THE DAYS OF JEZEBEL.*

THERE is very much in this polished and thoughtful poem which every cultivated man must read with pleasure and instruction. It has much beauty and much imaginative power ; indeed its faults are rather the faults of over-study than of negligence or haste. Sometimes, but especially towards the close of his poem, Mr. Bayne seems to us to have touched his theme with too little fire, rapidity, and intensity of manner, to have diluted when he ought to have aimed at terseness, and to have elaborated when he ought to have been even rugged. But his poem has always the charm of comprehensive thought and ample range of view. Nor do we feel at all disposed to underrate the value of this compre- hensiveness in the treatment of such a theme as the inevitable collision between the Phcenician culture of Sidon and Tyre and the rigid monotheism of the Hebrew faith in that petty northern kingdom where the yearning after the pantheism and the Nature- worship of the surrounding peoples was most keenly felt. Indeed without Mr. Bayne's comprehensiveness of treatment there could have been nothing really characteristic of the struggle; while with it, however imperfectly the plan of the poem may seem to us to be in some directions worked out, the wealth of suggestion is never lost. Mr. Bayne tells us in his very thoughtful and fascinating preface that the students of Hebrew history have attached too little importance to the figure of Jezebel, in their study of the great straggle between her and Elijah in the second half of the tenth century before Christ. He believes that Jezebel, the daughter of • The Days of Jezebel. An Hiatorical Drama. By Peter Bayne. London Stre.han and Co.

Eithobal,—one who was at once high priest of Ashtaroth and king of Sidon, and who obtained his throne by striking down a weaker brother (Phelles),—must have brought to the throne of Israel, as well as a haughty spirit, deeply ingrained convictions both as to the political value of the alliance with the great maritime cities of the coast of Syria, and as to the pernicious intellectual narrowness of that imperious monotheism which sternly repudiated the nature- worship and the hero-worship of Syria and Greece. In short, Mr.. Bayne wishes to sketch in Jezebel a queen of some political sagacity, who was "doubtless sincere in her convictions," and who. has been not so much maligned as misrepresented by the shrink- ing horror of the Hebrew annalists who never spoke of her at all where they could help it, and then only in tones of profound disgust and dread. The second element which Mr.. Bayne sets himself to paint in his poetical study of the collision between the commercial policy and nature-worship of the Phosni- cian Court of Ahab and the greatest prophet of Jehovah, is the reaction which took place in Elijah's mind after his great slaughter of the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel,—a reaction first reflected in the despair of his journey into the wilderness, when he "requested for himself that he might die," and then in the grand vision in which he learns that God is not in the wind, nor in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but is in the still, small voice which is more powerful than. all the violence of the sublimest forces of nature. We confess that with this part of Mr. Bayne's treatment of his drama we are much less content than with the other. It is clearly part of one whole with the other,—is illustrative, indeed, of that recoil from the rigid Hebraism of the Jahovistic law which might have almost excused such a one as Jezebel for her horror of the single and imperious faith of which Elijah was the prophet. But Mr. Bayne has made it too much of an episode in his poem, and has given us illustrations of "the still, small voice" in the shape of prophecies. of modern times from which we shrink, not only as incommensur- able with the conceptions of that time, but in some degree as. pseudo-applications and degradations of that great vision.

