But, by this time, what has happened to the second
brother? It is easy to believe that Beddoes was
always ready to begin a new play rather than finish
an old one. But it is not so certain that his
method was quite as inexcusable as his critics assert.
To the reader, doubtless, his faulty construction
is glaring enough; but Beddoes wrote his plays to be
acted, as a passage in one of his letters very clearly
shows. ’You are, I think,’ he writes
to Kelsall, ’disinclined to the stage: now
I confess that I think this is the highest aim of
the dramatist, and should be very desirous to get
on it. To look down on it is a piece of impertinence,
as long as one chooses to write in the form of a play,
and is generally the result of one’s own inability
to produce anything striking and affecting in that
way.’ And it is precisely upon the stage
that such faults of construction as those which disfigure
Beddoes’ tragedies matter least. An audience,
whose attention is held and delighted by a succession
of striking incidents clothed in splendid speech,
neither cares nor knows whether the effect of the whole,
as a whole, is worthy of the separate parts.
It would be foolish, in the present melancholy condition
of the art of dramatic declamation, to wish for the
public performance of
Death’s Jest Book;
but it is impossible not to hope that the time may
come when an adequate representation of that strange
and great work may be something more than ’a
possibility more thin than air.’ Then,
and then only, shall we be able to take the true measure
of Beddoes’ genius.
Perhaps, however, the ordinary reader finds Beddoes’
lack of construction a less distasteful quality than
his disregard of the common realities of existence.
Not only is the subject-matter of the greater part
of his poetry remote and dubious; his very characters
themselves seem to be infected by their creator’s
delight in the mysterious, the strange, and the unreal.
They have no healthy activity; or, if they have, they
invariably lose it in the second act; in the end, they
are all hypochondriac philosophers, puzzling over
eternity and dissecting the attributes of Death.
The central idea of Death’s Jest Book—the
resurrection of a ghost—fails to be truly
effective, because it is difficult to see any clear
distinction between the phantom and the rest of the
characters. The duke, saved from death by the
timely arrival of Wolfram, exclaims ‘Blest hour!’
and then, in a moment, begins to ponder, and agonise,
and dream:
And yet how palely, with what
faded lips
Do we salute this unhoped
change of fortune!
Thou art so silent, lady;
and I utter
Shadows of words, like to
an ancient ghost,
Arisen out of hoary centuries
Where none can speak his language.
Orazio, in his brilliant palace, is overcome with
the same feelings:
Methinks, these fellows, with
their ready jests,
Are like to tedious bells,
that ring alike
Marriage or death.