BOOKS.

BECKET.*

Tax Poet-Laureate, in dedicating his drama to Lord Selborne, -explains that Becket "is not intended in its present form to meet the exigencies of our modern theatre;" and in this, per- haps, he is right, for a drama turning on the subject of the spiritual independence of the Church, and its in- trinsic superiority to the State, is not likely, Without more preparation of the mind of the public than this play supplies, to take the fancy of the people. Yet there is more of drama in this play than of prose poetry. It is, we think, dramatically at least, as fine as Queen, Mary, and, perhaps, even its superior ; while it is quite in a higher plane than the certainly not very effectual drama of Harold. Becket, Henry, and Eleanor are all powerfully drawn,—though, by the way, we know no picture of Eleanor so powerful as that given us by "Michael Field," in the drama of Fair Rosamond, recently reviewed in these columns. One or two of the scenes in Becket,— for example, the scene between the beggars and the barons, and the scene between Becket's close personal friend, Herbert of Bosharn, and the popular assailant of the priesthood, Walter Map, when the latter gives an account of the coronation of the boy-King Henry by the Archbishop -of York, in defiance of Becket,—are in the best sense popular, and abundant in life and strength. The chief defect in the structure of the play is the very artificial bond, as it seems to the reader, by which the plot, so far as it affects Fair Rosamond, is pieced -on to the plot so far as it affects Becket. These two portions of the play are hardly fused together. Even after twice reading, we cannot help regarding them as portions of two separate plays, and pass from the one play,—the play on the great ecclesiastical hero,—to the other play,—the play on the King's mistress, whom Becket is made to save from the dagger and, the cup of poison without, we suppose, much historical authority for such an achievement, — as if they were distinct compositions added together rather than blended into one. We are well aware that in the fine prologue,—one of the finest scenes in the whole,— provision is carefully made for connecting the two threads of in- terest. But even there the connection between the two threads seems a rather arbitrary knot. Eleanor hopes, by holding out the prospect that she may take the Church's part against the King, to win over Becket to let her take a private revenge upon her rival, and fails in her design. The two elements in -the play are certa'nly not thoroughly blended ; and there is something unnatural in Henry's constituting Becket the pro- tector of his mistress's bower, even though the intention was to show how implicitly Henry trusted the honour of his former friend, even after Becket had become the foe of the English crown. Eleanor is, as we have said, a powerful sketch. But she is

painted much more powerfully in our opinion in the Prologue, as the Provençal minstrel with her fancy on fire and her heart as cold and hard as ice, rhyming away on Henry's deser- tion of her fur his Rosamund, than she is in the scene where she actually comes into collision with her rival. Lord Tennyson has written nothing more striking in its way than the passage in the Prologue to which we have just referred ; it is full not only of poetry, but of dramatic power

"Eater ELEANOR and SIR. REGINALD FITZURSE.

ELEANOR (singin3). Over! the sweet summer closes, The reign of the roses is done— HENRY (to BECKET, who is going). Thou shalt not go. I Lave not

ended with thee.

* Becktt. By Alfred Lord Tennyson. London: Macmillan and C. 1381. ELEANOR (seeing chart on table). This chart with the red line! her bower ! whose bower ?

HENRY. The chart is not mine, but Becket's: take it, Thomas.

ELEA/CO:– Becket ! 0—ay—and these chessmen on the floor—the king's crown broken ! Becket bath beaten thee again—and thou hest kicked down the board. I know thee of old.

HENRY. True enough, my mind was set upon other matters. ELEANOR. What matters ? State matters ? love matters ? HENRY. My love for thee, and thine for me.

ELEANOR. Over! the sweet summer closes,

The reign of the roses is done; Over and gone with the roses, And over and gone with the sun.

Here ; but our sun in Aquitaine lasts longer. I would I were in Aquitaine again—your north el-ills me.

Over! the sweet summer closes, And never a flower at the close ; Over and gone with the roses, And winter again and the snows.

That was not the way I enth-d it first—but nnsymmetrically, prepos- terously, illogically, out of passi,m, without art—like a song of the people. Will you have it ? The last Parthian shaft of a forlorn Cupid at the King's left breast, and all left.handedness and under- handedness.

And never a flower at the close,

Over and gone with the roses, Not over and gone with the rose.

