Scene 2 proceeds to Hubert’s wooing of Cara, whom he seeks next day in

the forest. But her thoughts are far away from him:

_Hubert._ Oh, now I know there is _for ever_

To make room for such loving.

_Cara._ Do you think

That he can love like that?

_Hubert._ You mean the king?

_Cara._ No, not the king. My lover is a man

Who tells me he is thirsty....

Hubert tries to make her understand the facts: that the King is

betrothed already, and that he cannot therefore love her.

_Cara._ ... He is mine;

A thief has hold of him, my own, my own,

My king, my love, my love!

_Hubert._ He never was,

Never will be your love.... The king would laugh

To hear you chirp such folly.

_Cara._ It’s more wicked

Than anything that’s done....

And it is such a lie! The king would laugh?

He had a still, grave face; I am quite sure

That he would never laugh at anything

So terrible and sudden. Why, the oak

Has a white, bony bough amid the leaves;

That’s where the lightning struck. I do not laugh,

I think what it must suffer ’neath the green,

So scathed and ugly.

_Hubert._ Cara, do not put

Such hatred in your eyes; if the great lady

Who loves the king--

_Cara._ Great ladies cannot love.

You must be poor and famished to be hungry.

* * * * *

If you meet him,

Oh, tell him I am his, a weary child,

Tired out since yesterday.

[_Exit Hubert mournfully._

I’ll go along

The wood, and say it over to myself,

_He cannot, cannot love me_; but I know

Deep in my heart he does. There was a gift--

The king had something for me in his eyes;

And when he waved good-bye ... I am quitesure

God made him for me: he will come again.

_The Tragic Mary_ (1890) returns to chronicles for its subject, and

belongs to our first category for that reason only. It has no

specifically intellectual theme, and for its tragic motive should rather

be classed in the third group of dramas, where “passions spin the plot.”

Not that the poet has neglected the element of fatal circumstance in

Mary’s life, nor the very intricate machinery of action in which she was

involved. The incidence of political intrigue, domestic plot, and

religious feud is clearly shown, and their mere data are used to carry

forward the brisk movement of the play. The Marian legend is, in fact,

handled boldly; some of the blackest charges against the Queen are

confronted, even those on which the historian has pronounced that there

is no evidence. But the whole tragedy is seen in its relation to

character, with Mary as the centre and source of it, not merely because

she is a beautiful queen precariously enthroned among false enemies and

falser friends, but because she carries in her nature the seed of

tragedy. Admirable balance is kept in picking a path through the mazy

inconsistencies of the old story: neither extreme of antithetical

judgment is adopted. And if Michael Field has not plucked out the heart

of Mary Stuart’s mystery, she has at least brought it out of the region

of the incredible. Her Mary is human: of such vivid humanity, indeed, as

to draw for that reason the lightnings of fate. She is a richly dowered

nature, capable of intense love and fierce anger and deep tenderness,

free and frank to the world’s measure of indiscretion, sensitive, eager,

and responsive to the world’s measure of excess; and of clemency wide

enough for the silly and the cynical to ban as complaisance. She has a

swift, gay temper; but underneath the flashing faults of incaution and a

rapier wit there lies an innocence which is from its nature incapable of

suspecting evil in others, or of calculating beforehand how her ardour

and friendliness would appear to meaner eyes. She is, in short, an

imperfect but large-hearted human creature; and she discovers that to be

one inch greater than a small world is to draw inevitably, if not the

bolts of Jove, at any rate the slings and arrows of a punier race.

It is, however, in comprehending Mary Stuart’s womanhood and its bearing

upon the tragedy that this study by a woman poet may claim its proper

value. No Cleopatra this: no male apprehension of femininity as sheer

sex-impulse. Mary’s love of loving and of being loved is shown to be

profound and instinctive, an impulse to give, to cherish, and to bless

which every normal woman shares in some degree. Michael Field has seen

it for the complex and subtle power it is, and not merely as a lure to

attract a lover. Raised as it is, in Mary Stuart, to the measure of her

human stature--the range of her sympathies, the keenness of her

perception, her gift of understanding, the goodwill that prompts her

clear intimacy of approach--it is a power that becomes a danger in a

circle which could not rise to the same height. But it was a danger

primarily to herself: she was its chief victim.

