set before the Emperor.
Leaving our readers to decide how much or how little in the above passage Mr. Buchanan is indebted to the great dramatists of Greece, we will now attempt some analysis of this wonderful trilogy. The three parts of which it is composed are Buonaparte: or, France against the Teuton, Napoleon Fallen, and The Teuton against Paris. As the two Napoleons, the Czar of Russia, the Emperor of Germany, and a few less important Sovereigns, with their chief Ministers, did not afford Mr. Buchanan full scope for the exercise of his dramatic power, recourse was had to supernatural agency. A hint was taken from the Book of Job or from Faust, and just before the prologue, an opening and a closing scene were given in “The Heavenly Theatre,” by way of prelude. Even a prelude, however, is rather too abrupt a beginning for one who aspires to a massive grandeur of style, and so the prelude is preceded by a proem. The proem is conveniently and decorously introduced by a “Dedication to the Spirit of Auguste Comte,” to whom is inscribed “this Drama of Evolution.” We begin then with a dedication, and go on in turn to a proem, a prelude, a prologue, and so at last arrive at the first scene of the drama. We would by the way remark that the audience of “The Heavenly Theatre” is unusually tolerant of iteration. However, even one of Mr. Buchanan’s choruses comes to an end, and an agreeable variety is introduced in the prelude by the sudden appearance of clouds and Lucifer, who, though there is a prologue to follow, yet plays much the same part as Peter Quince in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, and with almost the same success. After he has had his say, the real prologue enters, who is Time. When he has spoken some sixty lines or so, “a confused noise” is stated to be heard, which might, we should imagine, arise either from some echo or from a rival performer. However, he is not discomposed, but goes on speaking till it is time for him to unhood, when he “shows the mask of a Caput Mortuum” and announces, “My name is also Death.” With that the first part of the drama fairly begins, though why drama we cannot tell, as all the characters, Lucifer even included, speak exactly like Mr. Robert Buchanan. Three members of the Tugendbund, who, for any difference we can notice between them, might very well have had their speeches rolled up together into one of those vast soliloquies in which the poet delights, inform the spectator of the miserable state of Germany in 1808. Among other things we learn that “in every corner twinkle weasel’s ears,” and that Buonaparte was so despotic as to tax the poor man’s tobacco. Inspired with indignation at these and like wrongs, the Chorus enters into a lengthy examination of the causes of the French Revolution, and asks:—
Now hark! who lit the spark in the miserable dark?
If Mr. Buchanan had not told us that he aimed at the massive grandeur of style of the Greek dramatists, we should have thought that, consciously or unconsciously, he was parodying the following line in Cock Robin:—
Who’ll be the clerk? I, said the lark, if it’s not in the dark.
Be that as it may, the spark when once kindled grew into a fire so portentous that for the first time in the history of conflagrations “it screamed.” In our modern poems the laws of nature are always coming into collision with the laws of rhyme, and invariably get worsted. Our poet’s second line ends with “up-streamed,” and so his fourth must end with “screamed.” If fire does not scream, so much the worse for it. When the Chorus comes to an end, for want of further rhymes or breath, Buonaparte, with six other emperors or kings, and princes and dukes out of all count, makes his appearance. Did we not know that the French Emperor was no English scholar, and also that he lived at the beginning of the century, we should have imagined that he had studied both Shakspeare and Mr. Swinburne, so successful is he at times in parodying the style of each. We must hasten past the dialogue that ensues, and the Choruses, Semi-Choruses, and Voices that relieve its monotony, to the next scene, where Buonaparte meets a Cardinal, who remonstrates with him on his treatment of the Pope. The Emperor, with little regard to the language of Courts, or to massive grandeur of style, thus ends a long speech:—
Therefore I answer, “To thy puddle, Log!
The frogs will worship thee with their old croak;
But meantime, lest thou perish quite, begone—
Out of my sunshine!”
