BOOKS.

MR. DE VERE'S DRAMA OF " ST. THOMAS."•

Tam is a poem of the same order,—and a high order it is,—as Mr. De Vere's Alexander the Great. From the first page to the last, it has in it the breath of that stately life and those large conceptions which bespeak the growing phases of Church and Empire. It is a curious fact, that while Mr. De Vere aimed at • St. Thomas Of Canterbury_ .„ a Dramatic Poem. By Aubrey De Fere, Author of !‘Aleiander tho Great." London ; Hoary eating an. Co.

the modest mark of lyrical or meditative verse, his results were slender. He had not in him the intensity of purely emotional moods which is needful to set the seal of success on poems of that class. But as soon as he struck out into a bolder path,.

and began to mould large dramatic conceptions, involving both conflict and growth, into living forms, he sprang at once to a height of achievement for which no one who knew only his earlier verse could have been in any way prepared. Alexander the Great, little as it is yet known, is a poem that deserves to be remembered by the side of Sir Henry Taylor's Philip van Artevelde and his own fatheq Mary Tudor, as one of the few really dramatic poems of our own day. St. Thomas of Canterbury is of the same calibre. Whether any one picture in it is as unique as the picture of Alexander, and of that " zig-zag lightning in the brain" by which his mind forestalled the cir- cuitous reasonings of lesser soldiers and statesmen, we can hardly determine for ourselves. The nearest thing to it is the picture of.

the great Angevin king and statesman, Henry IL, with his large state-craft, his swift strokes of policy, his wiry tenacity of purpose, his flexibility in yielding to dangerous resistance, and the sharp recoil with which, when the obstruction was withdrawn, the pressure of his purpose was resumed. Very fine, too, are the glimpses given us of his wild bursts of passion, and of the in- flaming and baleful influence wielded over him by the light and lurid beauty of his evil-natured queen. These, though not in- tended to be the central figures of the drama, are, to our minds, the pictures which contain most of luminous personality and significance. On the other hand, the pendant to these pictures of royal keenness, passion, caprice, and daring, is infinitely more real and massive than the pendant to Alexander in Mr. De Vere's former play. Thomas of Canterbury is, no

doubt, idealised in this play. Even taking Mr. Freeman's very favourable picture of him, there was much more in him of the constrained and artificial Churchman, playing a part which-

was hardly natural to him, and in which he imitated with some- what ponderous conscientiousness the simpler and• less theatrical policy of his predecessor, Anselm, than Mr. De Vere would give us any conception of. Still, in a historic drama one does not look so much for absolute historic accuracy as for greatness and con- sistency of conception, so long as the deviation from historic accuracy is not too wide to be flagrant. Mr. De Vere wished evidently to give us a picture of the complex machinery of the- Church in one of its greatest crises, coming into collision with the machinery of the State, and winning its triumph partly by the combinations of a far-seeing policy, partly by the weakness and

foolishness-of heroic, faith. This he has done with great skill, by the

help of a combination of ecclesiastical characters, some of them of the type of the more or less conventional Church dignitary like Cardinal William of Pavia, another representing the diplomatist Churchman in John of Salisbury, another the pure spiritual-here in Herbert of Bosham, and one, again, the hero of the play, the ecclesiastical statesman who learns gradually to merge both the statesman and the ecclesiastic in the self-renunciation of the saint, Thomas of Canterbury. With these. characters Mr. De Were

has certainly.eontrived to give a very powerful picture of that, curious, superficial yieldingness and ultimate inflexibility of the Papal system, in its sharp contrast with the rapidity and apparent force of a great State, which Father Newman long ago thus powerfully described for us. Dr. Newman is speaking first of the temporal power :- '"How different is the bearing of the temporal power! Its prompti- tude, decisiveness, keenness, and force are well represented in the• military array which is its instrument. Punctual in its movements, precise in its operations, imposing in its equipments, with its spirit., high, and its stop firm, with its haughty clarion and its black artillery, behold, the mighty world is gone forth to war, with what ? With an unknown something, which it feels, but can- not see ; which flits around it, which flaps against it cheek, with the air, with the wind. It charges, and it slashes, and it fires. its volleys, and it bayonets, and it is mocked by a foe who dwells in another sphere, and is far beyond the force of its analysis or the capacities of its calculus. The air gives way, and it returns again ; it exerts a gentle but constant pressure on every side ; moreover, it is of vital necessity to the very power which is attacking it. Whom have- yon gone out against; a few old men, with red hats and stockings, or a hundred pale students, with eyes on the ground and beads in their girdle ; they are as stubble ; destroy them ;—then there will be other old men and other pale students instead of them. But we will direct our rage against one ; he flees; what is to be done with him ? Cast him out upon the wide world ? But nothing can go on without him.. Then bring him back ; but he will give us no guarantee for the future. Then leave him alone; hiff power le gone, he is at an end, or he will, take a new course of hinegeif : he will take part with the world. MeS+1%- while, the multitude of influences all over the great Catholic body rise up all around, and hide heaven and earth from the eyes of the *pee- takes of the combat; and unreal judgments are hazarded, sad. la*