“Terrible in love: no compromise between ecstasy and death,” says one of

her Maries; and another, speaking of her manner to those she deems her

friends, that she is “fond and familiar”; while a third declares of her

sympathy and insight, “There is not a balmy nook of one’s soul

undiscovered of her.” Thus, too, after she has dismissed Bothwell,

indignant at his proposal of marriage so soon after Darnley’s death, her

anger ebbs as she remembers how _natural it seems to hear the man’s love

in his voice_. And on another occasion, when she is thinking of him

after Darnley has deserted her:

... It was for courtesy

I stooped and let Lord Bothwell kiss my hands,

_For sweet to me is love in human eyes,

As daylight to the world_.

_Act III, Scene 1_

One observes, too, how the feminine author has perceived the incidence

of the feminine instinct of self-accusal on Mary’s tragedy, arriving by

intuition at a truth of psychology which the mental doctors declare to

be invariable. To a sensitive nature that instinct will often give the

colour of guilt, or will at least render disavowal impotent. Thus the

ancient lie attributing complicity in Darnley’s murder credibly takes

its rise in an access of remorse for an imagined sin--as when Mary, in

the shock of the news of Darnley’s death, remembers how she had once

wished him such an evil fate, on the night that he murdered David

Riccio:

... Heaven has crept

Into my ancient thoughts, and done the deed,

I, David,--I half-prompted in my prayers,

When I besought God’s pity on your soul.

I am a guilty woman....

_Act III, Scene 7_

And again, when she is thinking of Bothwell’s wooing and her growing

love for him:

I never shall grow holy among men,

And yet I wish them ever good, not evil,

And long to give them pleasure of such portion

Of wit or beauty as were made my dower.

It is significant, too, that Mary’s motherhood is seen to be a deep

force in her, and therefore in the tragedy. She is found to be an

instinctive mother, not only in the primary fact of rejoicing to bear a

child, but in a profound sense of the value of life and an urgent

impulse to protect it. Hence the supreme villainy of David Riccio’s

murder is seen by our poet to lie in the fact that he is struck down in

Mary’s presence, and desperately clinging to her for help, when she is

within a few weeks of the birth of her child. And this by the husband

whose sacred duty was to protect her. That is perceived to be Darnley’s

unpardonable sin, and it prepares for much that follows. But observe how

the poet has indicated the greatness of a mother-instinct which leaps to

parry even a shattering blow like this. Mary sees that she is hemmed in

by plots, that her life is in danger; and she makes a swift plan to

escape through the vaults of the ruined Abbey of Holyrood. But it is a

daunting project:

... If I were struck stone-dead

For horror at the grim, distorted tombs;

If I should bring forth a strange, spectral child,

To catch the bats that flit from roof to roof,

And wink at daylight! God, it shall not be!

For I will nurse him royally with my soft,

Wild, wayward songs, and he shall lie and laugh

Across my knees, until the happy tune

Drop off into a drowse.

_Act I, Scene 3_

There is much to illustrate this aspect of Mary’s womanhood; but one

other short quotation must suffice. It is after the birth of her son,

and she has forgiven and reinstated Darnley. Lethington has presented

another petition to her, and she replies:

I live now but to pardon and make peace,

I am a mother.

Technically, the drama must, of course, be considered as a

chronicle-play; and this cancels a criticism which might otherwise hold,

that the end of the play, when Mary gives herself up and Bothwell flees,

is weak. But the five acts go with a swing till that point is reached,

and the energy of movement gets into the verse. That is often vehement

to the measure of the vehement passions it expresses; and the relief of

a character like Lethington, ironical, subtle, sceptical of the whole

world but the innocence of his queen, is proportioned to the emotional

intensity of the play as a whole. Bothwell is a finely contrasted study,

compelling our belief in his lawless force, and in his mere physical

reaction to Mary’s influence. His psychology, true as hers, chimes

responsive to the masculine instinct of resentment in moments of mental

crisis: when passion pulls fate down upon him, he is, in his angry

conviction, the wronged one, and wronged by the woman. Thus Mary, to

him, is a temptress love,

The infamous soft creature with her sighs,

Her innocence and wonder!

and he has been damned by her love. There is a scene between Bothwell

and his wife, Jane Gordon, which is good in itself for its dramatic

truth and its utility in the action, but which has the further interest

of revealing the Queen as she looks through such different eyes. In

Mary’s womanhood, seen thus from perhaps a dozen different angles, there

is in truth an “infinite variety,” no gusty variation on the single

theme of passion.

