SATURDAY, JUNE 26, 1875.

No. 164, New Series.

IMPORTANT NOTICE.

On and after July 3 the price of the ACADEMY will be REDUCED to 3d.

THE EDITOR cannot undertake to return, or to correspond with the writers of, rejected manuscript.

LITERATURE.

Queen Mary. A Drama. By Alfred Tennyson. (London: H. S. King & Co., 1875.) It is impossible for any admirer of Mr. Tennyson to approach without mistrust a drama by the great lyric and idyllic poet, and especially a drama on such a subject as Mary Tudor. Mr. Tennyson has made the English language richer by lyrics ranging through every tone of music, from the cradlesong to the death-song, from "silver sails all out of the west," to those lines about dying eyes and the glimmering casement, that Edgar Poe never tired of repeating. The "Lotos-eaters contains all the magic of an earthly paradise in short; "Fatima," once for all, utters all passion of love, and outside these there is an unequalled wealth = of melody and of colour in "The Dream of

Fair Women," and the "Morte d'Arthur,"

as of unapproached clearness of spiritual vision in the ninety-fifth poem of In Memoriam. With such works behind him, works so admirable and lonely in their beauty, and yet so personal, so little dramatic in character, it is perilous for a poet arrived at that age when the Muse is wont to murmur to her votary,

"Nous n'irons plus aux bois, Les lauriers sont coupés," it is perilous to wander further afield in search of strange laurels.

Mr. Tennyson has not accustomed us to look for drama from his hands, and among other reasons for mistrust, the blank verse which he has made his own is not the verse best suited to the rapid utterance of the stage. He is known to be a student in the best school of dramatic verse, the school of Shakspere and Marlowe; but even so, for him to adopt another measure, and change his natural note, is a dangerous experiment. Add to this that he is now ruling among the second generation of men who have listened to his verse, and the second generation of a poet's hearers is always captious and hard to please, and has given its first love to the singers contemporary with its own youth. Mr. Swinburne has the ear of modern lovers

of modern drama, and it is difficult to avoid the temptation to fruitless and irritating comparison between his Mary, like his Félise

"swift and white,

And subtly warm and half perverse," and Mr. Tennyson's gloomy fanatic in love and religion.

This last thought, of the historical character of Mary Tudor, brings us to what we cannot but think is the one, the fundamental misfortune of Mr. Tennyson's play,

the misfortune that prevents it, in spite of all its skill, and manifold beauty of various passages, from pleasing as a whole. It seems so like an impertinence to say that the subject chosen by Mr. Tennyson for a tragedy, the life and death of Mary Tudor, does not contain the stuff of a tragedy at all, that one is compelled to quote the highest English authority on one's side, the authority of Mr. Matthew Arnold :

"What, then," says Mr. Arnold, "are the situations, from the representation of which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual life they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them in poetry is painful also.”

This criticism might have been written expressly for the history of Mary Tudor. A monotonous and continuous mental distress, the distress of jealousy, of lovelessness is only broken for a moment by hope of child-bearing. The suffering finds no vent in action, unless the cutting of Philip's picture out of its frame be action; the pain is unrelieved by incident, unless the burning

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of Cranmer may be considered as a relief. True, there is a kind of progress and development in Mary's distress, from the mere distress of "the ugly princess," to the jealousy that is born twin-sister of her love, and thence to almost the condition of the blood-maniac" whose language is charged with images from the stake and the block, ending in the trance where pain ceases to be conscious in the fine scene of the fifth act, part of which we quote. The Queen has been singing, and Alice, a much less pleasant confidante than Guinevere's little maid, says, "Your Grace hath a low voice." Mary.

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"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.)

"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 opened, and the dead were found
Sitting, and in this fashion; she looks a corpse."'"
To this crouching and unconscious position
of the savage buried, the monotonous misery
of her life brings the Queen. Her pain is
querulous and cruel: "Queen Mary gwoes
on a burnin' and a burnin', to get her baaby
born;" as one of the Oxfordshire Gossips
the ceaseless complaints. Pole, delicately
says in her dialect, and the mind wearies of
drawn as the scholar-priest compelled by
fortune and feebleness of will to cruelty,
grows querulous too, and Philip is peevish :-
"I am sicker staying here

Than any sea could make me passing hence,
Tho' I be ever deadly sick at sea.
So sick I am with biding for this child.
Is it the fashion in this clime for women