predictions, till the mist clears away, and then the old man is found in his own place, as before, saying Mass over the tomb of the Apostles. Eesentment and animosity tuteceed in the minds of the many, when they find their worldly wisdom quite at fault. But, In truth, it is her very vastness, her manifold constituents, her complicated structure, which give the Church this semblance, whenever she wears it, of feebleness, vacillation, subtleness, or dissimulation."

'That is the conception which, as it appears to ns, Mr. De Vere has very ably worked out, in his picture of Thomas's relations with the Holy See during his exile in France. In Thomas himself lielas conceived a representative Englishman of that broad, popular fibre which makes it, to some extent, difficult to trace the outline of his separate individuality. Thomas identifies himself so closely with the Church of the people, and keeps down with so much success the passions of the man and the prelate, that it is only in glimpses of his former life as Chancellor, and in the fine scene where he pleads with Henry to subdue his lower ambition and be faithful to the higher instincts of a statesman who sees something in the Church higher than the State, that we seem to discern the dentlines •of his personal character. At the same time, there is nothing unreal or misty about him. There is from beginning to end the grandeur of the true patriarch of the Church, who has set himself to subdue his own imperious will to God's, even when the divine will comes in the shape of seeming failure and grants Aiothing but the dim presage of a future success.

But to appreciate the painting of Thomas is impossible, without some clear conception of the Royal master against whom he had to strive. Here is Thomas's own view of the King, as given by 'the nun who so faithfully served Thomas as to press the Papal mandate into the Archbishop of York's hands in public, and to .call on him to read it to the people :— " 0 lady, deem it not I The primate hate your son! How many a time Have I not heard him praise the king's high heart ; His wit at years when others chase their follies ; His prescient thought ; his knowledge won from all, Drawn in with every breath; his wind-like swiftness, Now here, now there ; persistence iron-nerved, Pliant at need, but with resilience still

Back-springing to a purpose of that height Which makes ambition virtue. From him shake But two fierce passions which convulse his spirit (Anger was one, he did not name the other), No prince there reigns like him."

And here, again, is a graphic sketch of Henry's active mood, from Abe mouth of "a French Archbishop, who knows him well :—

"Your king is sudden :

The tidings of his march and victory reach us Like runners matched. That slender, sinewy frame, That ardent eye, that swift on-striding step, Yet graceful as a tiger's, foot descending

Sileat but sure on the predestinate spot—

From signs like these looks forth the inward man.

Expect grave news ere long."

Again, as to Eleanor :—the Queen's mother, the Empress Matilda, whose imperious and grandiose but somewhat sterile -nature, with its cold sense of duty and weary sense of failure, is very finely sketched, in contrast to the more brilliant but more • selfish and treacherous nature of her son, is supposed by the poet to give us this account of the malign influence exerted over Ilenry by his wife Eleanor :—

"That queen of his bath slain his reverence ;

That woman with five realms and fifty devils, Who witched him to her love. She loved him never ; And with her strident voice and angry eyes

-Scared from her soon his heart. A faithfuller husband

Had been obsequious less. A wife I a wife!

You on whose brows virginity is throned

Are liker to a -wife than Eleanor I

In that obdurate will, and lawless humour, And shallow heart, despite all marriage bonds, Wifehood's true spirit had been impossible Even had she loved him well! A married mistress Let such be called. Prop me this pillow, child, And put from you that wildered, frightened look. My father—him I loved the moat on earth; If wars I moved, if these thin fingers clutched The sceptre all too tight, 't was for this cause, Because his hand had held it !"

• Alld to complete the picture, take this sketch of Eleanor by one -of the English nobles, when she is planning to excite the King Otgailist the Archbishop :— " That smile is baleful as a winter beam

Streaking some cliff wreck-gorged ; her hair and eyes Send forth a glare half sunshine and half lightning."

