MICHAEL FIELD’S second dramatic period synchronizes almost exactly with the ‘eighteen-nineties.’ That is to say, it was contemporaneous with Wilde, Beardsley, and The Yellow Book, and belonged in time to that decadent decade which has gained its reproachful title mainly because work like that of our poet was ignored, and eyes were drawn exclusively to the swagger of a noisier set. In all that clamour there was hardly a word uttered about her, though a stray reviewer here and there tried vainly to rouse the literary world to the fact that it had in its midst a veritable dramatic poet.
The seven plays came out one by one and passed quietly into the hands of the very few—;book-lovers or poetry-lovers—;who really cared for fine work. And nothing more was heard of them or their authors. Of the noisier and naughtier set a good deal was heard; and yet it may be that in the last judgment of literary values these seven plays will go far to redeem their epoch, vicariously, from a reproach too lightly made.
This poet and her work are in truth far enough removed from decadence. A heroic temper was hers, and mental courage, rare in her day, to face and present the problems of life. A robust and militant morality—;no less moral because it sometimes shatters indignantly a mere moral convention—;informs her drama. She did not belong to any set, and was so far from swagger that her idea of advertisement was to print at the end of her books the bad as well as the good reviews. She lived secluded in the suburb of a great town, and there she laboured, with no hope of reward, at her daily toil in the service of poetry. Nevertheless, even so far withdrawn, the spirit of the age reached her and laid its mark upon her work. And that, ultimately, is the reason why this drama of the second period reveals itself, despite a continued sense of moral and spiritual problems, as drama in which Art is the primary value. If ever artist wrought, as some devout lover, for the sake of Art, it was Michael Field in this body of work; which, though it bears no relation to the trivial contemporary cliché, “Art for Art’s sake,” will be a bulwark (in the day of reckoning that one has foreseen) to the truth underlying that cry. But perhaps that is simply because this poet, as artist, was the devout lover, the reckless spendthrift of herself, the tenacious, tireless, painstaking follower of a vision.
But the proximate cause of the change from the characteristics of the first period lies in the changed conditions of the poets’ life—;that, in its turn, of course determined by their mental development. They were in many ways different people from the authors of Callirrhoë. Six years of living, as the artist lives, and the production of nine plays and at least one book of lyrics, had re-created them. Travel had made them free of a larger world, larger not merely in physical extent. For they were avid of the best in life; and they had the taste to gather and the temper to assimilate the finest things that the old cities of the Continent could offer. But whereas their early impulse had been toward Teutonic culture (Goethe had drawn them, and the German philosophers), now it was the art and the thought of the Latin races which held sway. Visits to Italy, and art friendships there and in London: research into medieval Latin chronicles, into French and Italian history: residence in Paris and contact with the Gallic sense of form—;all helped the trend of their mind. And when they determined to leave Clifton and settle at Reigate, the act was almost symbolic. For they removed themselves into what was at once a bigger and a smaller world, the resources of the metropolis lying accessible to the deliberate limits of their social existence, much as their greater mental area now lay subject to a stricter rule.
As a consequence, these plays are different in material, in spirit, and in manner from the plays of the first period. The material comes from the subjects which were most attractive to them at the time, much of it from old Roman history and the chronicles of medieval France. In spirit the work is withdrawn from the temporary, the immediate, and the actual, and is concerned with the more permanent issues of life; and in manner the sense of form which now ruled their æsthetic has constrained them to a finer balance, a sharper definition, and a greater simplicity of structure. The cumbrous Elizabethan machinery has been scrapped; and with a more careful economy of means, the plays are compressed into smaller compass. The wearisome and often redundant fifth act has disappeared. Three acts are the rule, with a fourth as an occasional exception. There is no subdivision into scenes, the movement of each act thus flowing uninterrupted. There are fewer long speeches, fewer soliloquies: dialogue is more nervous and forcible. Fine poetry is not wanting, but it is now in smaller proportion to dramatic and psychological truth. And action goes forward at its proper pace, pushed by the emotion of the moment, and freighted only by its just weight of reflection.
As a handy label, it is convenient to classify this drama as a Latin group. Its most prominent feature is, indeed, a Roman trilogy which the poets were engaged upon (though not exclusively) for seven years. These three plays are, in historical order, The Race of Leaves (1901), The World at Auction (1898), and Julia Domna (1903). Another Roman play, despite its title, is Attila, my Attila! (1896); and two whose subjects belong to French history and are drawn from medieval Latin chronicles are Anna Ruina (1899) and In the Name of Time. This last was, by the evidence of letters, being worked upon as early as 1890, but it was probably not finished until much later; and one imagines that after the poets’ conversion to the Roman Church theological scruples withheld them from publishing it. It did not appear until after their death, in 1919; but it belongs, in spirit and in form, to their work of the nineties.
