THE important fact concerning Michael Field is, of course, that she is a tragic poet. The truth may seem too obvious to need stating, when we glance down the list of her works and observe that of the twenty-seven complete plays created within thirty years every one has a tragic theme. But the attributes of a tragic poet are not necessarily revealed in the externals of his art: more than another he is difficult to recognize by his theme, form, and manner. If he could be confidently measured by a rule and appraised on a formula, many anomalies might be drawn to our net, including the urbane and essentially comic spirit of the author of Cato, and (not using too fine a mesh in the net) the mere dramaturgic facility of the author of Herod. With such as these, behind the formula of tragedy nothing remains—;no tragic vision, no sense of inimical and warring forces, no terror at their subtle and formidable power, no pity for human creatures doomed to live. But surely it is in these imponderable things that the tragic poet is made manifest, whether they take the garment of tragedy or, as often with Thomas Hardy, gleam sombrely in a lyric. It is in possessing them, and possessing them intensely, with a fierce dramatic impulse driving them, that the greatness of Michael Field consists.
Yet, once assured of the nature of our poet’s genius, the mere data of manner become significant. All the plays are tragedies, some of them in Elizabethan form, of five-act length. The very titles are eloquent. Michael Field took thought for the naming of her plays; and although she was often content to adopt simply the name of the protagonist, that is always resonant. Thus Attila, Borgia, Mariamne, Deirdre, Tristan, Fair Rosamund are words with solemn echoes; but, more than that, they indicate the vast issues to which this mind was drawn, and suggest the range of which it was capable. Sometimes a phrase was chosen for a title, as The Tragic Mary. This was lifted, with acknowledgments, from Walter Pater; and no apology is needed on that score, for surely it is no minor part of a poet’s equipment to know how “to take his own wherever he finds it.” In that sense The Race of Leaves may be said to have been lifted too—;from Homer and Marcus Aurelius; The World at Auction possibly from Gibbon or some much earlier historian, and In the Name of Time certainly from Shakespeare.
A complete list of the plays, with their dates, will be found in the Bibliography at the end of this book. There are, as I said, twenty-seven of them; and they were wrought between the years 1881 and 1911. The last four were not published until after the poet’s death; but of these In the Name of Time, which did not appear until 1919, was being written so long before as 1890; and A Question of Memory was first printed for the actors when the play was performed at the Independent Theatre in October 1893.
Besides complete plays, however, there is a masque called Noontide Branches (printed at Oxford by the Daniel Press in 1899), which has charming associations with the late Provost of Worcester and Mrs Daniel. And there is a trialogue called Stephania which was published in 1892. Indeed, the bibliographical interest of this poet’s work is very great, and would touch the history of several private printing-presses during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Thus Fair Rosamund and the poet’s Roman trilogy (The Race of Leaves, The World at Auction, and Julia Domna) were issued from the Vale Press of Mr Charles Ricketts, and nobly decorated by him. His border for Fair Rosamund is more than a lovely symbol; it expresses with the last fine touch of perception the wild-rose exquisiteness of the spirit of the play. The Tragic Mary was printed at the Chiswick Press in 1890: its binding was designed by Professor Selwyn Image, as also was the frontispiece of Stephania. Whym Chow, the rarest of the Michael Field books and the most curious in content, can hardly be said to have been published at all. It was printed in 1914 at the Eragny Press of Mr and Mrs Lucien Pissarro. Only twenty-seven copies were printed, and of these perhaps not more than half a dozen were given to intimate friends who might be trusted, if not to understand the poems (for they are extravagant and obscure), at least to sympathize with the occasion of them.
For all of their books, with one exception, the poets took pains to secure a comely form and adequate binding, often of white vellum. Even the group which appeared anonymously and in temporary covers between 1905 and 1911 (Borgia, A Question of Memory, The Tragedy of Pardon, Diane, The Accuser, A Messiah, Tristan) were printed with distinction on good paper. That the poets had sufficient means and leisure to indulge their taste may rejoice the bibliophile; but there is no doubt that the cost of books so produced was too high to gain them a large public. At one time they themselves suspected this, and experimented with a cheaper form. Hence the one exception (Brutus Ultor) to their practice. This work was published in 1886 as a small paper-covered booklet at the price of ninepence. Michael wanted, in her own phrase, “to reach the Demos”; and it is possible that she did so. But the Demos did not respond sufficiently to cause her to break her rule a second time.
Here, then, is a very large body of poetic drama, engaged upon subjects drawn from the literature and the history of many countries and many epochs. How to arrive at the significance of a total so extensive and various? A coherent impression of it would be difficult in any case; and within these narrow limits it may well be impossible. There is, however, one helpful fact, for the tragedies divide themselves almost automatically into three groups. The division is, indeed, so simple as almost to be suspect, and so definite as almost to be mechanical. It corresponds, too, in the most approved manner, with the early, middle, and later periods of the poet’s life. Thus there are, in progressive order from the beginning of her career, her English, Latin, and Eastern periods. The first deals with themes from Scottish chronicles and English history, and extends from 1881 to about 1890. In the second group, published from 1892 to 1903, the subjects are mainly drawn from Roman history; and the third, published from 1905 until the end, has for its outstanding features two plays of a projected trilogy from Josephus, another called A Messiah, and one which handles an Abyssinian love-tragedy.
Yet these categories are not quite so clear-cut, after all. One soon finds plays which do not correspond to the order to which they are supposed to belong, and discovers, on investigation, that they were not written in that order. But one makes at the same time the much more satisfying discovery that there are, within each group, affinities which hold the plays by a stronger bond than the arbitrary likeness of theme. Thus in the English period, the stage of the poet’s grave and strenuous youth, ideas are a motive force. This body of drama, if too dynamic to be ‘high-brow,’ may be justly defined as ‘intellectual,’ with a strange pouring of the new wine of modern thought into the old bottles of Elizabethan form. But with the approach of the Latin period the centre of power shifts from ideas to art. Form is now as important as, or more so than matter; and the two cannot be separated. The value of the work now is in its unity of beauty and truth. But when the last phase has come, and tragic vision has ranged far enough among the elements of its universe to make a final synthesis, it wheels back to close the cycle upon the idea of destiny. Vast passions are now the poet’s theme. Destiny, consisting in some overmastering elemental force, is now her inspiration. But it is no external, supernatural, or superhuman force. It subsists in nature, and resides within humanity: it belongs inalienably to the stuff of which man is made: it is the tragic shadow of life itself.