True, one rose will outblossom the rest, one rose in a bower. I speak after my fancies, for I am a Troubadour, you know, and won the violet at Toulouse; but my voice is harsh here, not in tune, a nightirgale out of season ; for marriage, rose or no rose, has killed the golden violet.

BECKET. Madam, you do ill to scorn wedded love.

ELEANOR. SO I do. Louis of France loved me, and I dreamed that I loved Louis of France ; and I loved Henry of England, and Henry of England dreamed that he. loved me ; but the marriage. garland withers even with the putting on, the bright link rusts with the breath of the first after-marriage kiss, the harvest moon is the ripening of the harvest, and the honeymoon is the gall of love ; he dies of his honeymoon. I could pity this poor world myself that it is no better ordered.

HENRY. Dead is he, my Queen ? What, altogether ? Let me swear nay to that by this cross on thy neck. God's eyes ! what a lovely cross! what jewels ! ELEANOR- Dail it please you Take it, and wear it on that hard heart of yours—there. Eatres it to him. HENRY (puts it on). On this left breast before so hard a heart, To hide the scar left by thy Pnrthian dart. ELEANOR. Has my simple song set you jingling? Nay, if I took and translated that hard heart into our Provençal facilities, I could so play about it with the rhyme— HENRY. That the heart were lost in the rhyme, and the matter in the metre. May we not pray you, Mulam, to spare us the hardness of your facility ?

ELEANOR. The wells of Castaly are not wasted upon the desert. We did but jest."

Eleanor's hard heart and glowing fancy is vividly presented to us there ; but when she has hunted-down her prey and has got her rival at her feet, we do not see her half so distiuctly. The scene in Rosarnund's Bower is not comparable in power to the scene in Henry's Norman castle.

So far as regards the chief subject of the drama, the battle between Church and King, in the persons of Becket and Henry, we think that Mr. Aubrey de Vere, in his striking drama called St. Thomas of Canterbury, has succeeded much better in leavening the mind of the reader with the ecclesiastical ideas of the time, than the Poet-Laureate has succeeded in Becket. Vigorous as much of the latter is, there is wanting to it a sufficient wealth and variety of ecclesiastical interest. Becket's spiritual friend and counsellor, Herbert of Bosham, is painted with great delicacy and vividness in Mr. De Vere's play, but rather feebly and slightly in the Poet-Laureate's ; and this alone makes a difference unfavourable to the newer play, for we seem to need the help of his purely spiritual insight to teach us how thoroughly Becket must have identified the cause of Canterbury in that struggle with the cause of God. Mr. De Yore makes us see this. He paints the ecclesiastical struggle and the various types of Churchmen who were concerned in it much more elaborately than Lord Tennyson, and shows us bow completely the con- science of the purest sided with the Archbishop and against the King. Tennyson's sketch of this part of the subject is somewhat meagre and rapid, adapted rather to the interest which the subject creates now, than to the interest which it created at the time when a great national tragedy actually re- sulted from it. As much more vivid as Tennyson's Eleanor is than Mr. De Vere's, so much more vivid is Mr. De Vere's picture of the priest-saint, Herbert, and the great Archbishop, Becket, than Tennyson's. The latter, no doubt, is pithier, and the action of his play is more rapid, which is, perhaps, a recommendation for the stage. But it is hardly a recommendation of the play as an imaginative work to the quiet reader. We need some- what more of the ecclesiastical atmosphere of the day than

Tennyson gives us. His play is barer and less comprehensible to as as a picture of tragic passion than Mr. De Vere's; and the Rosamund episode diverts our interest from the central interest of the play, instead of helping us to apprehend it better.

If we have a more touching and a more adequate picture of Becket in the play of Mr. Be Vere than we have in the new work of the Poet-Laureate, we have in the latter a much finer and more stirring picture of Henry than we find in the work of Mr. De Vere. In fact, perhaps, the interest of the new play centres somewhat more than it ought to do in Henry and some- what less than it ought to do in Becket. The picture which Tennyson gives us of Henry's sudden Angevine fury, and of the high imaginative statesmanship that alternated with it, is very striking, and, indeed, interests us far more deeply than the picture of the great ecclesiastical statesman to whom Henry was opposed. The following is a finer picture of Henry's feeling for the State than any we can find of Becket's feeling for the Church. For Becket we go to Mr. De Vere, who has the spiritual imagination in great perfection. For Henry we turn to the Poet.Laureate

"Enter KING HENRY.