Anna Ruina, a Russian princess, daughter of Jaroslav, became queen to Henry I of France in the middle of the eleventh century. Henry was prompted to seek a wife in so distant a country because nearer royal houses were already allied; and the medieval popes had an uncomfortable habit of excommunicating princes who married within the forbidden degrees. His Russian wife secured him from such molestation; but when, after his death, his widow married his kinsman Raoul, Conte de Valois, the pope of the moment annulled the marriage and ordered Raoul to take back his former wife—;a woman notoriously evil—;whom he had divorced. Our play is concerned with the loves of Anna and Raoul, their struggle with the Church, and the disastrous conflict between Anna’s passion and her piety which brought ruin on them both.
So much it seems necessary to premise concerning this somewhat unfamiliar story, which the poets appear to have gathered from French and Latin chroniclers who stress very quaintly Anna’s piety. One old historian thus describes her:
Icele dame pensoit plus aux choses a venir que aux choses presentes ... dont il avint qu’ele fist estorer a Senliz une Yglise en l’enor S. Vincent.
The Abbey at Senlis which she built, and in particular St Vincent’s tower, is used very effectively both as a setting for the play and as a symbol of that in Anna’s character which was deep and strong enough to defeat her love. The strength of this religious sense, and the consequent rigour of the conflict, are of course to be measured by her love; for which reason the whole first act is devoted to a vigorous presentment of Anna, the widowed queen, mother and regent of the young king, putting off her royalty to claim Raoul’s love, and sweeping aside every obstacle in order to become his wife. It is, therefore, as no feeble puppet of the Church that she twice betrays her love to her faith at the crucial moment; for she has force, decision, independence of character. It is from something deeper than these, which also the poet is careful to indicate in the first act—;a religious instinct which lies at the roots of her nature and which is, in some of its aspects, identical with her love. Thus when, in the opening of the second act, the Pope orders her to renounce Raoul, she at first joins in his defiance, and yields only to the archbishop’s lurid prophecy of the damnation present and to come which she will bring upon Raoul. The third act finds her in retreat at the convent which she endowed, profoundly discouraged and disillusioned. She perceives her act to have been foolish and futile, of the worst cruelty to Raoul, because it has driven him back to his wife and a life of debauchery. At the command of the Church, in a kind of perverse obedience, he has taken back the repudiated Aliénor, and both have plunged into an orgy of sensuality. Stories of their abandoned living penetrate the Abbey walls, are whispered among the sisterhood, and reach Anna’s ears. They cost her remorse for her own folly, and wrath against Raoul’s infamous wife. The act opens in the convent garden on a winter afternoon. Twilight is falling rapidly, and an old nun who has been talking to Anna puts away her gardening-tools and goes into the convent. Anna, left alone in the gathering darkness, sees the gate open and the figure of a man enter. She recognizes instantly that it is Raoul; but he strides forward without knowing her.
Raoul. What are you,
Crossing my pathway, like a ghost?
Anna. You come?
Raoul. To search this convent. Aliénor, my wife,
Is here in hiding. I am come to kill her.
Say where she hides.
Anna. I cannot.
Raoul. By all saints,
You are a hypocrite. I shall discover
My victim in your bleating flock. [He passes on.
Anna. I think,
Oh, I believe he does not know my voice;
He passes on beyond me—;to what deed?
To one most righteous, one that long ago
He should have wrought. But is it possible
That she abides here? Ah! I recollect....
I have the clew!—;My lord!
Raoul [turning]. And who are you?
Your name? Your purpose? [Coming closer.]
Well, my crystal flower,
What is the part you play? Are you a Queen,
My Countess, or a little temptress nun?
Give me the word.
Anna. Who am I—;dear, my lord,
Your handmaid if you come, wronged in your honour,
To punish treason. I will lead the way.
But first a light.... [Stooping to kindle the lantern.] This evening in the dark
A woman crept along; the chapel door
Received her. But I have not seen her face.
[Looking toward the chapel.
How dark and shut!
She sleeps, if she is sleeping, in a tomb....
If she is sleeping.
Raoul. Is the chapel locked?
But you have entry. Give me up the key.
Anna. Then waken her. To slay one in one’s sleep
Is like a murder.
Raoul. Anna, you are cold,
These hands are far more icy than the keys....