In Act III, Scene 2, Jane Gordon has consented to release Bothwell from

his marriage with her, so that he may win the Queen:

_Bothwell._ It is a desperate scheme!

How cold, and yet how kindly, are your eyes.

I never hate you--her I often hate.

_Lady Bothwell._ Poor lady, for you love her! I have been

More fortunate in winning your respect.

You are a gallant fellow; but too wild

For the great fireside virtues....

Bothwell tries to make his wife divulge what are Mary’s feelings toward

him:

_Lady Bothwell._ For her sake

I am unknitting, James, our marriage-bond;

I shall not then report her.

At your feet

The gown of Spanish fur I recognize

As her own mother’s wear. She loved her mother;

She would not part with that except to one

She trusted with a child’s simplicity.

Prove worthy of her faith. [_Exit._

* * * * *

_Bothwell._ Fie, this woman

Leaves me with branded cheeks. To bid her

pack; To break up house, to get myself divorced

From one so noble and so tolerant

Just for a giddy hope!--Ho, Paris,

put This trumpery away. [_Kicking the Spanish fur._]

I must to-morrow

Betimes conduct the queen

to Callander.

_Act III, Scene 2_

Contrast the way in which Lethington--scholar, wit, and

statesman--reacts to Mary’s character. There is a scene with him when

the Queen is in the deepest gulf, her courage broken by treachery, her

love for Bothwell humiliated, her life so netted in intrigue that she is

helpless and despairing. With almost every soul about her counsels

proved false, she still believes in Lethington, and he is in truth her

friend. But he, with his itch for policy, had given his support long ago

to the Bothwell conspiracy against Darnley, believing in good faith

that it might help the Queen. Now the Bothwell marriage has proved

disastrous: the people are in revolt, and Mary is accused of hideous

crimes that she cannot refute. She turns for advice to the one man whose

wisdom and whose honour she believes that she can trust; and Bothwell,

enraged and brutally jealous, breaks upon their conference:

_Bothwell._ ... Since you thwart me

And magnify this pard--I will unfold

The smooth and cowardly creature you esteem.

This man heard Morton promise me your hand,

And to and fro he journeyed prospering

My heady plans; he is the sorcerer

To lure your mates to death, one after one;

He sits, and sees them drop away from you,

But yet he meddles not. Now chat together;

He will advise you how you may entoil

A second victim. I will leave you now. [_Exit._

_Queen._ To think that you were with me at Dunbar!

_Lethington._ You saved my life.

_Queen_ [_looking toward the door_]. He cannot be a king;

They wither, or are murdered, or grow mad

Who link themselves with me in sovereignty.

Twilight and ruin settle on us both!

Oh, might we be forgotten; could we lie

In the blank pardon of oblivion! That,

Alack, can never be; there is no man

Can give me safety, or protection, or

Peace from vicissitude; I have no lover,

Servant or friend; and yet I am beloved

Even to marvel. I can pray no more,

I have no more dependence upon God;

And none on any of His creatures, none.

Go, tell my story as you learnt it, add

New matter. If I sat beside the fire

In prison with my maids, and never spoke,

While you put forth fresh libels, or confirmed

The common talk, you could not injure me:

My silence would have privilege.

* * * * *

_Lethington._ Libellers

Are sure of popularity. My brain

Treasures a rare, untarnished miniature.

With that I shall not part. [_She gazes at him,

sobbing._] Nay, pardon now,

Full pardon, great, obliterating sea

Of love o’erwhelm me! You have heaven’s own measure:

The seventy-times-and-seven is in your eyes,

Immeasurable grace....

God shield you from dishonour! May He draw

Blood of me, when my life has other use

Than to protect your titles.