Coming at once to the English group, it is amusing to find that this starts off with a Greek play! That is to say, the earliest work published by the poets as Michael Field, Callirrhoë, has a Greek theme. It is a fact which at first glance threatens to embarrass our nice clear categories; but we remember in time that there is something almost absurdly native in the familiar spectacle of a Greek subject in the hands of a young English poet. Of course! What else, what other, could one expect?—;at least down to the epoch of yesterday to which our poet belonged. Was not this dependence upon the classics largely responsible for the revolt of contemporary poets—;as witness Anna Wickham:
We are outwearied with Persephone,
Rather than her, we’ll sing Reality.
The story of Callirrhoë comes from Pausanias; but our poet has modified the original by basing the motive of the plot upon the origin of the worship of Dionysos, which, as she admits, must have been much earlier. The anachronism is deliberate, however, and does not vitiate the theme, which is already un-Greek in its preoccupation with romantic passion. For Callirrhoë, a maiden of Calydon, is beloved to distraction by the Dionysiac priest Coresus. She loves him in return (or at least our poet makes us suspect so), but will not marry him because she cannot worship the new god. He thereupon calls down a curse upon her city, and the people begin to sicken and die of the plague. They send to consult the oracle at Dodona, and it is decreed that Callirrhoë must be sacrificed to Dionysos unless some one else will die in her stead. No one offers, however, and she goes to the altar prepared to die. Coresus makes ready to slay her, but when the moment comes to strike he kills himself instead of her. His sacrifice convinces Callirrhoë of the truth of his religion. Now that he is dead she realizes that she had loved him, and she kills herself as an offering to his god.
The play is a living work despite its ancient theme, its rather cumbrous machinery, and its mixed elements. But apart from certain passages of great imaginative beauty, its chief interest lies in the fact that its motives—;love, self-sacrifice, enthusiasm—;were the ruling motives of the poets’ lives and a frequent theme of their art. Therein, of course, lies the significance of their modification of the old story. Love they always saw as the greatest good of life, self-sacrifice as the dearest end of life, and enthusiasm (here enters Dionysos) as the means to life’s noblest expression. In this last element the work remains Greek, though Englished in so much else. Michael was, in that sense, a Thracian born, and she had compelled a peace with Apollo. She infused the play with the spirit of Dionysiac worship because that spirit was her own. And when one remembers the spiritual truth that was implicit in the cult of Dionysos, its contribution to the world’s growing belief in immortality, and its connexion with the origins of tragedy, there is peculiar appropriateness in such a subject for Michael Field’s first essay in drama. Thus the key-pieces to the poet’s meaning are found where Coresus is pleading with Callirrhoë for his love and his religion. He has begged her to join the Maenads’ revel, and so set her spirit free; and he declares of his god:
He came to bring
Life, more abundant life, into a world
That doled its joys as a starved city doles
Its miserable scraps of mummying bread.
He came to gladden and exalt, all such
Must suffer....
Callirrhoë. ... Of old the gods
Gave culture by the harp, the helm, the plough,
Not by the ivy-wand.
Coresus. Seems it so strange
That Semele’s sublime audacity
Should be the origin of life urbane?
We must be fools; all art is ecstasy,
All literature expression of intense
Enthusiasm: be beside yourself.
If a god violate your shrinking soul,
Suffer sublimely.
Callirrhoë. Yet I hold it true,
Divinity oft comes with quiet foot.
Coresus. To give a moment’s counsel or to guard
From instant peril. When a god forsakes
Olympus to infuse divinity
In man’s mean soul, he must confound, incite,
O’erwhelm, intoxicate, break up fresh paths
To unremembered sympathies. Nay, more,
Accompany me further in my thought—;
Callirrhoë, I tell you there are hours
When the Hereafter comes and touches me
O’ the cheek.
. . . . .
Callirrhoë. I tremble at your god, for terrible
In wrath I fear him; though you speak him fair.
. . . . .
Coresus. Turn not away, Callirrhoë; by goads
The ox-souled must be driven; yield response
To Heaven’s desire of thee; love humanly.
Love is the frenzy that unfolds ourselves;
Before it seize us we are ignorant
Of our own power as reed-bed of the pipe.
The rushes sang not; from Pan’s burning lips
Syrinx sucked music. Wert thou lute to love,
There were a new song of the heaven and earth.
Callirrhoë. ... I will not yield my love
To Bacchic priest....
Coresus. ... As unseasoned wood
That smokes and will not kindle is flung by
For any refuse purpose, while the train
Of torchlight sinuous winds among the hills,
A starry serpent, so art thou cast out,
An apathetic slave of commonplace,
Sluggish and irreceptive of true life,
From all high company of heavenly things.
Go to your home.
Callirrhoë. O, Heaven shelter it!
Act I, Scene 3
There is much that one would like to quote from this play, including the faun scenes (written by Henry) that have already been adopted into certain anthologies. Machaon, too, sceptic and humorist, might be used to confound the dullards who said that Michael Field had no humour. There is salt enough in him to give the whole tragedy another flavour, and he breaks at least one of the precious unities. His rationalism is away in a much colder region (he usually speaks in prose); and his conversion to the cult at the end is out of character. But though one may not linger on him, one must stop for a moment at Henry’s faun song. For here, very delicately and quietly, a greater theme is stated. And if we seek in this first work for an early glimpse of the larger vision which the poets attained at last, seeing the tragic element of life as life’s inescapable shadow, it will be found, quite unself-conscious, in this playful song.
I dance and dance! Another faun,
A black one, dances on the lawn.
He moves with me, and when I lift
My heels, his feet directly shift.
I can’t out-dance him, though I try;
He dances nimbler than I.
I toss my head, and so does he;
What tricks he dares to play on me!
I touch the ivy in my hair;
Ivy he has and finger there.
The spiteful thing to mock me so!
I will out-dance him! Ho! Ho! Ho!
