THE HARRAP LIBRARY

Further volumes will be announced later

MICHAEL FIELD
BY MARY STURGEON

Katharine Bradley

and

Edith Cooper

The latter from a miniature
by Mr Charles Ricketts in
the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

MICHAEL
FIELD

BY MARY STURGEON

AUTHOR OF “STUDIES OF CONTEMPORARY
POETS” “WESTMINSTER ABBEY” ETC.



LONDON: GEORGE G.
HARRAP & CO. LTD.
2-3 PORTSMOUTH ST. KINGSWAY
& AT CALCUTTA AND SYDNEY


First published March 1922

Printed in Great Britain at The Ballantyne Press by
Spottiswoode, Ballantyne & Co. Ltd.
Colchester, London & Eton

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PREFACE

SOME years ago the writer of this book discovered to herself the work of Michael Field, with fresh delight at every step of her adventure through the lyrics, the tragedies, and later devotional poems. But she was amazed to find that no one seemed to have heard about this large body of fine poetry; and she longed to spread the news, even before the further knowledge was gained that the life of Michael Field had itself been epical in romance and heroism. Then the theme was irresistible.

But although it has been a joy to try to retrieve something of this life and work from the limbo into which it appeared to be slipping, the matter may wear anything but a joyful aspect to all the long-suffering ones who were ruthlessly laid under tribute. The author remembers guiltily the many friends of the poets whom she has harried, and kindly library staffs (in particular at the Bodleian) who gave generous and patient help. To each one she offers sincere gratitude; and though it is impossible to name them all, she desires especially to record her debt to Mr Sturge Moore and Miss Fortey; Father Vincent McNabb, Mrs Berenson, and Mr Charles Ricketts; Dr Grenfell, Sir Herbert Warren, and Mr and Mrs Algernon{8} Warren; Miss S. J. Tanner, Mr Havelock Ellis and Miss Louie Ellis; the Misses Sturge; Professor F. Brooks and the Rev. C. L. Bradley; Professor and Mrs William Rothenstein; Mr Gordon Bottomley and Mr Arthur Symons—;who will all understand her regret that this book is so unworthy a tribute to their friend and that the scheme of it, designed primarily to introduce the poetry of Michael Field, rendered impossible a fuller use of the material for a Life which they supplied.

To the courtesy of Mr Sydney C. Cockerell, the Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, the author owes the copy of Edith Cooper’s portrait. This portrait is a miniature set in a jewelled pendant (both drawing and setting the work of Mr Charles Ricketts) which was bequeathed to the Fitzwilliam Museum on the death of Katharine Bradley.

Warm thanks are also tendered to the publishers who have kindly given permission to use extracts from the poets’ works, including Messrs G. Bell and Sons, the Vale Press, the Poetry Bookshop (for Borgia, Queen Mariamne, Deirdre, and In the Name of Time); to Mr T. Fisher Unwin, Messrs Sands and Company, and Mr Eveleigh Nash; and to{9} Mr Heinemann for Mr Arthur Symons’s poem At Fontainebleau.

A Bibliography is appended of all the Michael Field books which have been published to date; but there still remain some unpublished MSS.

MARY STURGEON

Oxford
November 1921

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CONTENTS

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I. BIOGRAPHICAL

ONE evening, probably in the spring of 1885, Browning was at a dinner-party given by Stopford Brooke. He had recently met for the first time two quiet ladies who had come up to the metropolis from Bristol to visit art galleries and talk business with publishers, and he suddenly announced to the company in a lull of conversation, “I have found a new poet.” But others of the party had made a similar discovery: it had jumped to the eye of the intelligent about a year before, when a tragedy called Callirrhoë had been published; and several voices cried simultaneously to the challenge, “Michael Field!”

Only Browning, however, and a few intimate friends of the poets, knew that Michael Field was not a man, but two women, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper. They were an aunt and niece, and came of a Derbyshire family settled at Ashbourne. Joseph Bradley, its representative there in 1749, with his son and grandson after him, were merchants of substance and culture. They were men of intellect as well as business men, and seem to have possessed between them all the elements which ultimately became concentrated in our two poets. There is evidence of a leaning to philosophy, a feeling for the arts, an interest{14} in drama; and, more significant still, there is one Charles Bradley who was “a prolific and meditative writer both of prose and song.”

Katharine Harris Bradley, the elder of the two poets, was born at Birmingham on October 27, 1846. Her grandfather had migrated there from Ashbourne in 1810, and her father, Charles Bradley, was a tobacco-manufacturer of that city. He had married in 1834 a Miss Emma Harris of Birmingham, and, in the simpler fashion of those times, he and his wife were living in a house adjoining their place of business in the old quarter of the town. There, at 10 Digbeth, Katharine was born, The only other child of the union was a daughter who was eleven years old at Katharine’s birth. She was named Emma, and was of first importance in the lives of the Michael Fields. For, being a thoughtful creature, of rare sweetness and strength of character, she largely shaped the life of the little sister who was so much younger than herself; and, still more vital fact, she afterward became the mother of our second poet. She married, about 1860, James Robert Cooper, and went with him to live at Kenilworth. Her daughter, Edith Emma Cooper, was born there, at their house in the High Street, on January 12, 1862.{15}

Both poets, therefore, took their origin in the heart of a Midland city and came of merchant stock. These facts may have larger significance than their bearing on environment and nurture, though that was important. But regarded more widely, they seem to relate Michael Field and her fine contribution to English literature to that movement in our modern civilization which, in the last two or three generations, has drawn commerce into intimate connexion with our art and letters. Such names as Horniman, Fry, Beecham (and there are others of similar import) suggest at once drama, art, music. They are associated in one’s mind with new impulse, energy, initiative, and above all with disinterested service of the arts; and they are connected chiefly with Midland towns. In like manner Michael Field, with her gift of tragic vision sublimated from fierce Derbyshire elements, may be seen spending a strenuous life and a moderate fortune, without reward or encouragement, to enrich English poetry.

Neither poet ever attended school, or swotted to gain certificates; which is probably one reason why they both became highly educated and cultured people. When Katharine was two years old her father died from cancer—;a disease which afterward carried off her mother, and{16} from which both our poets died. Mrs Bradley removed to a suburb of Birmingham, and was careful to provide that the lessons which she gave her little girls should be supplemented, as the need arose, by other and more advanced teaching. But the children were allowed to follow their bent, and authority took the form of a wise and kindly directing influence. We hear in those early days of eager studies in French, painting, and Italian. We hear, too, of friendships with a group of lively cousins. One of them remembers Katharine’s vivid childhood, and speaks of her as a gay and frolicsome creature, highly imaginative and emotional, with whom he used to act and recite. She adored poetry, would write even her letters in rhyme, and had, as a small child, a particular fondness for Scott’s Lady of the Lake. And she joined with the greatest delight in the dramatic ventures which the group from time to time attempted, such as the representation at Christmas of the passage of the Old Year and the coming of the New.

It is probable that such conditions were ideally suited to a child of great natural gifts and buoyant temperament. Katharine evidently thrived under them both in mind and body; and by the time of her sister’s marriage to Mr Cooper she was not only the healthy,{17} happy, and well-developed young animal who was the potential of all she afterward became, but she had already embarked upon the classics and was beginning to interest herself in German language and literature. Thus it happened that when, about 1861, she and her mother made their home with the Coopers at Kenilworth, Katharine became the natural companion of the little Edith, born in the following year, when Katharine was sixteen. But she was, from the first, much more than that. Mrs Cooper remained an invalid for life after the birth of her second daughter, Amy, and Katharine fostered Edith as a mother. She lavished on her an eager and rather imperious affection. She led her, as the child grew old enough, along the paths that she herself had adventurously gone, and although Edith was always shyer and more hesitating than Katharine, poetic genius was dormant in her too, only waiting to be stimulated by Katharine’s exuberance and led by her audacity. Edith, stepping delicately, followed the daring lead of her elder with a steadiness of mental power which was her proper gift; and she reaped from Katharine’s educational harvest (won in all sorts of fields, from literatures ancient and modern, from the Collège de France, Newnham, University College, Bristol, and numerous private{18} tutors) fruits more solid and mature than even Katharine herself.

When the poets removed to Stoke Bishop, Bristol, in 1878 it was with intellectual appetites still unsatisfied, and determined to pursue at University College their beloved classics and philosophy. They were already, in the opinion of a scholar who knew them at that time, fair latinists: they possessed considerable German and French, and some Italian, while Edith’s enthusiasm for philosophy was balanced by Katharine’s for Greek. Edith, docile in so much else, yet “could not be coaxed on” in Greek; not even later, when Browning, who used to speak affectionately of her as “our little Francesca,” one day gently pressed her hand and said “in honied accents, ‘Do learn Greek.’” What could a young poet do, overwhelmed by the courtly old master’s flattery, except promise softly, “I will try”? But it is not recorded that the effort took her very far. Katharine the Dionysian (always a little over-zealous for her divinities, whether Thracian or Hebrew) did not cease from coaxing; and perhaps did not perceive, for she could be obtuse now and then, how radical was Edith’s austere latinity. A poem of this period, addressed by Katharine to Edith, and called An Invitation, throws a gleam on their student days. Through it one sees as{19} in morning sunlight their strenuous happy existence, their eager welcome to the best that life could offer, and their fortunate freedom to grasp it, whether it were in books or art, in sunny aspects or beautiful new Morris designs and textures. For they were, from the first, artists in life.

Three stanzas describe the woodbine and the myrtles outside the window, and the cushioned settee inside. Then:

It is clear from all the testimony that Katharine and Edith were extremely serious persons in those first years at Stoke Bishop, a fact which seems to have borne rather hard on the young men of their acquaintance. Thus, a member of their college, launching a small conversational craft with a light phrase, might have his barque swamped by the inquiry of one who really wanted to know: “Which do you truly think is the greater poem, the Iliad or the Odyssey?” It was an era when Higher Education and Women’s Rights and Anti-Vivisection were being indignantly championed, and when ‘æsthetic dress’ was being very consciously worn—;all by the same kind of people. Katharine and Edith were of that kind. They joined the debating society of the college and plunged into the questions of the moment. They spoke eloquently in favour of the suffrage for women,{21} and were deeply interested in ethical matters. They were devotees of reason, and would subscribe to no creed. Katharine was a prime mover of the Anti-Vivisection Society in Clifton, and was its secretary till 1887. She was, too, in correspondence with Ruskin, was strongly influenced by him in moral and artistic questions, and was a companion of the Guild of St George—;though that was as far as she ever went in Ruskinian economics. Both of the friends adored pictures, worked at water-colour drawing, wore wonderful flowing garments in ‘art’ colours, and dressed their hair in a loose knot at the nape of the neck.

But more than all that, they were already dedicated to poetry, and sworn in fellowship. That was in secret, however. Student friends might guess, thrillingly, but no one had yet been told that Katharine had published in 1875 a volume of lyrics which she signed as Arran Leigh, nor that Edith had timidly produced for her fellow’s inspection, as the experiment of a girl of sixteen, several scenes of a powerful tragedy; nor that the two of them together were at that moment working on their Bellerophôn (with the accent, please), which they published in 1881, signed “Arran and Isla Leigh.” But such portentous facts kept them very grave; and their solemnity naturally provoked the{22} mirth of the irreverent, especially of undergraduate friends down from Oxford, who knew something on their own account about æsthetic crazes and the leaders of them. Thus a certain Herbert Warren came down during one vacation and poked bracing fun at them. The story makes one suppose that he must have disliked the colour blue in women and the colour green in every one—;possibly because he was then in his own salad days. For when somebody mischievously asked him in Katharine’s presence, “Who are this æsthetic crowd?” he promptly replied, “They’re people as green as their dresses.”

But their women friends were more favourably impressed. To them the two eager girls who walked over the downs for lectures every morning were persons of a certain distinction who, despite careless hair and untidy feet, could be “perfectly fascinating.” Their manner of speech had been shaped by old books, and was a little archaic. Later it became a “mighty jargon,” understood only of the initiate. Their style of dress was daringly clinging and graceful in an age of ugly protuberances. And though these things might suggest a pose to the satirical, they were very attractive to the ingenuous, who saw them simply as the naïve signs they were of budding individuality. Their{23} friendship, too, was clearly on the grand scale and in the romantic manner. They were, indeed, absorbed in each other to an extent which exasperated those who would have liked to engage the affections of one or the other in another direction. Yet they were companionable souls in a sympathetic circle, Katharine with abounding vitality and love of fun and keen joy in life, expansive and forthcoming despite an occasional haughtiness of manner; and Edith lighting up more slowly, to a rarer, finer, more delicate exaltation.