To go twelve months in bearing of a child?" The reader also grows "sick with biding for this child," yet such "biding" was an

essential part of the sorrow, we cannot say the tragedy, of Mary Tudor. Only a French play-writer imagining things "not dreamed of by the rabidest gospeller," things more absurd than parody can surpass, could get dramatic passion and incident into the story of this Queen. Mr. Tennyson, we are compelled to think, has done everything in his play but this; he has developed characters of great subtlety with masterly touches, has rendered the historical spirit and tone of the time:

"The world is like a drunken man Who cannot move straight to his end, but reels Now to the right, then as far to the left," has shown the resistance excited by cruelty"They swarm into the fire

Like flies for what? No dogma," -has relieved the horror of Cranmer's burning by the indifferent tattle of his gossips, but he has not made a tragedy where tragedy there was none to make.

Mr. Tennyson has criticised his own play when he makes Lord Howard say of Mary

:

"Her fierce desire of bearing him a child

Hath like a brief and bitter winter's day
Gone narrowing down and darkening to a close."

There is no room for sympathy in the record of the narrowing and darkening. The whole weight of all the world's forces seems to crush the wretched and frail protagonist of a cause neither romantic nor successful, that has pleased neither the gods nor the girls.

To turn from the effect of Mr. Tennyson's drama, as a whole, to the admirable execution of parts, to the elaboration of the minor characters, is to be relieved from necessity of hinting disappointment. Elizabeth is perhaps the most prominent and masterly portrait, where most are masterly :

Schooled by the shadow of death, a Boleyn too
Glancing across the Tudor."

There is much humour in her unqueenly readiness to flirt, in her puns, and her flash of energy and thunder of speech, when she hears of Mary's mortal illness :

"God's death! and wherefore spake you not before?
We dally with our lazy moments here,
And hers are numbered."

Gardiner's brutal temper, and difficulty in
swallowing papal claims, are carefully in-.
dicated. He scolds, and, so to speak, "proc-
torises" the crowd :-
:-

"Gardiner. What is thy name?' Man. Sanders.'

The blustering Lord Mayor, the sonneteering Wyatt, the feather-head Courtenay,

Howard divided between country and church, Cranmer consoling his remorse by the thought that Joan of Kent was a witch-are all figures that live. As to the gossips, Tib and Joan, their likes may be met any day at Carfax, talking of cows and white pease, as they did in Mary's time. The tempest of Church and state, all change of faith from transubstantiation to protoplasm, sweep by and do not change the peasantry of Oxford

"Joan. Why it be Tib.'

Tib. I cum behind, gall, and couldn't make tha hear. Eh, the wind and the wet. What a day, what a day! Nigh upo' judgement daay loike. Pwoaps be pretty things, Joan, but they wunt set i' the Lord's cheer o' that daay.'

Joan. I must set down myself, Tib; it be a var waay vor my owld legs up vro' Islip. Eh, my rheumatizy be that bad howiver be I to win to the burnin'.' Tib. I should saay 'tweer ower by now. I'd ha' been here avore, but Dumble wur blow'd wi' the wind, and Dumble's the best milcher in Islip.' Joan. Our Daisy's as good 'z her.'

Tib. Noa, Joan.'

Joan. Eh, then ha' thy waay wi' me Tib, ez thou hast wi' thy owld man.'

Tib. Ay, Joan, and my owld man wur up and awaay betimes wi' dree hard eggs for a good please at the burnin'; and barrin' the wet, Hodge 'ud ha' been a-harrowin' o' white peasen i' the outfield-and barrin' the wind, Dumble wur' blow'd wi' the wind, so'z we was forced to stick her, but we fetched her round at last. Thank the Lord there vore. Dumble's the best milcher in Islip.'

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Joan. Thou's thy way wi' man and beast, Tib. I wonder at tha', it beats me! Eh, but I do know ez Pwoaps and viros be bad things; tell 'ee now, I heerd summat as summun towld summun o' owld Bishop Gardiner's end; there wur an owld lord a cum to dine wi 'un, and a wur so owld a couldn't bide vor his dinner, but a had to bide howsomiver, vor, "I wunt dine" says my Lord Bishop, says he, not till I hears Latimer and Ridley be a-vire" and so they bided on and on till your o' the clock, till his man cum in post vro' here, and tells un ez the vire has tuk holt. Now," says the bishop, says he, "we 'll gwo to dinner;" and the owld lord fell to's meat wi' a will, God bless un; but Gardiner were struck down like by the hand o' God avore a could taste a mossel, and a

were enthusiastic. Walter Scott may pass for one of the former. Though he cannot be reproached for the severity of his judgment, there is no doubt that at the present day no one in England would accept that judgment without reservation.