Act III, Scene 6
Fair Rosamund, which appeared in the same volume with Callirrhoë, possesses equal dramatic power with greater control and a clearer sense of direction. The play is built with more economy; the movement is quicker, and the lyrical passages really belong to the setting and are not simply interludes to provide relief. Of the works of the first group, Fair Rosamund is perhaps the most perfect artistically, which may have been the reason why the poets chose it for reproduction in the Vale Press. But just because it is so balanced, and entirely free from afterthought, it is not fully typical of this group. We pass it, therefore, with two short quotations, and in addition only this fragment from Rosamund’s farewell to the King, to illustrate how our poet will sometimes gather infinity into a gem-like phrase:
Dear, my lord,
There are some thoughts
That through this stormy weather of my soul
Cannot now travel toward you.
Act II, Scene 5
In Act I, Scene 3, spies have just informed Queen Elinor of the King’s love for Rosamund, and of the place where he has hidden her:
Q. Elinor. Thank God for boys!
To have reared a treasonous brood from his own blood,
To have it at my call!
[To the King, who has entered.
I tell you to your face, that boy of ours,
Crowned Henry, has my love, because he has
My bridegroom’s eyes; but for the rest, my lord,
You’re old to think of love: when you were young
You thought not of it.
K. Henry. I embraced your lands,
Not you.
Q. Elinor. Plantagenet, you wronged yourself
As you had made the day and night your foe,
And roused
The violated seasons to confer
Each his peculiar catastrophe
Of death or pestilence.—;Embraced my lands!
I’ll shatter you
As Nature shatters—;you as impotent
As the uprooted tree to lash the earth....
Embraced my lands.—;Ah, I forget myself,
The loveless are insensate to presage;
’Tis in calamity’s harsh stubble-field
They learn to suffer. I’ll be harvester,
And sickle your ripe joys.
The last scene is in Rosamund’s room at Woodstock. It is night, and she is waiting for the King. But Queen Elinor has found the clue to the labyrinth, and is at this moment approaching the secret bower, intent upon killing her rival:
Rosamund. White moon, art thou the only visitant?
Thou lookst like death!
Dost glisten through the trees
My Henry bows his plumes to in the gloom?
He comes to-night; for good Sir Topaz said,
“My lady, put you on the crimson gown
The King had wrought for you, and ask no more,
But trust an old man’s word.
And be you ready.” It’s a silver night;
I’ll put me out apparel. How blood red
Burn the dark folds! I cannot put it on;
And yet I will. My lute; what is’t I want—;
God, or the King?
[Sings.
Love doth never know
Why it is beloved,
And to ask were treason;
Let the wonder grow!
Were its hopes removed,
Were itself disproved
By cold reason,
In its happy season,
Love would be beloved.
No; it hurts sharper. I must just sit down
On the edge of the bed, and comb my hair and wait—;
. . . . .
I cannot think at all. How beautiful
This gold made silver in the moonlight! What!
Would Heaven age me for my Love? Let’s look
In the mirror. Rosamund, you’re worshipful.
[Starting back.] ’Tis thus,
Even thus, he swore that he should come to me.
His very words! The prophecy’s fulfilled,—;
I’ll comb my hair down to my very feet.
A step!—;my heart, some patience. Henry, speak;
Bid it take courage! [Enter Elinor.] God! the Queen!
Q. Elinor. The Queen, who’ll give you access to your God;
The wife, who’ll doom the leman.
Act II, Scene 8
But coming now to the plays which are completely representative of the poets in this period, we may glance at The Father’s Tragedy, William Rufus, Canute the Great, The Cup of Water, and The Tragic Mary. These, with three others, appeared within the dates 1885 and 1890—;not a poor record of five years’ work, and one which reminds us that our poets laboured at their art as only the genuine artist does. They drew the themes of these plays mainly from English history and Scottish chronicles; and they selected them, all except that of The Tragic Mary, ultimately for an idea that lay behind them. Obviously, therefore, this work is not entirely disinterested art: it anticipates, to that extent, the problem-play, the intellectual drama, and even (so far as concerns his influence in this country) Ibsen. Indeed, a remarkable aspect of the group is the way in which, despite its romantic tone and its Elizabethan form, it yet foreshadows the movement that English drama was about to make toward a ‘realistic’ presentment of life. There may be a piquancy in thinking of Michael Field the romantic as the forerunner of Mr Bernard Shaw and Mr John Galsworthy: and it is not certain which would be the less pleased at the comparison, ancestress or descendants. The latter, following a poetic age with inevitable comedy—;inevitable if only from reaction—;were compelled to decline upon prose as their medium; and the great merit of Michael Field is that, belonging to the poetic age and possessed of the poet’s ardour and imagination, she yet kept near enough to the actual world to see the evils that existed there. Happily removed from them by circumstance and temperament, she yet kept her eyes clear and her sympathies alert. Her prologue to The Father’s Tragedy is apt to this point, for there she warns
the light and easy-souled
Who shun the joyless truth in human things
to turn to more congenial pages than her tragedies. It is evident that she was concerned, thus early, with the joyless truth which was to take possession—;absolute and somewhat depressing possession—;of the dramatists who came after her. Unlike them, however, by giving her truth the form of poetry she endowed it with the joyousness of art. She saw it, too, in the round: there is a largeness in her conception of it which gives her ‘intellectual drama’ greater dignity, and one would suppose greater permanence, than later ‘realistic’ work. Yet when one observes the ideas that govern some of her plays in this kind—;parental tyranny, the land question, marriage, or the conflict between an older and a newer order of civilization—;one recognizes at once the likeness to the motives of much more recent drama. Indeed, we might go further and demonstrate a rather later play—;Attila—;as an anticipation of Freud and the psycho-analysts.
The Father’s Tragedy, a play in five acts and a great many scenes, was written almost entirely by the younger of the two poets. Some parts of it were composed by her at the age of sixteen, and were in fact the means by which Michael discovered her dramatic talent. At the date of its publication (1885) Henry was only twenty-three, and it had been completed some months before. The play is, therefore, the work of a very young mind, and one is not surprised that its main feature is a vigorous and sympathetic study of youth. What does surprise one, however, is that the study of age in this struggle between a father and a son is also sympathetic; and although it is the son who is the victim of the father, the play is called, significantly, the father’s tragedy. Which is to say that the profoundest depth of the tragedy is seen to be the moral defeat (one ought rather to say the moral annihilation) of the father. That is a conception not so youthful, perhaps, as the age of the author; just as the fierce dark strength of the drama would not appear to accord with her sex. There is something Brontesque in the sombre power of this tragedy; something too much of horror, barely relieved by two or three short scenes of hectic gaiety when the young prince has escaped temporarily to his boon companions. But only imagination of the highest kind could have conceived it.