Yet, in spite of many friends and a genuine interest in affairs, one perceives that they constantly gave a sense of seclusion from life, of natures set a little way apart. It was an impression conveyed unwittingly, and in spite of themselves; and one is reminded by it of their sonnet called The Poet, written, I believe, about this time, but not published until 1907, in Wild Honey:

Consciously or not, the poem is a portrait. More than one touch is recognizable, and there can be no doubt that the opening lines give a glimpse of Edith. They suggest for this reason that the sonnet was written by Katharine; and if that is so, her use of the word dullard sweetly turns the edge of the complaint of critical friends that Katharine could be thoroughly stupid. Of course she could!—;why not? though, to be sure, it was very provoking of her. Returning, however, to the resemblance to Edith. She had never the good health of Katharine, and her beauty, which was of the large, regular, blonde type, suffered in consequence. One of her friends says: “She was as if touched by a cloud—;crystalline and fragile as flowers that love the shade.” All who knew her speak of the extraordinary look of vision in her eyes: time after time one hears of the ‘inspiration’ in her face, which is visible in no matter how poor a photograph or hasty a sketch. Katharine had intensity of another{25} kind: warm, rich, glowing, a lyric and almost bacchic expression. But in Edith there was “a Tuscan quality of refinement, the outward expression of an inward beauty of thought.”

One cannot but associate those “lamps of the sanctuary” with the psychic power which Edith undoubtedly possessed. An incident attested by their cousin, Professor F. Brooks, may be given to illustrate this. It was occasioned by the death of Edith’s father in the Alps. He and his younger daughter Amy were there on holiday in 1897, and had planned to climb the Riffelalp. They wrote of their plan to Katharine and Edith, who received the letter at home in England on the day that the ascent was being made. Edith read the letter and passed it to Katharine with the remark: “If they go to the Riffelalp they will go to their doom.” And, probably about the time she was speaking, Mr Cooper met his death, for he was lost in the ascent, and his body was not recovered for many months.

That is only one of several psychic experiences which incontestably occurred to Edith Cooper, the most impressive being the vision which appeared to her as her mother was dying. Edith, who was helping to nurse her mother, had gone into another room to rest, as it was not believed that the end was near. She afterward{26} told her friend Miss Helen Sturge that in the moment of death her mother’s spirit passed through the room and lingered for an instant beside the bed on which Edith was lying. The event is recorded explicitly in a poem published in Underneath the Bough (first edition):

* * *

‘Michael Field’ did not come into existence until the publication of Callirrhoë in 1884. The poets put behind them, as experimental work, the two volumes which they had already published, and began afresh, changing their pen-names the better to close the past. The{27} pseudonym under which they now hid themselves was chosen somewhat arbitrarily, ‘Michael’ because they liked the name and its associations, ‘Field’ because it went well with ‘Michael.’ But it is true also that they had a great admiration for the work of William Michael Rossetti, whom, Katharine says in one of her letters, they regarded as “a kind of god-father”; and it is true, too, that ‘Field’ had been an old nickname of Edith. Their family indulged freely in pet names, and Edith was teased by a nurse, from her boyish appearance during a fever in Dresden, as the “little Heinrich.” Thenceforth she became Henry for Katharine, and Katharine was Michael to her and to their intimates.

Callirrhoë was well received, and went to a second edition in November of the same year. It is amusing now to read the praises that were lavished upon ‘Mr Field’ upon his first appearance. Thus the Saturday Review talked of “the immutable attributes of poetry ... beauty of conception ... strength and purity of language ... brilliant distinction and consistent development of the characters ... a poet of distinguished powers”—;all of which is very true. The Spectator announced “the ring of a new voice which is likely to be heard far and wide among the English-speaking peoples”—;and that may yet become true, if the English-speaking peoples{28} are allowed to hear the voice. The Athenæum saw “something almost of Shakespearean penetration”; the Academy rejoiced in “a gospel of ecstasy ... a fresh poetic ring ... a fresh gift of song ... a picturesque and vivid style.” The Pall Mall Gazette quoted a lyric which “Drayton would not have refused to sign”; and, not to multiply these perfectly just remarks, the Liverpool Mercury crowned them all in a flash of real perception, by noting that which I believe to be Michael Field’s first virtue as a dramatist in these terms: “A really imaginative creator ... will often make his dialogue proceed by abrupt starts, which seem at first like breaches of continuity, but are in reality true to a higher though more occult logic of evolution. This last characteristic we have remarked in Mr Field, and it is one he shares with Shakespeare.”

But alas for irony! These pæans of welcome died out and were replaced as time went on by an indifference which, at its nadir in the Cambridge History of English Literature, could dismiss Michael Field in six lines, and commit the ineptitude of describing the collaboration as a “curious fancy.” Yet the poets continued to reveal the “immutable attributes of poetry”; their “ecstasy” grew and deepened; their “Shakespearean penetration” became a thing almost uncanny in its swift rightness; their “creative{29} imagination” called up creatures of fierce energy; their “fresh gift of song” played gracefully about their drama, and lived on, amazingly young, into their latest years—;which is simply to say that, having the root of the matter in them, and fostering it by sheer toil, they developed as the intelligent reviewers had predicted, and became highly accomplished dramatic poets. But in the meantime the critics learned that Michael Field was not a man, and work much finer than Callirrhoë passed unnoticed or was reviled; while on the other hand Borgia, published anonymously, was noticed and appreciated. One might guess at reasons for this, if it were worth while. Perhaps the poets neglected to attach themselves to a useful little log-rolling coterie, and to pay the proper attentions to the Press. Or it may be that something in the fact of a collaboration was obscurely repellent; or even that their true sex was not revealed with tact to sensitive susceptibilities. But whatever the reason, the effect of the boycott was not, mercifully, to silence the poets: their economic independence saved them from that; and a steady output of work—;a play to mark every year and a great deal of other verse—;mounted to its splendid sum of twenty-seven tragedies, eight volumes of lyrics, and a masque without public recognition. The poets did not greatly care about the neglect.{30} They had assurance that a few of the best minds appreciated what they were trying to do. Browning was their staunch friend and admirer; and Meredith, chivalrous gentleman, wrote to acclaim their noble stand for pure poetry and to beg them not to heed hostility. Swinburne had shown interest in their work, and Oscar Wilde had praised it. Therefore only rarely did they allow themselves a regret for their unpopularity. But they were human, after all, Michael particularly so; and once she wrote whimsically to Mr Havelock Ellis, “Want of due recognition is beginning its embittering, disintegrating work, and we will have in the end a cynic such as only a disillusioned Bacchante can become.”

Their reading at this period, and indeed throughout their career, was as comprehensive as one would expect of minds so free, curious, and hungry. To mention only a few names at random, evidence is clear that they appreciated genius so widely diverse as Flaubert and Walt Whitman, Hegel and Bourget, Ibsen and Heine, Dante, Tolstoi, and St Augustine. Yet so independent were they, that when it comes to a question of influence, proof of it is by no means certain after the period of their earliest plays, where their beloved Elizabethans have obviously wrought them both good and evil. Traces of Browning we should take for granted, he{31} being so greatly admired by them; yet such traces are rare. And still more convincing proof of their independence surely is that in the Age of Tennyson they found his laureate suavity too smooth, and his condescension an insult; while at a time when the Sage of Chelsea thundered from a sort of Sinai those irreverent young women could talk about “Carlyle’s inflated sincerity.”

Again, one may think to spy an influence from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy in their Callirrhoë; but it is necessary to walk warily even here. For the genius of Michael Field, uniting as it does the two principal elements of art, Dionysian and Apolline, is therefore of its nature an illustration of Nietzsche’s theory. They needed no tutoring from him to reveal that nature, for they knew themselves. Nor did they need prompting to the primary spiritual act of the tragic poet. From the beginning the philosophic mind lay behind their artistic temper. Very early they had confronted reality, had discovered certain grim truth, and had resolutely accepted it. Not until they became Roman Catholics did they become optimists, and then they ceased, or all but ceased, to be tragic poets.

* * *

When the Michael Fields left Bristol for Reigate in 1888 they withdrew almost entirely{32} from contact with the world of affairs, and devoted themselves to their art. Old friendships and interests were left behind with the old environment. Their circle became restricted, as did their activities of whatever kind, to those which should subserve their vocation. Family ties, which had always been loosely held, were now (with the exception of Mrs Ryan, Edith’s sister Amy) almost completely dropped. Their life became more and more strictly a life of the mind, and more and more closely directed to its purpose. It was a purpose (that “curious fancy” so called by the learned critic) which had been formulated very early—;long before Katharine found it expressed for her to the echo in Rossetti’s Hand and Soul: “What God hath set in thine heart to do, that do thou; and even though thou do it without thought of Him, it shall be well done. It is this sacrifice that He asketh of thee, and His flame is upon it for a sign. Think not of Him, but of His love and thy love.” To that, as to a religion, they deliberately vowed themselves, guarding their work from trivial interruption, plunging into research, and yielding themselves up to the persons of their drama, in whom they vividly lived. But although their imaginative adventures were stormy and exhausting (the death of one of their characters would leave them stricken), external{33} events were very few. Never had dramatist so undramatic a career; and there is an amazing contrast between the tremendous passions of their Tragic Muse and the smoothness, temperance, and quietude of their existence. One has no right to be surprised at the contrast, of course, for that untroubled, purposeful living was the condition which made possible their achievement. And that a virile genius can consist with feminine power, even feminine power of a rather low vitality, hardly needs to be remarked, since Emily Brontë wrote. Moreover, the contrast is determined by the physical and mental basis proper to genius of this type, one that is peculiarly English, perhaps, with sanity, common sense, and moral soundness at the root of its creative faculty. No doubt the type has sometimes the defects of its virtues, and Michael Field, who was inclined to boast that there was no Celtic strain in her blood, was not immune from faults which the critical imp that dances in the brain of the Celt might have saved her from. For he would have laughed at a simplicity sometimes verging on the absurd, at grandeur when it tended to be grandiose, at emotion occasionally getting a little out of hand; just as he would have mocked a singleness and directness so embarrassing to the more subtle, and have declared that no mature human{34} creature in this bad world has any right to be so innocent as all that!

Happily we are not concerned with the impishness of the satirical spirit: we have simply to note that it was a physical and mental (and possibly a racial) quality which enabled Michael Field thus to dedicate herself to poetry and steadily to fulfil her vow. Even the poets’ journeys now were less disinterested than their early jaunts in France and Germany for the pure pleasure of seeing masterpieces. Thus, in these later days, if they went to Edinburgh, it was for the Marian legend; to the New Forest, it was for some faint sound of Rufus’s hunting-horn; to Italy, it was for innumerable haunting echoes of Imperial Rome, of the Borgia, of the Church; to bits of old France, for memories of Frankish kings; to Ireland, for a vanishing white glimpse of Deirdre; to Cornwall, in the belief that they might be favoured to give “in the English the great love-story of the world, Tristan and Iseult.” All of which does not mean, however, that those journeys were not very joyous affairs. Several of them were sweetened by friendships, as the visits to the Brownings at Asolo, the Italian tours with Mr and Mrs Bernard Berenson, and jolly times in Paris, with peeps at lions artistic and literary. It was on one of these occasions that their British eyes were assailed (not{35} shocked, for they were incapable of that kind of respectability) by a vision of Verlaine “coming out of a shop on the other side of the road with a huge roll of French bread under one arm.” It was Mr Arthur Symons who pointed out to them this apparition; and it was he who delightedly watched their joy in the woods of Fontainebleau, and afterward wrote a poem to recapture the memory of Edith Cooper on that day:

One is not surprised to see how brightly our poets struck the imagination of the few who{36} knew them, particularly of their poet and artist friends. Mr Charles Ricketts, Mr and Mrs Berenson, Father John Gray, Mr and Mrs William Rothenstein, and, later, Mr Gordon Bottomley were of those whose genius set them in tune with the fastidious, discriminating, and yet eclectic adoration of beauty which was the inspiration of Michael Field. They have all confessed the unique charm of the poets (a charm which consisted with “business ability and thoroughly good housekeeping”); and Mr Bottomley has contrived, by reflecting it in a poet’s mirror, to rescue it from Lethe:

Mr Ricketts first met the poets in 1892, when he and Mr Shannon were editing The Dial. Michael Field became a contributor to that magazine, and the acquaintance thus begun ripened into close friendship and lasted for twenty years. In memory of it Mr Ricketts has presented to the nation a picture by Dante Gabriel Rossetti which now hangs in the National Gallery of British Art. Its subject, Lucrezia Borgia, was treated by Michael Field in her Borgia tragedy, and is one of her most masterly studies. I am{38} indebted to Mr Ricketts for many facts concerning the poets’ lives in their Reigate and later Richmond periods, and for some vivid impressions of them. Thus, at their first meeting:

Yet it is clear that she, as well as Michael, loved the give-and-take of social intercourse within their circle. She too liked to catch up and pass on an amusing story about a contemporary, and thoroughly enjoyed a joke. After the austere Bristol days, when their gravity might have been at least a thousand years old, they grew steadily younger through the next fifteen years. “Michael had,” says Father John Gray, “the look, the laugh, and{39} many of the thoughts of a child.” Both were witty, but Michael, the richer and more spontaneous nature, had a warm gift of humour almost Rabelaisian. She loved fun, and jesting, and mimicry. With her frequent smile, her sparkling eyes, and her emphatic tones and gestures, she was an extremely animated storyteller. Henry’s wit had a more intellectual quality: it was quicker and sharper in edge than Michael’s, and it grew keener as she grew older, till it acquired almost a touch of grimness, as when she said to a friend during her last illness: “The doctor says I may live till Christmas, but after that I must go away at once.”