In France, where at times opinion changes so rapidly, the fall of the great Emperor in 1814 was hailed as a deliverance by the large majority of the nation, but less than one year of the Restoration sufficed to give him back a popularity that rendered his fatal return from Elba possible. After 1815, under the Second Restoration, the liberal party was neither clear-sighted nor truthful when, in opposition to the reactionary spirit of legitimacy, they set up the legend of revolutionary Napoleon, parading the principles of '89 throughout Europe, in the track of his soldiers' steps. The influence of this legend-the type of which is embodied in the figure of Napoleon in the little hat and grey overcoat placed by LouisPhilippe on the top of the Vendôme Column -made itself felt through a long succession of years, and traces of it are found even in the most eminent historians.

a

It would certainly be impossible to find anywhere a more sagacious writer than M. Thiers, or one with a mind more free from bias and less easily led astray. In many passages of his Consulate and Empire he inveighs against the injustice and follies of the Imperial régime with remarkable vigour, and yet now and then it seems as though he had been under the influence of the legend which had nursed his childhood. Military tactics, moreover, always exercise a great spell over him; the military genius of the great commander dazzles and fascinates him; he delights in describing his

set him all a-vire so 'z the tongue on un cum a lollup- plans for a campaign or, if necessary,

ing out o' 'is mouth as black as a rat. Thank the Lord therevore.'"

In parting with Mr. Tennyson's play, it is necessary to say something of the structure of his verse. He has rightly refrained from the polished and musical style that is his own, the cadences that he first introduced to English poetry. He does not imitate the natural roughness and the archaisms of Elizabethan art, but employs a plain verse, with occasional half lines for the more em

phasis. Often it would be hard to guess that Mr. Tennyson is the writer, only in a curious speech of the Second Alderman there comes a familiar touch, and at the same time a slight obscurity

-

Did you mark our Queen? The colour freely played into her face, And the half sight which makes her look so stern Seem'd through that dim dilated world of hers To read our faces."

Queen Mary is full of various interest and insight; it shows powers unguessed at, and as yet scarcely to be appreciated. This is too early a day to guess at its future place and rank in English poetry and among the works of Mr. Tennyson.

A. LANG.

Histoire de Napoléon Ir. Par P. Lanfrey. Tome V. (Paris: Charpentier, 1875.) THE history of Napoleon has often been written, but never yet, perhaps, in a really impartial manner. The very day after his fall the great Emperor found many detractors, detractors as violent as his admirers

in

guessing them. He leaves such subjects with regret, and when forced to speak of politics he hurries over the ground, hastens to express blame as if to ease his conscience, and appears anxious to return to what he is permitted to admire, namely, the military conceptions of the unrivalled captain. M. Lanfrey belongs to a different school. He has not been so unwise as to attempt to rewrite the military history of the First Empire after M. Thiers. He gives to the events of the war their proper place, the great place they must necessarily occupy great place they must necessarily occupy in the treatment of such a subject, but dwells far more than his illustrious predecessor on the political and economical history of the Empire. Judging it by the light of liberal principles as well as of modern events, he blames and condemns more frequently and more severely than M. Thiers. This is no reason for numbering him among Napoleon's systematic detractors; he is not one of those who question his military genius. Quite the reverse; on Quite the reverse; on that point he does him the fullest justice. An entire chapter of his new volume is devoted to Wagram-a battle which, though it certainly did not result in a victory as complete and decisive as that of Austerlitz or Jena, was yet a glorious triumph, and a triumph due to the wisdom, consummate prudence, and undeniable skill of the Emperor in preparing his movements and concentrating his forces.