Some wrath is in your heart.
Anna. O love, beloved,
That she could so betray you! Take the light,
Swift to your vengeance!
Raoul. Guide me to the door....
There is the siren in your voice. I falter....
Say, Anna—;we are lovers, it is dark,
And if I have your love that is revenge,
The sweetest to my lips.
Anna. Go, strike her dead.
It is my swift command. Betwixt us twain
There is no secret moment while she lives.
Strike swiftly, for I perish.
Raoul. But lead on;
It was your promise....
Anna. I will look no more
Upon her face, or dead or living. Strike,
With an open-dealing justice.
[She turns with the lantern away.
Raoul. And no light,
Your will, but shifting Luna.
[He disappears in the gloom.
Anna. I would pray....
[Facing the tower.
How still and awful! I could wish the bells
Would jangle on my ear: through the open turret
Two stars at gaze, but no sharp monitor.
And there is peril. Treason moves about
Somewhere, though indistinct. Some wrong is done
That the wide stream of starlight warns me of.
What is it? [She remains looking steadily up.
Raoul [returning]. But the door is barred within....
I cannot enter. Quick, take up the lantern
And light me to my work.... You will not come?
... You are dazed,
Staring at that high belfry. Off again!
An instant, you have lost the scent, poor Lulla!
What puts a woman off the scent of life
Like this religion! [Catching her wrist.] But you shall not damn me
A second time with your uncertain strength
And eddying virtue. Come, take the lantern
And tremble to the doorway.
[She holds the light steadily, looks in his
face, and stretches her arm as a
barrier between him and the chapel.
Anna. ... Count of Valois,
No further! I am taken unawares
In a great sin. That woman is my foe,
I am thirsting for her death.... We may not touch her.
She is in sanctuary.
Raoul. But I am come,
An angel sent to carry her to hell;
She is misplaced among the just, and if
You would escape damnation with the damned,
Light me to fling her down the great abyss.
Unbar your arms.
Anna. She rests beneath my roof,
The tower I raised, and, as I am a Queen,
Her life shall be untouched.
Act III
In the Name of Time is the most exciting of Michael Field’s plays, because it presents the high adventure of a soul. It is the work of her mid-career, the expression of a mature philosophy, and of fine, though not faultless, technique. It was conceived and in great part written when she was in love with life, a worshipper at the altar of her art, and—;this is the most significant condition of its being—;when she was entirely free from theological prepossession. For the play is concerned with an idea—;the greatest of all, perhaps, since it is the idea of God. Carloman, the protagonist, determines in its first lines to possess the Great Reality; and the drama follows him through one avenue after another of baffled quest until, dying in a prison, he murmurs his latest creed:
... I for myself
Drink deep to life here in my prison cell.
Fellowship, pleasure,
These are the treasure—;
So, I believe, so, in the name of Time....
One sees why, after the poets became Roman Catholics, they hesitated to publish this work; for the protagonist is that Carloman (son of Charles Martel, King of the Franks to A.D. 741) who renounced a kingdom for the monastic life. But in Michael Field’s presentation of him he is no submissive son of the Church. He has the independence and audacity of intellect of the poets themselves at this period; and he is the absolute visionary which they were capable of being and sometimes were. Nevertheless the play is not a polemic; and though it is vastly interesting on the speculative side, it is no philosophical treatise. It is genuine drama, and a striking example of the way in which our poets could at this stage fuse thought and form. Carloman’s spiritual adventures move us because they are enacted in human stuff; the events of his life utter his character. We see them through the renunciation of his royalty, the abandonment of his faithless wife and their child, the first convent life and its disillusion, the craving for freedom and the reawakening of ambition, the journey to Rome and dismissal to a second monastery, the revolt against bondage, the escape and armed rebellion against the Pope, the return to his home and his now prostituted wife, his recapture, imprisonment, and death. But being thus true to life, these spiritual adventures are, in their primary quest, inconclusive. For all the passion of pursuit, the vehement rejection of the outworn, the eager clutch at experience, the joyful confidence at every new turn of the road that now at last the Great Reality is in sight do but lead Carloman back to the common things of life, and only furnish him with light enough to keep a foothold in the actual world. Carloman does not find the Great Reality, though glimpses of its nature fitfully shine on him. But he discovers how to live—;that human existence to be tolerable must be sweetened by fellowship and ennobled by pleasure. Those bare elements are all that he attains; but he throws off, in the process of arriving at something so simple, hints and gleams of truth more complex and more vivid. To gather merely those flashes may do an injustice to the work as drama; but one must risk that, for its thought is at least of equal importance. And since these fragments express the character of Carloman as he passes stage after stage of his quest, it follows that they cannot be a coherent philosophy.