_Act V, Scene 3_

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 life. A robust and militant morality--no less

moral because it sometimes shatters indignantly a mere moral

convention--informs her drama. She did not belong to any set, and was so

far from swagger that her idea of advertisement was to print at the end

of her books the bad as well as the good reviews. She lived secluded in

the suburb of a great town, and there she laboured, with no hope of

reward, at her daily toil in the service of poetry. Nevertheless, even

so far withdrawn, the spirit of the age reached her and laid its mark

upon her work. And that, ultimately, is the reason why this drama of the

second period reveals itself, despite a continued sense of moral and

spiritual problems, as drama in which Art is the primary value. If ever

artist wrought, as some devout lover, for the sake of Art, it was

Michael Field in this body of work; which, though it bears no relation

to the trivial contemporary _cliché_, “Art for Art’s sake,” will be a

bulwark (in the day of reckoning that one has foreseen) to the truth

underlying that cry. But perhaps that is simply because this poet, as

artist, _was_ the devout lover, the reckless spendthrift of herself, the

tenacious, tireless, painstaking follower of a vision.

But the proximate cause of the change from the characteristics of the

first period lies in the changed conditions of the poets’ life--that,

in its turn, of course determined by their mental development. They were

in many ways different people from the authors of _Callirrhoë_. Six

years of living, as the artist lives, and the production of nine plays

and at least one book of lyrics, had re-created them. Travel had made

them free of a larger world, larger not merely in physical extent. For

they were avid of the best in life; and they had the taste to gather and

the temper to assimilate the finest things that the old cities of the

Continent could offer. But whereas their early impulse had been toward

Teutonic culture (Goethe had drawn them, and the German philosophers),

now it was the art and the thought of the Latin races which held sway.

Visits to Italy, and art friendships there and in London: research into

medieval Latin chronicles, into French and Italian history: residence in

Paris and contact with the Gallic sense of form--all helped the trend of

their mind. And when they determined to leave Clifton and settle at

Reigate, the act was almost symbolic. For they removed themselves into

what was at once a bigger and a smaller world, the resources of the

metropolis lying accessible to the deliberate limits of their social

existence, much as their greater mental area now lay subject to a

stricter rule.

As a consequence, these plays are different in material, in spirit, and

in manner from the plays of the first period. The material comes from

the subjects which were most attractive to them at the time, much of it

from old Roman history and the chronicles of medieval France. In spirit

the work is withdrawn from the temporary, the immediate, and the actual,

and is concerned with the more permanent issues of life; and in manner

the sense of form which now ruled their æsthetic has constrained them to

a finer balance, a sharper definition, and a greater simplicity of

structure. The cumbrous Elizabethan machinery has been scrapped; and

with a more careful economy of means, the plays are compressed into

smaller compass. The wearisome and often redundant fifth act has

disappeared. Three acts are the rule, with a fourth as an occasional

exception. There is no subdivision into scenes, the movement of each act

thus flowing uninterrupted. There are fewer long speeches, fewer

soliloquies: dialogue is more nervous and forcible. Fine poetry is not

wanting, but it is now in smaller proportion to dramatic and

psychological truth. And action goes forward at its proper pace, pushed

by the emotion of the moment, and freighted only by its just weight of

reflection.

As a handy label, it is convenient to classify this drama as a Latin

group. Its most prominent feature is, indeed, a Roman trilogy which the

poets were engaged upon (though not exclusively) for seven years. These

three plays are, in historical order, _The Race of Leaves_ (1901), _The

World at Auction_ (1898), and _Julia Domna_ (1903). Another Roman play,

despite its title, is _Attila, my Attila!_ (1896); and two whose

subjects belong to French history and are drawn from medieval Latin

chronicles are _Anna Ruina_ (1899) and _In the Name of Time_. This last

was, by the evidence of letters, being worked upon as early as 1890, but

it was probably not finished until much later; and one imagines that

after the poets’ conversion to the Roman Church theological scruples

withheld them from publishing it. It did not appear until after their

death, in 1919; but it belongs, in spirit and in form, to their work of

the nineties.