Henry was not a sedulous correspondent: indulged by Michael, she only wrote letters when a rare mood prompted her to do so. But the fortunate friend who heard from her at those times received a missive that was like an emanation from her soul, tender, wise, penetrative, gravely witty and delicately sweet. One would like to give in full some of those letters, but must be content to quote characteristic fragments of them. Thus, in March of 1888, she wrote to Miss Alice Trusted:

In May she wrote to the same friend an account of a visit to their “dear old friend, Mr Browning”:

Another visit is described in July of the same year:

One finds acute artistic and literary estimates in these letters. Thus, after an appreciation of Whistler’s nocturnes, she remarks of his Carlyle portrait, “It is a masterpiece; the face has caught the fervid chaos of his ideality.”

Of Onslow Ford’s memorial of Shelley she says: “The drowned nude ... is an excellent portrait of the model, and therefore unworthy of Shelley, to my mind. The conventional lions and the naturalistic apple-boughs don’t coalesce. The Muse is but a music-girl. I like the bold treatment of the sea-washed body.”

She sketches an illuminating comparison between the art of Pierre Loti’s Pêcheur d’lslande and that of Millet; and declares that Huysmans’ work “is the last word of decadence—;the foam on the most recent decay—;and yet there is something of meagre tragedy about it.”

After a visit to the opera she writes:

She exclaims at the “elegant Latin” used by Gerbert in his letters, “written in the dark tenth century”; agrees with Matthew Arnold that Flaubert has “neither compassion nor insight: his art cannot give us the verity of a temperament or soul”; but adds of his (Flaubert’s) correspondence, “To me each letter in which he writes of art is full of incitement, help, and subtle justness.”

She gives her impressions of Pater when delivering a lecture in December 1890:

A criticism of the comedy of the nineties,{43} and its manner of production, is thrown off lightly in a letter to Miss Louie Ellis:

On an Easter visit to the country, in 1894, she wrote to Miss Trusted:

Writing to another friend at a much later date, she says:

{44}

And in 1913, the last year of her life, when Mr Rothenstein had been making a sketch of her head for a portrait, she wrote him thanks which were both critical and appreciative, concluding:

It is significant that, wherever they went, the servants fell in love with Henry. Her manner, always gracious, was to them of the most beautiful courtesy and consideration. Michael was more imperious, more exigent. Warm and generous in her friendships, she yet was capable of sudden fierce anger for some trivial cause—;when, however, she would rage so amusingly that the offender forgot to be offended in his turn. She might banish a friend for months, for no discoverable reason, or might in some other rash way inconsiderately hurt him; but, though she would be too proud to confess it, she would be the unhappiest party of them all to the quarrel. “Of the wounds she inflicts, Michael very frequently dies,” she once wrote in a letter.

But of her devotion to Henry, its passion, its{45} depth, its tenacity and tenderness, it is quite impossible to speak adequately. From Henry’s infancy to her death—;literally from her first day to her last—;Michael shielded, tended, and nurtured her in body and in spirit. Probably there never was another such case of one mind being formed by another. There surely cannot be elsewhere in literature a set of love-songs such as those she addressed to Henry; nor such jealousy for a comrade’s fame as that she showed to the reviewers after Henry’s death; nor such absolute generosity as that with which she lavished praise on her fellow’s work, and forgot her own share in it. But there is not room, even if one could find words, to speak of these things. One can only snatch, as it were in passing, a few fragments from her letters. And this I do, partly to bring home the other proof of Michael’s devotion, namely, that she always did the very considerable business involved in the collaboration, and wrote nearly all the social letters: but chiefly so that some direct glimpses may be caught of her warm human soul.

Thus we may find, in her correspondence with Mr Elkin Mathews about Sight and Song in 1892, one proof out of many which the poets’ career affords of their concern for the physical beauty of their books. They{46} desired their children to be lovely in body as well as in spirit; and great was their care for format, decoration, binding, paper, and type: for colour, texture, quality, arrangement of letterpress, appearance of title-page, design of cover. In every detail there was rigorous discrimination: precise directions were given, often in an imperious tone; experiments were recommended; journeys of inspection were undertaken; certain things were chosen and certain others emphatically banned. But in the midst of exacting demands on some point or other one lights on a gracious phrase such as “We know you will share our anxiety that the book should be as perfect as art can make it”; or, this time to the printers, “I am greatly obliged to you for your patience.”

Again, Michael is discovered, in 1901, when a beautiful view from the old bridge at Richmond was threatened by the factory-builder, rushing an urgent whip to their friends. That which went to Mr Sydney Cockerell ran:

In a letter to Mr Havelock Ellis, in May 1886, there is a picturesque but concise statement of the manner of the poets’ collaboration:

To the same correspondent she wrote in 1889, on the subject of religion:

And in 1891, because Henry was recovering from her Dresden illness, Michael wrote in jocular mood:{48}

One finds in letters to Miss Louie Ellis amusing evidence of both our poets’ love of beautiful clothes, as well as of Michael’s gift of humorous expression. Thus, in 1895, just before a visit to Italy, she wrote:

And later, after the frock was received, she wrote:

The following too brief passages are from some of Michael’s letters to the Rothensteins: the occasion of the first being to commiserate them on the discomforts of a removal:{49}

There are delightful letters about the Rothenstein children, in particular of an unfortunate catastrophe to a parcel of birds’ eggs sent to a certain small John in January 1907:

In the spring of 1908 the poets went on one of their frequent country visits, which were often rather in the nature of a retreat, and this time they put up at an inn called the Tumble-Down-Dick. Thence they wrote:

And a few days later:

And in March 1910, having both been ill, they conclude thus an invitation:

From the time of the Dial contributions Mr Ricketts became their adviser in matters of book-production. It was on his suggestion, too, that they removed from Reigate to the small Georgian house at 1 The Paragon, Richmond, which overlooks the Thames from its balconies and sloping garden, and remained their home until their death. That was in 1899, after the death of Henry’s father had left them free to choose another home. It was in this year that they published their masque, Noontide Branches, from the Daniel Press at Oxford. They had been in Oxford two years earlier, in October 1897, while they were still under the shadow of Mr Cooper’s uncertain fate. He had been lost on the Riffelalp in June, and his body had not yet been recovered. But the beauty of Oxford brought them peace, and the kindliness which met them there, in particular from Mr and Mrs Daniel, lightened the cloud that lay on their spirits. Michael wrote afterward from Richmond to Miss Trusted to record gratefully how Mr Daniel, though she had been quite unknown to him,{52} had consented to print the masque and warmly befriended them.

They would joke about the minute size of the house at Richmond, which nowadays has dwindled to a mere annexe. “Do not squirm at the lowly entrance,” they wrote in an invitation to a friend; “within the snail-shell are two poets most gay and happy”; and added, referring to their dog, “Do come! Chow says you will, or he will know the reason why.” Probably there never was so modest a shell with so exquisite an interior; but of this it is Mr Gordon Bottomley who can best speak:

It is true that at Paragon they were gaily and happily busy: the years there were fruitful of mellow achievement. Nevertheless, it was there that the spiritual crisis of their life came, when in 1907 both poets entered the Roman Catholic Church. Henry was received into the Church at St Elizabeth’s, Richmond, on April 19th of that year; and Michael went to Edinburgh on May 8th to be received by their old friend the poet Father John Gray.

The crisis had been prepared for partly by Henry’s ill-health, which encouraged her contemplative habit of mind—;that in turn operating upon the religious sense which had always underlain their rationality. It was Henry who first made the great decision when, after reading the Missal in Latin, she suddenly exclaimed: “This is sacrifice: from this moment I am a Catholic.” But their curious small volume called Whym Chow suggests (and the suggestion is confirmed by the facts) that the course of that event was strongly influenced by the death of their Chow dog. It was a mental process of great interest for the student of the psychology of religious conversion, but too{54} intimate and subtle to be discussed here; and Whym Chow, printed privately in an exquisite small edition in the Eragny Press, was intended only for the eyes of friends. The chief value of the book is therefore bibliographical. Yet, in order to comprehend how the rationalists of the year 1887 and the declared pagans of 1897 became the Catholics of the year 1907, one thing may at least be said—;that in the manner of the death of the little creature they loved both the poets came to realize sacrifice as the supreme good. It was not by any means a new idea to them; on the contrary, it will be seen that it was their earliest ideal. And the reason for its triumphant force at this stage lay precisely in the fact that what had been an instinct then, an intuitive, hardly conscious, but integral element of character, became now a passionate conviction.

In February 1911 Henry was attacked by cancer; and in one of the few letters that she wrote she says (to the Rothensteins):

At the same time her fellow was writing to their friend Miss Tanner:{55}

Michael’s sufferings, through the long ordeal of Henry’s illness, were not, however, confined to spiritual anguish. She herself was attacked by cancer six months before Henry’s death on December 13th, 1913. But she did not reveal the fact; no one knew of it save her doctor and her confessor, and they were under a bond of secrecy. She nursed her fellow tenderly, hiding her own pain and refusing an operation which might have been remedial, encouraging Henry in the composition that she still laboured at, attending to the details of its publication, and snatching moments herself to write poems which are among the most poignant in our language. Neither poet would consent to the use of morphia, for they desired to keep their minds clear; and to the last, in quiet intervals between attacks of pain, they pursued their art. In a cottage in the village of Armitage, near Hawkesyard Priory, where they stayed for a few weeks in the summer of 1911, I stood in{56} the small sitting-room they occupied, and there, so the good housewife told me, Miss Cooper, though very weak, sat day after day—;writing, writing. All through 1912, with occasional weeks of respite and certain visits to Leicester and Dublin, the work went on: Poems of Adoration, Henry’s last work, was published in that year. In the summer of 1913, from the Masefields’ house at 13 Well Walk, Hampstead (taken for the poets by the generosity of Mrs Berenson), Michael wrote to Miss Fortey:

Yet Mystic Trees, Michael’s last written book, was published in that year.

When December brought release at last to Henry’s gentle spirit, Michael’s endurance broke down. A hæmorrhage revealed her secret on the day of Henry’s funeral; a belated operation was performed, and for some weeks Michael was too ill to do more than rail angrily against the Press notices of her fellow:

By March 1914, however, she was at work again, collecting early poems of Henry’s to{57} publish in a volume called Dedicated, and about this time she wrote to Miss Fortey:

The poems she mentions appeared in the Dedicated volume shortly afterward.

As the summer grew her malady gained the mastery; and, knowing that death was approaching, she removed to a house in the grounds of Hawkesyard Priory, in order to be near the ministration of her friend and confessor, Father Vincent McNabb, a Dominican priest who was at that time Prior at Hawkesyard. One of the few recorded incidents of her last days (it was on August 24th, 1914, just a month before she died) is touchingly characteristic. Father Vincent had taken tea with her, and Michael, propped by her pillows, yet contrived to add dignity and grace to the little ceremony with which she presented to him a copy of Henry’s Dedicated. One can imagine the scene—;the long, low room on the ground floor in which her bed had been placed for greater convenience in nursing her; the windows giving on to an unkempt lawn and a tangle of shrubs; summer dying outside, and{58} inside the dying poet reading to the white Dominican poem after poem by her fellow, in a voice that must have shaken even as the feeble hand shook in writing the record down. Finally the priest, taking the book in his turn, read to her her own poem Fellowship, and, hearing her soft prayer for absolution on account of it, turned away his face and could find no answer.

I

II

III

IV

The weeks of Michael’s passing witnessed the passing of the age to which she belonged, for they were those in which the Great War began. It is clear that Michael Field, in the noble unity of her life and work, represented something that was finest in the dying era; and yet she was, in certain respects, aloof from that Victorian Age, and in advance of it. It is profoundly moving to see how, even in extremity, her genius remained true to itself. It was so true, indeed, that in her pitiful, scanty record of those days one may catch a glimpse, through her winging spirit, of the moments of greatness to which the spirit of England rose in that crisis.

She was desolated at the thought of the killing, the suffering, the destruction of beauty. But she too felt the stimulus which the vastness of the danger gave to the national spirit,{60} and she longed to serve. “I want to live now the times are great,” she wrote to Mrs Berenson. “There are untended wounds to think of—;that makes me ashamed”—;ashamed, she meant, of the tendance that her own wound was receiving. Again, on August 13th:

She followed with desperate anxiety the calamitous events in Belgium, writing on August 28th:

And finally, on September 19th:

After that day little or nothing more was written. Every morning she rose at seven o’clock, and, assisted by her nurse, dressed and was wheeled in a chair through the Priory park to hear Mass at the chapel. On September 23rd the nurse wrote at Michael’s bidding to Miss Fortey:{61}

On September 26th Michael for the first time did not appear in the chapel at her usual early hour. Father Vincent, seeing her vacant place, had a sudden certainty of the end. “Consummatum est” rushed to his lips as he ran down the grassy slopes to the house. He found Michael stretched on the floor of her room, dead, with her head on the bosom of the kneeling nurse. She had sighed her last breath one moment before. She had succeeded in dressing ready to go to Mass, but the effort to step into the carriage had been too much. She sank down and died quietly in the nurse’s arms.