In illustration of Jezebel's recoil from the narrowness of the Hebrew faith, and her aspiration after a great foreign policy for Israel, Mr. Bayne has given us many striking drama* scenes, and perhaps still more beautiful lyrics. But, on the whole, we cannot but think that his preface contains a more striking out- line of the Jezebel he meant to paint than the finished picture. Why, for instance, has he neglected to avail himself of almost the only hint which the Hebrew annalist gives us that the reign of Ahab. was in its way really splendid—splendid in the sense in which a princess of the house of Sidon would value splendour,—namely, that short obituary notice contained in the words (I. Kings xxii. 29) : "Now the rest of the acts of Ahab and all that he did, and' the ivory house which he made, and all the cities that he built, are they not written in the book of the Chronicles of the Kings of Israel?" And, again, if he were bent on taking literally the harsh lan- guage put into Jehu's mouth by the Hebrew chronicler as to- " the whoredom of Jezebel,"—in all probability, it is only figurative of the licence of her idolatries,—why did he not. palliate it, as he might have done, on the authority of the chronicler who gives Ahab as many as seventy sons, by imputing to the King like infidelity to his wife, instead of picturing him as he has done, as the embodiment of passionate devotion to her? An far as we can see, Ahab is not at all regarded by the Hebrew historians as the mere tool and instrument of his wife. Their relation is presented much as Shakespeare pictures that of Macbeth to Lady Macbeth. Ahab's imagination conceives the evil which he has not always the strength to execute. Jezebel, no doubt, "stirs him up" to persecute the prophets of the Lord. But there- is not a trace anywhere of Ahab's lamenting her purposeior wish- ing to restrain her hand,—as Mr. Bayne imputes to him. He repents, it is true, of the murder of Nebo* when Elijah denounces. it, and prophesies his and his wife's violent deaths ; but the first imagination of that murder was as much his own as that of the murder of Duncan was Macbeth'e ; and in both cases the wife's was no doubt the keener, narrower, and more remorseless, but also the- less selfish executive will, which carried out for the man what the man did not dare carry out for himself. The narrative of the books of Kings suggests—to us at all events—that Ahab was quite as eager- an idolater, though not as eager a persecutor, as his wife ; that he was a man of large desires, bold in war, impulsive in generosity to a fallen foe, magnificent in his conceptions of material splendour, anxious for the growth of the cities of Israel, the master of a. regular harem, vindictive against his personal enemies, and differing from Jezebel only in this, that he retained some of the Hebrew awe of Elijah's prophecies, while Jezebel regarded them as the mere utterances of a lurid superstition. As regards his idolatries, they do not seem to have been by any means due to his wife's influence, though without a doubt she showed her greater feminine fanaticism by instigating the persecutions of the prophets. Hence Mr. Bayne has hardly, we think, drawn his picture of Jezebel as much in accordance with his own conception as he might. He should have shown us more clearly the difficult problems of the foreign policy of Israel during Ahab's reign. He might fairly have given us some picture of the fear in which Ahab and Jezebel stood of the King of Syria (Benhadad), and of the need in which they stood of Sidonian mercenaries to help them. He might have suggested that the King of Sidon made the protection of the religion of Baal against the fury of the prophets of Israel one of the conditions of the alliance. In short, his own outline of Jezebel as a politician, who helped her husband to work out a great policy,—the cementing of a natural and necessary alliance with her own people, and the widening of the apparently narrow ideas of a stiff-necked people,—might, we think, have been considerably more perfectly worked out than it is. The sketch is nobly begun in the following fine passage, but after this Jezebel is permitted to degenerate a little into the vindictive and sensual woman, instead of continuing steadily the far-sighted heathen Queen. Ahab has just bidden her to ask what boon she will to test his love:—

"Jezebel.

"I ask my life: not the rude sustenance

We throw to slaves or beasts; the finer breath That the live spirit draws, the atmosphere In which my soul expanded, grew to strength And noble quality ; the cherishing light That fell about my maiden brow, the light Of knowledge and of wisdom and large thoughts, That went like those bold birds, with broidered wings, My father's ships, far o'er the purple sea, To many lands, to distant isles, to men Of other tongues than oars and other gods ; Large thoughts, the mothers of large sympathies And tolerant forbearance, keen to see And separate dross from ore, yet smiling calm

On varying customs among various men,

Finding a kindred touch in all, a tone Of natural harmony, and scorning nought That made its dwelling in a human heart.

I bowed to Sidon's gods, but honoured those

That the great Homer sang of ; reverently

Beheld their temples, heard their oracles, And marked their rites divergent. Beauty's voice In music ; beauty's form divine, that changed The dead rock into living image, showed

The hero's arm in act to cast the spear, Lit in his eyes the glory and the joy

Of the poised battle, set the smile of love

To burn immortal on the eloquent lip

Of ivory goddess, tressed and zoned with gold ; The subtle skill that knew to match and wed

The colours on the robe, till ecstacy

Swooned at the sight ; all these I learned to love, And held them sacred on whatever land They beamed forth blessing. Now, my good lord, say Did not my father pledge thee at the first That this my life's best life, my soul's true soul, Should not be quenched in our Samaria?

And now ?—

"Ahab.

"Well, now ; do I not sympathise With all this. Jezebel? Do I not grant, Nay, guard this life of thine, which thon right well Describest ?—better with thine eye and lip- Glance-words of lightning, crimson syllables— Than with thy voice, and that is ever sweet, And sweetly penetrant to Ahab's heart.

"Jezebel.

"A truce to courtesies ; the time has come For swift decision. Be my voice or sweet Or shrill, I now must speak. 'Tis not the life That my proud father meant or I can live, To be bound fast in Sinai's iron law,

To build within some tuft of shadowy trees,

Deep in our garden bowers, an altar small To Sidon's go is, and offer, trembling, there The scanty gift. No! no! by Eithobal, By Baal himself, I worship as a Queen.

