aid?

There must be nothing attempted to make the exhibition subservient
to what is vulgarly termed a moral purpose. The highest moral
purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama is the
teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies,
the knowledge of itself.

A great drama on the story of the Borgias could certainly have much to
teach the human heart in the knowledge of itself. It would be moral in
its presentation of the most ignobly splendid vices that have swayed the
world; of the pride and defiance which rise like a strangling serpent,
coiling about the momentary weakness of good; of that pageant in which
the pagan gods came back, drunk and debauched with their long exile
under the earth, and the garden-god assumed the throne of the Holy of
Holies. Alexander, Caesar, Lucrezia, the threefold divinity, might be
shown as a painter has shown one of them on the wall of one of his own
chapels: a swinish portent in papal garments, kneeling, bloated,
thinking of Lucrezia, with fingers folded over the purple of his rings.
Or the family might have been shown as Rossetti, in one of the
loveliest, most cruel, and most significant of his pictures, has shown
it: a light, laughing masquerade of innocence, the boy and girl dancing
before the cushioned idol and her two worshippers.

Swinburne in _The Duke of Gandia_ has not dealt with the whole matter of
the story--only, in a single act of four scenes, with the heart or
essence of it. The piece is not drama for the stage, nor intended to be
seen or heard outside the pages of a book; but it is meant to be, and
is, a great, brief, dramatic poem, a lyric almost, of hate, ambition,
fear, desire, and the conquest of ironic evil. Swinburne has written
nothing like it before. The manner of it is new, or anticipated only in
the far less effectual _Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards_; the style,
speech, and cadence are tightened, restrained, full of sullen
fierceness. Lucrezia, strangely, is no more than a pale image passing
without consciousness through some hot feast-room; she is there, she is
hidden under their speech, but we scarcely see her, and, like her
historians, wonder if she was so evil, or only a scholar to whom learned
men wrote letters, as if to a pattern of virtue. But in the father and
son live a flame and a cloud, the flame rising steadily to beat back and
consume the cloud. It is Caesar Borgia who is the flame, and Alex