* * *

There are questions of intense interest involved in the life of the Michael Fields—;personal, psychological, literary—;which one must put aside, angry at the compulsion of restricted space. But their life was in itself a poem, and the beauty of it is unmistakable. These were heroic and impassioned souls, who, in honouring their vow to poetry, gave life, it is true, “a poor second place”; and yet they fulfilled life itself, with a completeness few are capable of, in love and sacrifice. Michael would{62} quote from her copy of St Augustine: “Aime, donc, et fais ce que tu voudras ensuite”; and love was her gift to the fellowship, as Henry’s was intellect. But the collaboration was so loyal, the union so complete, that one may search diligently, and search in vain, for any sign in the work both wrought that this is the creation of two minds and not of one. It is possible to sift the elements, of course, seeing in this work vividly contrasting qualities; that it is at one and the same time passionate and intellectual, exuberant and dignified, swift and stately, of high romantic manner and yet psychologically true; that it is fierce, sombre, vehement, and at the same time gentle, delicate, of the last refinement of perception and feeling. One can even identify the various elements (when one knows) as more characteristic of one poet or the other; perceiving that Michael was the initiator, the pioneer, the passionate one from whom the creative impulse flowed; and that to Henry belonged especially the gift of form, that hers was the thoughtful, constructive, shaping, finishing genius of the fellowship. But it is not possible, in the plays on which the two worked, to point to this line or that speech, and say “It is the work of Michael” or “It is the work of Henry.” You cannot do it, because the poets themselves could not have{63} done it. The collaboration was so close, so completely were the poets at one in the imaginative effort, that frequently they could not themselves decide (except by reference to the handwriting on the original sheet of manuscript) who had composed a given passage.

In like manner it is possible to follow the poets through the facts of their existence, and to see that existence shape itself, despite mental vicissitude and apparent change, triumphantly of one piece throughout—;generous in colour, rich in texture, graceful in design. It might seem that gulfs were fixed between their grave, austere, studious girlhood, the joyous blossoming of their maturity with its pagan joy in beauty, and the mysticism of their last years. They appeared to go through many phases, and even to pass, under the eyes of astonished and indignant friends, out of all mental resemblance to what they were believed to be. A friend of Bristol days, Miss Carta Sturge, writing in a strain of regret for this apparent inconsistency, adds generously:

{64}

That is finely true; and yet it may be that the tone of regret is unnecessary; for on a complete survey it will be found that Michael Field was deeply consistent from first to last. Through perhaps a hundred changes—;of opinion, of taste, and of deeper things—;she remained the same; and those changes were but steps toward the fulfilment of what she had been from the beginning. Thus one sees the ending of the poets’ life as the inevitable outcome of that which they always were—;of a magnificence touched with grace. The Dionysian wine of those early days was poured at last to the Man of Sorrows; the Bacchic revel was turned to tragedy. But it was the same wine; the same energy of enthusiasm; and the latest-written lyrics, devotional pieces composed in suffering and very near to death, have often the audacity and abandon of the worshipper of the vine-god. The poet is Mænad still.{65}

II. THE LYRICS

THE lyrical poetry of Michael Field is much smaller in bulk than her dramatic work; yet there are eight volumes of it. On the other hand, it is more perfect in its kind than her tragedies, and yet its chiselled, small perfection cannot approach their grandeur.

A story is told about one of the books of lyrics which is amusingly characteristic of the poets. Underneath the Bough made its appearance first in the spring of 1893, and was well received. The Athenæum reviewer even went so far in admiration as to suggest, of obvious defects, that Michael Field probably preferred to write in that way! Soon after the book came out, however, the poets went on an Italian journey with some friends who took a different view of the function of criticism, and who dealt with them faithfully about the weakness of some of the pieces. Thereupon, with a gesture that is entirely their own in its grace and emphasis, the poets confessed their repentance for the defective work by immediately cutting the book to the extent of one-half, and reissued it in the autumn of 1893 with the careful legend “Revised and Decreased Edition.” The story, however, does not close on that access of humility which, on a comparison of the two editions, would certainly appear{66} somewhat excessive. But humility was not, at any rate with Michael, a pet virtue. Repenting at leisure of their hasty repentance, they brought out yet another edition, and reinstated many of the poems which they had rejected from number two—;this with a word of defiance to the critics of number one, and a recommendation to them to look for a precedent to Asolando.

The third edition is rare, but a copy of it may be seen at the British Museum. It was published in Portland, Maine, in 1898. It still omits about thirty of the pieces from the first edition, but it introduces a number of new ones and restores, among others, the In Memoriam verses for Robert Browning which appeared first in the Academy for December 21st, 1889, on the occasion of Browning’s death:

It would appear from the preface, however, that there was an additional motive for publishing a third edition in an invitation from the{67} United States to contribute a volume to the “Old World” series, and the poet adds a note of gratitude to her American readers who, as she says, “have given me that joy of listening denied to me in my own island.”

Considering the lyrical work as a whole, it is seen to cover Michael Field’s poetical career from beginning to end. Not that the lyric impulse was constant (for there were times when the poets’ dramatic work absorbed them almost completely); but it never entirely failed. It was, as one would expect, strongest in their early years: it recurred intermittently through the period of the later tragedies, and returned in force when, toward the end of their life, tragic inspiration gave place to religious ardour. Thus, although this poetry is subjective in a less degree than lyrical verse often is, most of the crucial events of the poets’ lives are reflected there. The lover of a story will not be disappointed, and the student of character will find enough for his purpose in personal revelation both conscious and unconscious. Moreover, a spiritual autobiography might, with a little patience, be outlined from these eight volumes; and it would be a significant document, illuminating much more than the lives of two maiden ladies in the second half of the nineteenth century.{68}

Such a spiritual history would be complete, in extent at least, for it would begin with Michael’s earliest work in The New Minnesinger (that title at once suggesting the German influence in English life and letters at the moment, 1875), with its strenuous ethic of Unitarian tendency based on a creed so wide as to have no perceptible boundary; and it would end only with the devotional poetry of her last written volumes where, with no concern for ethics as such, the poet stands at the gate of the well-fenced garden of the Roman Church with a flaming sword in her hand and a face of impassioned tenderness. But in the interval it would pass through her pagan phase, when she revelled in joyful living—;and in the classics, turning their myths into pleasant narrative verse; when in Long Ago (1889) she daringly rehandled the Sapphic themes; and when in Sight and Song (1892) she tried to convey her intense delight in colour and form by translating into poetry some of the old master-pictures that she loved. More important, however, than those books are in such an autobiography is the human record of joys and loves and sorrows contained in the volume called Underneath the Bough (1893); while Wild Honey (1908), a collection covering about ten years of her life, brings us down to the epoch{69} of religious crisis and reconciliation with the Church of Rome. Then, with tragic inspiration quelled by Christian hope and submission, all her creative energy flowed into the Catholic lyrics contained in Poems of Adoration (1912) and Mystic Trees (1913).

One does not pause long on The New Minnesinger in this survey of the lyrics, because it was published by Katharine Bradley as Arran Leigh, and is not, therefore, strictly a work of Michael Field. Nor shall we deal with the lyrics in Bellerophôn, a volume published by the two poets as Arran and Isla Leigh in 1881. Not that either book is unworthy of study; on the contrary, there are some fine pieces in both. But the poets having elected to leave them in limbo, where one has had to grope for this mere reference to them, there, for my part, they shall remain. Except to note in passing that, following Swift’s Advice to a Young Poet to “make use of a quaint motto,” the poet has inscribed on the front of The New Minnesinger the phrase “Think of Womanhood, and thou to be a woman.” That has a significance which is elaborated in the name-piece, whose theme is of love and of the woman-poet’s special aptitude to sing about it; and where it is insisted that the singer shall be faithful to her own feminine nature and experience. All through{70} the work of the two poets it will be seen that the principle stated thus early and definitely by the elder one ruled their artistic practice; so that we are justified in extracting this, at least, from Michael’s earliest book, and noting it as a conscious motive from the beginning.

I think, too, we are entitled to recover from the shades one small song. For, after all, a great literary interest of the work of the Michael Fields is the amazing oneness of the two voices. The collaboration, indeed, deserves much more space than it is possible to give it here. But it is something to the good if we can glance, in passing, at undoubted examples of each poet’s work, hoping to see hints of the individual qualities which each contributed to the fellowship. We have already told how, after Henry’s death and when Michael knew that she too must soon die, she hastened to gather together certain early pieces by her fellow, and published them, with a poignant closing piece of her own, in the book called Dedicated (1914). That closing poem, Fellowship, closed her artistic life: it is Michael’s last word as a poet. But the point for the moment is that she has given us in Dedicated the means of recognizing Henry, and distinguishing between the two poets in their youthful work. One may take from The New Minnesinger, therefore, as characteristic of{71} the younger Michael, such a piece as The Quiet Light:

That is a slight thing which does not, of course, represent Michael at anything like her full power; but it does already suggest the emotional basis of her gift, and her lyrical facility. The piece which follows, Jason, is a luckier choice for Henry, not only in that it gives her greater scope, but in that it is probably a maturer work than the other. The comparison would, therefore, be unfair to Michael if one were judging of relative merits; but we are thinking for the moment only of a difference in kind of poetic equipment. And the poem is given for this further fact—;it was chosen by Michael herself to read to Father Vincent{72} McNabb a few days before she died, in exultation at her fellow’s genius:

Clearly there are elements here different from those of The Quiet Light. One feels in{73} this poem a dramatic movement and a sense of tragedy which are not simply given in the data of the noble old story; one sees structural skill in the shaping of the narrative, and recognizes in a memorable line or two—;“A golden aim I followed to its truth” and “Ashes of flame she was, ashes of flame”—;the final concentration of thought and feeling where great poetry begins.

Perhaps we are not mistaken, therefore, in distinguishing, even so early as these two poems, the contrasting qualities of the two poets which, met in happy union, made so clear a single voice that Meredith was amazed when he discovered that Michael Field was two people. One may define these qualities as emotional on the one side and intellectual on the other. It is, of course, the old distinction between rhetoric and imagination, matter and form; and clearly shows itself again in the two volumes of devotional poetry at the end of their life, where Henry is seen as kin to Herbert and Michael as kin to Vaughan. And though the whole story of the collaboration cannot be contained within any statement so simple as that, its fundamentals are rooted in this complementary relation between the two minds.

Returning to the lyrics, I choose frankly the{74} pieces which throw some light on the poets’ lives. And although I do this from an unashamed interest in their story, and without immediate reference to the merits of the verse as poetry, there should be a chance that the poetical values of pieces wrought under the stress of intimate feeling will be not lower but higher than those of others. So, indeed, the event proves; for of the lyrics which may be safely attributed to Michael those are the best which can be called her love-poems. Of love-interest, in the attractive common meaning of the term, there is not a great deal in the work of either poet; and in that of Michael it is mainly comprised in half a dozen songs in Underneath the Bough. Sapphic affinities notwithstanding (and imaginary adventures in that region), the two ladies had their measure of Victorian reticence; though that did not decline upon Victorian prudishness. But Michael wrote love-poetry of another kind than the romantic, in a series about her fellow which is probably unique in literature. It will be found in the third book of Underneath the Bough, and is supplemented by pieces scattered through later books, notably a small group at the end of Mystic Trees. Those poems are a record of her devotion to Edith Cooper, and it is doubtful whether Laura or Beatrice or the Dark{75} Lady had a tenderer wooing. They explain, of course, the slightness of a more usual (or, as some would put it, a more normal) love-interest in Michael’s work. But it need not be supposed that there was anything abnormal in this devotion. On the contrary, it was the expression of her mother-instinct, the outflow of the natural feminine impulse to cherish and protect. And this she herself realized perfectly; for there is a passage in one of her letters to Miss Louie Ellis which runs:

But that Michael was ‘normal’ in the mere sense of having had love-affairs there is proof enough without recourse to the vulgarity of spying into every lyric for a record of actual experience. Her dramatic instinct would make that pitfall even more dangerous in her case than in most, so that one would not dare to venture in the direction at all without a warrant. But, armed with the poet’s confession, one may quote from a tiny sequence which has an almost tropical breath. It tells of a passion that blossomed quickly in hot, bright colour, and died with sudden vehemence.{76}

If we were concerned with the art of this verse rather than its tale one would be compelled to consider a touch of rhetoric and a violence of gesture which are characteristic of Michael not at her best; but which do correspond with the turbulent youthful emotion out of which the poems were born. Michael’s authentic love-story, however, is that which centres upon Henry; and the poems to Henry express a master-passion. There was an element of her nature as strong and as constant as its poetic impulse, and that was her affection for her fellow. Indeed, she was greater as a lover than as a poet; for her life was her finest poem, and Henry was its inspiration. It follows that she was never so happy as when she was engaged upon this theme; and that the sequence I have mentioned is a joyful record of the fellowship. Here is a piece which describes the sealing of the bond between the poets in{79} those early days when they had not yet embarked on their great quest:

Next we may take a portrait of Henry in her girlhood when the two began to collaborate, this giving incidentally a description of what was, on the testimony of intimate friends (and, indeed, of the poets themselves), their method of work:

Exactly in that way the two would often co-operate, working together actually on one piece. When it was a question of a big work—;of a tragedy or a chronicle-play—;there was, of course, a united exploration of the ground and a mapping of it. The two poets would go together to the British Museum or some other great library for the research. The scheme was then fully discussed, ideas were exchanged, conceptions of character formed and tested, and scenes allotted to suit individual taste or aptitude. But the collaboration was even more intimate than that. They would readily interchange their parts; and frequently they would be engaged together upon a page, a speech, or even a single line. It is therefore no poetic licence which declares that the half-written sheet of one would be completed to perfection by the other, but only further proof of the way in which the diverse elements of these two minds were fused in a union so complete{81} that the reader cannot credit a dual authorship, and the poets themselves could hardly distinguish their individual contributions.