There is no vanity in life; life utters
Unsparing truth to us,—;there is no line
Or record in our body of her printing
That stamps a falsehood. Do not so confound,
Father, life’s transience and sincerity.
* * *
The thing to do
Is simply just the sole thing to be done.
* * *
There should have been no tears, no taking leave,
A freeman can do anything he will.
* * *
Oh, do not put your trust in Time;
Put on at once forever, leap to God!
Have done with age and death and faltering friends,
Assailing circumstance, the change of front
That one is always meeting in oneself,
The plans and vacillations—;let them go!
And you will put on immortality
As simply as a vesture.
* * *
Heaven detests
A beggar’s whining. God is made for Kings,
Who need no favours, come to Him for nothing
Except Himself.
* * *
We must escape
From anything that is become a bond,
No matter who has forged the chain—;ourselves,
An enemy, a friend: and this escape,
This readjustment is the penitence....
* * *
But there is no such thing—;
A vow! As well respect the case that sheathes
The chrysalis, when the live creature stirs!
We make these fetters for ourselves, and then
We grow and burst them. It is clear no man
Can so forecast the changes of his course
That he can promise so I will remain,
Such, and no other. Words like these are straws
The current plays with as it moves along.
* * *
... You cannot see that Time
Is God’s own movement, all that He can do
Between the day a man is born and dies.
... Think what the vines would be
If they were glued forever, and one month
Gave them a law—;the richness that would cease,
The flower, the shade, the ripening. We are men,
With fourscore years for season, and we alter
So exquisitely often on our way
To harvest and the end.
* * *
It never is too late for any seeing,
For any recognition we are wrong.
* * *
Earth’s wisdom will begin
When all relationships are put away,
With their dull pack of duties, and we look
Curious, benignant, with a great compassion
Into each other’s lives.
* * *
Pepin. And are you not a rebel?
Carloman. I am, I am, because I am alive—;
And not a slave who sleeps through Time, unable
To share its agitation.
* * *
The God I worship. He is just to-day—;
Not dreaming of the future,—;in itself,
Breath after breath divine! Oh, He becomes!
He cannot be of yesterday, for youth
Could not then walk beside Him, and the young
Must walk with God: and He is most alive
Wherever life is of each living thing.
To-morrow and to-morrow,—;those to-days
Of unborn generations.
The Roman trilogy dramatizes the epoch in which the decline of the Empire began, and covers, in the period from A.D. 180 to 212, the disastrous reigns of Commodus, of Didius Julianus, and the co-emperors Caracalla and Geta. The interlude of Pertinax and his heroic effort to stop the downward movement is not treated, except that his assassination is the starting-point of The World at Auction; and the military adventures of Septimius Severus offered the poets no suitable material. The three plays have not, therefore, a common protagonist: royal persons were killed off too quickly to be of service in this respect. But there is, nevertheless, a real bond between the three plays in the idea of the State; and there are physical links in certain persons of the drama. Thus Marcia, the noble Christian slave who was so closely associated with Commodus that her figure appears engraved with his on certain coins of the period, plays a very important part in the two first tragedies, with Eclectus her lover. Fadilla, sister to Commodus, and Pylades, a Greek dancer and pantomime, appear in all three plays—;Pylades giving the poets a welcome opportunity to present the character of artist that they always delighted in.
The first play of the trilogy, The Race of Leaves, is concerned simply with the downfall of Commodus. There is, of course, no deliberate presentation of a problem in any of these plays of the second period, though a problem of some sort is implicit in every one. It is not, in the trilogy, capable of statement as one clear force fighting another to a single issue; but as the complex, fluctuating, diverse elements of the epoch, making for conflict of morals, of religion, of class, of political and Imperial interests. And if it be protested that that is altogether too vague and abstract as a motive for drama, the reply is, of course, that it is by no means presented as theory. It is wrought into the persons of the drama and impels them. Imagination has so possessed itself of the historical situation that what was rotten in the State has crept insidiously into the life of the play, which goes to its tragic end in consequence.
It would be a fascinating study, illuminative of the different mental processes of the historian and the poet, to compare, throughout the trilogy, what Gibbon made of the same materials. One must not be beguiled far along that path; but in respect of Commodus, he is for Gibbon (and, of course, the evidence supports his judgment) an unnatural monster with “every sentiment of virtue and humanity extinct.” Which is to say that the historian has collated the facts and fitted them together into a certain pattern. The poet has done more than that. She has absorbed the spirit of the time; she has penetrated to the very soul of each of the persons of her drama, and that sympathetically: she has felt not only their individual reaction to the forces of their age of transition, but the subtle, disintegrating influence of the age itself.