The plot comes from Scotichronicon and the old chronicler Wyntoun, whose words are in one place almost exactly quoted. Robert III is shown to be pious, weak, superstitious, affectionate, desiring only the ‘good’ of his heir, the young Prince David, Duke of Rothsay. But David, intensely alive in his buoyant young manhood, loathes the dour ‘good’ that is forced upon him, and combats it. He has, in fact, more strength than his father, and the struggle becomes bitter and tragic only when Albany, the King’s brother, backs the King with a strength equal to David’s own, overbears the father’s weakness and perverts his affection, and eventually compasses the Prince’s death. The crisis is the enforced marriage of David to a bride whom he detests, he having been literally sold to her father as the highest bidder for a great match. He breaks into the council-chamber at the moment when the King and Albany are settling the price that the bride is to pay for him. Albany bids him be seated.
Rothsay. In the market-place
Slaves stand for sale. I will not sit; I’ll stand
In purchasable shame before you all
Who bargain for my manhood; stand and watch
My father sell the birthright of my flesh;
Yea, stand and bear a sacrilege my youth
Must damn itself to credit.
King. David, peace!
. . . . .
Rothsay. Nothing glorious
Is marketable—;fame, nor love, nor deeds
Of any virtue, youth nor happiness;
Nothing, oh nothing, but the meanest things,
Of which I am the meanest. On my soul,
You drag me in the dirt, and there I’ll lie
And dash it in your faces....
Albany. Wherefore all this noise
And rampant passion? We would understand
The tossing cause thereof.
Rothsay. Speak it! Oh no!
’Twould want an old and worldly merchant, one
Who has a counting-house. I’m still a prince
About the lips, nor know your tricks with coin,
Your sales of man for woman, your low truck
And miserable frauds. You’ve ruined me,
And thrown my youth down to the bottom step
Of Pride’s high stairs. I’ll never climb again.
. . . . .
Oh, write your contract, for it joins my life
To snaky-headed Sin, in whose hot breast
I’ll know what pleasure is. Call forth your priest—;
He’s but a pander in the guise of Heaven.
Let Hymen’s torches flare—;they smell of pitch
And sulph’rous fever of contemn’d desire;
Ring from your steeples—;’tis the curfew-bell;
Prepare your bridal-veil—;’tis hiding night;
Present your hateful bride to pulseless arms—;
And Lust receives the harlot in its clasp.
Act I, Scene 3
Rothsay. Oh, all the shame
You’ve struck into my being will be there,
When it is opened to its secret depth
Before the Judgment seat, and lo! old men
Will answer for the sins that they have done
Across the years to those in backward Time’s
Most lovely season.
Act II, Scene 2
The scenes in Act IV, when Rothsay is starving to death in Falkland Castle, are vividly imagined:
Rothsay. I can only think
Of bread, bread, bread!...
... Oh, without
Are many cornfields—;and the river! God!
I scarcely can remember anything
But the white floods, and the last scrap of meat
I emptied from my wallet.
. . . . .
I ever thought
Death was a shadow.—;I myself am Death.
I fed and never knew it: now I starve.
Here is the skeleton I’ve seen in books!
’Tis I—;the knarled and empty bones. Here—;Here—;
The grinning dints! I thought Death anywhere
But near my life; and it is in the pith
And centre of my body. Horrible!
Act IV, Scene 2
King Robert does not know that David is dying, and the tragic irony of Scene 5 of this act is masterly. It is a wild night, and the King, crouching over the fire of a room high up in the castle, hears the wind shriek outside and thinks of his boy, whom he believes to be merely shut up like a naughty child to recover from his rage:
K. Robert. My poor lad,
My David, who is fearful of the dark,
Would he were here this bleak and scolding night!
He used to throw a cushion on the floor,
And lay him down as featly as the hound,
His foolish yellow head against my knee;
And so he’d laugh and chat and sing old songs,
Or gaily sneer at our last grave debate,
Drop sudden crude suggestions that anon
Our older counsel ripened into act;
Until for some light word I’d give rebuke,
When either with a peal of raillery
He’d toss me back a penitent bright face,
Or with a shaded humour spring apart,
No place from me too far. Good Albany,
You would not have our Rothsay longer shut
In such grim-tempered darkness?
Act IV, Scene 5
William Rufus (1885), a full-dress drama of five acts, is without a woman character. It is based on Freeman’s history of Rufus, and was suggested to the poet, as she explains in the preface, by a visit to the New Forest. There she found the stone which marks the spot where Rufus fell, pierced by an arrow glancing from an oak, “as if directed,” to use her own phrase, “by Nature’s anger at the destruction of her food-bearing fields for the insolence of pleasure.”
So there, again, peeps out the ulterior motive. The idea of the play is explicitly to be the land question; and that it had, in fact, a political bearing is confirmed by the poet’s letters on the subject. Yet one is glad to discover, as we quickly do, that here as elsewhere in her intellectual drama Michael Field has been better than her creed: her dramatic instinct has subdued the idea to itself. So that, if we had no other evidence than that of the play, we should be convinced that the idea grew out of the theme, and was not imposed upon it. It was never a case of the poets’ exclaiming, “Go to, we will write a problem-play!” but rather of a sudden perception, in their travels or their reading, “What a subject for drama!” and then, as an afterthought, “And see what profound significance!” But as a fact all the evidence points in the same direction: a character would arrest them, they would be attracted by its story, would absorb themselves in the study of it, and become literally possessed by it—;working out the implicit idea as something subsidiary.