To Jah, thou knowest, tendered we the free

And honourable service of an old And strenuous god, the god of Israel : I smiled upon his prophets, gladly threw Upon his altars incense, passing by ; What god of all the nations asketh more ?

But for my father's god, for Baal that guides You flaming chariot down the steeps of heaven, And for my own dear goddess, Ashtoreth, The bright, kind, loving, glorious Ashtoreth, I claim supremest honours. Ahab, speak."

'The scene of meditation, again, in her own tower, before she gives -the orders for the massacre, is finely given, though had she been the politic woman she is meant to be, she would doubtless have confessed to herself a little more of hesitation between the two policies, before committing herself irrevocably to the policy of blood. But those considerations which Mr. Bayne hints at in his preface, but almost forgets in his actual delineation,—the need of a powerful alliance against the Syrians, and the impossibility of getting it while the worship of Sidon was prohibited and scorned, —should certainly have been introduced to strengthen her posi- tion against the more moderate counsellors of Ahab. The later scenes are very unequal to the earlier ones in the development of Jezebel's character ; and the last, in which, after Elijah's denunciation of Ahab for the murder of Nabot13, she holds a long, abstract, and considering the critical character of the struggle, a lifeless argument with Elijah on his exclusion of variety and comprehensiveness in the modes of embodying re- ligious feeling, makes an exceedingly disappointing end to the play. We cannot help thinking that Mr. Bayne has judged ill in ending it with Elijah's prophecy of Jezebel's violent death, and the spasmodic rage with which Jezebel receives the prophecy (though she had borne the prediction of her husband's similar end with comparative equanimity), rather than with the very dramatic and characteristic scene in which that death is painted in the Book of Kings. Jezebel, though widowed and old, and in mourning for the murder of her son Jehoratn,—the second of her sons who had reigned over Israel since her husband Ahab's violent death, and the second who had come to an untimely end,.—steels herself to meet the brutal soldier who was his murderer with all the contemptuous and daring pride of her youth :—" And when Jehu was come to Jezreel, Jezebel heard of it ; and she painted her face, and tired her head, and looked out at a window. And as Jehu entered in at the gate, she said, 'Had Zimri peace who slew his master?' And he lifted up his face to the window and said, ' Who is on my side? who?' And there looked out to him two or three eunuchs. And he said, Throw her down.' So they threw her down: and some of her blood was sprinkled on the wall, and on the horses : and he trode her under foot. And when he was come in, he did oat and drink, and said, Go. see now this cursed woman, and bury her, for she is a king's daughter.' And they went to bury her : but they found no more of her than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands." Whereupon Jehu, with all the self-satisfaction of a fulfiller of prophecy, remarks that Elijah's prophecy, that dogs should eat the flesh of Jezebel, and not leave enough of her to say, "This is Jezebel," is fulfilled. Surely a grand, if a ghastly,end to a grand and ghastly life, which Mr. Bayne should have kept for its natural close. Jezebel's last political comment was a sagacious as well as an imperious one. Zimri, who slew his master, had not peace; neither had Jehu, for "in those days the Lord began to cat Israel short ; and Hazael smote them in all the coasts of Israel." Mr. Bayne has not made the end of his play either so grand or so grim as the Bible has made the end of Jezebel, and as he himself has sketched her in the early part of the play.

A great part of the picture of Elijah, especially that of his con- test with the priests of Baal and of the excitement which followed it, is exceedingly fine. But we are thoroughly dissatisfied with the somewhat magniloquent and watery expansion given to Elijah's great vision in Horeb, though we agree with Mr. Bayne that that vision should be interpreted as correcting and chastening the fiery passion of Elijah's heart after the massacre of the priests of Baal. However, we have carped so much already—where there is so much to admire that it is ungracious and ungenerous to carp,— that we prefer now to give some specimen of Mr. Bayne's strongest painting. The following is the picture drawn of Elijah by his servant when, after his conquest and massacre of the prophets of Baal, his prayer for rain is answered :—

',When we had reached the eastern brow, he knelt,

Staying his breast upon a rock, and prayed In agony of earnestness for rain.

Seven times, at bidding of his voice or eye,

I went to Carmel's loftiest crest that fronts The western sea. Six times I only saw The pallid yearning of the nearer waves, And the keen silver-edge of stainless light Where sea mot sky. But at the seventh, behold A delicate hand, fine-fingered, on that line Gleamed like a lily. Then I hosted back, And told the prophet. Quickly he arose; A fiery agitation shook his frame.

