BOOKS.

ATALANTA IN CALYDON.*

THAT this is full of true poetry, even if it be not, as a whole, a true poem, there can be no manner of doubt,—but how near it ap- proaches to a true poem, or what may be its real place in modern poetry, it is a much harder matter to discriminate. For nothing is more difficult than to estimate the worth of a poem which endeavours, with more or less success, to revert to antique standards of thought and feeling, to paint with the colours, and limit itself to the intellectual conceptions, of a wholly different age. This was not unfrequently the attempt of the writer whom Mr. Swinburne (with an extravagance that makes us smile) speaks of in his dedication as " the highest of contemporary names," Walter Savage Landor, —who by his 'imaginary dialogues' won for himself an ingenious reputation as a sort of " bastard Plato." There is usually something a little perverse in the mind of a man who can find nothing real enough whereon to nourish his imagi- nation within two thousand years of his own time, and who must go back to Greece, not merely to study the roots and analyze the primeval type of many modern thoughts and feelings, but in order that he may (if he can) strip off every intellectual element (Christian or Teutonic) that has been grafted into the pure Hel- lenic stock, and try to reproduce the naked beauty of Greek simplicity. Of course poets who will do this, so far as they succeed, deliberately sacrifice the sympathy and appreciation of their own time to their intellectual pride —or conscience, if we may call it so. Mr. Swinburne has written a poem of very considerable imaginative power, full of fertility of fancy and, what is much more remarkable, so far penetrated by the keen naturalism of Greek feeling concerning human ties as to stir one's sympathies in spite of the natural dislike one feels to such feats of poetical ventriloquism. But it would be out of the nature of things for such a poem to become popular,—and we are not sure that Mr. Swinburne wishes it. If a man will appeal to the feelings and conceptions of an imaginary Greek audience of the fourth or fifth century before Christ, he must expect that his modern readers will be comparatively few,—scarcely more numerous perhaps than they would be for a tragedy really of that era now for the first time discovered and published, in spite of the disadvantage of a foreign tongue under which such a drama would labour. For in that case we should at least assume, though perhaps erroneously, that the poem represented the acteeljskas and measured the intellectual horizon of the writer, and so was a real expression of his own intellect and of the state of society in which that intellect had been formed. But in this case most men will assume (perhaps also erroneously) that Mr. Swinburne has been attempting a poetical tour de force rather than a genuine expression of his own intellect and imagination. While the former would be a new intel- lectual trace of a bygone age, the latter is only the impression left by its literature on the mind of a clever man of the present day. Now as there is nothing men crave more in poetry than intellec- tual genuineness and authenticity,—signs that the poem has come from the very depths of its author's nature,—the mere suggestion of a doubt whether there is anything of the nature of an intellectual experiment or exercise in the poem, even though the doubt be not justified, will tend to diminish greatly its popularity. Add to this that it must always be an effort to readers who do not * Atalanta in Calydon. A Tragedy. By Algernon Charles Swinburne. London : Edward Bloxon, 1865.

habitually live in a scholarly atmosphere to put off the ideas of their own century and put on those of one profoundly different from it in all its main characteristics, and it will be obvious that Mr. Swinburne must have been prompted in his choice of a subject either by the impulses of an irresistible poetic inspiration, or by a very fanatical poetic creed. Mr. Matthew Arnold's experiment in Merope was not sufficiently successful to encourage any one to imitate it. And though we admit that Mr. Swinburne has pro- duced in this drama something much more astir with life than the pallid classicism of Merope, we are not at all sure that he has otherwise approached so near to his models.