In this play the idea is completely assimilated to imagination. There is no bald presentation of it on the plane of everyday existence, for that surely is a function of comedy. And though the King’s cruelty in appropriating the peasants’ land is shown in its effect upon the lives of individuals, a larger vision of the problem is presented in the figure of one old man, Beowulf, who is, as it were, the wronged spirit of the Earth in human shape. In him the idea is made both concrete and spiritual, as the genius of poetry can make it. He is a very real, rough-hewn old countryman, with a vigorous part in the movement of the drama; and yet there is a touch upon him that is weird and supernatural, which relates him to fierce elemental forces and makes him at one and the same time a rustic and an avenging deity. He is blind; his eyes were put out long ago for trespass; and he feels his way to the gallows where the body of his grandson has now been hanged for killing a deer:
Beowulf. I feel it’s here; I have no need to see.
I’m glad they murdered him, not made him dark;
For now he’s dead the Earth will think on him
As she unweaves his body bit by bit.
She’ll have time like the women-folk at work
To turn all over in her mind, and get
His wrongs by heart.
... Who is here?
Wilfrith. Wilfrith! I often come to pray for him!...
Beowulf. Pray! Pray! Are you a wench to chatter so?
Does not your tongue grow rigid in your head,
A corpse to bear that silence company?
Have you no death in you? Oh, say your prayers;
I will keep mourning in my ruined ears
The passing of his voice.
Act II, Scene 1
Beowulf. Do you think the Earth’s a thing that makes your flesh
Soft for the worms?—;the harvests lie asleep
Upon her bosom; she has reared the spring;
The seasons are her change of countenance;
She lives, and now for many thousand years
Hath ruled the toiling and the rest of men.
... She’ll judge.
Old Man. Do thou make known this matter to the Lord;
He will avenge.
Beowulf. The Lord! Oh, He’s above!
There’s something lying at the roots of things
I burrow for.
Act IV, Scene 1
Beowulf [his last speech, after Rufus has been
killed]. Yea, bear him through the woods like a gashed boar,
Present him dripping to your angry God;
He may not be implacable. In haste
Cloak the foul thing beneath the minster tower;
Heap soil on him....
... There are worms
About his darkness; I am satisfied.
End of Act V
The people of this drama are vigorous creatures, as sharply drawn and clear-cut as types, but very far from the merely typical. The poet has created, and not constructed, them; and each one possesses his own soul. Rufus is a credible villain, a man and not a monster. He can melt at the sight of filial piety, unbend to a jest, warm to affection. Anselm may stand as a figure which shall represent the insulted Church, but he is a very holy and gentle old priest. Philosopher and saint, he was, of course, historically studied; but he is, despite verisimilitude, an almost complete embodiment of the two qualities of our poet’s mind which make so rare a combination—;her religious temper and her philosophic intellect. Two short quotations from him may help to illustrate this:
Anselm. God gives His bread to children who are sweet
With golden faith; to thinkers and to men
Of striving reason He presents a stone.
. . . . .
Faith is the child’s gift, and Philosophy
The man’s achievement. Blessèd toil, to walk
Where babes are carried past on angel-wings.
... It is Philosophy
That knocks at Heaven’s gate: Faith finds the door
Wide open.
Act II, Scene 2
But of all the characters, one supposes Leofric to have engaged the poets’ affection most. He is a ‘mason’: which is to say he is the architect, sculptor, and builder all in one who was the medieval artist. It is evident that the poets had particular joy in imagining him, absorbed and happy in his real world of art, with the actual world as mere stuff for his modelling. If Leofric ever allows himself to be disturbed by the King’s greedy inroads, it is from no ‘political’ reason, but simply that the noisy hunters make such havoc of the woodland peace:
Leofric. ... A horn!
Methinks the forest hath another use
These precious hours of morning, when the world
Is at some process of its perfecting
’Twere well to learn the trick of. Wilfrith toils,
Tearing yon fibre from the ground a-sweat
With effort; while for me!—;my eyes are full;
I have no want; the world is excellent;
There is no prickle in the holly wrong.
How bossily it clusters!
... Oh do not think
We travel so untreasured in resource
We needs must earn the bread of every joy
By sweat of soul. If life’s a desert—;Ah!
There’s manna in the waste; it lies about,
And the wise idle soul is satisfied.
Act I, Scene 4
The motive of Canute the Great (1887) presents a curious difficulty. For if we are to accept the poet’s own statement of what she meant by the play (and it does seem as if she ought to have known), then we are forced to conclude that she attempted the impossible, and therefore failed. But one has the suspicion that she did not quite know what she meant by it—;which is not so impertinent as it sounds, and only means that her artistic instinct was stronger and truer in this case than her philosophy. For in the preface she declares that she is here dealing with the theory of evolution; and she elaborates an idea which, had it really operated as a motive force, would surely have paralysed her Muse and struck it dumb. Canute, however, is no paralytic: on the contrary, he has his creator’s vehement life and passion, at least for the first half of the drama. But in those scenes he is far enough from any abstract theory. Yet when his vitality flags, as it does sometimes, and when the play becomes, as a consequence, to that extent unsuccessful, the cause lies in a certain resemblance which the theme does bear to the poet’s definition of it. For it is possible to regard the character of Canute in the abstract as a transition between two ages and a link between two orders of civilization. That is, of course, the meaning which the poet saw in it—;when she was writing her preface. But in the process of making the drama the wise æsthetic impulse seized and worked upon something simpler, more definite, and more moving—;the potential conflict that exists everywhere and always among human creatures between their instincts and their reason. That, surely, is a tragic motive of universal validity; and it may precipitate at any moment, and at any stage of civilization, the revolt of the half-tamed instincts which is true stuff of tragedy, whether it be enacted within the small orbit of an individual soul or in the insane immensity of a world-war. So long as Canute is at grips with the rebel powers—;dramatized in his struggle with Edmund—;he is a great dramatic figure; but when his creator raises the conflict—;with his penitence for Edmund’s death—;to the plane of pure thought, the life goes out of him and he becomes but a type, though a very noble one, of spiritual struggle. Even at those moments, however, one may find passages where the æsthetic sense has subdued theory to itself with fine effect. Thus the poet has touched Canute’s love for Emma with symbolism, seeing her as the gentler and riper civilization into which Canute is adopted; and again, the wild Northern land of his origin, the elements which went to the making of his race, the secret compulsive urge of heredity, are embodied in the figure of a weird prophetess who is to him his other self, the incarnate spirit of those ancient forces. The speech which follows is made by Canute when he is recalling his first meeting with Emma. There are passages with her, love-scenes between the young sea-king and the mature queen, which are adroitly and boldly handled, and are drama in essence and in fact. But here, in a reverie, is the poet’s opportunity for putting her theory into a symbol:
Canute. ... Above me bent
A sweet, soft-shouldered woman, with supreme,
Abashing eyes, and such maturity—;
The perfect flower of years—;such June of face....
