The Queen Mother. Rosamond. Two Plays. By Algernon Charles
Swinburne.—London: B. M. Pickering, 1861.
This little volume (beautifully executed, by the way, in point of typography) must
by no means be thrown aside with the poetic trifles of the season. Mr. Swinburne has
grave deficiencies, but he has at the same time several points about him which indicate
the spirit of a true poet. He has obviously studied with intense pains the dramatists
of the Elizabethan age, and he has drawn from this study a remarkable power over their
modes of thought and diction, so that his language blooms redundantly with all the
conceits and elaborate imagery which was characteristic of that time, and these expressed
in forms of phraseology which partake to a great degree of those which were current
at the same period. This phraseology gives to Mr. Swinburne's writing a somewhat quaint
and affected air; nevertheless it is manifest as you read that the style is one which
he has made his own by habit and congeniality of thought, and that he is no mere imitator
of antique diction.
These compositions should be called dramatic poems rather than plays, as they are
not in any wise adapted for the stage. There is not enough action about them for dramatic
purposes; and yet Mr. Swinburne has no doubt had before his eyes the histrionic strut
and rage of our older dramas, and has followed that model in his dialogues. But the
involved meaning, the crowded and often far-fetched metaphors, and the contorted phraseology
in which Mr. Swinburne's characters express themselves, will make their language quite
incomprehensible to a theatrical audience. The entire lack of any human and moral
interest about them would be equally fatal to their success on the stage. The author
evidently loves to delineate the morbid aspects of human nature, and he delineates
them in a highiy spasmodic style of art. If, however, you are willing to overcome
your repugnance to this sort of thing, and will take the trouble of construing Mr.
Swinburne's difficult scenes, you will be forced to own in many places the signs of
a rich fancy, and a powerful grasp of ideas.
In the first of these plays the character of Catherine di Medici disappoints us. The
motives and feelings by which she was actuated would no doubt be dark and latent enough
in her real life; but it is the business of the dramatic poet to lay bare by some
means or other the workings of these dark spirits. But we have a much more lively
idea of Catherine from Miss Freer's biographies than from Mr. Swinburne's dramatic
presentment. The character of Charles IX., however, is admirably drawn, and with great
historic accuracy. The uncontrolled passion with which he gloats fiercely on the coming
Bartholomew, alternating with his relenting words, and the relations of both to the
feelings with which he regards his mistress Denise, are the fruits of a very high
poetic invention. The horrors of the massacre, too, are brought vividly before the
reader's fancy with an artistic power of no common order.
The tragedy of Rosamond is conceived in a similar spirit. The contrast is finely drawn between the gentle,
loving, sorrowing Rosamond and the hard and haughty Eleanor; but the scenes in which
this contrast is delineated, are expressed in language that is so difficult to construe,
in conceits that are so forced and artificial, that we fear Mr. Swinburne will not
attract the attention that his poem really deserves. He has much to learn before his
verse will become popular; he must restrain the redundant imagery in which his fancy
revels, and which so overloads his phraseology as to obscure the sense; and he must
refrain from going out of his way to catch unnecessary metaphors.