When he goes on in a page or two to threaten this log in its puddle, the Pope, and says that he will “hale him screaming up and down the earth,” the Cardinal thinks it time to end the dialogue, and goes off leaving “God’s curse behind.” Hereupon Semi-Chorus I. keeps insisting that Semi-Chorus II. should “echo the curse.” To this Semi-Chorus II. very properly objects, and points out the uselessness of curses. However, after four or five pages of argument on the comparative advantages of praying or cursing, “a Voice” is heard which takes the part of Semi-Chorus I., and says, “Echo Rome’s curse.” Semi-Chorus II. is still not convinced, and at the end of about four more pages leaves off where it had begun, and obstinately refuses to have anything to do with either curses or their echoes. Buonaparte then returns and talks to his “Famulus,” in an unbroken speech of rather more than eighteen octavo pages. The Famulus, let us hope, was some poor spirit which, when forced to listen to this awful soliloquy, was rapidly working out its time in purgatory. The Emperor concludes by announcing that he “must have a child,” and must therefore seek a divorce. Inspired with the notion of wedding “Seed of the Czar,” he exclaims:—
. . . with hands outstretch’d I watch
Rubily glistening glory.
He rises to still higher flights, and begins to talk of the Golden Age, the sleeping Titan, the quiet Sea, Light of the Lotus, and heliotropes, when the Chorus evidently thinks that he is poaching on its ground, and so breaks in. With the help of two Voices, one of which keeps asking, “Whither?” and the other as persistently answers, “O, hither,” Mr. Buchanan brings the first part of the trilogy to a convenient close.
By way of a little break we have next a “Choric Interlude—The Titan.” Here Semi-Chorus I. and Semi-Chorus II., with the help of either the same or two fresh Voices, manage to fill up as many pages as the Emperor’s soliloquy. Semi- Chorus I. asks, like the robbers in the jars in Ali Baba, “Is the time come?” To which, unlike the maid, Semi-Chorus II. replies, “The time is come.” Thereupon the Chorus cries out, “Titan, to thy revenge!” The second Voice does not, however, seem satisfied with the answer which it receives to the inquiry which it had so lately made, and when, apparently without reference to anything in particular, the first Voice cries out, “Hither, O hither!” the second naturally enough asks, “Whither?” The first Voice makes a long speech in reply, which does not seem to us to convey the desired information, but which evidently satisfies the questioner, as he concludes the Choric Interlude by merely exclaiming, “Irene!”
The second part of the trilogy—Napoleon Fallen—we have already criticized, and the third part is so like the other two as to need no criticism. The extraordinary sameness of the characters of the two Napoleons, and of the Royal Chancellor, is happily accounted for in the Epilude, where Lucifer proudly owns that he had disguised himself, and had played all three parts. We could have readily believed him if he had claimed to have represented all the other characters, Choruses, Voices, and all. He receives just praise for his excellent acting from “The Lord,” and the Epilude is brought to an end by a Chorus of the Dead, and a Chorus of Citizens. A story is told in the Arabian Nights or elsewhere of a man who was so wonderfully swift of foot that he outstripped the game he pursued, and so never caught it. At last he tied his feet together, and thus became a successful hunter. Might we suggest to Mr. Buchanan that in the extraordinary command he has over words he is always outrunning the sense. It is somewhat difficult no doubt to fetter one’s pen, but if the next time he writes a poem he were to use slightly greasy paper, he would find his flow of words so greatly impeded that he would have time to put in a little sense.
* The Drama of Kings. By Robert Buchanan. London: Strahan & Co. 1871.
___
The Daily News (23 December, 1871)
RECENT POEMS.