There is among the poems to Henry a dainty mock-pastoral in praise of her beauty which might have been written by an Elizabethan songster to his mistress; and a sonnet called Constancy which speaks with graver passion:

There are pieces which reveal Henry, quieter perhaps, but deeply tender toward her fellow:

There is a short poem in which Michael is thinking about the nature of Henry’s genius, and perceives its tragic power as her peculiar gift:

And in another piece she compares and contrasts her own gift with that of Henry in imagery as brilliant as its criticism is just:

It is evident that Michael knew herself and her impulsive and exuberant Muse, which, to quote one of the irreverent faithful among her friends, would sometimes merely “fizz” into expression. That it could be too facile, and was, by comparison with Henry’s depth, superficial, is true. Michael had not the syllogistic mind of her fellow, and arrived at conclusions by an intuitive process rather than by reasoning. She was capable of unintelligent questions and occasional stupid moods that exasperated the critical type of mind which is so much cleverer than that. But she brought a positive contribution to the fellowship, nevertheless, in swift perception, intense ardour, keen sensibility, and above all in the generosity of temper that found its chief expression in devotion to her fellow-poet. Thus the most gracious of her love-lyrics is that in which, after having fostered the younger mind with infinite sympathy, making possible all that it became and achieved, she withdraws herself to cede the higher place to her lover:

The love-story of Henry’s life was not so frankly revealed; she was never so forthcoming as Michael. Nevertheless, there was such a story, and in outline it seems to have been one of the convergence of kindred minds, of friendship growing to passion, of love declared and reciprocated, but not fulfilled because of some other tie which bound both lover and beloved.

It is not difficult to see how such a crisis might arise in Henry’s life. Delicate in health and shy of temperament, she was from her childhood sheltered by Michael, and surrounded by a love which she was accustomed to accept as simply as the air she breathed. Just so unconsciously she would receive the homage offered by their friends, drifting into{85} a closer relation with one of them, both of the lovers cheated by the tranquil air which overlay her depth of feeling, until a sudden surprising passion overtook them. That the awakening for Henry meant renunciation sounds a little old-fashioned to a current philosophy which sees no virtue in the verb ‘to renounce,’ and demands fulfilment, not only as the highest good, but as the holiest duty of the human creature. But either that modern doctrine is not so new as it sounds, or these two ladies were in advance of their time, for they held it, and (at least in their art) persuasively commended it. They wrote a charming play, The Cup of Water, deliberately to claim the woman’s right to love, and to demonstrate the cruelty and waste of frustration. And they once said, in a whimsical letter to a friend:

Nevertheless, when it came to the test of action, theory went to the winds, and Henry renounced her lover for her fellow. She held herself bound by every tie of tenderness and{86} gratitude, and no other course was conceivable save to shut the gates of the fortress and bar them against that clamorous joy.

Human instinct may rebel at the spectacle of life so baffled; and common sense, in its short way with problems, may deny a valid cause for the sacrifice. But a longer vision is compelled to observe that fulfilment was not, after all, withheld. It came on the spiritual plane, however; for it is safe to say that we owe the finest work of Michael Field to the fact that Henry did not marry her lover:

Before leaving the volume called Underneath the Bough it is convenient to take examples of lyrics in a different kind from those we have been considering. Thus we may select two or three pieces which an easy label would describe as nature-poems. There are not a great many which answer fully to that description, for although our poets adored the beauty of the physical world, their Muse was too prepossessed by the movement of human life to surrender itself completely to Nature. Yet by certain{87} aspects of Nature they were deeply stirred—;great spaces, lofty skies measured by masses of moving cloud, trees blown by the wind—;in short, by just those features in which in old Italian painters people have agreed to see the signs of a religious sense:

The two pieces which follow are chosen because they illustrate the touch of fantasy which our poets often added to their nature-poetry—;a touch which gives such grace and charm to the lyrics of their earlier plays.{88}

* * *

The volume called Long Ago was published as early as 1889: that is to say, four years before Underneath the Bough and nineteen years before Wild Honey. It is, however, a more perfect work than either of those two, both of which include poems of very various date, circumstance, and merit. Long Ago possesses a unity which they lack, and which characterizes the spirit as well as the form of the book. The fact of its having been designed as a whole and wrought to a finish without any long interruption may account for its effect of singleness in impulse and style; but its more satisfying inner unity no doubt arises from the harmony that existed between the poets and their theme, Sappho. Critics notwithstanding, it was not so audacious as it seemed for two Victorian ladies to plunge into the task of rendering Sapphic ecstasy. For, first, the leader of the sally was herself a flame of Dionysiac fire; and the inscription on the banner of her life, from its beginning to its end, was love. There would appear to be a real resemblance between Michael’s intensity, her exuberance and quick lyrical impulse, and the legendary Sappho. And this, restrained by Henry’s sense of form and deepened by their classical lore in poetry and philosophy, should surely have armed them for the adventure.{90}

There is an ironic flavour now in tasting the comments on the book at its appearance. One of the faithful held up protesting hands at the poets’ audacity. Another described the book as a “ludicrous and lamentable attempt.” Yet Browning praised it, and marked some of the pieces in the manuscript “Good” and “Good indeed!” Meredith wrote to the poets to express his joy in it. The Academy reviewer, in June 1889, predicted that it would some day be described as “one of the most exquisite lyrical productions of the latter half of the nineteenth century”; while Wharton, in the preface to the third edition of his Sappho, speaks of the “felicitous paraphrases of Michael Field,” and quotes from four of them. The contrast between the two opinions is as amusing as such things are apt to be to those who are not the subject of them; but Michael Field did not see the joke (perhaps her sense of humour was deficient), and the severer judgments pained her. They were probably based on an assumption that the poets were trying to recreate Sappho, a project which might have justified brickbats if it had ever been entertained. But their aim was simply to make short dramatic lyrics out of the scenes suggested to their imagination by the Sapphic fragments. The verdict of those most com{91}petent to judge the book is, on balance, that they succeeded remarkably well; while as to the average reader, he will surely find something most attractive in the flashing moods of the verse, in its grace and finish, and in its complete harmony. Truly pagan the work is, whether in its sunny aspects or its dark ones, whether in its philosophy or its art. The pursuit of joy, the adoration of beauty, the ecstasy and the pain of love, the gay light and colour of the physical world, its sweet scents and sounds, its lovely shapes and delicate textures, are all here, their brilliance but the brighter for the shadow that flits about them of death and its finality.

* * *

* * *

* * *

To pass immediately from Long Ago to the poets’ last lyrical works may seem a wilful act, considering the length of time between the books, and their amazing unlikeness. Yet there is a very great interest in the contrast and all that it implies, and a piquancy which one may hope is not too irreverent in the reflection that at the root there is no great difference, after all, between the Lesbian songs and the Christian ones.

The volume called Poems of Adoration was published in 1912, and Mystic Trees in 1913. They were both signed Michael Field, but the first is all Henry’s work with the exception of two pieces, and the second is all by Michael except the poems called Qui Renovat Juven{95}tutem Meam and The Homage of Death. The two volumes therefore provide material for a useful study from the point of view of the collaboration; and they are a positive lure to a comparison with the devotional poetry of the seventeenth century, notably, of course, with Herbert and Vaughan. One would not go so far as to claim an absolute likeness between Henry and George Herbert, if only because Henry does not spread herself in tedious moralizing nor indulge in concetti. To that extent her work is purer poetry and, one would suppose, purer religion than that of the old poet; and she rises oftener to sublimity. But in essentials the two are close akin—;in sweetness and strength and clarity, in their sense of form, and in terse, vigorous expression. Between Michael and Vaughan the likeness is even closer, and would tempt one far if it were not that our limits prevent straying. But indeed the human and spiritual values of the two books transcend mere literary questions so greatly as to make those look trivial and even impertinent.

For Poems of Adoration was published only a few months before Henry died. Much of the book was composed at dead of night, during great pain, when, as her father confessor has remarked, “most of us would be trying not to{96} blaspheme.” The poems are in fact those of a dying woman, and one who had refused herself any alleviating drug. Two of them, Extreme Unction and After Anointing, were written when she was at the point of death and had received the last offices of the Church. Some bear evidence of acute crises of body or soul; and in some the vision of the mysteries of her faith is so vivid that the poet herself is almost overwhelmed. Once or twice, when she has gone to the limit of spiritual sight, she falters; but never does that fine intelligence stumble into the outer darkness. Perceiving that it is coming near the verge of sanity, it draws back in time to leave the vision distinct and credible.

To the strict eye of criticism these poignant facts may appear irrelevant. I cannot bring myself to think that such splendour of soul has no relation to the art that it produced; but those persons who insist on cleaving the two asunder may be reassured as to the technical accomplishment of this poetry. Often cast into something of the poets’ earlier dramatic form, its music is sweet, its measures are rhythmical, and its language has force and clarity. It has a majesty which proclaims its origin, and one has no need to know the circumstances of its birth. Imagination rises, swift and daring, to heights which are sometimes sublime, as in the{97} first poem quoted below. Here the conception of Christ the wine-treader is treated with magnificent audacity of image and metaphor, while underneath runs a stream of thought which, though it makes great leaps now and then, pouring its strong current into cataract as it goes, yet bears its craft safely up and on.

DESOLATION

. . . . .

THE BLESSED SACRAMENT

THE HOMAGE OF DEATH

. . . . .

QUI RENOVAT JUVENTUTEM MEAM

Mystic Trees, the last book which Michael gave to the world, is more strictly theological than Henry’s. Always less the philosopher than her fellow, she took her conversion to Catholicism, in externals at least, more strenuously. She developed, for example, a proselytizing habit which a little tried the patience of her friends, especially those who remembered her as a joyful pagan. That her Christian zeal was as joyful, to her, as her paganism had been did not much console them, or soften the onslaught of her blithe attacks. Indeed, it occasionally led her to acts which she herself afterward repented of. Thus there is a comic touch in the spectacle of Michael, truly English as she was, urging upon Ireland, in the person of a poor old Irishwoman, every benefit but that one which the old woman craved for. For Michael went to great pains to help her, and to get her placed in a home, and she subsequently wrote to a friend, “I am{102} so deeply regretting my part in putting an Irishwoman in a Nazareth house: their love of freedom is so great.” The little parable holds Michael’s character almost in entirety—;impulsive, eager, generous, wilful, rash; and then deeply penitent and rushing to make noble amends.

But that over-zeal had a significance for her artistic life too. She wrote in a letter to another friend, “I will pray for Orzie’s conversion: O Louie, be religious! You cannot ‘laugh deep’ unless you are.” In the phrase I have italicized Michael is surely confessing, though it may be without intent to do so, that her religion is now awaking in her the same ecstasy which had formerly been awakened by the poetic impulse. To herself it seemed that she had suffered an enormous change, and that she was no longer the old Michael. And it is true that for a time the tragic inspiration of her art was suspended. Perhaps that follows of necessity from the nature of the Christian doctrine, its hope, its humility, its vicariousness, and its consolation. Yet the moment one turns to these religious lyrics one finds the same ecstasy with which the earlier Michael had adored the beauty of the world and had sung the love of Sappho. So, too, in the first work which Michael Field had produced, Callirrhoë, the{103} theme is none other than the worship of the god by love and sacrifice. That, in fact, is the meaning implied in nearly all her poetry, as it was the motive force of all her life; and the only change that has occurred when we reach, with Mystic Trees, the end, is that the name of the god is altered. But whichever god possessed her had the power to make Michael “laugh deep” in a rapture which, whether of delight or rage or sorrow, was always an intense spiritual joy—;which is simply to say, to evoke the poet in her. The exaltation of spirit which in Callirrhoë said of Dionysos “He came to bring Life, more abundant life,” and declared “Wert thou lute to love, There were a new song of the heaven and earth,” is the same as that which wrote to a friend in early days, “We are with the nun in her cell as with the pagan at the Dionysos’ feast”; and which affirmed in a letter to another friend that she welcomed inspiration from whatever source, “whether the wind and fire sweep down on us from the mighty realms of the unconscious or from the nostrils of a living God, Jehovah, or Apollo, or Dionysos.”