So ceremonious, and yet so fearless
In passionate grace, that I was struck with shame,
And knew not where I was, nor how to speak,
Confounded to the heart. She made me feel
That I was lawless and uncivilised,—;
Barbarian! In all my brave array
I shrank from her, as she had caught me stripped
For some brute pastime. Is this womanhood?
There’s more to see each time one looks at her,
There’s music in her; she has listened much,
Pored o’er the lustrous missals, learnt how soft
One speaks to God....
Act I, Scene 4
Another and more powerful example of our poet’s genius for giving form to the abstract, and triumphing dramatically over a most stubborn theory, is in her creation of Gunhild, the Scandinavian prophetess. Gunhild is something more than a symbol—;though she is that, and stands for ancestry, the ancient gods, and the wild fight with nature of the barbaric order which Canute is renouncing. But she is, besides, a terrifying old witch: an ugly, clinging creature who will not be cast off. She enters to Canute just at the moment when he is thinking of Emma:
Canute [to Hardegon]. Whom hast thou brought?
A brooding face, with windy sea of hair,
And eyes whose ample vision ebbs no more
Than waters from a fiord. I conceive
A dread of things familiar as she breathes.
Gunhild. O King.
Canute. Ay, Scandinavia.
Gunhild. He sees
How with a country’s might I cross his door;
How in me all his youth was spent, in me
His ancestors are buried; on my brows
Inscribed is his religion; through my frame
Press the great, goading forces of the waves.
Canute. Art thou a woman?
Gunhild. Not to thee. I am
Thy past.
Canute. Her arms are knotted in her bosom
Like ivy stems. What does she here, so fixed
Before my seat?
. . . . .
Gunhild. Hearken!... All eve I stood
And gathered in your fate. You raise your hands
To other gods, you speak another tongue,
You learn strange things on which is Odin’s seal
That men should know them not, you cast the billows
Behind your back, and leap upon the horse.
You love no more the North that fashioned you,
The ancestors whose blood is in your heart—;
These things you have forgotten.
Canute. Yes.
Gunhild. But they
Will have a longer memory.
. . . . .
... Oh, indestructible
Are the first bonds of living. Fare thee well.
Thou wilt engender thine own ancestry;
Nature will have her permanence.
Canute. And I
Will have my impulse.
Gunhild. Oh, the blue fir-bough,
The bird, the fern, and iris at my feet!
The whole world talks of birth, it is the secret
That shudders through all sap. [Exit.
Act I, Scene 4
In illustrating poetic drama, one chooses inevitably such passages as these, where poetic imagination is concentrated at high power. But they, by their nature, cannot represent the suppler and swifter dramatic qualities of this poetry. And they do no more than hint at what is, in our poet, a very great gift—;psychological insight flashing into expression as vivid and as true as itself. It is well-nigh impossible to illustrate this by quotation, because the effect is cumulative. The phrase which darts into the mind is full of what the mind already holds, but which was dark and inchoate until the flash came. One or two minor examples may be given from this play, as when Edric (conceived by the poet as entirely base) is sounding Canute on the subject of a marriage with Emma:
Canute. I have no doubt
But I shall marry.
Edric. Where’s the wife to match
An eagle of your plumage?
Canute. All the world
Is full of stately women.
Edric. I have seen
But one, the late king’s widow. She is prime
Among all dames.
Canute. You think that you have seen her,
Because you know she has a radiant skin,
And strange, proud eyes!
And again, when Edric asks for some message, a “sugared speech” to take to Emma:
Canute [aside]. The fool!
I cannot speak.—;Take her my silence, Thane.
Act I, Scene 4
The Cup of Water, published in the same volume with Canute, is an idyll whose delicate beauty one almost fears to touch. That it too astonishingly carries a problem one would hardly guess; and even in face of the poet’s confession of the fact, and her anxiety lest the problem should be misunderstood, one would demur that here again her practice has been better than her precept. For these exquisite love-scenes, these magnanimous friends and lovers, and this clear greatness of thought issuing simply in noble action might bear some relation to a ‘marriage question’ in Utopia, but would have little enough to do with such a problem in the actual world. That, however, is rather a cause for rejoicing to those who can delight in the ideal beauty of the work, and who can see in its ethical audacity an innocence which only could dare to follow up so boldly a logical attack upon the conventions of morality.
The theme was adopted from a projected poem of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; but in taking it over our poet has moralized it far from its origin. The story as she tells it is concerned with the love of a young king, Almund, for a peasant-girl, his renunciation of her from motives of loyalty, and his ultimate discovery that in giving her up he has sinned against something in her and in himself which has a deeper sanction than loyalty—;that, in a word, fulfilment is a higher good than renunciation. But this he finds out too late:
Almund. I shall find
All the great years of Hell inadequate
To mourn this mighty error and defeat—;
To put such gift away, and youth and manhood
Stirring within me! Act III, Scene 2
. . . . .
Oh, we must learn
To drink life’s pleasures if we would be pure,
Deep, holy draughts.... Act III, Scene 2
. . . . .
Love, Love, Love,
Without which we are made of the mere clay
Of the world’s agèd floor. Act II, Scene 1
In the first scene the King and his friend Hubert have encountered Cara in the forest, and have begged of her a drink of water. She does not know them, and is unconscious that both are enchanted by her wild prettiness. She fills her cup with water, and brings it straight to Almund, though Hubert teasingly tries to intercept it; and the King desires her to serve his friend first. The merest touches put us in possession of the tragic knot—;that both of the young men love her and that she loves Almund; but that he, in the moment of realizing his passion, feels upon him the bonds of honour to his betrothed wife and loyalty to his friend. As they ride away, his mind is full of the conflict:
Almund [aside]. She is mine.