_____
Several recently-published works of poetry demand serious consideration for the imposing earnestness of their tone, which claims to be inspired by a sense of anxiety concerning urgent moral, social, and religious questions of the present time. Among these productions one of the first to be noticed is that of Mr. Robert Buchanan, whose literary merits as an accomplished master of poetical diction and versification are generally acknowledged. If these faculties, added to great power of rhetorical expression, and a perfect command of the artistic methods and effects proper to the Greek lyrical drama, were all that is needful in a modern Æschylus, we should hail Mr. Buchanan as a truly classical poet. Mr. Algernon Swinburne, indeed, would dispute his pre-eminence by virtue of the same qualities, while Tennyson would stand at a modest distance, and Browning would be nowhere. There may, however, be a high degree of excellence in form, with a deficiency of substance, a crudeness and unsoundness of conception, a want of truth to nature, an absence of ethical wisdom, most fatal to dramatic or to epic poetry. In either of those two species of composition, it ought to be presumed that the author, whose personality should be kept quite out of sight, is an impartial philosopher or enlightened man of the world. He should have a superior acquaintance with all the varieties of human character, habit, and condition, but should regard them all with the equal eye of compassionate tolerance. He should be a calm witness even of the worst actions performed on the stage of history, and of the most distressing events, believing in the ultimate restoration of moral order, and prophesying, in the spirit of this faith, that wrong shall hereafter be righted, and loss shall be repaired in the common existence of humanity. Mr. Buchanan, though a man of ability and moral refinement, is far from having attained this serene equanimity, by which the imagination is preserved in the state of a clear and placid mirror for the undistorted reflection of surrounding objects. He is disqualified by an over-hasty vehemence of temper for the office of a poet, revealing the spiritual significance of things daily reported and discussed. This he attempts in “The Drama of Kings” (Strahan and Co.). The composition purports to be a “trilogy,” representing, from a divine, and therefore infallible point of view, the conflicts between Bonapartist France and Germany; the first part showing the victories of Napoleon I., and the establishment of his temporary dominion over Europe; the second part consisting of “Napoleon Fallen,” or the surrender of Napoleon III., after his defeat at Sedan; and the third part bringing in “The Teuton against Paris,” with the coronation of the Emperor William at Versailles during the siege. The author tells us, in a prose note on “Mystic Realism,” which is the explanation of his literary mission, that he has thought it worth his while to celebrate these events in song, because he finds that ordinary people have failed to perceive their poetic and mystic sublimity, as they fail in their daily walk through life to feel the spiritual relations, or to discern the ideal and essential characteristics of every object in nature. Mr. Buchanan, the “mystic realist,” esteems himself the possessor of some unique neutral endowment, by which he is made aware of the wonderful and beautiful significance of earthly affairs; and he is thereby entitled to judge of contemporary foreign politics from the standpoint of a heavenly spectator, admitted to the counsels of the Deity, and seated among the Archangels to see the play. This amazing supposition is presented in the framework of prelude and “epilude,” within which the three acts of the dramatic trilogy are inclosed. We scarcely like to tell our readers the manner in which Mr. Buchanan has ventured to introduce the person of the Supreme Being, as president of a company assembled to witness a theatrical performance, in which Lucifer takes the part of Napoleon Bonaparte, and afterwards of Bismarck, for their entertainment. The device is not very witty, and its effect is much more obnoxious to Christian feelings than that of the well-known Prologue to Goethe’s Faust, which might in some sort be excused by the necessity of accounting for the permission granted to Mephistopheles to mislead Faust by insidious suggestions and temptations. Mr. Buchanan is avowedly a Theist, in the Christian sense, and his sincerity and piety are not to be impeached; we hope that he will see the impropriety of the passages to which we advert, and that he will remove them from a future edition of this singular poem, should that be called for. The whole composition, though evincing considerable powers of imaginative idealisation and forcible expression, has the effect of fantastic unreality. The author, with superior literary talents for the manipulation of language, and especially for the construction of verse, is deficient in the faculties required for truly discerning and representing in a dramatic form the characters of individual men. He does not help us to understand the sentiments of a Napoleon or a Bismarck any better than we did before, “Mystic Realism” has read the newspapers, like the rest of us, and has risen to an exalted mood of self-conscious wonderment, but has no peculiar insight, as it fancies, into the inner workings of the mighty world-machine.
___
|