Anna Ruina, a Russian princess, daughter of Jaroslav, became queen to

Henry I of France in the middle of the eleventh century. Henry was

prompted to seek a wife in so distant a country because nearer royal

houses were already allied; and the medieval popes had an uncomfortable

habit of excommunicating princes who married within the forbidden

degrees. His Russian wife secured him from such molestation; but when,

after his death, his widow married his kinsman Raoul, Conte de Valois,

the pope of the moment annulled the marriage and ordered Raoul to take

back his former wife--a woman notoriously evil--whom he had divorced.

Our play is concerned with the loves of Anna and Raoul, their struggle

with the Church, and the disastrous conflict between Anna’s passion and

her piety which brought ruin on them both.

So much it seems necessary to premise concerning this somewhat

unfamiliar story, which the poets appear to have gathered from French

and Latin chroniclers who stress very quaintly Anna’s piety. One old

historian thus describes her:

Icele dame pensoit plus aux choses a venir que aux choses presentes

... dont il avint qu’ele fist estorer a Senliz une Yglise en l’enor

S. Vincent.

The Abbey at Senlis which she built, and in particular St Vincent’s

tower, is used very effectively both as a setting for the play and as a

symbol of that in Anna’s character which was deep and strong enough to

defeat her love. The strength of this religious sense, and the

consequent rigour of the conflict, are of course to be measured by her

love; for which reason the whole first act is devoted to a vigorous

presentment of Anna, the widowed queen, mother and regent of the young

king, putting off her royalty to claim Raoul’s love, and sweeping aside

every obstacle in order to become his wife. It is, therefore, as no

feeble puppet of the Church that she twice betrays her love to her faith

at the crucial moment; for she has force, decision, independence of

character. It is from something deeper than these, which also the poet

is careful to indicate in the first act--a religious instinct which lies

at the roots of her nature and which is, in some of its aspects,

identical with her love. Thus when, in the opening of the second act,

the Pope orders her to renounce Raoul, she at first joins in his

defiance, and yields only to the archbishop’s lurid prophecy of the

damnation present and to come which she will bring upon Raoul. The third

act finds her in retreat at the convent which she endowed, profoundly

discouraged and disillusioned. She perceives her act to have been

foolish and futile, of the worst cruelty to Raoul, because it has driven

him back to his wife and a life of debauchery. At the command of the

Church, in a kind of perverse obedience, he has taken back the

repudiated Aliénor, and both have plunged into an orgy of sensuality.

Stories of their abandoned living penetrate the Abbey walls, are

whispered among the sisterhood, and reach Anna’s ears. They cost her

remorse for her own folly, and wrath against Raoul’s infamous wife. The

act opens in the convent garden on a winter afternoon. Twilight is

falling rapidly, and an old nun who has been talking to Anna puts away

her gardening-tools and goes into the convent. Anna, left alone in the

gathering darkness, sees the gate open and the figure of a man enter.

She recognizes instantly that it is Raoul; but he strides forward

without knowing her.

_Raoul._ What are you,

Crossing my pathway, like a ghost?

_Anna._ You come?

_Raoul._ To search this convent. Aliénor, my wife,

Is here in hiding. I am come to kill her.

Say where she hides.

_Anna._ I cannot.

_Raoul._ By all saints,

You are a hypocrite. I shall discover

My victim in your bleating flock. [_He passes on._

_Anna._ I think,

Oh, I believe he does not know my voice;

He passes on beyond me--to what deed?

To one most righteous, one that long ago

He should have wrought. But is it possible

That she abides here? Ah! I recollect....

I have the clew!--My lord!

_Raoul_ [_turning_]. And who are you?

Your name? Your purpose? [_Coming closer._]

Well, my crystal flower,

What is the part you play? Are you a Queen,

My Countess, or a little temptress nun?

Give me the word.

_Anna._ Who am I--dear, my lord,

Your handmaid if you come, wronged in your honour,

To punish treason. I will lead the way.

But first a light.... [_Stooping to kindle the

lantern._] This evening in the dark

A woman crept along; the chapel door

Received her. But I have not seen her face.

[_Looking toward the chapel._

How dark and shut!