It is against such a combination of •Angevin genius and pas-

• eion with malign Poiton resentment that Becket has to urge his ecclesiastical and spiritual war. Here is Mr. De Vere's conception of the basis of his character :—

"Salisbury's bishop Hates him and fears him both; yet says full oft Becket was fanatic never, though a Churchman: High priest at heart had scarce been priest so late, Nor worn so long the Chancellor's gown. He's dangerous Neither as proud nor tortuous, but as simple, And passionate for the honour of his charge : Some mastiff old is he, that by the door Of but or house, alike, keeps honest watoh ;— The State, not Church, his charge.'"

But we must give one longer extract, to show how Mr. De Vere paints Becket pleading the still fresh controversy of the Church against the State, in the interview which he has with the King in " The ' Traitor's Meadow,' near Freitval " :— " BECKET. A morn there was— Your Highness then had scarce been three months king—

When, in a window of your Woodstock palace (The Queen was singing 'mid the birds below), We read some history of pagan days ;— It pierced your heart: you started up : you cried, Thrice better were these pagans than your saints !

They loved their native land! They set their eyes

On one small city—small, but yet their mother—

And died in its defence !'

Krim HENRY.

Again I say it!

BECKET.

I answered thus—' They knew tho State alone : They played at dim rehearsals, yet were true To truth, then man's. They gazed with tearful eyes, Not on their city only, but that rock, Its marble mother, which above it soared, Crowned with that city's fortress and its fanes.

Beyond their gods lived on the "God Unknown:" Above base mart and popular shout survived The majesty of law.' KING HENRY.

'Tie true. Thus spake you.

BECKET.

But added this:—' Our God is not unknown : In omnipresent majesty among us His Church sits high upon her rook tower-crowned, Fortress of Law divine, and Truth Revealed, O'er every city throned, o'er every realm!

Had we the man-heart of the men of old, With what a spirit of might invincible For her should we not die!'

KING HENRY.

With tears you spake it.

Bxocur.

Then judge me justly, 0 my King, my friend, Casting far from you, like a sundered chain, A thought abhorred, an ignominy down-trodden, The oppression of dead error. Say, shall I, A Christian bishop, and a subject sworn,

Be pagan more than pagan, doubly false—

False to a heavenly kingdom throned o'er earth, False to an earthly kingdom raised to heaven, And ministering there, high on the mount of God, 'Mid those handmaiden daughters of a King Who gird the Queen gold-vested ? Pagans, sire, Lived not, though dark, in Babylonian blindness: The laws of that fair city which they loved Subjecting each man, raised him and illumined.

We, too, are citizens of no mean City: Her laws look forth on us from rite and creed: In her the race of Man Redeemed we honour,

Which—cleansed from bestial, and ill spirits expelled— In unity looks down on us, God's Church,

The Bride of Christ, beside the great King throned, Who on his sceptre leans. My King, my friend I I have done to you no wrong My many sins Lay other where. Tenfold their compt would rise, If, sane myself, I pandered to your madness.

KING HENRY.

Thomas, you lack what only might convert me:— Could you be England's King, her primate I, Your part I too would play!

BEcKET.

And 0 how nobly And unlike me in fashion you would play it! How petty my discourse bath been till now :— Sir, see these things as you will one day see them ! Two lots God places in the hand of each : We choose ; and oft we choose the lot least loved. The youth who slays life's hope in blind excess Knows not that deep within his heart—far deeper Than all base cravings—those affections live Which sanctified his father's home. Years pass: Sad memories haunt the old man in his house, Sad shadows strike the never-lighted hearth, Sad echoes shake the child-untrodden floors : A great cry issues from his famished heart— 'I spurned the lot I loved.'

KING HENRY.

My youth is past : It had its errors ; yet within my house Are voices young and sweet. BEmcwr.

God keep them such!

Far better silence, and the lonely hall, Than war-cries round the hearth. God guard your children!

If you have risen against the Church, your mother, God guard them from revolt against their sire !

I spake not, sir, of errors in your youth: A parable was mine.

The soul's revolt is deadlier than the body's : Sir, that revolt is pride. In time, beware That God who shapes us all to glorious end For you ordained a glory beyond glory : Spurn not true greatness for a phantom greatness !

Your flatterers are your danger : them you trust: You fear the Church : to her you owe your all : From her you gat your crown.

KING HENRY.

That word is true : The Church and Theobald, and you not less, Propped me at need. What then? A king, perforce, Reveres the ancient ways.