On the other hand, M. Lanfrey does not belong to the Chauvins who see no merit out of France, and who, unable to bring themselves to attribute any to their enemies, explain their country's reverses by such meaningless words as fortune and fatality. He does full justice to Wellington's genius; and if he lays stress upon the faults into which the French generals fell in the campaigns of 1809, 1810, and 1811 in Spain and Portugal, he does so with no intention of lessening the glory of their great adversary. It is impossible to read these chapters of his book without asking what would have happened had Napoleon, after the Peace of Vienna, gone himself as he had promised, and as everyone expected he would-to Spain at the head of his best troops. What would have been the issue of a gigantic duel between these two men- —one the personification of the genius of attack, the other of defence? Most Frenchmen are convinced that Napoleon would have carried off the victory; most Englishmen, no doubt, have the opposite conviction-a conviction, it must be owned, which Waterloo seems to justify. They ought, however, to be reminded that the Grand Army had perished in Russia; that in 1815 Napoleon had not the soldiers of Austerlitz under his command; and that the arrival of the Prussians, which gave the Allies such an immense numerical superiority, must count for something in Wellington's victory. The question will remain unsolved to the end of time. Why did Napoleon not solve it in person? Why did he not proceed to Spain when everything seemed to call him thither? Was it care, perhaps even fear, for his own safety that kept him from taking a personal share in a war consisting wholly of skir mishes and ambuscades ? Was he absorbed by all the varied anxieties inseparable from the administration of his vast Empire? Did he think that the question could not be immediately solved, and that the war in Spain would cease of itself as soon as he had struck Russia with dismay and forced England by establishing a continental blockade to sign a treaty of peace? M. Lanfrey leaves his readers rather in indecision, and judging by his explanations, is evidently not clear himself on this point. One thing is certain, that Napoleon noised abroad his intended departure for Spain, and yet appa rently never had any serious intention of going thither. It is not easy to penetrate his motives or to explain a line of conduct which seems to run so directly counter to the interests of the Emperor.

And is this the only thing difficult to explain with regard to his conduct? Assuredly not. The epoch which forms the subject of the fifth volume of M. Lanfrey's book seems to be the most brilliant of the whole reign. Napoleon has defeated Austria at Wagram. The great English expedition has met with a signal disaster in the fever-breathing marshes of Walcheren. It is true, the war in Spain was being carried on amidst useless successes and painful reverses, but who would have suspected that this obscure struggle going on in one corner of Europe could influence the destinies of the grand empire, the empire which was still continuing, without any apparent difficulties, to extend its

boundaries by the annexation by simple decrees of one vast country after another. In this way, the Papal States, Holland, the Valais, the Hanse towns, a part of Hanover and Oldenburg all lost their last shadow of independence. As though wishing to make his great power felt as much in words as in deeds, the Emperor officially proclaimed the interests of the empire-that is to say, his own private interest, which thus became the official law of public right-to be the object and motive of these unheard-of measures. Europe all the time said nothing. The fact was, Napoleon's power was at that time boundless. Yet it was manifest, even then, that the feet of the colossus were of perishable clay; it is clear to every careful observer that, in spite of its brilliant exterior, the immense erection was fragile and must before long fall to the ground. The conception on which it is based was so insane, and the means employed to carry it out were, if anything, still more so. To dream of a universal monarchy after Charlemagne and Charles V., and to aim at turning Europe into one vast empire by subjecting all the nations to the French régime was surely the most insane and the most guilty of political conceptions. Had Napoleon been successful, had he been able to bring the whole of Europe into lasting submission to the French yoke, he would only have ended in ruining it, if not materially, at all events morally and intellectually. The diversities of genius, temperament and character which distinguish nations from each other are no less necessary to the life and progress of humanity than are diversities of men to the life and progress of nations. To reduce all nationalities to the same level, to convert Rome, Geneva, Amsterdam and Hamburg into so many capitals of French departments, was not merely to trample justice under foot, it was insulting to common sense.

If this fatal system had lasted Europe would have gradually sunk into one dead uniformity, and all intellectual and moral life would have become extinct. It is therefore true (and M. Lanfrey is right in saying so) that England, who at that moment alone withstood Napoleon, became by virtue of the facilities afforded her by her insular position the champion of liberty and civilisation, and deserves the gratitude of the whole world in return.

But if the end in view was detestable, the means which the Emperor used to attain that end were no better. Sometimes they seem to have been expressly devised to run counter to the intended results. The moral sense was wanting in the Emperor. He was through life the man who caused the assassination of the Duc d'Enghien and laid a trap for the King of Spain at Bayonne. He not only felt no repugnance for falsehood, cunning, and violence, but had habitual recourse to them in all his governmental acts. And yet, wishing as he did to bring the whole of Europe under his sway, he should have made it his first object to render his authority endurable. He should have done all in his power to lessen the unavoidable humiliation of his rule by the most studied consideration, or at least a just and foreseeing administration. He took no such precautions. We are now and then led to ask whether he did not rely for the establishment

of the Empire on brute force alone because | he was aware how monstrous a conception it was, and acknowledged to himself that there was but one way to make it enduring, namely, to crush those over whom that empire was to extend.