But, as we said, to herself she seemed a new creature; she had found a treasure and must run to share it, even as she had burned to impart the Bacchic fire thirty years before.{104} Thence came the scheme of Mystic Trees, which, as Father Vincent McNabb suggested to me, seems to be unique in religious poetry. The book contains a cycle of poems, designed to express the mysteries of the Roman Catholic faith as they are celebrated in the seasons of the Church. The “Trees” of the title are the Cedar and the Hyssop, used as an image of the Incarnation: the great Cedar, the Son of God, becoming the little Hyssop, which, in the lovely cover-design by Mr Charles Ricketts, stands on either side of the Cross with bowed head.

The book is divided into three parts, with a small group of poems added at the end, which Michael wrote while Henry was dying. In the first part, called “Hyssop,” the story of the Redemption is unfolded in a series of poems representing the life and death of Christ. It is possible to quote only two or three of the incidents thus treated, but we may take first this one describing the presentation of the infant Christ in the Temple:

THE PRESENTATION

Passing some intervening poems, we take from the same sequence these two members{106} of a group of imagined incidents on the evening of the Crucifixion:

SUNDOWN ON CALVARY

. . . . .

A FRIDAY NIGHT

We may take from the second part of the book, called “Cedar” and dedicated to the Virgin, two short pieces which help to illustrate the sweetness of this poetry, its tenderness, its{108} intimacy of approach to divine things, and its innocence.

CALLED EARLY

UNDER THE STAR

From the third part, which is called “Sward” and therefore is obviously dedicated to ordinary{109} folk, we need take only the little poem which follows. But we ought to remember the occasion of it, that Michael had been compelled to go alone to Mass because Henry was too ill to accompany her.

Michael said, in a letter to a friend, “Mystic Trees is for the young”; and one perceives the truth of that. But I do not think that her word ‘young’ means only ‘youthful,’ although children would probably understand the poems readily, and a certain kind of child would delight in them. Nor do I think that they were written with any special audience in mind. But the poet, in reading them afterward, recognized their childlike qualities of simplicity and directness, and their young faith and enthusiasm. Did she realize, one asks oneself, how she had{110} in them recaptured her own youth and its lyrical fervour? She was nearly seventy years old when she wrote them, which is a wonder comparable to Mr Hardy’s spring-songs in winter. And though we may accept, if we like, the dubious dictum of the psycho-analyst that every poet is a case of arrested development, that does not make any less the marvel that in old age, after the lyric fire had subsided and the sufferings of her fellow had destroyed the joy of her life, she should have written such poems. For here it is certainly relevant to remember that at this time Henry was dying, and that Michael herself was suffering, silently, the torture of cancer. “Michael has a secret woe of her own,” was all that she permitted herself to reveal, in a letter to her closest woman friend. But so stoical was her courage, and so composed her manner, that the hint was not taken, and no one guessed that she too was ravaged by the disease. Before her intimates, as before the world, she kept a cheerful face, in terror lest her fellow should come to know of her state. Her doctor knew, of course, and Father Vincent McNabb. But they were under a bond to spare Henry the added anguish of knowing the truth, and the bond was faithfully kept. Not until her fellow was dead, when Michael had, in fact, laid her in her coffin, did{111} she break silence to the friend who was with her in that ordeal. Two days later a hæmorrhage made it impossible to conceal her condition any longer. “God kept her secret,” said Father McNabb, “until the moment when it was no longer necessary”; and without disloyalty to the godhead of the heroic human spirit, we may accept that word from one who brought consolation and devoted friendship to the poets’ last sad days.

It was, then, during the closing weeks of Henry’s life, and while Michael was suffering that sorrow and great bodily pain, that she wrote Mystic Trees. Yet the poems manifestly bear within them a deep creative joy, and breathe sometimes a holy gaiety of spirit; and it is only at the end of the book, in a tiny section containing four short poems, that the poet allows her anguish of body and mind the relief of expression. For that brief space, so rightly named “A Little While,” the inspiration to “laugh deep” failed, and stark tragedy overwhelmed her.

BELOVED, MY GLORY

SHE IS SINGING TO THEE, DOMINE!

CAPUT TUUM UT CARMELUS

III. THE TRAGEDIES—;I

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{115} 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{116} 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{117} 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{118} 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{119} 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{120} 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:

The story of Callirrhoë comes from Pausanias; but our poet has modified the original{121} 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{122}—;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:

. . . . .

. . . . .

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{125} 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.

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{126} 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:

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:

[To the King, who has entered.

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:

[Sings.

. . . . .

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{130} 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

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{131} 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{132} 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 Princ{133}e’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.

. . . . .

. . . . .

The scenes in Act IV, when Rothsay is starving to death in Falkland Castle, are vividly imagined:

. . . . .

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:

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 in{137}stinct 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;{138} 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:

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{140} 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:

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{141} 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:

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{142} 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{143} 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{144} 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:

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,{145} 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:

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,{147} 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:

And again, when Edric asks for some message, a “sugared speech” to take to Emma:

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{148} 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:

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:

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 tries to make her understand the facts: that the King is betrothed already, and that he cannot therefore love her.

[Exit Hubert mournfully.

The Tragic Mary (1890) returns to chronicles for its subject, and belongs to our first category{152} 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{153} 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{154} 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:

One observes, too, how the feminine author has perceived the incidence of the feminine{155} 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:

And again, when she is thinking of Bothwell’s wooing and her growing love for him:

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{156} 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:

There is much to illustrate this aspect of{157} 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:

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{158} by the woman. Thus Mary, to him, is a temptress love,

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 tries to make his wife divulge what are Mary’s feelings toward him:{159}

. . . . .

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{160} 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:

IV. THE TRAGEDIES—;II

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{163} 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{164} 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.{165}

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{166} 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{167} 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:

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{168} 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 sister{169}hood, 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.

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 philo{173}sophy, 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:

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{174} 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 dis{175}covers 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.

The Roman trilogy dramatizes the epoch in which the decline of the Empire began, and{178} 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{179} 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;{180} 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:

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{182} 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:

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,{187} 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:

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:

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{190} 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{191} 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:

[After a pause, with a deep inclination.

Other Roman work of this period is Stephania (1892), a trialogue dealing not very convincingly with the vengeance taken by the{194} 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{195} 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{196} 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.{197}

V. THE TRAGEDIES—;III

THE last group of tragedies is that which was published from the year 1905 onward to the poets’ death—;and afterward; but it was not a product of their latest creative activity. That activity was lyrical: or, if it ventured at all into the region of tragedy (as in an unpublished piece called Iphigenia in Arsarcia) it was with tragic genius shorn and subdued by Christian hope, Christian meekness, and Christian triumph over death—;which is to say, that it was tragedy no longer.

One may not assert in round terms that, of the eleven plays in this last group, not one was written after Michael Field entered the Roman Catholic Church in 1907. But the evidence suggests that they were all conceived before that date; and although certain revision may have been done afterward to some of them, the more important plays were completed before the poets’ conversion.

After that event their minds were possessed by the exaltation of the mystic, and their days were largely occupied in devotional exercises. Obviously they were not in the mood for the objective imagining of the dramatist; and an artistic cause is thus added to the philosophic one for the suspension of dramatic impulse.

In the Name of Time, as I have elsewhere{198} stated, must be put back as far as 1890; A Question of Memory was written and played in 1893. Deirdre in its first form was in existence years before they died, and with Borgia would rank in style with their earlier chronicle-plays. These two belong to the last dramatic phase only in their tragic motive. Mariamne was finished in 1905, The Accuser by January 1907, and one at least of the Tristan plays by 1903.

I have called these plays an Eastern group, because the most prominent of them are Eastern in theme—;and for another reason. But several come much nearer home for their subject. Two of them, Tristan de Leonois and The Tragedy of Pardon, deal with different aspects of the Tristan legend; and one treats (en fantaisie) of that great lover, Diane de Poytiers. Nevertheless, whatever the theme, all possess the characteristic which makes a second reason for describing them as Eastern—;namely, an almost Oriental violence of passion. Thus Cesare Borgia is hurled to the abyss down the immense ascent of his ambition. Deirdre’s love—;too noble for caution, too great to calculate, and too proud to dissemble—;compels catastrophe. Herod’s passion passes into a destroying madness. Ras Byzance consumes his universe in the hell of his own jealousy; and the messiah Sabbatai, distilling a cold spiritual{199} pride, cries from its lonely central ice, “I am a god,” only to shrivel incontinently at the first touch of the world’s derision. It is as though Michael Field were consciously ruled in this last phase of her Tragic Muse by the lines from the Antigone which she has set upon the first page of her Deirdre, “Nothing that is vast enters into the life of man without a curse.” For it is with the vast, the excessive, the overwhelming that she deals here; and since she is a tragic poet, she sees the vast forces accompanied by their curse, and life persistently followed by its attendant shadow.

The Herodian trilogy is the clearest illustration of this, because the material has been reduced to its simplest elements. It is, too, a good example of the poet’s dramatic art in its final manner, since therein is developed almost to an extreme her compacted, elliptical method of presentation. She had from the first a gift of seizing character into expression which, though intensely poetical, was often abrupt, fragmentary, and disjointed; the swift words leaping from the cloud of passion like lightning in a night of storm, and laying bare in one instant the whole earth and sky. In these plays, and especially in Queen Mariamne, this characteristic economy is practised to an extent which sometimes almost defeats itself.{200}

Only two plays of the trilogy were completed, Queen Mariamne and The Accuser. But neither suffers from the absence of the third; for while the first is the tragedy of Mariamne and the second the tragedy of Herod, the two together form a complete dramatic presentment of the historical figure of Herod the Great. It is a subject made for drama; and although for a century before Michael Field no great rendering of it had been made, the flair of the early seventeenth-century dramatists had unerringly tracked it down and fastened upon it. Fenton’s Mariamne (a hundred years later) is a rather blustering affair, mainly occupied with intrigue and family feuds, and presenting Mariamne as an inferior kind of gramophone with a very limited number of records.

But a pleasing and significant fact about the origins of Michael Field’s Queen Mariamne is that this was the subject of the first English drama ever published by a woman. In 1613 a play appeared called The Tragedie of Mariam, the faire Queene of Jewry, written by that learned, vertuous and truly noble Ladie, E. C. And although there has been some question as to which of two possible individuals this “truly noble” E. C. represented, both of them were women; and it seems to have been established now that the author was certainly Lady Elizabeth Carew.{201} Whether our poets knew of this play and its authorship does not appear: they seem to have gone straight to Josephus for their material, and to have been completely loyal to him. Indeed, so close do they keep to the historical record of their persons, that the transformation they effect is the more magical. They take the rugged facts, and breathe life into them. Thus their Mariamne grows out of history like a tree out of a bare hillside, made from the rock and rooted in it, and yet a new and living thing. She is very clearly and strongly drawn, a nature that clings with racial tenacity fast to the ties of family, and which therefore cannot forget the dead grandfather and brother who lie between herself and Herod. She does not wish to avenge them: she possesses an integrity which holds her loyal to the man her husband “who had slain her kin”; but she cannot love him, and she finds it impossible to be polite to his relatives. That intriguing Idumean set! Mariamne the Maccabee, impolitic and proud, allows herself to sneer at their Edomite origin and their creeping ways. But she will not countenance, either, the plots of her own mother; and stands alone, a noble if scornful figure, between their snarling camps.

The question as to whether Herod’s passion for Mariamne does at last win her love is one{202} which attracts the modern romantic, though it was, of course, irrelevant to Josephus. To him the damning fact about her was that she permitted herself to be haughty to her husband; and Michael Field respects her original so far as to leave the question unsolved. Yet it is possible to see in a hint or two the gradual filming over, so to speak, of the wounds that Mariamne had suffered at Herod’s hands; and an appeal to his love, as to a refuge, from the spiteful, clamorous hatreds of both their families. The tentative response makes her tragedy the more poignant. But even had she loved Herod, her pride could not have borne the insult of that fatal summons to his pleasure. The Asmonean princess denied the Edomite, and, lighting up his wrath, thereby fell into the hands of those malignant enemies their relatives. These, when Herod would have annulled the death-sentence passed on her, fanned his jealousy and outraged pride, and compassed her end.