The water came not straighter from the earth,
Than she herself to me.
Hubert. You are unmindful.
I vainly prate to one in reverie—;
Indifferent to my fortune.
Almund. May you win her!
You are my friend.
Hubert. I doubt not she will listen;
The small, cold cheek grew ruddy. We shall wed,
When you espouse your Millicent.
Almund [aside]. Thus God
Severs, without the clemency of death.
Act I, Scene 1
Scene 2 proceeds to Hubert’s wooing of Cara, whom he seeks next day in the forest. But her thoughts are far away from him:
Hubert. Oh, now I know there is for ever
To make room for such loving.
Cara. Do you think
That he can love like that?
Hubert. You mean the king?
Cara. No, not the king. My lover is a man
Who tells me he is thirsty....
Hubert tries to make her understand the facts: that the King is betrothed already, and that he cannot therefore love her.
Cara. ... He is mine;
A thief has hold of him, my own, my own,
My king, my love, my love!
Hubert. He never was,
Never will be your love.... The king would laugh
To hear you chirp such folly.
Cara. It’s more wicked
Than anything that’s done....
And it is such a lie! The king would laugh?
He had a still, grave face; I am quite sure
That he would never laugh at anything
So terrible and sudden. Why, the oak
Has a white, bony bough amid the leaves;
That’s where the lightning struck. I do not laugh,
I think what it must suffer ’neath the green,
So scathed and ugly.
Hubert. Cara, do not put
Such hatred in your eyes; if the great lady
Who loves the king—;
Cara. Great ladies cannot love.
You must be poor and famished to be hungry.
. . . . .
If you meet him,
Oh, tell him I am his, a weary child,
Tired out since yesterday.
[Exit Hubert mournfully.
I’ll go along
The wood, and say it over to myself,
He cannot, cannot love me; but I know
Deep in my heart he does. There was a gift—;
The king had something for me in his eyes;
And when he waved good-bye ... I am quitesure
God made him for me: he will come again.
The Tragic Mary (1890) returns to chronicles for its subject, and belongs to our first category for that reason only. It has no specifically intellectual theme, and for its tragic motive should rather be classed in the third group of dramas, where “passions spin the plot.” Not that the poet has neglected the element of fatal circumstance in Mary’s life, nor the very intricate machinery of action in which she was involved. The incidence of political intrigue, domestic plot, and religious feud is clearly shown, and their mere data are used to carry forward the brisk movement of the play. The Marian legend is, in fact, handled boldly; some of the blackest charges against the Queen are confronted, even those on which the historian has pronounced that there is no evidence. But the whole tragedy is seen in its relation to character, with Mary as the centre and source of it, not merely because she is a beautiful queen precariously enthroned among false enemies and falser friends, but because she carries in her nature the seed of tragedy. Admirable balance is kept in picking a path through the mazy inconsistencies of the old story: neither extreme of antithetical judgment is adopted. And if Michael Field has not plucked out the heart of Mary Stuart’s mystery, she has at least brought it out of the region of the incredible. Her Mary is human: of such vivid humanity, indeed, as to draw for that reason the lightnings of fate. She is a richly dowered nature, capable of intense love and fierce anger and deep tenderness, free and frank to the world’s measure of indiscretion, sensitive, eager, and responsive to the world’s measure of excess; and of clemency wide enough for the silly and the cynical to ban as complaisance. She has a swift, gay temper; but underneath the flashing faults of incaution and a rapier wit there lies an innocence which is from its nature incapable of suspecting evil in others, or of calculating beforehand how her ardour and friendliness would appear to meaner eyes. She is, in short, an imperfect but large-hearted human creature; and she discovers that to be one inch greater than a small world is to draw inevitably, if not the bolts of Jove, at any rate the slings and arrows of a punier race.
It is, however, in comprehending Mary Stuart’s womanhood and its bearing upon the tragedy that this study by a woman poet may claim its proper value. No Cleopatra this: no male apprehension of femininity as sheer sex-impulse. Mary’s love of loving and of being loved is shown to be profound and instinctive, an impulse to give, to cherish, and to bless which every normal woman shares in some degree. Michael Field has seen it for the complex and subtle power it is, and not merely as a lure to attract a lover. Raised as it is, in Mary Stuart, to the measure of her human stature—;the range of her sympathies, the keenness of her perception, her gift of understanding, the goodwill that prompts her clear intimacy of approach—;it is a power that becomes a danger in a circle which could not rise to the same height. But it was a danger primarily to herself: she was its chief victim.
“Terrible in love: no compromise between ecstasy and death,” says one of her Maries; and another, speaking of her manner to those she deems her friends, that she is “fond and familiar”; while a third declares of her sympathy and insight, “There is not a balmy nook of one’s soul undiscovered of her.” Thus, too, after she has dismissed Bothwell, indignant at his proposal of marriage so soon after Darnley’s death, her anger ebbs as she remembers how natural it seems to hear the man’s love in his voice. And on another occasion, when she is thinking of him after Darnley has deserted her:
... It was for courtesy
I stooped and let Lord Bothwell kiss my hands,
For sweet to me is love in human eyes,
As daylight to the world.
Act III, Scene 1
One observes, too, how the feminine author has perceived the incidence of the feminine instinct of self-accusal on Mary’s tragedy, arriving by intuition at a truth of psychology which the mental doctors declare to be invariable. To a sensitive nature that instinct will often give the colour of guilt, or will at least render disavowal impotent. Thus the ancient lie attributing complicity in Darnley’s murder credibly takes its rise in an access of remorse for an imagined sin—;as when Mary, in the shock of the news of Darnley’s death, remembers how she had once wished him such an evil fate, on the night that he murdered David Riccio:
... Heaven has crept
Into my ancient thoughts, and done the deed,
I, David,—;I half-prompted in my prayers,
When I besought God’s pity on your soul.
I am a guilty woman....
Act III, Scene 7
And again, when she is thinking of Bothwell’s wooing and her growing love for him:
I never shall grow holy among men,
And yet I wish them ever good, not evil,
And long to give them pleasure of such portion
Of wit or beauty as were made my dower.