The continental blockade was undoubtedly one of the worst inventions of imperial despotism, and one of its gravest errors. Napoleon had flattered himself that he could compel England by that means to lay down her arms, but England suffered far less than his own empire from the blockade, the surest result of which was to ruin the industry of the whole continent. Again, had the whole empire suffered equally from the scourge thus inflicted upon it, the consequences would have been less disastrous; but no sooner had Napoleon recognised the fatal result of the system he had adopted, than for his own benefit and the benefit of the old France, he began to infringe the law he had laid down. It is difficult to conceive anything more iniquitous than the system of licences by which he sold for hard cash permission to French merchants to run the blockade, enforcing it at the same time with the utmost rigour on the rest of his subjects, and whenever he could on his allies as well. Was not this to seek deliberately to exasperate those whose attachment, since he had proclaimed himself their ruler, it should have been his interest to secure? The fact is the faults he committed during those brilliant years are simply innumerable. After the fault of not having put an end to the war in Spain by going thither himself after the fault of those insane annexations by which he extended his empire from Rome to Hamburg-after the fault of marrying an Austrian princess and quarrelling with Russia, whose powerful sovereign he treated as no well-bred man would treat a private gentleman under similar circumstances, the Emperor committed a fault more serious still when he convoked the Council of

1811.

How was it possible for a man of such exalted genius and so superior a mind, a man trained as he was in the direction of human affairs, to have made a mistake of so grave a nature?

Napoleon believed in force and in force only; he fancied he could command the Church as he commanded an army. This at once renders the annexation of the Papal States and the strict captivity of the Holy Father intelligible; but it is unintelligible that having thus acted he should have deemed it possible to convoke a council. The very thing he ought to have foreseen happened; the men whom he had found tractable and even fearful when they were isolated, acquired a certain self-esteem and esprit de corps, which gave them, as soon as they were brought together, a strength and firmness they would never otherwise have possessed.

And to his amazement the Emperor found himself face to face with something that looked like resistance. This had not happened to him for many long years. But he did not thence learn that men were less contemptible than he had believed them to be, he did not give up his project of reorganising Catholicism after his own fashion

and for his own profit, but found himself when the council broke up rather farther from the goal than before.

How many more faults might be enumerated, were we to follow M. Lanfrey step by step through all the chapters of his new volume! And yet the man who committed them was undoubtedly one of the most powerful geniuses the world has ever seen. But no genius has ever yet been able to resist the infatuation of supreme power. The truth is-and this gives the narrative its keen interest, an interest admirably sustained by the author's sober and severe style

that during these three years Napoleon is at war, solely, with himself. Excepting England, whom he cannot touch and who cannot on her side do him any great harm, everything has bent before him and is silent. But he is at strife with his own passions, with that unquenchable thirst for power, that ambition which knows neither curb, measure, nor bounds, which impels him again and again to call everything in question, again and again to stake his crown in order to enrich it with new gems. Russia alone has preserved some degree of independence, and therefore Russia must be conquered. Like the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia, Alexander must be reduced to the position of a vassal, so without any reason, without the excuse of having a single grievance to allege, a single motive to put forward, he prepares to invade Russia, denying it all the time in a manner as shameless as it was useless. It is said, and M. Lanfrey just mentions the fact, that several times during those long preparations the ghost of Charles XII. appeared to the Emperor. Unhappily for the hundreds of thousands of men who were to meet their death on the icy fields of Russia, he paid no heed to it. The demon of absolute power had seized on its prey, and was to lead him to his ruin.

ETIENNE COQUEREL.

Our Bishops and Deans. By the Rev. F. Arnold, B.A., late of Christ Church, Oxford. (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1875.)

QUID domini facient, audent cum talia – curates? What is to become of the Bench of Bishops, when the order of "orders" is reversed, and a curate, unbosoming his inner heart to a poet-friend, declares what, in his deliberate opinion, is the lesson taught by the past and present history of our "Bishops and Deans"? It is scarcely probable that a conclave will be urgently summoned to Lambeth with a view to joint-answering Mr. Arnold's challenge, in the 700 pages of which there is little noticeable beyond secondhand ecclesiastical gossip, a heaping-up of bad jokes, and a consistent exhibition of bad taste. If a bona fide history of our bishops and deans was needed, it should have drawn a line at the penultimate incumbents of the sees and deaneries, whereas by making his book for the most part a sketch-book of contemporary ecclesiastics, Mr. Arnold panders to the craving for tittle-tattle which is bred by books like Mrs. Stowe's Sunny Memories, or Willis's People I have Met; and so far from sustaining the already defective rever