I think of his men as with broad brows and golden beards and mild eyes
and tranquil speech, and of his good women as like ‘The Bride’ in
whose face Rossetti saw and painted for once the abundance of earth
and not the half-hidden light of his star. They are not in love with
love for its own sake, with a love that is apart from the world or at
enmity with it, as Swinburne imagines Mary Stuart and as all men have
imagined Helen. They do not seek in love that ecstasy, which Shelley’s
nightingale called death, that extremity of life in which life seems
to pass away like the Phœnix in flame of its own lighting, but rather
a gentle self-surrender that would lose more than half its sweetness
if it lost the savour of coming days. They are good house-wives; they
sit often at the embroidery frame, and they have wisdom in flocks and
herds and they are before all fruitful mothers. It seems at times as
if their love was less a passion for one man out of the world than
submission to the hazard of destiny, and the hope of motherhood and the
innocent desire of the body. They accept changes and chances of life
as gladly as they accept spring and summer and autumn and winter, and
because they have sat under the shadow of the Green Tree and drunk the
Waters of Abundance out of their hollow hands, the barren blossoms do
not seem to them the most beautiful. When Habundia takes the shape of
Birdalone she comes first as a young naked girl standing among great
trees, and then as an old carline, Birdalone in stately old age. And
when she praises Birdalone’s naked body, and speaks of the desire it
shall awaken, praise and desire are innocent because they would not
break the links that chain the days to one another. The desire seems
not other than the desire of the bird for its mate in the heart of the
wood, and we listen to that joyous praise as though a bird watching its
plumage in still water had begun to sing in its joy, or as if we heard
hawk praising hawk in the middle air, and because it is the praise of
one made for all noble life and not for pleasure only, it seems, though
it is the praise of the body, that it is the noblest praise.
Birdalone has never seen her image but in ‘a broad latten dish,’ so the
wood woman must tell her of her body and praise it.
‘Thus it is with thee; thou standest before me a tall and slim maiden,
somewhat thin as befitteth thy seventeen summers; where thy flesh
is bare of wont, as thy throat and thine arms and thy legs from the
middle down, it is tanned a beauteous colour, but otherwhere it is
even as fair a white, wholesome and clean as if the golden sunlight
which fulfilleth the promise of the earth were playing therein....
Delicate and clean-made is the little trench that goeth from thy mouth
to thy lips, and sweet it is, and there is more might in it than sweet
words spoken. Thy lips they are of the finest fashion, yet rather thin
than full; and some would not have it so; but I would, whereas I see
therein a sign of thy valiancy and friendliness. Surely he who did thy
carven chin had a mind to a master work and did no less. Great was the
deftness of thine imaginer, and he would have all folk who see thee
wonder at thy deep thinking and thy carefulness and thy kindness. Ah,
maiden! is it so that thy thoughts are ever deep and solemn? Yet at
least I know it of thee that they be hale and true and sweet.
‘My friend, when thou hast a mirror, some of all this thou shalt see,
but not all; and when thou hast a lover some deal wilt thou hear, but
not all. But now thy she-friend may tell it thee all, if she have eyes
to see it, as have I; whereas no man could say so much of thee before
the mere love should overtake him, and turn his speech into the folly
of love and the madness of desire.’
All his good women, whether it is Danaë in her tower, or that woman in
_The Wood beyond the World_ who can make the withered flowers in her
girdle grow young again by the touch of her hand, are of the kin of the
wood woman. All his bad women too and his half-bad women are of her
kin. The evils their enchantments make are a disordered abundance like
that of weedy places and they are as cruel as wild creatures are cruel
and they have unbridled desires. One finds these evils in their typical
shape in that isle of the Wondrous Isles, where the wicked witch has
her pleasure-house and her prison, and in that ‘isle of the old and the
young,’ where until her enchantment is broken second childhood watches
over children who never grow old and who seem to the bystander who
knows their story ‘like images’ or like ‘the rabbits on the grass.’ It
is as though Nature spoke through him at all times in the mood that is
upon her when she is opening the apple-blossom or reddening the apple
or thickening the shadow of the boughs, and that the men and women of
his verse and of his stories are all the ministers of her mood.