R370507D. Strafford.
John Bull, 7 May 1837, p. 225.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 402–403.
Covent Garden.—The principal attraction of the week here has been the new tragedy, entitled Strafford, from the pen of Mr. Browning, author of the poem of Paracelsus. It was produced by Mr. Macready, on the occasion of his benefit, on Monday evening last, and has been twice repeated since: but for which, unless our notice could have been entirely eulogistic, courtesy would have constrained us to pass it over with merely a cursory comment. The plot of the piece is by no means intricate. The first act opens with a meeting of the republican party, Hampden, the younger Vane, (J. Webster), Hollis (G. Bennett), Pym (Vandenhoff), &c., to discuss the fittest measures to be adopted with regard to Wentworth, the future Earl of Strafford (Macready), who is then presented to us as just arrived from his government in Ireland. He has an interview with Charles I, (Dale), in which he removes the suspicions which the Court party, as it was termed, with the Queen at its head, had excited in the monarch’s mind, and, receiving the patent of an Earldom as a pledge of constant favour, takes his leave to summon a parliament in Ireland. In the second act there is another meeting of the self-same party, in which Pym, as he had done at their former council, overrules their indignation against Strafford; and the Earl, who has returned from his mission to the sister country, has another interview with the King. In this, he upbraids him with the forfeiture of his word, his desertion of the plan of policy that had been arranged between them, the war with Scotland, and then quits the Court once more, to conduct that war. The third act brings with it Strafford rejoicing at the hope of crushing both the republican and the Queen’s party, “the Court and the Cabal;” when, like “a woodcock to his own springe,” he is overwhelmed by Pym’s sudden impeachment of him at the bar of the House of Lords. In the fourth act, the vacillation of Charles, the repentance of most of the republicans (except Pym), touched by Strafford’s noble bearing on his trial, which is supposed to pass off the stage, and the endeavours of the Countess of Carlisle (Miss H. Faucit) to rouse the King to effectual steps for the preservation of his loyal subject, form the leading features. The fifth gives us Strafford in prison, with his children; the frustration of a plan of the Countess’s for his escape, by the vigilance of Pym; and terminates with Strafford’s staggering out to execution. Such is the outline of the plot.
Strafford and Pym are the chief parts, on whom devolves “the burden of the mystery.” Their two absorbing passions, as drawn by the author, are personal attachment to his Sovereign in the one; love of country in the other. Charles is depicted, not to speak it profanely, “as a reed shaken by the wind;” the Queen is a slight sketch of a termagant, a miniature Mrs. Sneak; the Countess of Carlisle, who, as memoir writers tell us, was first mistress to Strafford, and then concubine to the moral Pym, is converted by his “so potent wand” into a pure single-hearted girl, attached to Strafford, yet letting “concealment prey on her damask cheek.” The younger Vane has some animated speeches; the rest of the dramatis personæ are nonentities. Viewed as a whole, the tragedy wants interest. This proceeds in part, perhaps, from its subject, and in part, certainly, from the manner in which it has been handled. The fate of Strafford is an epoch to the historian of those troubled times; but his life and fate, considered as the ground-work of a poem, are purely episodical. In this light they only affect us as shadowing forth the tragic end of the “Lord’s anointed.” Over his corpse Democracy strode wildly and fiercely to its bloody consummation; and it is in this consummation that the mind becomes absorbed. Strafford was a, not the, chief actor on the scene. This is a fault inherent in the subject, and not to be lightly surmounted. The life of Strafford constitutes a part, not a whole. In his treatment of it the author has created no adventitious interest to redeem this original defect. The introduction of the Countess, under her poetic aspect, may be a “purpureus pannus” to the reader of the play; to the spectator there is so little loveable presented in Strafford, that he can hardly reconcile so improbable a love to himself. He can have no sympathy with it. Strafford was ambitious, wholly so; not that we mean to deny him great virtues; but they centered in self. The author tries to throw this in the shade, and to bring out a personal affection for Charles, with a yearning for its being reciprocated, in full relief, as his characteristic. Yet he has not availed himself of any resource within the domain of invention, to countenance this supposed ruling passion. It is a naked poetic license; an offensive assumption. The more so, as the Strafford of Mr. Browning is devoid of that reverence for a kingly head, which was so habitual to the time as to hold even the lowest scoffers and brawlers in personal awe. He is made to upbraid the Monarch in terms, not to be tolerated from an equal. In this very gratuitous tone given to the character of Strafford, and the shuffling and evasive meanness as gratuitously attributed to the character of Charles, unredeemed by any of the majesty which was to the last as “a tower of strength” to the latter, lie some of the chief blemishes of the portrait-painting of the play. Pym, too, is out of keeping from the same process. To the end, he is made to garner a love of Strafford in his “heart of hearts;” which strong feeling he is represented as enabled to overcome solely through the stronger passion of patriotism.After all, the author has only split upon a rock, as hard to be avoided as the loadstone