It is significant, too, that Mary’s motherhood is seen to be a deep force in her, and therefore in the tragedy. She is found to be an instinctive mother, not only in the primary fact of rejoicing to bear a child, but in a profound sense of the value of life and an urgent impulse to protect it. Hence the supreme villainy of David Riccio’s murder is seen by our poet to lie in the fact that he is struck down in Mary’s presence, and desperately clinging to her for help, when she is within a few weeks of the birth of her child. And this by the husband whose sacred duty was to protect her. That is perceived to be Darnley’s unpardonable sin, and it prepares for much that follows. But observe how the poet has indicated the greatness of a mother-instinct which leaps to parry even a shattering blow like this. Mary sees that she is hemmed in by plots, that her life is in danger; and she makes a swift plan to escape through the vaults of the ruined Abbey of Holyrood. But it is a daunting project:
... If I were struck stone-dead
For horror at the grim, distorted tombs;
If I should bring forth a strange, spectral child,
To catch the bats that flit from roof to roof,
And wink at daylight! God, it shall not be!
For I will nurse him royally with my soft,
Wild, wayward songs, and he shall lie and laugh
Across my knees, until the happy tune
Drop off into a drowse.
Act I, Scene 3
There is much to illustrate this aspect of Mary’s womanhood; but one other short quotation must suffice. It is after the birth of her son, and she has forgiven and reinstated Darnley. Lethington has presented another petition to her, and she replies:
I live now but to pardon and make peace,
I am a mother.
Technically, the drama must, of course, be considered as a chronicle-play; and this cancels a criticism which might otherwise hold, that the end of the play, when Mary gives herself up and Bothwell flees, is weak. But the five acts go with a swing till that point is reached, and the energy of movement gets into the verse. That is often vehement to the measure of the vehement passions it expresses; and the relief of a character like Lethington, ironical, subtle, sceptical of the whole world but the innocence of his queen, is proportioned to the emotional intensity of the play as a whole. Bothwell is a finely contrasted study, compelling our belief in his lawless force, and in his mere physical reaction to Mary’s influence. His psychology, true as hers, chimes responsive to the masculine instinct of resentment in moments of mental crisis: when passion pulls fate down upon him, he is, in his angry conviction, the wronged one, and wronged by the woman. Thus Mary, to him, is a temptress love,
The infamous soft creature with her sighs,
Her innocence and wonder!
and he has been damned by her love. There is a scene between Bothwell and his wife, Jane Gordon, which is good in itself for its dramatic truth and its utility in the action, but which has the further interest of revealing the Queen as she looks through such different eyes. In Mary’s womanhood, seen thus from perhaps a dozen different angles, there is in truth an “infinite variety,” no gusty variation on the single theme of passion.
In Act III, Scene 2, Jane Gordon has consented to release Bothwell from his marriage with her, so that he may win the Queen:
Bothwell. It is a desperate scheme!
How cold, and yet how kindly, are your eyes.
I never hate you—;her I often hate.
Lady Bothwell. Poor lady, for you love her! I have been
More fortunate in winning your respect.
You are a gallant fellow; but too wild
For the great fireside virtues....
Bothwell tries to make his wife divulge what are Mary’s feelings toward him:
Lady Bothwell. For her sake
I am unknitting, James, our marriage-bond;
I shall not then report her. At your feet
The gown of Spanish fur I recognize
As her own mother’s wear. She loved her mother;
She would not part with that except to one
She trusted with a child’s simplicity.
Prove worthy of her faith. [Exit.
. . . . .
Bothwell. Fie, this woman
Leaves me with branded cheeks. To bid her
pack; To break up house, to get myself divorced
From one so noble and so tolerant
Just for a giddy hope!—;Ho, Paris,
put This trumpery away. [Kicking the Spanish fur.]
I must to-morrow
Betimes conduct the queen
to Callander.
Act III, Scene 2
Contrast the way in which Lethington—;scholar, wit, and statesman—;reacts to Mary’s character. There is a scene with him when the Queen is in the deepest gulf, her courage broken by treachery, her love for Bothwell humiliated, her life so netted in intrigue that she is helpless and despairing. With almost every soul about her counsels proved false, she still believes in Lethington, and he is in truth her friend. But he, with his itch for policy, had given his support long ago to the Bothwell conspiracy against Darnley, believing in good faith that it might help the Queen. Now the Bothwell marriage has proved disastrous: the people are in revolt, and Mary is accused of hideous crimes that she cannot refute. She turns for advice to the one man whose wisdom and whose honour she believes that she can trust; and Bothwell, enraged and brutally jealous, breaks upon their conference:
Bothwell. ... Since you thwart me
And magnify this pard—;I will unfold
The smooth and cowardly creature you esteem.
This man heard Morton promise me your hand,
And to and fro he journeyed prospering
My heady plans; he is the sorcerer
To lure your mates to death, one after one;
He sits, and sees them drop away from you,
But yet he meddles not. Now chat together;
He will advise you how you may entoil
A second victim. I will leave you now. [Exit.
Queen. To think that you were with me at Dunbar!
Lethington. You saved my life.
Queen [looking toward the door]. He cannot be a king;
They wither, or are murdered, or grow mad
Who link themselves with me in sovereignty.
Twilight and ruin settle on us both!
Oh, might we be forgotten; could we lie
In the blank pardon of oblivion! That,
Alack, can never be; there is no man
Can give me safety, or protection, or
Peace from vicissitude; I have no lover,
Servant or friend; and yet I am beloved
Even to marvel. I can pray no more,
I have no more dependence upon God;
And none on any of His creatures, none.
Go, tell my story as you learnt it, add
New matter. If I sat beside the fire
In prison with my maids, and never spoke,
While you put forth fresh libels, or confirmed
The common talk, you could not injure me:
My silence would have privilege.
. . . . .
Lethington. Libellers
Are sure of popularity. My brain
Treasures a rare, untarnished miniature.
With that I shall not part. [She gazes at him, sobbing.] Nay, pardon now,
Full pardon, great, obliterating sea
Of love o’erwhelm me! You have heaven’s own measure:
The seventy-times-and-seven is in your eyes,
Immeasurable grace....
God shield you from dishonour! May He draw
Blood of me, when my life has other use
Than to protect your titles.
Act V, Scene 3