The plot of Atalanta in Calydon is as simple as that of any Greek play. Mr. Swinburne has told it briefly and poetically in

_-such admirable archaic English that we do not know whether we could find anything much more taking in the play than the follow- ing "Argument t"—

" Althaaa, daughter of Thestius and Eurythemis, Queen of Calydon, being with child of Meleager, her first-born son, dreamed that she brought forth a brand burning; and upon his birth came the three Fates and prophesied of him three things, namely, these,---That he i

should have great strength of his hands, and good fortune in this life, and that he should live no longer when the brand then in the fire were consumed: wherefore his mother plucked it forth and kept it by her. And the child being a man grown sailed with Jason after the fleece of gold, and won himself groat praise of all men living; and when the tribes of the north and west made war upon 2Etolia, he fought against their army and scattered it. But Artemis, having at the first stirred up these tribes to war against CEnens, King of Calydon, because he had offered sacrifice to all the gods saving her alone, but her he had forgotten to honour, was yet more wroth because of the destruction of this army, and sent upon the land of Calydon a wild boar which slew many and wasted all their increase, but him could none slay, and many went against him and perished. Then were all the chief men of Greece gathered together, and among them Atalanta, daughter of Isaias the Arcadian, a virgin; for whose sake Artemis let slay the boar, seeing she favoured the maiden greatly; and Meleager having despatched it gave the spoil thereof to Atalanta, as one beyond measure enamoured of her; but the brethren of Althorn, his mother, Texans and Plexippus, with such others as misliked that she only should bear off the praise whereas many had borne the labour, laid wait for her to take away her spoil; but Meleager fought against them and slew them: whom when Althaaa their sister beheld and knew to be slain of her son, she waxed for wrath and sorrow like as one mad, and taking the brand whereby the measure of her son's life was meted to him, she cast it upon a fire ; and with the wasting thereof his life likewise wasted away, that being brought back to his father's house he died in a brief apace ; and his mother also endured not long after for very sorrow ; and this was his end, and the end of that hunting."

The play turns upon the struggle in Althaaa's mind between the love of the mother for her best-beloved child and the love of the sister for the brothers whom that child has slain,—the latter triumphing. She burns out the brand which measures the life of her son, so avenging her brothers, and terminating at once her son's life and her own for very grief and horror at her own act. Of course there is some analogy in this plot to that of many of the old Greek plays, e. g., the Choephorte of /Eschylus, in which the conflict—we can scarcely say in the mind—but among the destinies of Orestes, between the debt he owes to his murdered father and the claims of natural affection on the part of his guilty mother, is depicted ; or in the Electra of Sophocles, a variation of the same subject ; or again, to some extent, in his Antigone, where the claims of Antigone's dead brother are represented in conflict with those of her living lover, the former prevailing over the latter. How far has Mr. Swinburne treated the ancient subject in the ancient way, or, so far as he has modernized it, how far has he modernized it equably, so as to preserve the entirety in the im- pression produced on the mind of the reader ? Judging of it as a whole, we should say that while there is scarcely a passage in the play which has not either great force or rare beauty, the effect left 'on the mind is incongruous and unsatisfactory. We read it and re- read it without clearly disentangling the reason for this want of integrity in the poem, and with an increasing wonder why a drama so full of fine passages interests us on the whole so little, why we read it for the sake of its fine passages, and not its fine passages for the touches they contribute to the main passion of the play.

\At last it dawns upon us that the intellectual form and nexus of

the play-is both unreal and also inadequate to the richness of the It workmanship. In the old Greek tragedies the clue of faith which rilitruggles painfully through the mysterious darkness of human

destiny is always real, is, indeed, the connecting idea which deter- mines the form of the whole, which gives it its mould and unity, and which is never overpowered by the subsidiary imaginative illustration through which the poet expresses his thought. The Bacchic odes which, transfigured into religious choral songs, thread together every Greek tragedy, are as it were the sky, the firmament,_ giving unity and meaning to the narrative of earthly calamity. In Mr. Swinburne's drama; on the other hand, there is no excuse for the peculiarity of form ; the choral songs, though sometimes very beautiful, instead of interpreting, confuse_. the drama. They are ornamental addenda, not a harmonizing clue. There is no leading faith glimmering through the per- plexity of misfortunes ; but, on the other hand, the luxuriance of the clustering fancies cries out far more loudly than in the Greek drama for a mastering idea, a dominant unity of thought, and does not find it. In short, while the tragedy of the plot is classical in its simplicity, instead of a dim arch of faith bending over the human instincts which connect the story together, there is an entire want of a clear drift of purpose looming through the clouds of mortal trouble. Yet the foliage of thought and sentiment is indefinitely more tropical than in the Greek drama, and more in want therefore of some strong binding idea to subordinate it to a single law.