Mariamne’s death, even in the plain statement of the historian, is one of the sublime tragedies of the world. Our poet does not move a hair’s breadth from the facts, nor colour them. She was probably tempted to do so, for there is a sense in which the facts were undramatic enough to defeat her. Mariamne makes no{203} defence when she is accused, no protest when she is condemned; and the poignancy of her tragedy lies largely in her silence and her isolation. This pitiful loneliness is difficult to handle as drama; and the poet has been so true to the record that, after the short crucial scene at the beginning of Act V which provokes the catastrophe, Mariamne has no more to say than a single line as she goes to her execution. Yet the whole act is permeated by her personality and visibly moved by the forces that the poet has set alight in her. Thus even Salome and Herod’s mother, spying fearfully upon Herod after the sentence has been decreed, are obsessed by the thought of her:

Thus Herod, the first fury of his anger spent, begins to be possessed by the haunting apparition of Mariamne which will not leave him any more; and to dream, while there is yet time, of reprieve:

Salome, however, has different views on the matter; and though Herod is at first strengthened in his project by her opposition to it, he{205} reverts to the mood of vengeance when a member of the Sanhedrin comes to plead for Mariamne’s life:

Of the final scene, and of the rendering of Herod’s madness after Mariamne’s execution, one can only say that history provided the poets with a magnificent opportunity and that they rose to the height of it. But it is necessary to quote at least one other passage to illustrate the progress of the plot through the development of character. Accident plays no part in the march of the story: intrigue notwithstanding, the protagonists are betrayed from within, and events proceed inevitably, like a conspiracy of life itself. Almost any scene would indicate this; but one chooses that which follows, for the further reason that it treats a well-known incident of the story, and one which reveals at once Herod’s character and the nature of his love for Mariamne. I mean, of course, the secret command which he gave on two separate occasions when starting upon a dangerous expedition, that if he should die Mariamne should be instantly killed. It is an action in which the elements of his nature are stripped bare by his frantic passion. At least, the casual eye will see nothing more in it than a savage and treacherous cruelty verging on madness. How{207} much more the poet can see need not be indicated in giving this quotation from Act II, Scene 2. Herod has returned in safety from Rome, and discovers that Joseph, who had charge of Mariamne, has betrayed to her the order to slay her in the event of Herod’s death. His jealousy immediately concludes that she has bribed Joseph by her favour:

The poets call their Borgia a period-play; and in its large scale, its manner of handling history, and its elaborate construction it resembles their earlier chronicle-plays rather than those of the last period. Written in six acts and a great many scenes, it has not the simplicity of design of Mariamne, A Messiah, or Ras Byzance. It moves through a wider circuit, embraces many more incidents, and develops character at greater leisure. It has, of course, a complex and exacting theme; one of no less magnitude, indeed, than the Italian Renaissance, centred upon the portentous Borgia trinity—;Pope Alexander VI and his children Cesare and Lucrezia.{210}

Nevertheless, though the full measure of the play cannot be gauged except by reference to the complexity and sheer extent of its material, the tragedy is reducible to much simpler terms. For it is as the rise and fall of Cesare Borgia that one finally sees it: his stupendous ambition dominates it; and the last and deepest impression of it is the news of his end brought to Lucrezia by his page Juanito, who had found his mangled body:

That scene is a lasting memory, as, indeed, are others to which we shall come; but the play’s the thing. The poets seem to indicate this in their sub-title, suggesting that the value of the work is its value as a whole; and bare courtesy would constrain one so to regard it. But that is not an easy thing to do. Poetic drama always draws heavily on the concentration and imaginative sympathy of its readers; and this one more than most makes that demand if one is to appreciate it fully. As tragedy—;that is, as pure art—;its appeal is direct and irresistible, and could not be escaped by the most casual person who is likely to take up a book of this kind. But the casual person will not, perhaps, perceive its other significance—;in values of history, of portraiture, of the marshalling, selecting, and grouping of facts, of the evocation of atmosphere, of what is, in short, the re-creation of a very brilliant epoch.

Take the historical aspect first. At the time the poets wrote their play the principal authorities on the subject were Gregorovius and Yriarte. The fresh data of Professor Woodward, published in 1913, and the dry light in which he presents the life of Cesare Borgia, were not accessible to them. Moreover, Yriarte, whom they seem to have chiefly followed, is now accused (in what looks to the{212} lay mind so much like the invariable formula of successive ‘authorities’) of inaccuracy. It would not be surprising, therefore, if the poets were caught out in matters of fact or, a graver fault, in false deductions from the facts, to accord with Yriarte’s romanticism. An obvious defence would be at hand. But the truth is that there is no need to take up the cudgels for them on this score. Apart from scenes of minor importance, they have selected as the main events of their ‘plot’ incidents so well documented as the murder of the Duke of Gandia, the Pope’s remorse and penitence, his complicity after the event, his support of Cesare’s schemes, his death at the crisis of Cesare’s fortunes. Thus, too, we have Lucrezia’s betrothal and marriage with Don Alfonso, Duke of Bisceglia, Cesare’s hatred of her husband, his assassination, and Lucrezia’s remarriage with Don Alfonso of Este. And for Cesare himself such established facts are taken as will conveniently serve to reveal his character; for example, his renunciation of the cardinalship, his military ambition, his marriage of policy, and his master-stroke of treachery in the betrayal of the Condottieri at Sinigaglia. Details of policy are avoided. Cesare’s campaigns, important as they are, are wisely indicated by these unmilitary authors only in their effect on{213} his fortunes. While as to more sinister things, rank scandal with which the air of the time was foul, a quotation will best illustrate our poets’ method of dealing with material of this kind. In Scene 4 of Act IV Cesare and the Pope, having discussed matters of weight, are reminded by a paper lying on the ground of things more trivial:

One does not claim exact historical accuracy for the play, of course. Certain incidents are introduced which will not be found in the{214} records, but which possess the essential truth of being in character; and the scenes they inspire are the fruit not of dramatic imagination alone, but of that power operating upon very great knowledge of the life of the time and the place. It is, indeed, in its re-creation of that life that the chief interest of the play resides. As scientific history it may fail the test—;though not by a very wide margin. But scientific history never yet re-created life, and perhaps one has as little right to expect from it this, the great function of art, as to expect of art a precise accuracy. Yet one may claim for Michael Field that she has achieved the re-creation with a high degree of truth to fact; and further, that the poetic truth of her creation comes surprisingly near, in its implicit judgments, the final verdict of the historian. There is, of course, no overt judgment in her work: the human spectacle holds us too fascinated, pitiful, and terrified to leave room for censure. We are not concerned to weigh the guilt of Lucrezia, allured and appalled as we are by her fatal suppleness and passivity. We are in no mood to reckon the total of Cesare’s crimes, terrified as we are at the stupendous force to which they but serve as a convenient means. And it is not our poet’s doing, but of the mere data of history, that Rodrigo Borgia, his Holi{215}ness Pope Alexander VI, pronounces inexorable judgment on himself. This he does when, stricken by the murder of his son Giovanni, Duke of Gandia, he is filled with remorse and penitence. A vision of his son in Paradise induces the softer mood:

A cardinal point is the poet’s conception of her three Borgia persons as one, united by every possible tie—;of blood, of sympathy, of ambition, of deep affinity. They are devoted to each other, and vowed as one mind to the aggrandizement of Cesare. Indeed, the core of the tragedy is, astonishingly, this simple human feeling. But the affection between them might never appear, under their sinister star, as a natural family bond. It was suspect from its origin. Thus the thread which binds the play together, and might have been so clear and firm a line, wavers and slips in those slippery high places of Renaissance Italy; and, however innocent in fact, takes from so much corruption the colour of guilt. Round the three persons of her trinity Michael Field has made to revolve the vivid life of the epoch they made and were made by—;warm, coloured, gay, radically unmoral and strictly religious, sparkling with wit and gravely learned, rejoicing equally in the sensible world and the things of the intellect, adoring art and pursuing science; at once fierce{217} and cunning, militant and politic, barbarous and polished; frivolous, worldly, and voluptuous, and yet saintly, serious, and capable of profound concentration and dogged industry.

The magnificence of the Renaissance is here—;in feasts, dances, military triumphs, and ecclesiastical pomp: in Cesare’s resplendent trappings that provoke the covert sneer at the French Court, and in Lucrezia’s countless pearls. The art of the Renaissance enters, with Pintoriccio and Michelangelo and others, to foster Cesare’s love of exquisite handicraft. Its poetry comes in the person of Cavaliere; its science in the engineering works of Leonardo; its statecraft in that astute and watchful envoy from Florence, already brooding upon his Il Principe. And its very atmosphere clings about the scene, bright with a kind of glare, almost dazzling the spiritual sight; hot, heavy, and enervating to the moral sense. The poets were apparently well justified in calling their Borgia a period play.

The subject of Act I would make a complete tragedy in itself, and has in fact been so treated by other poets. Its central event is the murder of the Duke of Gandia, the Pope’s sorrow and penitence, his discovery that Cesare is the murderer, and the subdual of his will to Cesare’s immense designs. In Scene 1, on the occasion{218} of Lucrezia’s betrothal, the Duke is reported missing. Poto, the Chamberlain, suggests that he shall be searched for; and the Pope turns to the company, which includes his young mistress, Giulia, with a jesting protest:

But in Scene 2 levity is turned to fear. Cesare, who was last in his brother’s company two nights before at a banquet given by their mother, Vanozza de’ Catanei, is commanded to the Pope’s presence, and succeeds in turning his father’s suspicion in the direction of the Orsini. In Scene 3 the Pope, in desperate anxiety, is watching from a window of the Vatican the darkening Tiber, where fishermen are dragging for Giovanni’s body. He turns suddenly to the cardinals about him:{219}

As he wrathfully dismisses the circle Madonna de’ Catanei enters:

At this moment a waterman is brought in. He relates how he saw a body brought down to the Tiber, and where it was flung into it. A messenger is sent to direct the dragging of the fishermen to the spot he indicates; and the Pope returns to the window to watch the lights of their boats. The psychology of this passage will be observed. When the Chamberlain enters and gives the Pope the fatal news he appears not to hear, but continues something he had been saying. Then he is silent while rapid question and answer pass between the cardinals; but at the mention of Giovanni’s wounds he falls to the ground with a cry:

One must not stop to analyse the play, or even this first act, completely. But one ought at least to indicate its extraordinary combination of subtlety with passion. In the scenes we have glanced at, the Pope passes from pole to pole of his nature. The poets have the difficult task of indicating this transit—;from vast sorrow and horror, through remorse and penitence, suspicion, wrath, and dread at the accusation laid against Cesare, to forgiveness, reconciliation, compliance, and even a compact with Giovanni’s murderer. In a cold historical statement one either finds these facts incredible, or is tempted to account for them, in Renaissance fashion, by believing the Borgia nature to have been something monstrous and un{223}human. From the artistic standpoint such a transition would appear well-nigh impossible to represent convincingly. Yet it is done, and we never question that the thing really happened so. The means used to this end are often very quiet. By the lightest touches—;a broken phrase, an exclamation, or even a silence—;the poet will register the swiftly changing current of emotion. One cannot easily illustrate this by quotation; but an example occurs in a passage already quoted—;that in which the Pope, having seen a vision of Giovanni, is filled with remorse. It will be remembered that he rails against his children, and particularly Lucrezia. Yet two minutes afterward, when he inquires for her and is informed that she is praying in the convent, he murmurs “Sweet soul!”; and one sees his rage and remorse crumble, and the whole fabric of his penitence come toppling down. In touches like this the incredible is made to look only too easy to the ductile Borgia temperament. But they are often the merest hints, as in this tiny masterpiece, Scene 4. The papal Court is by this time seething with rumour. Suspicion has fallen upon one after another of the enemies of Giovanni; but within the innermost circle there is a whisper that Cesare was the murderer. It is this that has driven Lucrezia to her convent;{224} but at midnight she creeps out and comes to Cesare:

One leaves Borgia reluctantly, having done so much less than justice to it: nevertheless, it is refreshing to turn to Deirdre after an atmosphere so charged and tropical. Not that Deirdre is set on any lower plane of emotion, for it also deals with vast passions. But in this play we pass visibly to a more northerly latitude, to an austerer race and a more primitive{225} age; and it is in an air swept clean by storm that the business of sowing the wind and reaping the whirlwind goes forward.

Michael Field has made a noble rendering of this old Irish story which, its subject dating from the first century, suggests a cause no less remote than that for the ancient feud between Ulster and the rest of Ireland. The story is well known: the birth of Deirdre and the prophecies of doom to Ulster through her; the defiance of the doom by Conchobar the king, and the fostering of Deirdre to be his wife; the carrying off of Deirdre on the eve of her wedding by Naisi and their flight to Alba; the invitation to Naisi and his brothers to return under Conchobar’s promise of forgiveness; and the treacherous assassination of them upon their arrival. There are many variants of the legend; and our poet has chosen the oldest of them all, that preserved in the Book of Leinster, for the chief events of her drama. She was compelled to alter the story at one point, for it would hardly have been convenient to represent the Sons of Usnach slain, all three at one stroke, by the magic sword. But in varying the manner of their death she was enabled to adopt another form of the legend, in which Naisi and his two brothers were overcome by a Druid’s enchantment, and,{226} believing themselves to be drowning, dropped their weapons and were immediately overpowered by Conchobar’s men. There was, however, a difficulty here too; for whereas three heads lopped off at one blow was a little too dynamic even for the purposes of drama, an unseen spell of wizardry was altogether too static; and the poet therefore contrived a scene in which Naisi’s comrades are actually drowned, and he, left alone to protect Deirdre, is slain by Eogan.

