he complete art of the playwright,
and achieved it? Byron, Coleridge, Browning, Tennyson, all wrote plays
for the stage; all had their chance of being acted; Tennyson only made
even a temporary success, and _Becket_ is likely to have gone out with
Irving. Landor wrote plays full of sublime poetry, but not meant for the
stage; and now we have Swinburne following his example, but with an
unexampled lyrical quality. Why, without capacity to deal with it, are
our poets so insistent on using the only form for which a special
faculty, outside the pure poetic gift, is inexorably required?

A poet so great as Swinburne, possessed by an ecstasy which turns into
song as instinctively as the flawless inspiration of Mozart turned into
divine melody, cannot be questioned. Mozart, without a special genius
for dramatic music, wrote _Die Zauberfloete_ to a bad libretto with as
great a perfection as the music to _Don Giovanni_, which had a good one.
The same inspiration was there, always apt to the occasion. Swinburne is
ready to write in any known form of verse, with an equal facility and
(this is the all-important point) the same inspiration. Loving the form
of the drama, and capable of turning it to his uses, not of bending it
to its own, he has filled play after play with music, noble feeling,
brave eloquence. Here in this briefest and most actual of his plays--an
act, an episode--he has concentrated much of this floating beauty, this
overflowing imagination, into a few stern and adequate words, and made a
new thing, as always, in his own image. It is the irony that has given
its precise form to this representation of a twofold Satan, as Blake
might have seen him in vision, parodying God with unbreakable pride. The
conflict between father and son ends in a kind of unholy litany. 'And
now,' cries Caesar, fresh from murder,

Behoves thee rise again as Christ our God,
Vicarious Christ, and cast as flesh away
This grief from off thy godhead.

And the old man, temporising with his grief, answers:

Thou art subtle and strong.
I would thou hadst spared him--couldst have spared him.

And the son replies:

Sire,
I would so too. Our sire, his sire and mine,
I slew him not for lust of slaying, or hate,
Or aught less like thy wiser spirit and mine.

But Caesar-Satan has already said the epilogue to the whole
representation, when, speaking to hi