HENRY. Where's Thomas ? bath he signed ? show me the papers ! Signed and not sealed ! How's that ?

JonN OF OXFORD. He would not seal.

And when he sigo'd, his face was stormy-red- Shame, wrath, I know not what. He sat down there And dropt it in his bands, and then a paleness, Like the wan twilight after sunset, crept Up even to the tonsurP, and he groan'd, 'False to myself ! It is the will of God !'

HENRY. God's will be what it will, the man shall seal,

Or I will seal his doom. My burgher's son—

Nay, if I cannot break him as the prelate, I'll crush him as the subject. Send for him back.

[Sits en his throne.

Barons and bishops of our realm of England,

After the nineteen winters of King Stephen—

A reign which was no reign, when none could sit By his own hearth in peace ; when murder common As nature's death, like Egypt's plague, had fill'd All things with blood ; when every doorway blusli'd, Dash'd red with that unhallow'd passover ; When every baron ground his blade in blood ; The household dough was kneaded up with blood ; The millwheel turned in blood ; the wholesome plow Lay rusting in the furrow's yellow weeds, Till famine dwarft the race—I came, your King !

Nor dwelt alone, like a soft lord of the East, In mine own hall, and sucking thro' fools' ears The flatteries of corruption—went abroad Thro' all my counties, spied my people's ways ; Yea, heard the churl against the baron—yea, And did him justice ; sat in mine own courts Judging my judges, that had found a King Who ranged confusions, made the twilight day, And struck a shape from out the vague, and law From madness. And the event—our fallows till'cl, Much corn, repeopled towns, a realm again.

So far my course, albeit not glassy smooth, Had prosper'd in the main, but suddenly Jarr'd on this rock ! A cleric violated The daughter of his host, and murder'd him.

Bishops—York, London, Chichester, Westminster—

Ye haled this tonsured devil into your courts; But since your canon will not let you take Life for a life, ye but degraded him Where I had hang'd him. What cloth hart murder care For degradation ? and that made me muse, Being bounden by my coronation oath To do men justice. Look to it, your own selves !

Say that a cleric murder'd an archbishop,

What could ye do ? Degrade, imprison him—

Not death for death.

JOHN OF OXFORD. Bat I, my liege, could swear, To death for death.

HENRY. And looking thro' my reign, I found a hundred ghastly murders done

By men, the scam and offal of the Church ;

Then, glancing thro' the story of this realm, came on certain wholesome usages, Lost in desuetude, of my grandsire's day, Good royal customs—had them written fair For John of Oxford here to read to you.

JOHN OF OXFORD. And I can easily swear to these as being The King's will and God's will and justice; yet I could but read a part to-day, because-

FITZUR8E. Because my lord of Canterbury— Da TRACY. Ay, This lord of Canterbury—

DE BRIM. As is his wont Too much of late whene'er your royal rights Are mooted in our councils-

F1T2URSE. —made an uproar. BERRY. And Becket had my bosom on all this ; If ever man by bonds of gratefulness—

I raised him from the puddle of the gutter,

I made him porcelain from the clay of the city—

Thought that I knew him, ered thro' love of him, Hoped, were he chosen archbishop, Church a nd Crown, Two sisters gliding in an equal dance,

Two rivers gently flowing side by side—

Bat no !

The bird that monks sings the same song again, The snake that sloughs comes out a snake again.

Snake—ay, but he that looks a fangless one,

Issues a venomous adder.

For he, when having dofft the Chancellor's robe—

Flung the Great Sbal of England in my face-

Claim'd some of our Crown lands for Canterbury—

My comrade, boon companion, my co-reveller,

The master of his master, the King's king.—

God's eyes! I had meant to make him all but king.

Chancellor-Archbishop, he might well have sway'd All England under Henry, the young King, When I was hence. What did the traitor say ?

False to himself, but tenfold false to me !

The will of God—why, then it is my will—

Is he coming ?''

We need hardly say that the little lyrics with which the drama is interspersed are very beautiful. Mr. Tennyson hardly ever failed in any effort of this sort, and in this play there are one or two lyrics of singular loveliness. Certainly amongst the works by which Tennyson will always be remembered Becket will rank as one, though not among the highest or the most perfect. It has the stamp of true power upon it, and often of unquestionable dramatic power too.