She sleeps, if she is sleeping, in a tomb....

If she is sleeping.

_Raoul._ Is the chapel locked?

But you have entry. Give me up the key.

_Anna._ Then waken her. To slay one in one’s sleep

Is like a murder.

_Raoul._ Anna, you are cold,

These hands are far more icy than the keys....

Some wrath is in your heart.

_Anna._ O love, beloved,

That she could so betray you! Take the light,

Swift to your vengeance!

_Raoul._ Guide me to the door....

There is the siren in your voice. I falter....

Say, Anna--we are lovers, it is dark,

And if I have your love that is revenge,

The sweetest to my lips.

_Anna._ Go, strike her dead.

It is my swift command. Betwixt us twain

There is no secret moment while she lives.

Strike swiftly, for I perish.

_Raoul._ But lead on;

It was your promise....

_Anna._ I will look no more

Upon her face, or dead or living. Strike,

With an open-dealing justice.

[_She turns with the lantern away._

_Raoul._ And no light,

Your will, but shifting Luna.

[_He disappears in the gloom._

_Anna._ I would pray....

[_Facing the tower._

How still and awful! I could wish the bells

Would jangle on my ear: through the open turret

Two stars at gaze, but no sharp monitor.

And there is peril. Treason moves about

Somewhere, though indistinct. Some wrong is done

That the wide stream of starlight warns me of.

What is it? [_She remains looking steadily up._

_Raoul_ [_returning_]. But the door is barred within....

I cannot enter. Quick, take up the lantern

And light me to my work.... You will not come?

... You are dazed,

Staring at that high belfry. Off again!

An instant, you have lost the scent, poor Lulla!

What puts a woman off the scent of life

Like this religion! [_Catching her wrist._] But you shall not damn me

A second time with your uncertain strength

And eddying virtue. Come, take the lantern

And tremble to the doorway.

[_She holds the light steadily, looks in his

face, and stretches her arm as a

barrier between him and the chapel._

_Anna._ ... Count of Valois,

No further! I am taken unawares

In a great sin. That woman is my foe,

I am thirsting for her death.... We may not touch her.

She is in sanctuary.

_Raoul._ But I am come,

An angel sent to carry her to hell;

She is misplaced among the just, and if

You would escape damnation with the damned,

Light me to fling her down the great abyss.

Unbar your arms.

_Anna._ She rests beneath my roof,

The tower I raised, and, as I am a Queen,

Her life shall be untouched.

_Act III_

_In the Name of Time_ is the most exciting of Michael Field’s plays,

because it presents the high adventure of a soul. It is the work of her

mid-career, the expression of a mature philosophy, and of fine, though

not faultless, technique. It was conceived and in great part written

when she was in love with life, a worshipper at the altar of her art,

and--this is the most significant condition of its being--when she was

entirely free from theological prepossession. For the play is concerned

with an idea--the greatest of all, perhaps, since it is the idea of God.

Carloman, the protagonist, determines in its first lines to possess _the

Great Reality_; and the drama follows him through one avenue after

another of baffled quest until, dying in a prison, he murmurs his latest

creed:

... I for myself

Drink deep to life here in my prison cell.

_Fellowship, pleasure,

These are the treasure_--

So, I believe, so, in the name of Time....

One sees why, after the poets became Roman Catholics, they hesitated to

publish this work; for the protagonist is that Carloman (son of Charles

Martel, King of the Franks to A.D. 741) who renounced a kingdom for the

monastic life. But in Michael Field’s presentation of him he is no

submissive son of the Church. He has the independence and audacity of

intellect of the poets themselves at this period; and he is the absolute

visionary which they were capable of being and sometimes were.

Nevertheless the play is not a polemic; and though it is vastly

interesting on the speculative side, it is no philosophical treatise. It

is genuine drama, and a striking example of the way in which our poets

could at this stage fuse thought and form. Carloman’s spiritual

adventures move us because they are enacted in human stuff; the events

of his life utter his character. We see them through the renunciation of

his royalty, the abandonment of his faithless wife and their child, the

first convent life and its disillusion, the craving for freedom and the

reawakening of ambition, the journey to Rome and dismissal to a second

monastery, the revolt against bondage, the escape and armed rebellion

against the Pope, the return to his home and his now prostituted wife,

his recapture, imprisonment, and death. But being thus true to life,

these spiritual adventures are, in their primary quest, inconclusive.

