Mary. How dare you say it? Even for that he hates me. A low voice A voice of shipwreck on a shoreless sea! A low voice from the dust and from the grave (sitting on the ground), There, am I low enough now? Alice. Good Lord! how grim and ghastly looks her Grace, With both her knees drawn upward to her chin. There was an old-world tomb beside my father's, And this was open'd, and the dead were found Sitting, and in this fashion; she looks a corpse." Such gloom as that can hardly be said to deepen even in the final scene, but it spreads. The reader is made to see the hatred in which the Queen's policy is held out of doors, and the confusion which it has introduced within. On the whole, I think I may say that this is a play which will compare with something more than advantage with Shakespeare's "Henry VIII." Of course that is by no means the finest even of the historical plays of Shakespeare, nor is it probably wholly his own, and I only mention it because it, too, contains a study of the good and of the evil qualities of the Tudor character, but then no play of any modern poet's would be likely to rank with any of the greater plays of Shakespeare. Certainly I should be surprised to hear that any true critic would rate "Queen Mary," whether in dramatic force or in general power, below "Henry VIII.”, and my own impression is that it is a decidedly finer work of dramatic art. The morbid passions of Mary, the brief intervals of her lucid and energetic action, the gloom of her physical decay, and the despair of her moral desolation, together make up a picture which it would be impossible for any one who can enter into it ever to forget. Becket," quite the second of Tennyson's poems in dramatic power, is not the equal of "Queen Mary." The two main portions of the play are hardly fused together. We pass from the one play,—the play on the great ecclesiastical hero,-to the other play,— the play on the King's mistress, Fair Rosamund, whom Becket is made to save from the dagger and the cup of poison without, we suppose, any 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 interest. But even so the connection between the two threads seems a rather arbitrary knot. The interest of "Becket centres somewhat more than it ought to do in Henry, and somewhat 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. But even "Becket" will not add to Tennyson's reputation as a dramatic writer, for, taken as a whole, and in spite of some passages which perhaps surpass any in "Queen Mary," it falls considerably below that fine study of the most unfortunate of the Tudors. The great poet of the nineteenth century will certainly never be regarded as a great dramatist. But that, being the great lyric poet he is, he should be so great as he is even in drama, will always be his singular distinction. 66 IX NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE HAWTHORNE has been called a mystic, which he was not,—and a psychological dreamer, which he was in very slight degree. He was really the ghost of New England, —I do not mean the "spirit," nor the 'phantom," but the ghost in the older sense in which that term is used, the thin, rarefied essence which is supposed to be found somewhere behind the physical organisation: embodied, indeed, and not at all in a shadowy or diminutive earthly tabernacle, but yet only half embodied in it, endowed with a certain painful sense of the gulf between his nature and its organisation, always recognising the gulf, always trying to bridge it over, and always more or less unsuccessful in the attempt. His writings are not exactly spiritual writings, for there is no dominating spirit in them. They are ghostly writings. Hawthorne was, to my mind, a sort of sign to New England of the divorce that has been going on there (and not less perhaps in old England) between its people's spiritual and earthly nature, and of the difficulty which they will soon feel, if they are to be absorbed more and more in that shrewd hard common sense which is one of their most striking characteristics, in even communicating with their former self. Hawthorne, with all his shyness, and tenderness, and literary reticence, shows very distinct traces also of understanding well the cold, inquisitive, and shrewd spirit which besets the Yankees even more than other commercial peoples. His heroes have usually not a little of this hardness in them. Coverdale, for instance, in The Blythdale Romance, and Holgrave, in The House of the Seven Gables, are of this class of shrewd, cold inquisitive heroes. Indeed there are few of his tales without a character of this type. But though Hawthorne had a deep sympathy with the practical as well as the literary genius of New England, it was always in a ghostly kind of way, as though he were stricken by some spell which half-paralysed him, and so prevented him from communicating with the life. around him, as though he saw it only by a reflected light. His spirit haunted rather than ruled his body; his body hampered his spirit. Yet his external career was not only not romantic, but identified with all the dullest routine of commercial duties. That a man who consciously telegraphed, as it were, with the world, transmitting meagre messages through his material organisation, should have been first a custom-house officer in Massachusetts, and then the consul in Liverpool, brings out into the strongest possible relief the curiously representative character in which he stood to New England as its literary or intellectual ghost. There is nothing more ghostly in his writings than his account of the consulship in Liverpool,-how he began by trying to communicate frankly with his fellow-countrymen, how he found the task more and more difficult, and gradually drew back into the twilight of his reserve, how he shrewdly and some what coldly watched "the dim shadows as they go and come," speculated idly on their fate, and all the time discharged the regular routine of consular business, witnessing the usual depositions, giving captains to captainless crews, affording meagrely doled-out advice or assistance to Yankees when in need of a friend, listening to them when they were only anxious to offer, not ask, assistance, and generally observing them from that distant and speculative outpost of the universe whence all common things looked strange. Hawthorne, who was a delicate critic of himself, was well aware of the shadowy character of his own genius, though hardly aware that precisely here lay its curious and thrilling power. In the preface to Twice-told Tales he tells us frankly, "The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear brown twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages. It is one of his favourite theories that there must be a vague, remote, and shadowy element in the subject-matter of any narrative with which his own imagination can successfully deal. Sometimes he apologises for this idealistic limitation to his artistic aims. "It was a folly," he says in his preface to The Scarlet Letter, "with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age, or to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, when at every moment the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort would have been to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus to make it a |