Hence no rigid datum is postulated, even about Commodus. We see him, through the action of the play, in the process of becoming what he was. We see how and why he became a creature so abandoned to lust and cruelty that Marcia, a Christian and his loyal friend, could yet bring herself to mix for him the poison-cup. We see the whole desperate business already implicit in his origins: not, as Gibbon somewhat mechanically saw it, from the partiality of Marcus Aurelius for his beautiful young son, but from the elements in Commodus of Faustina’s amoral nature, and his reaction from his father’s stoical austerity. Thus we find Fadilla, in Act I, speaking to her sister Lucilla of their father:
Philosophy,
That smiles on life, till life is made ashamed,
And sunders from each end for which it throbs,
Praise, glory, pleasure, how should it direct
Youth through its awful rapine? By the gods
Marcus is held as good and our fair mother
As evil ... yet our father poisoned life
In each of us from childhood, for his voice
Withered illusion, and our urgent youth
To him was nothingness, to us a lie
That could not prove the truth it made us feel.
He spoke of us as leaves within a wind,
Leaves shaken diversely: and so we are,
Unhappy children!
There are indicated in Commodus from the beginning the portents of what he afterward became; but there are also spiritual graces (his love for Marcia, his love for his sister Lucilla, and his faith in Cleander) which hold him to humanity and reasonableness. But the seed comes to its fruit through the logic of events: the grace and sweetness of humanity wither as, one by one, those whom he loved and trusted prove traitors. His deepest affection had been for Lucilla, and her plot to murder him shakes him to the soul. But he cannot bring himself to sentence her, and it is only under the shock of another perfidy that he is hardened sufficiently to order her death. That act is the spiritual crisis of his life, for in committing it he sins against the last ray of light left in him. When Cleander is revealed as a traitor, and Commodus rushes out to destroy his sister, he does in fact compass his own destruction, both moral and physical. The scene occurs in Act II, and I quote it for the reason that it is the crucial incident of the drama. But the rightness of its psychology steadily wins the mind as one perceives how the memory of Lucilla’s crime works in him at first to reject the warning of Marcia and Fadilla because they are women; the reaction to pity after he has condemned Cleander; his revulsion to hatred of Marcia because she brings evil tidings and comes in ugly clothing; the swift change when he appeals to her sympathy; his turning to perverse rage again when she cannot weep with him for the traitor, and he rushes out to sentence Lucilla—;this, finally, in order to avenge himself on Marcia because she had begged him to spare his sister.
Fadilla and Marcia have broken upon his revels, dressed in mourning as a sign of their ominous news, and Commodus has commanded them to speak at once, on pain of death:
Marcia. ’Tis you must die,
My lord, unless—;[to Fadilla]—;but tell him, Princess, all.
He will believe a lady of his blood.
Tell him of ruin, tell him he has lost
The Roman people, tell him he has lost
The moiety of his guard, that he must dread
From his own subjects what could never chance
By hand of barbarous nation.
Eclectus. All is lost;
Your Guard is broken; you are now defenceless,
And on the brink of slaughter....
Fadilla. Outside these walls a fiery hatred marshals
The citizens. They have a single shout
Of hunger after justice, and one name
For all they hate—;Cleander. Every voice
Demands his head.
Commodus. An execrable plot!
I cannot listen any more to words;
They are the language of conspirators.
[To Marcia.] But you have put your beauty quite away,
Made yourself hideous, distasteful. There
Again I catch design; my sister too—;
Cleander smote her lover. Envious, Ha!
That was Lucilla’s keynote. Agony!
I will not give him up.
Marcia. He is a traitor.
I say this in Truth’s name.
Commodus. And through your eyes
I look as to the bottom of the well.
Marcia, come nearer! You are deadly sure ...?
Marcia. Eclectus!
Commodus. No, swear to me by your eyes....
Marcia. Cleander is a traitor. He has brought
A host together, he has armed your people
To strike you dead unless you quell this strife:
He fraudulently bore the public grain
To private granaries, till famine raged,
And still it rages on. Although I tremble
To move you with the sorrow worst to man
Of finding falsehood in the services
That fashioned every day, I, who must die
So soon beside you, yet proclaim with Rome
Cleander is a traitor. [She gazes into his eyes.