To illustrate our meaning, —if we recall the lyrical parts of Greek tragedy, the choruses, we see at once that the thoughts and images are exceedingly simple, but that they all have a distinct object—that they follow a single train of conceptions, that they moderate between the different actors, that thsy fulfil the function of a thoughtful and solemn public opinion, and help the audience to think rightly of the great events passing before their eyes without going into captivity to any of the conflicting views. They recognize a higher purpose than any of the parties to the plot are able to discern in its dark development, and thus com- plete its architecture with a vaulted roof. Such choral songs may be fairly represented, for instance, by a few lines from a chorus in the Antigone, where the old men who compose it are brooding over the sentence of death just passed upon her by Creon. " Blessed are they," it begins, "whose life has tasted not of evil, for they whose house is shaken by the gods never want for calamities falling in succession upon all the members of the race—just as when driven by dangerous Thracian squalls, a billow races over the darkness beneath the sea's surface, and rolls up from the bottom the black shingle, and the beaten promon- tories groan in answer. I see that the misfortunes of the house of the Labdacidte spring from its very root,—the misfor- tunes of the living succeeding to the misfortunes of the dead, nor do one generation's sufferings release the next, but some god casts it down, and it has no remission of guilt. For now the light which was spread over the last root of the house of (Edipus is clouded,—it in its turn is buried beneath the deadly dust of the gods below, beneath folly of speech and frenzy of mind." This is the kind of running comment with which the Greek chorus deduces the teaching of the tragedy before it, a commentary interspersed often with beautiful single images, though always sparely used and always strictly subordinated to the religious meaning of its doctrine. No doubt the choral songs are sometimes much more general and applied to the abstract lot of man, but even then they are directly suggested by the course of destiny in the particular drama. Sometimes for a time the strain is a general wail on the sadness of human destiny, like that beginning "Not to be born is much the best," but it always runs parallel with the evolution of the tragedy, and expresses at last the calmer thoughts of a spectator on its movement. Now Mr. Swinburne's choruses are beautiful but chaotic. They are rich in fancies which do not tell on the play, and in doubts which the action of the principal characters neither supports, illustrates, nor re- futes. Instead of making the chorus calmer and clearer-sighted than his main characters, with a religious impartiality which is beyond the reach of the main sufferers, the chorus contributes the intellectual anarchy to the play. Meleager, the hero (so far as there is one), seems to believe in the newer faith, in the Zeus who is above mere law, who recognizes a higher law in himself than in any dark outlying Necessity. Althma, the principal character, believes in the older creed, in adamantine customs and pieties from which even maternal instinct cannot absolve her. But the young ladies of the chorus believe in nothing particular ; believe at first in Spring ; become rather pessimist as they go on, expressing a very low opinion of humanity, which they think was the product of a grim sort of irony in the gods ; express later (unlike young ladies) a still worse opinion of Love, describing her much as Shelley describes Desolation (" 0 l)esolation is a delicate thing "), then rise even into a sort of curse of " the supreme evil, God," and this before the great calamitous crisis of the play ; —then out of this depth they pass in their next song into a common hymn of praise to Artemis, express no particular opinion about the great agony of the play, but sum up everything at the end like Mr. Carlyle, with a mere tribute to the maxim "Might is right :"—

"Who shall contend with his lords, Or cross them or do them wrong ?

Who shall bind them as with cords ?

Who shall tame them as with song?

Who shall smite them as with swords? For the hands of their kingdom are strong."

These young ladies are clearly anarchic. Instead of giving unity to the play, their songs are ornamental breaks in it, though some of them extremely beautiful, for instance the second one, on the creation of man :-

"Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time, with a gift of tears ; Grief, with a glass that ran ; Pleasure, with pain for leaven ; Summer, with flowers that fell ; Remembrance fallen from heaven, And madness risen from hell ; Strength without hands to smite ; Love that endures for a breath ; Night, the shadow of light, And life the shadow of death.