Another modification, with less warrant from the documents, perhaps, but of even greater interest, is that which introduces into this primitive world the first gleam of Christianity. The fact might suggest that the Deirdre play was written after the poets’ conversion, did one not know that they were at work on the theme some time before. But it is extremely probable that the passage in which the wise woman Lebarcham tries to turn Conchobar from brooding on vengeance by the tale of a new god who refused to avenge himself on his enemies was inserted after the first draft of the play was made. It is written in prose, and, placed at the beginning of Act III, hardly affects the subsequent action. From that point of view it might be considered superfluous; but Michael, though not Henry, was capable of so much{227} over-zeal. She was, however, also capable of justifying her act artistically. The interpolation is at least not an anachronism. It is possible, there in Ireland, that even so early had penetrated “the story of how a god met his death ... young, radiant ... bearing summer in his hands.” But it might have been a menace to the unity of the drama: it might have destroyed the satisfying wholeness which, in whatever form one finds it, the pagan story possesses. Michael Field avoided that calamity. She threw her glimmer of Christian light across the scene in such a way that it reveals more strongly by contrast the dark elements of which the story is composed. By it one instinctively measures the barbarity of the age out of which the story came, and realizes its antiquity. The poet does not allow it to influence action, for that would weaken the tragedy; but she uses the occasion to humanize and make credible that which, in the Conchobar of the records, seems almost monstrous. In those ancient tales Conchobar plans his vengeance on Naisi and his brothers with a coldness that is diabolic and a precision almost mechanical. He provides for his own safety, too, with comical caution, carefully sounding one after another of his knights until he finds one who does not immediately threaten to kill him for suggesting{228} such a dastardly deed as the murder of the Sons of Usnach. Yet, as our poet has re-created Conchobar, he is a human soul driven this way and that in a running fight with passion; pitiable in his hopeless love for Deirdre, comprehensible in his wrath against Naisi, sinister and terrifying in his revenge. And underneath the overt drama lies a profounder irony; for while he is plotting in his heart the enormous treachery, Lebarcham tells of the young god who was betrayed by his friends, and he says:

The play is written in five acts and a prologue; but is not divided into scenes. Its form is for the most part blank verse—;the iambic pentameter of Michael Field which is so often neither iambic nor a pentameter. Her verse is, indeed, a very variable line, changing its unit as frequently as will consist with a regular form; and as flexible, sinewy, and nervous as will consist with dignity, grace, and splendid colour. Prose passages occur in Acts III and V; and a form of lyrical rhapsody is used to express the Druid prophecies and Deirdre’s lament. The use of lyrics in her drama was{229} not new to Michael Field, who from the beginning could always relieve the strain of intense emotion by a graceful song. But in this case she is following, with her accustomed fidelity, lines laid down in older renderings of the legend.

The most notable feature of this play is its ending. No author of the more important modern versions of this theme has dared to take his conclusion from the oldest one of all. Usually he has preferred the variant which tells of Deirdre, broken-hearted at Naisi’s murder, falling dead into his grave. This is, of course, in some respects a more ‘poetic’ passing: it lends itself to romantic treatment, and its tragedy is more immediate and final. Moreover, from the dramaturgic point of view the action is easier to handle and more certain of its effect. Michael Field was not, however, attracted by mere facility. Truth drew her with a stronger lure, and to her the more ancient story would make a claim deeper than loyalty. For she would see Deirdre’s survival not only as a more probable thing, but as something more profoundly tragic; and the manner of her death, when it came, as more clearly of a piece with the old saga and essentially of Deirdre’s wilful and resolute character.{230}

Deirdre is no Helen, though her legend has features so similar. The mere outline of her which the old story gives indicates a creature who will compel destiny rather than suffer it; and our poet has but completed, imaginatively, what the original suggests—;a girl whose instinct of chastity drives her away from marriage without love; whose ardour and courage claim her proper mate; whose fidelity keeps her unalterably true; and whose head is at least as sound as her heart is tender. For although she is a rather tearful creature, she is also very astute; and Naisi need not have died quite so young if he had only listened to her warning and condescended to take her advice. Deirdre is, in short, of her race and of her time as surely as Lucrezia Borgia is a daughter of Pope Alexander VI and a child of the Italian Renaissance. Michael Field’s range in the creation of women characters is very wide, and the verisimilitude with which she presents natures so alien from herself as the courtesan and the voluptuary might be astonishing if one thought of her simply as a Victorian lady, and not as a great creative artist. Nevertheless, in the re-creation of Deirdre one feels that she must have taken an especial joy, as witness the opening passage of Act I, where Lebarcham and Medv the nurse are discussing their fosterling.{231} It is the morning of her sixteenth birthday, and King Conchobar is coming to the little secluded house where Deirdre has been brought up to claim her as his bride:

Again, in the same first act, when Deirdre has prevailed on Lebarcham to bring Naisi to the hut, and the two have spoken of their love, it is she who at once perceives where that confession must lead. Naisi would rather kiss and part than rob the mighty Conchobar of his bride. But for Deirdre, having kissed, there shall be no parting:

It is, however, in the last act that Michael Field again triumphantly proves her mettle as{234} poet and dramatist. She had stubborn material here, harsh and crude stuff which kept the poets long at bay. For Deirdre’s end as related by the old bard is a bit of primitive savagery matched in terms of the plainest realism. Conchobar, after Naisi is enticed back to Ulster and murdered, takes possession of Deirdre; and she remains in his house for a year. But her constant reproaches and lamentation weary him; and at last, in order to subdue her, he threatens to lend her for a year to the man she hates most, Eogan, the slayer of Naisi. She is thereupon driven off in Eogan’s chariot, apparently subdued, seated in shame between him and Conchobar. At a gross taunt from Conchobar, however, she springs up, and flings herself out upon the ground. “There was a large rock near: she hurled her head at the stone so that she broke her skull, and killed herself.”

Our poet does not try to make this pretty or pleasing: and at one point at least she uses the exact terminology of the translation from which she worked. Its brutal elements are not disguised: Deirdre’s humiliation and the animal rage of Conchobar and Eogan remain hideous even after the poet, accepting all the material, has wrought it into a tragedy of consummate beauty. Its beauty has, indeed, more terror than{235} pity in it—;it is brimmed with life’s actual bitterness—;but the depth and power of this Deirdre are not equalled by any other.

In quoting the closing passage of the play one does not afflict the reader by a comment on it; but there is a technical point which should be noticed. It is the device of the Messenger by which the poet avoids the representation of Deirdre’s death. The manner of that death was not only too awkward to present, but its horror as a spectacle was too great for artistic control. In causing it to be related by the charioteer Fergna, the poet has, in classic fashion, removed it from actual vision, but has enabled the mind to contemplate what the eyes could not have borne to look upon.

The chariot has driven off with Deirdre, Eogan, and Conchobar; and Lebarcham watches it till it passes out of sight beyond the mound that marks Naisi’s grave. Then she turns away, lamenting; and suddenly Fergna, the charioteer, re-enters, scared and breathless:

* * *

In concluding this very brief survey of Michael Field’s life and poetry, one turns back with a sense of illumination to her sonnet called The Poet, which has been already quoted. For therein Michael Field has indicated the nature of her own genius and the conditions of its activity. She was not thinking of herself, of course, but of the poetic nature in the{239} abstract, when she declared in the first two lines of the sestet that the poet is

Those verses apply in some degree to the whole race of poets, which is, indeed, the test of their truth. Yet it is significant that in choosing precisely that form of expression for the truth, Michael Field has inadvertently stated the essential meaning of her own life, of her long service to literature, and of the peculiar greatness and possible limitation of her poetry.

“A work of some strange passion.” Strange, indeed, and in many ways. For, first, it is no common thing to find, in a world preoccupied with traffic and ambition, two souls completely innocent of both. Not small souls, nor stupid nor ignorant ones—;as clever people might aver in order to account for the phenomenon—;but of full stature, intelligent, level-headed, and with their sober measure of English common sense. They knew themselves, too—;were aware that they possessed genius, that they had first-rate minds and were artists of great accomplishment. Moreover, for the larger part of their life they were on terms with ‘the world’; they welcomed experience as few Victorian women dared, gathered knowledge eagerly wherever it{240} was to be found, and had business ability sufficient to direct prudently their own affairs.

They would have denied that there was anything of the fanatic or the visionary in the dedication of themselves to their art, believing fanaticism to be incongruous with the undiluted English strain of which they boasted. And, indeed, there is something typical of the race in this deliberate setting of a course and dogged persistence in it. Yet there is hardly an English precedent for their career; and it is to France one must look—;to the Goncourts or to Erckmann-Chatrian—;to match the long collaboration, or to find similar examples of their artistic method. And not even there, so far as I know, will be found another such case of disinterested service.

But the lines we have noted have an application to the work as well as to the life of Michael Field. They may be used almost literally, to summarize in a convenient definition the nature of her poetry. For in this body of work one sees passion as an almost over-powering element, and it is of surprising strangeness. However fully one may recognize the truth that there is no sex in genius, I suppose that we shall always be startled at the appearance of an Emily Brontë or a Michael Field. They seem such slight instruments for{241} the primeval music that the earth-mother plays upon them. And their vehemence mingles so oddly with tenderer and more delicate strains that it will always be possible for a reviewer to sneer at what is “to the Greeks foolishness”—;he having no perception of the fact that in gentleness added to strength a larger humanity is expressed. Such an eye as Meredith’s could perceive that, and, catching sight of some reviewing stupidity about it, would flash lightnings of wrath in that direction, and send indignant sympathy to the poets.

There is strangeness, too, of another kind in the passion which was the impulse of this poetry. Under the restraint that art has put upon it, it is, as we have seen, an elemental thing. It is a creative force akin to that of Emily Brontë or of Byron, and is tamer than their wild genius only in appearance. Its more ordered manner grew from two causes: that one of the collaborators blessedly possessed a sense of form, and that both of them lived withdrawn from the brawl of life. They were placed, perhaps, a little too far from “Time’s harsh drill.” Their lives were, on the whole, easier and happier ones than are given to most people. That is why the loss of their Chow dog caused them a grief which seems exaggerated to minds not so sensitively tuned as{242} theirs. Until the agony of the last three years overtook them, their share of the common lot of sorrow had been the barest minimum: adversity did not so much as look their way: poverty laid no finger on them, and was but vaguely apprehended, in the distance, as something pitiful for its ugliness. Therefore, secure and leisured, they envisaged life, in the main, through art, through philosophy, through literature, and hardly ever through the raw stuff of life itself. And thence comes the peculiar character which the passion of their poetry acquired, as of some fierce creature caught and bound in golden chains.

It may be that this seclusion from life will be felt in Michael Field’s poetry as a limitation; that the final conviction imposed upon the mind by the authority of experience is wanting; and that the work lacks a certain dry wisdom of which difficult living is a necessary condition. It may be so; but I do not think the stricture a valid charge against their work, first because of our poets’ great gift of imagination, and second because they chose so rightly their artistic medium. Comedy may require the discipline of experience, the observing eye constantly fixed upon the object, and a rich knowledge of the world; but surely tragedy requires before everything else creative imagination,{243} sympathy, and a certain greatness of heart and mind. Those gifts Michael Field possessed in very large degree; so large that one often stands in amazement before the protagonists of her drama, demanding, in the name of all things wonderful, how two Victorian women “ever came to think of that.” A Renaissance pope, a Saxon peasant, or a priest of Dionysos—;decadent emperors, austere Roman patriots, or a Frankish king turned monk—;those are only a few of the surprising creatures of her imagination, conceived not as historical figures merely, but as living souls. And by the range of her women characters—;from the dignity of a Julia Domna to the wild-rose sweetness of a Rosamund; from the Scottish Mary, with her rich capacity for loving, to the fierce chastity of an Irish Deirdre, or the soul of goodness in a courtesan; from the subtlety of a Lucrezia Borgia to the proud singleness of a Mariamne; from the virago-venom of an Elinor to the sensitive simplicity of a country-girl, or the wrong-headedness of a little princess whose instincts have been perverted by frustration—;Michael Field has greatly enriched the world’s knowledge of womanhood.

She did not set out to do that, of course. Her sanity is evident once more in the moderation with which she held her feminist{244} sympathies, despite the clamour of the time and the provocation she received from masculine mishandling of her work. Herein too she had removed herself from “Time’s harsh drill,” having too great a reverence for her art to use it for the purposes of propaganda. That fact leads us again to her sonnet and the light it throws upon herself. For in studying her work one sees that she fulfilled completely her own conception of the poet—;as an artist withdrawn from the common struggle to wrestle with a fiercer power, and subdue it to a shape of recognizable beauty.{245}

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Of the works of Michael Field, published to 1919