Commodus. So you doom him,
So! Woman, how I hate you. From his youth
When every office nearest to myself
Was his, and he familiar with my pleasures,
My needs, my health, my privacy, my sleep,
Even then he was a traitor? All must end
If such a hollow, such inanity
Gape round me as existence. [Re-enter Cleander.
... Let him die!
Cleander. ... The cup!
Commodus. He promised me
To bring it. It is brought. A poison-bowl!
Drink, drink, Cleander; pledge me!
[Cleander drops the cup and crouches at his feet.
Cleander. I am lost,
Crushed by your sudden anger. Could I drink?
’Twas an oblation. Are you not a god,
And through my service? Dare you cast me off?
Dare you discard such deep fidelity?
Gods do not so desert.
Eclectus. You are condemned. The crowd impatient.
Cleander. Master, by our youth,
By all my fond devotion.... If I erred,
It was for you. I twisted circumstance
For you, I stole, I lied....
Marcia [calling]. Laetus!
Cleander. Her voice—;
The harlot, my accuser!
Marcia. Laetus! [Laetus enters with soldiers.
Commodus. Take
Your victim, offer him!
[Cleander is dragged away. Commodus wraps
his face in his mantle.
I shut my ears.
Truly I am a god; ’tis on this wise
The gods abandon, deaf to circumstance.
You cannot rate him. Why, he kept my rooms:
A little Phrygian slave, the cryer offered,
They bought him for me, and he jigged a dance
Of the mountain-loving Mother the first night
He placed my pillow. Marcia, cling to me!
Marcia. My lord!
Commodus. Cling, cling as to a drowning man.
O Veritas, I loved him. Do not weep.
[A distant cry and shouts are heard.
For me, I must. A ghost cries after me;
And at the little bloodless Hades-moan
My heart grows soft.
Marcia. Oh, steel yourself. Cleander
Has fallen justly.
Commodus. So you will not weep!
He shall have justice in the Shadow-land.
Some parchment—;Quick!—;[Exit.
Fadilla. What moves him?
Marcia. Something moves,
Something! When men rise restless from their tears
One must not ask their errand....
[Re-enter Commodus.
. . . . .
Commodus [to Pylades]. Bear this sentence
Forth to the hall, to Laetus. It condemns
One I found wholly guilty: she must die.
Fadilla. Gods, ’tis Lucilla!
Commodus. Bear the sentence, beauty....
Ah, Marcia, this is well; you do not move.
Marcia. How could I?
Commodus. What a rigid ugliness you stand. I hate you.
The World at Auction follows The Race of Leaves historically (though it appeared earlier) with the inglorious episode of the reign of Didius Julianus. This is he who is said to have bought the Empire with his fortune and to have paid for it with his head; and that barter is the whole plot of the drama. Julia Domna takes up the chronicle after the death of Severus has left his sons Caracalla and Geta joint emperors. Its plot is concerned with the jealous struggle between the two brothers and its fatal issue, which all the astuteness and the passionate devotion of their mother, Julia Domna, could not avert.
Lack of space prevents one from dealing fully with these plays; and from The World at Auction it is impossible to do more than quote, from the initial incident of the barter, Marcia’s protest. The Prætorian Guard has just assassinated the uncomfortably virtuous Pertinax, and the Imperial seat is vacant. We are introduced to the house of Didius, and are shown his wealth, his vanity, his weakness, and the greed and ambition of his wife and daughter; that is to say, the elements which make for his downfall. His treasurer, Abascantus, enters with the news that the Prætorians are putting Rome up for sale, and he proposes that Didius shall bid for it. Marcia interposes, horrified:
Rome for sale!
The empire offered! Didius, do not listen;
There is no verity behind this cry;
The world may be possessed in many ways,
It may not know its lord; but oh, believe me,
It has its Cæsar; nothing alters that,
No howling of a little, greedy crowd.
Why should you rule this city? Have you raised it
To higher honour? Have you borne its griefs?
Will it remember you?
Act I
There follows a masterly passage in which Didius vacillates between the indignation of Marcia and the persuasions of his family. At length he yields to them (though still half afraid of Marcia) to the extent of sending Abascantus to bid for him; and then turns whining to Marcia:
Didius. Is Rome bought and sold?
Alas, you see, she is. A purchaser
Is not ashamed to trade in noblest blood,
If once a state of servitude is owned.
We traffic in all creatures, and, if fate
Allow the traffic, we are justified.
Marcia. You are forbidden; something holds you back.
Rome to be bought! [Showing the city.] Look there!
Didius. But if I stood,
An army at my back to overwhelm,
You would not interpose.