And tho high gods took in band Fire, and the falling of tears, And a measure of sliding sand From under the feet of the years ; And froth and drift of the sea; And dust of the labouring earth ; And bodies of things to be In the houses of death and of birth ; And wrought with weeping and laughter, And fashioned with loathing and love, With life before and after And death beneath and above, For a day and a night and a morrow, That his strength might endure for a span With travail and heavy sorrow, The holy spirit of man. From the winds of the north and the south They gathered as unto strife; They breathed upon his mouth, They filled his body with life ; Eyesight and speech they wrought For the veils of the soul therein, A time for labour and thought, A time to serve and to sin ; They gave him light in his ways, And love, and a space for delight, And beauty and length of days, And night, and sleep in the night.

Ills speech is a burning fire ;

With his lips he travaileth ; In hii heart is a blind desire, In his eyes foreknowledge of death ; He weaves, and is clothed with derision ; Sows, and he shall not reap ; His life is a watch or a vision Between a sleep and a sleep."

That is fine, but not Greek, and still less Greek in its place and application. A Greek dramatist would certainly have inserted some comment on the omens which accompanied Meleager's birth, which his mother has just been relating, and the unfulfilled pre- dictions of the Fates. But these young ladies are always in favour of songs malbpropos to the circumstances ; comment on the con- tradictions in man's destinies when they have been hearing of fulfilled prophecies ; curse the gods with alight reserves just before the crisis of the action when a pious chorus would have been particularly anxious to conciliate them ; and when all is fulfilled simply hold their breath.

The choral songs therefore, though full of beauty, instead of accounting for the form of the play, as in the Greek drama, pulverize and injure it. The passion of Althma is much the finest part of the play. The naturalism of maternal instinct struggling with the feeling of what is due to the shade of her mother and her brothers goes far beyond the struggle in Antigone or Orestes. Out of many noble passages depicting this feeling we choose the last and most passionate,—passionate beyond the limits of Greek passion and too little ingrained with the Greek awe,—but still exceedingly fine, when Altheei, after setting light to the brand which consumes away her son's life, comes out again,—a flame of living fire in her blood,—to await the result :— " I know not if I live;

Savo that I feel the fire upon my face And on my cheek the burning of a brand. Yea the smoke bites me, yea I drink the steam With nostril and with eyelid and with lip Insatiate and intolerant ; and mine hands

Burn, and fire feeds upon mine oyes; I reel

As one made drank with living, whence he draws Drunken delight ; yet I, though mad for joy, Loathe my long living and am waxen red As with the shadow of shed blood; behold,

I am kindled with the flames that fade in hint, I am swollen with subsiding of his veins,

I am flooded with his ebbing; my lit eyes Flame with the falling fire that leaves his lids Bloodless ; my cheek is luminous with blood Because his face is ashen. Yet, 0 child, Son, first-born, fairest-0 sweet month, sweet eyes, That drew my life out through my suckling breast, That shone and clove mine heart through-0 soft knees Clinging, 0 tender treading of soft feet, Cheeks warm with little kissings-0 child, child, What have we made each other ?"

On the whole, we are convinced that the Greek form is a mistake. Mr. Swinburne's craving we suppose was to return as completely as he could to the naturalism of the higher paganism, and to strip off a cloak of modern sentiment which he regards as shallow and worn out. But he does not wholly effect this, while he does wholly fail in restoring the poetic unity of the Greek drama. Naturalistic beauty, such as Mr. Swinburne, loves, lacks poetic continuity and integrity unless it receives a higher unity from that " feeling after and finding" of a higher hand, which casts so solemn a light on the great Athenian tragedies. Althmi's struggles are grandly drawn, but they stay in the imagination as struggles in vaeu9,— purposeless writhings of a large nature in pain, dislocated from the "All of Things." There wants that soothing and healing influence which in JEschylus and Sophocles tracks the dark destiny towards a breaking in the clouds, and purifies the pain with its vision of divine purpose and dawning hope.