To me he spoke not, but from crag to crag, Downhill, with giant leaps, and form that showed Larger than human in the gloom, he rushed To seek the king. I saw him gird his loins

To run beside the royal chariot."

In the Bible, by the way, Elijah's attitude during the prayer for rain is one of even greater humility and anguish of supplication ; he "cast himself down upon the earth and put his face between his knees." The following is the prophet's own subsequent account of what he felt :—

"Why should I, point by point, rehearse to thee

What thou rememberest well, the glory wrought Upon Mount Carmel; the bared sword of God, The might acclamation of the throng?

But know thou this, that, as I stood alone Against Baal's hundreds, armed with might Divine, Through the deep chambers of my heart there rang The tones of ancient prophecy, which said That to His folk Jehovah would raise up A prophet like to Moses, whom they all Would follow and obey. Pride's whisper then, Faint as the serpent's rustle among stones, Glided into my heart that I was he ; That Ephraim, melting at my voice, would give The hand to Judah, and they both would go,

With weeping loud for that great weight of joy,

Up to God's house in company, and then That all earth's nations would bow down the knee To David's seed on Zion hill enthroned.

Thou dost remember well how, at the last, The heavens grew black with clouds, the rising wind Sang from the sea, the vivid lightnings played, And with a thunder-crack that shook the hill, Sprang to the earth the cataracts of rain.

"Oh ! Nabotb, how my spirit burned in me !

Since that dread hour when first, on Gilead's hill; The Breath of God fell on me, never yet Had joy and exultation thrilled my breast With such a flood of rapture. Down I rushed, Called to the King to mount his chariot And urge his horses, lest the trampling floods Should bar his way. Since earliest glimpse of dawn I had not tasted food, and sore my toil In slaying those false prophets. Now the night Had fallen. But the terrible joy that rang Within my swelling bosom gave me strength, And by the chariot of the King I ran, Up the long hills, across the vales, and through - The rising torrents, 'mid the streaming rain.

I thought, 'The King will gladly take me in, And set me on his right hand, so that I May execute the judgments of the Lord, And be a greater Moses in the land.'

So ran I till we came to Jezreel, And Ahab reined up at his palace door."

That would be a perfect, as it is a very powerful picture of the prophet who so haughtily_opposed the King in his idolatry, and then with the true Oriental feeling for the monarch's greatness ran like a mere servant beside his chariot as soon as he thought he had converted him to the true faith, but for what seems to us the faulty though shadowy suggestion that his ambition was partly worldly as well as personal, and took the form of the hope that he himself should be raised by Ahab to be the royal instru- ment in the reformation he counselled. The passion of religious excitement which made Elijah run before Ahab's carriage to Jezreel like a mere servant, seems to us to be of the same kind which made David dance before the Ark as it entered Jerusalem,—in _fact, a passion of exultant self-humiliation. It was not earthly, but spiritual ambition which filled him ; and the revulsion came with the proof not that he (personally) was held in as light esteem as ever by the Court, but that the great signs and wonders of which he had been the prophet, were lost upon the land and on the throne, and that all things were "to continue as they were from the beginning of creation."

We should do a great injustice to this poem if we did not express our sincere admiration for its many beautiful little lyrics. We have no room left for some of the longer of these, of which the hymn to Baal, describing the rising sun, as it lights up the Lebanon and brings spring to the earth, is perhaps the finest ; but we will give one little specimen. We do not think Mr. Bayne adds much to his poem by introducing the figure of the Tyrian Elissa (the future Dido of the 2Eneid) into it as a niece of Jezebel's. It is one of those side-vistas which he loves, but which seem to us rather to distract than to relieve his reader's attention. But whatever we may think of the suggestion itself, no one will deny the great beauty of Elissa's little song :— " Leave the bonny bubble floating, Faint, fair, and gay,

Leave the bonny bubble floating, Leave, leave, I say.

"On the bonny bubble floating Gaze while you may, Crimson, orange, pearly, golden, Brighter than day.

"Leave the bonny bubble floating, Oh, could it stay !

Look, a wandering wind has smote it, Gone, gone for aye !"

That will give the reader a fair measure of Mr. Bayne's more delicate work,—perhaps the most perfect, though not the most

powerful that his very unequal but beautiful poem contains. We I may answer for it that no one will read it as a whole without real enjoyment, nor without feeling that it is a poet who writes, though a poet of very unequal powers of execution.