Marcia. It is the strong,
And they must be accoutred by the gods—;
What helmets and what spears!—;who may prevail
In circumstance so awful. Dare you call
The Mighty Helpers who have fought for Rome
To aid you in this enterprise? I know
The day will come she will bear many evils,
And many kingdoms build their seat on her:
But touch her with a manacle for gold!
O Didius, do not dream that what is done
Of foolish men can ever come to pass;
It is the Sibyls’ books that are fulfilled,
The prophecies—;no doings of a crowd.
They are laid by as dust. “If fate allow,”
You say, “the traffic”! You may change the current
And passage of whole kingdoms by not knowing
Just what is infamy; a common deed
It may be, nothing monstrous to the eye,
And yet your children may entreat the hills
To hide them from its terror.
Act I
Julia Domna, the last of the three plays, is terrible in the fierce truth of its imagination, and contains in Act II the most powerful bit of drama that these poets have written. Once again they have taken the bare bones of history and made of them human creatures of almost appalling vitality and strength. The emperors Caracalla and Geta pursue a vague and erratic course through the scene of the historian, and a dry phrase about “fraternal discord” does not much illumine it or make it comprehensible. But the poet brings to it the light of vision, and sees in Julia Domna, their mother—;a woman of rare beauty, grace, and intelligence; able, subtle, of irresistible attraction and powerful personality—;the cause of the insane jealousy between the brothers which not only explains their career, but makes the catastrophe inevitable. And what gives this play its almost awful force is that Julia Domna, though loving deeply both her sons, herself precipitates the tragedy and brings about Geta’s murder. In this element of the drama there is a tragic irony which gets itself wrought into the mere dramaturgic irony of Act II with a total effect of great intensity. When the act begins Julia is rejoicing that she has succeeded in keeping both her sons in Rome. There had been a plan to divide the Empire and to give a separate rule in East and West to each of the two brothers; but she—;her affection mastering prudence—;had opposed it. She could not tolerate the pain of parting from Geta; and the plan was defeated. The opening conversation skilfully reveals the dangerous situation that she has thus created. Her two sons, ravenous for her favour and openly loathing each other, refuse to meet. It is only in deference to her that they consent to inhabit the same building, where they are lodged in separate suites. So long as she does not swerve a hair’s breadth from impartiality, and so long as her wit can devise means to soothe and flatter each in turn, she can hold them from violence. But secretly she is not quite impartial. For Geta, her younger son, with his sunnier and gentler nature, she has a deeper tenderness. And that betrays itself when, taking Caracalla in what seems a propitious mood, she proposes to him a reconciliation with his brother. His wrath is the more deadly in that he had felt himself, a moment earlier, alone and secure in his mother’s affection. He dissembles, and promises to make friends; but when Julia Domna goes out to bring Geta, he quickly plots to kill him. He hides soldiers behind his mother’s throne, instructs them to act upon a given signal, and when Geta enters receives him with a speech of welcome. The tragic irony of the scene is complete; Geta’s death, when it comes, is of the last horror, and his mother’s agony a thing only to be realized by a woman and expressed by a great poet.
The act is so complete a unity that to detach a part of it must necessarily do the poet an injustice. One risks taking the central passage, however, in the hope that even out of its context something may remain of the imaginative truth which sees Caracalla, lulled for the moment by his mother’s welcome, and exultantly promising her a boon, for that reason turned to fury the more vengeful when the boon that she names is begged for Geta. One may be prepossessed; one may, with the cumulative weight of the whole tragedy in one’s mind, see more in a phrase than the poets intended to put there. Nevertheless, it does seem to me that Caracalla’s answer to his mother, “Rise from your knees,” and her frightened rejoinder, “I am not kneeling,” are supreme touches, awful in their brief, pregnant, startling rightness.
Caracalla, happy to find his mother alone, has been protesting his love for her:
Caracalla. As wine
I have flushed your face. Are you so weary now
And so dejected? But your very raiment
Shines in my presence and casts off a dust
Of little stars.
... What is the boon?
Julia Domna. What boon?
... I had forgot.
Caracalla. But I will grant it,
I must in this great prodigy of joy
To find you thus, to give you health again
Simply by breathing near you. Majesty,
No son, but Hercules I think in me
Has pulled at Juno’s breasts again. I smack
The flavour still of those first draughts. Beloved,
If you would ease my reeling brain, confer
Some labour on me, some attempt; for you
I would disjoint the hills.
Julia Domna. Nay, of myself
And for myself I cannot heave a wish.