mount of Sindbad. It is given but to few to conciliate historic and poetic truth; to make the former gain substance as well as form from the latter. By these “quillets of the brain,” however, he has lost the best means of animating the personages of his drama. Humanising them, as he has fondly thought, he has destroyed their humanity. Imagining, perhaps, that he trusted solely to the indomitable spirit of Strafford to work out the character, he has missed the effect by lighting it at an ideal fire. The bold purposes, wise intentions, infirm yet regulated temper of the man, engrossed with the hope of establishing his Sovereign’s power, in order that he himself might prove “the be all, and the end all,” evaporate in the play into an irritable, self-willed political adventurer; and the tortuous designs, firm resolves, and daring craft of Pym and his “rebel crew,” are steeped in womanish tears. There was room for fine contrasts betwixt the bright and chivalrous grandeur of the loyalists, and the intense, but gloomy and turbid pride of the levellers of the day; and the court furnished a fitting canvass for the picture. However, our business lies with what is, not what might have been. In the conduct of the drama, the fourth act is entirely “otiosus;” its interest is over with the third, which brings Strafford to his trial, and from this the piece should have been rapidly hurried to a conclusion. The best parts of the play are its opening, which is very spirited, and dashes at once “in medius res;” the close of the third act, when Strafford, after his agony of proud resistance, submits to the arrest of Maxwell; and the touching, and, from the manner of its execution, poetically devised, and novel introduction of the children in the last scene. In particular the close of the third act, with the retainers of either party congregated at the door of the House of Lords, from which loud and fierce cries are ever and anon heard, its being thrown open so as to discover in the background the assembled Lords and impeaching Commons, and the falling of the curtain just as Strafford rushes through the door and kneels at the bar, has a very scenic effect. It reminds one very strongly of the French coups de théatre. The language of the play is nearly allied to the humiles sermones of Horace. It is all but prosaic; being studiously denuded of poetical ornament. We did not recognise half a dozen lines of such sustained rhythm or imaginative beauty even as the following, put into the mouth of Pym,—“When Eliot’s brow grew broad with noble thoughts.” The verse seemed truncated, cut into half, jerked out as it were. Too great an endeavour after naturalness has occasioned several phrases that border on the ludicrous; thus, Carlisle observes to Strafford of his detractors, they “one may say, nibble at what you do;” and Strafford, just before his execution, exclaims, “But ’tis so awkward—dying in a hurry.” Altogether the language, as the play itself, is suggestive rather than explanatory. To relish either fully would require in the spectator a tolerably minute acquaintance with the political struggles of the time, and a previous reading of the drama. Events are implied, not stated; thoughts inferred, not uttered. The acting requires little remark. Macready looked as if fresh from the hands of Vandyke; and his personation came nobly up to the author’s imaginings, haughty, overbearing, sudden in resolve, and abrupt in manner as he has drawn Strafford, and with melancholy presages stamped on his thoughtful brow—a grace owing to the player, “his whole function suiting with forms to his conceit.” Knowing, as we have often been made aware by many beautiful passages in his acting, of his attention to all recorded minutiæ in order to heighten the verisimilitude of character, we were surprised at his giving to the part the firm, elastic walk, and upright bearing of youth, rather than the premature weakness which had bowed Strafford’s stately frame. At all events, some marks of this about the period of his trial, when, as he expressed himself in one of his pleadings, the noble lords “had here this rag of mortality before them, worn out with numerous infirmities,” would have deepened the darkness thickening around him; it would have touched our sympathies more nearly. Little is to be said of the other actors. Either Pym imparted no character to Mr. Vandenhoff, or this gentleman none to it. Miss Faucit played with a gentle earnestness, in unison with the author’s conception.
Now, unfavourable as is our judgment on this tragedy, it has been given in no intolerant spirit. We would hardly have been so minute, or so diffuse, on an unworthy subject. It is for the promise which the effort betokens that we speak. There is evidence of power in it, from which failure cannot detract. The very faults of the drama are proofs of talent. The author has aimed at the Greek model in its construction, and successfully. He has shown, and well, the powerlessness of man’s will against destiny. The failure here has been the fault of his choice of a hero; for Strafford was not “a great man struggling with the storms of fate.” Nor, as we previously observed, has he made him such. The very plainness of the language, too, evinces strength, and is good augury for the future. In his scorn for what are y’clept poetic plays, in other words, for dramas made the vehicle of a puling poetry, he has rushed into the opposite extreme, and rudely discarded the grace of diction. But in this, there is a self-reliance, and a knowledge of the true ends of theatric representation which we honour. In his next attempt, let him bring on the scene Character in Action, and we will answer for it that he triumphs.
Reviewed:
Strafford (RB), London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, 1837.
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