BECKET.

0 never in you Was tender reverence for the ancient ways!

Another mind is yours; a different will, An adverse aim ;—that aim I deem not base:

There's greatness in it ; but your means are ruthless. You love your children—there's your sum of love; Yours are the passions which torment our clay, The intellect and the courage which exalt it, The clear conception of a state and empire— Yet seen but from below. To raise that state You crush all ancient wont, all rights and heights : Your kingdom you would level to a plain, O'erlooked by one hill only, and, thereon The royal tent."

That is true feeling and true poetry. Nor could the strongest of the arguments for Erastianism,— the extraordinary failure of the Church to develop in Churchmen the quality of justice, and her still more extraordinary capacity for developing in Churchmen a worldliness of a far worse type than any worldliness of the State,—have been put into Henry's mouth, even if Mr. De Vere had acknowledged its truth, which he probaby does not, with any historic or dramatic propriety.

We cannot leave the play without giving one or two illus- trations of the manner in which Mr. De Vere contrives to delineate—without passing beyond the proper region of dramatic representation—the high and serene beauty of the religious mystic,—Thomas's chief religious counsellor, Herbert of Bosham. A play which turns so much on ecclesiastical strife would, with- out this feature, have seemed deficient in the higher motive, for ecclesiastics and ecclesiastical warfare usually borrow all their grandeur from the life which they contrive rather to obstruct than to foster, the life of the true spiritual devotion. In the following passage the first glimpse is given of the higher vision which is intended to be that which really sustains Becket not merely in his conflict with the King, but in his desertion by the Pope during a part of that struggle. It is in a conversation between Becket and Herbert, on the election of the former to the See of Canterbury :—

" BECKET.

A heavy weight, good Herbert, and a sudden

HERBERT.

My lord, it came from heaven ; what need we more ? Who sent the weight will send the strength. That bard Whose Trojan legend was the old world's Bible Clothed his best Greek with armour from the Gods, And o'er the field it bore him like a wind. What meant that armour ? Duty ! 0 my lord, The airy gauds that deck us, these depress us : The divine burthen, and the weight from God, Uplift us and sustain."

And here is the picture of Herbert's mind, as the tragic close draws near, when the statesman-ecclesiastic, John of Salisbury, expresses his irritation at the serenity of the mystic :-

" HERBERT.

Here stood we on his consecration feast.

The long years dragged : to-day they seem but weeks, A dove-flight of white weeks through vernal air.

Jour( OF SALISBURY.

Herbert, you jar me with your ceaseless triumphs,

And hope 'gainst hope. You are like a gold leaf dropped

From groves immortal of the Church triumphant To mock our Church in storm! For manners' sake I pray you, chafe at times. The floods are out!

I say the floods are out! This way and that They come a-sweeping.

HERBERT.

Whereso'er they sweep The eye of God pursues them, and controls : That which they are to Him, that only are they: The rest is pictured storm."

This serene character was absolutely needed for the exhibition of

'5 the real grandeur of such a drama as this. Whether or not the same spiritual serenity might not have lent its strength just as much to Thomas if he had taken a very different part in that struggle, and fought against the sacerdotal authority of Rome as strongly as he fought for it, is a point on which we should hardly agree with Mr.. De Vere. But on this, at least, we do agree with him, that the nobler minds of that age, as a matter of fact, probably took the view which is here attributed to Herbert and to Becket, and felt that they were leaning on God when they were fighting the battles of the Church. And to give this elevation of tone to the drama, the picture of Herbert, of whom the diplomatic eccle- siastic truly says,— " A mystic feeding on faith's inmost lore,— A. dreamer, scanning mysteries in flowers,— I guessed not of your strength,"

was absolutely necessary.

The play contains singularly fine poetic phrases scattered through it, for a selection of which we have not room. But take this single specimen. The Empress Matilda, on the eve of death, says :—

" Till these my later years, I feared not death. Death's magnanimity, as death draws nigh, Subdues that fear."

We have rarely come upon a finer and more delicate poetical description of a fact with which every physician is well acquainted. That the great fear of death which so many have, usually vanishes at the approach of death, every one• knows to be true. But only the poet could discern in this fact, what experience nevertheless certainly bears out, the evidence of that general enlargement of the spiritual measures of things, before which the seeming importance of the imminent change dwindles into insignificance. But those who read Mr. De Vere's play with open eyes will find many touches in it as fine and true- as this, as well as enjoy the rare pleasure of a large treatment of a large theme.