Caracalla. But for your greater honour—;a fresh palace,
Baths of more tempered coolness, any jewel
That the East buries....
Julia Domna. ... For my greater honour,
And pride of glory! But there is a thing....
Come to me, for you cannot understand
Unless I speak it close.
[She stretches her arms to Caracalla, and
whispers to him.
Caracalla. Rise from your knees.
Julia Domna. I am not kneeling.
[Caracalla is silent. She turns away,
terrified.
Caracalla [with a slow smile]. But there is a power
I may myself invoke.
Julia Domna [turning to him]. O Caracalla,
Your daemon, the low voice of your own soul.
Caracalla. You cannot name the power....
[After a pause, with a deep inclination.
When least you hope,
Your prayer is heard. Lo, I extinguish strife
With Geta, in your presence meet him here,
Within your room; and we will give this palace
One hearth, one board, one audience-chamber, one
Glad-smiling Lar—;for we will be as one,
And rule as one. You shall embrace him even
Before my eyes. Go, fetch him out of exile;
Bring him to me.
Julia Domna. If from your soul you speak....
Caracalla. By Vesta’s Sacred Relics.
Julia Domna. You will meet him?
Caracalla. Within the hour.
Julia Domna. And will become as one?
Caracalla. Ay, as one son.
[Julia Domna, still keeping her eyes on
him, goes out.
The Syrian bitch, what guile!
[Calling to the soldiers in the anteroom
to order the murder of Geta.
Tarantus, heigh!
Other Roman work of this period is Stephania (1892), a trialogue dealing not very convincingly with the vengeance taken by the wife of the Roman consul Crescentius on Otto III. There is much interest and not a little beauty in this play, but no dramatic conviction. One comes, therefore, finally, to Attila, my Attila! (1896), which refuses to be passed over in complete silence, though it does not lend itself to quotation. The intellectual motive here is much more conscious than in the other plays of the group. Indeed, the play is in spirit a survival from the earlier period, and belongs to this one only in external things of matter, form, and date.
Honoria, the heroine, is described by the poets as “the new woman of the fifth century,” and the mere record of that fact is enough to indicate the nature of the problem which will be dealt with. But Michael Field did herself a greater injustice than usual in trying to define the meaning of this drama in terms which suggest a local and temporary phase. For just as neither Honoria nor the ‘new woman’ of the nineteenth century was really new and transitory, but rather a reassertion of very old and permanent things, so this play belies its preface; and instead of treating a mere ‘movement’ in a given epoch, it is found to deal with perennial human stuff.
Honoria, the little princess of A.D. 450, to whom even Gibbon was sympathetic, is no mere smasher of windows—;though she does that too in her own way, by an illicit union with a young chamberlain of the palace whom she loves against prudence and convention. She is, however, in her complete significance, something more than a rebel against convention. The poet wrought better than she knew, and gave in her Honoria a woman’s presentation of the woman’s right to love and motherhood. She had formulated the idea before, tentatively and somewhat in disguise, in The Cup of Water; and her letters at that time amusingly reveal both trepidation lest her real meaning should be discovered, and anger at the blunderers who did not detect it. She need have had no fear: no one guessed. The time was not ripe; and now, ten years after, with the production of Attila, it still was not ripe. It may even be that we have had to wait for the teaching of Freud to make plain all that is implied in this play. Of him the poets knew nothing; and could they have known, would have disliked intensely, as most healthy minds do, his obsession with the idea of sex. Yet they have done the poet’s work so well—;which is to say, they have observed so carefully, thought so fearlessly, and so vividly imagined—;that they have presented (without in the least intending to do so) an almost pathological study of suppressed instinct: one which illumines and is in its turn illuminated by the residuum of truth which does underlie the fantastic theories of the psycho-analyst.
Yet once again it is necessary to qualify an impression of too stark a problem. One repeats, therefore, that the problem, though distinct and weighty, is implicit; it grew up in the artist’s despite. Honoria is not a peg on which to hang a theory or a puppet with which to illustrate one. She is a creature of great vitality who wins our affection and our pity by her eager challenge of life and her disastrous defeat. We watch her developing from an immature and impulsive girl who follows innocently her newly awakened maternal instinct into a woman whose rich emotional power and mental strength have been thwarted by repression and perverted to an insane infatuation for the Hun king, Attila. But it follows from those elements that the chief value of the play is its psychology and not its dramatic power. The work will charm for half a dozen reasons—;its sympathy with the youthful rebel, its gem-like utterances on love, its mental courage, its penetration, its dramatic truth; but it never rises to the force of the great scenes of the trilogy.