SOME ASPECTS OF MR. STEPHEN

PHILLIPS'S NEW TRAGEDY

MORE than one critic of Paolo and Francesca has justly pointed out that the concluding lines of the drama have a ring of the seventeenth-century dramatist, Webster, about them. The final verdict upon the unhappy lovers, pronounced by the injured husband and brother as he gazes upon his two newly-slain victims

I did not know the dead could have such hair.
Hide them. They look like children fast asleep!

was in all probability suggested by the famous cry of Ferdinand, in The Duchess of Malfi, when his eye falls upon his murdered sister:

Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young.

The desire to conceal the features of the dead, and the comment on the lives cut off in their early prime, are the same in both instances. But though both utterances are at first startling to the reader or spectator, they are not alike open to the same defence. For in the modern tragedy

the words of Giovanni, upon which the curtain falls, would appear to represent a kind of final epitaph on the lovers. In any case, it is the only approach to a moral that the author vouchsafes us. Indeed, from the first scene of the play to the last, it is impossible to define the poet's own judgment of the crime that brings about so terrible a retribution. At one moment he seems desirous to emphasise the action of Paolo as being specially ungrateful, unnatural, and treacherous. At another, he dwells upon the youthfulness of the pair as something of an excuse. At another, again, he would appear to regard them as entangled by Destiny in a certain web from which it were idle to expect them to extricate themselves. And the strange plea is more than once advanced in their behalf that the lovers wooed, and were wooed, respectively, "against their will,” though the development of the story, as worked out by the dramatist, by no means supports this pretension. The lady, more especially, never from the first offers any appreciable resistance to the course that events are taking.

It is this undetermined attitude of the dramatist that more than anything else makes his treatment of the theme unsatisfying. With whom lies the chief responsibility for the guilt of the lovers-if guilt it be—is left unsettled. The great poet who first treated the subject was able to throw no light on it in this direction, save in so far that he recognised eternal punishment as its righteous

Dante had no

doom. room for detail in his consummate and world-famous episode. He does not add a word that could lead the reader to take a side in the matter. The deformity and savage temper of the husband, and the deceit practised on the unhappy maiden by her father, in allowing her to believe that it was Paolo to whom she was betrothed, are alike ignored. The simple outlines of the story-an ill-assorted match, love, temptation, retribution-are indicated; and in the space of some fifty lines no more could have been told. But when Dante's version was chosen for expansion into either narrative verse or drama, this policy of reticence became no longer possible. Leigh Hunt recognised this when he wrote his Story of Rimini. He felt that some palliation must be provided for the infidelity of the lady, and he found it in the treachery of her own father. Indeed, that there should be no mistake in the matter, he boldly labelled his poem, The Story of Rimini; or, Fruits of a Parent's Falsehood. He might have borrowed Wordsworth's heading to a well-known lyric and called it A Lesson to Fathers. Mr. Phillips wholly ignores the incident of deception on the parent's side; nor does he submit any other definite excuse for the lovers. As to whether pity or blame is to be predominant in the reader's judgment of their offence, no guidance is even suggested by the dramatist. The reader purchases the volume and takes his choice. He must draw his own moral.

But, as I have said, for taking this course Mr. Phillips cannot claim the authority of his great original. Dante's method does not, indeed, admit of his passing his own comments on the guilt of the lovers, but at least they are represented as performing an eternal expiation. In his method there is, indeed, no playing with sin, no minimising its eternal significance. But a poet, borrowing the subject for dramatic purposes, cannot have recourse to the theological aspect of the situation. Mr. Phillips does, indeed, introduce one, and only one, allusion to the source and inspiration of his play. In a remarkable passage towards the close of the fourth act, he makes the lovers anticipate the destiny which Dante was afterwards to pronounce for them. "Ah, Paolo!" exclaims Francesca,

if we

Should die to-night, then whither would our souls
Repair? There is a region which priests tell of
Where such as we are punished without end.

The lady, being the weaker vessel, shows some concern at the prospect, but her lover retorts by welcoming so blest a fate, defying the Almighty to do His worst. If only the lovers are allowed to remain together, he declares, even hell will be a heaven:

Us, then, whose only pain can be to part,
How wilt Thou punish? For what ecstasy
Together to be blown about the globe!
What rapture in perpetual fire to burn
Together!-where we are is endless fire.

There centuries shall in a moment pass,
And all the cycles in one hour elapse!

How wilt Thou punish us who cannot part?

Probably Mr. Phillips held this oblique recognition of the poet from whom he borrows as that poet's due, but its effect-as suggesting that the characters have no existence independent of Dante -is singularly undramatic.

The drama has been welcomed by the critics with a rare unanimity of applause, one reviewer alone so far as I have noticed-having demurred to the general verdict. With some of the praise thus liberally bestowed, it is pleasant to be able to agree. Mr. Phillips has evidently a shrewd sense of what will be effective on the stage. He understands construction, and the value of situations and of climax, and-greatest rarity of all— he errs on the side of brevity rather than of diffuseness. The story is worked out without unnecessary circumlocution, and there is not much of the dialogue that could be spared. Save for the unfortunate digression into the theological speculations of the "Inferno," there does not seem much work for the pruning-knife of the stage-manager to do. Yet this very circumstance seems to point to the radical defect of the drama. It is too brief for the adequate development of the serious human interests involved; it is rather the skeleton of a tragedy than a tragedy. It wants clothing, or elaborating, with something that the author does not provide. It lacks some