For all the passion of pursuit, the vehement rejection of the outworn,

the eager clutch at experience, the joyful confidence at every new turn

of the road that now at last the Great Reality is in sight do but lead

Carloman back to the common things of life, and only furnish him with

light enough to keep a foothold in the actual world. Carloman does not

find the Great Reality, though glimpses of its nature fitfully shine on

him. But he discovers how to live--that human existence to be tolerable

must be sweetened by fellowship and ennobled by pleasure. Those bare

elements are all that he attains; but he throws off, in the process of

arriving at something so simple, hints and gleams of truth more complex

and more vivid. To gather merely those flashes may do an injustice to

the work as drama; but one must risk that, for its thought is at least

of equal importance. And since these fragments express the character of

Carloman as he passes stage after stage of his quest, it follows that

they cannot be a coherent philosophy.

There is no vanity in life; life utters

Unsparing truth to us,--there is no line

Or record in our body of her printing

That stamps a falsehood. Do not so confound,

Father, life’s transience and sincerity.

* * * * *

The thing to do

Is simply just the sole thing to be done.

* * * * *

There should have been no tears, no taking leave,

A freeman can do anything he will.

* * * * *

Oh, do not put your trust in Time;

Put on at once _forever_, leap to God!

Have done with age and death and faltering friends,

Assailing circumstance, the change of front

That one is always meeting in oneself,

The plans and vacillations--let them go!

And you will put on immortality

As simply as a vesture.

* * * * *

Heaven detests

A beggar’s whining. God is made for Kings,

Who need no favours, come to Him for nothing

Except Himself.

* * * * *

We must escape

From anything that is become a bond,

No matter who has forged the chain--ourselves,

An enemy, a friend: and this escape,

This readjustment is the penitence....

* * * * *

But there is no such thing--

A vow! As well respect the case that sheathes

The chrysalis, when the live creature stirs!

We make these fetters for ourselves, and then

We grow and burst them. It is clear no man

Can so forecast the changes of his course

That he can promise _so I will remain,

Such, and no other_. Words like these are straws

The current plays with as it moves along.

* * * * *

... You cannot see that Time

Is God’s own movement, all that He can do

Between the day a man is born and dies.

... Think what the vines would be

If they were glued forever, and one month

Gave them a law--the richness that would cease,

The flower, the shade, the ripening. We are men,

With fourscore years for season, and we alter

So exquisitely often on our way

To harvest and the end.

* * * * *

It never is too late for any seeing,

For any recognition we are wrong.

* * * * *

Earth’s wisdom will begin

When all relationships are put away,

With their dull pack of duties, and we look

Curious, benignant, with a great compassion

Into each other’s lives.

* * * * *

_Pepin._ And are you not a rebel?

_Carloman._ I am, I am, because I am alive--

And not a slave who sleeps through Time, unable

To share its agitation.

* * * * *

The God I worship. He is just _to-day_--

Not dreaming of the future,--in itself,

Breath after breath divine! Oh, He becomes!

He cannot be of yesterday, for youth

Could not then walk beside Him, and the young

Must walk with God: and He is most alive

Wherever life is of each living thing.

To-morrow and to-morrow,--those to-days

Of unborn generations.

The Roman trilogy dramatizes the epoch in which the decline of the

Empire began, and covers, in the period from A.D. 180 to 212, the

disastrous reigns of Commodus, of Didius Julianus, and the co-emperors

Caracalla and Geta. The interlude of Pertinax and his heroic effort to

stop the downward movement is not treated, except that his assassination

is the starting-point of _The World at Auction_; and the military

adventures of Septimius Severus offered the poets no suitable material.

The three plays have not, therefore, a common protagonist: royal persons

were killed off too quickly to be of service in this respect. But there

is, nevertheless, a real bond between the three plays in the idea of the

State; and there are physical links in certain persons of the drama.

Thus Marcia, the noble Christian slave who was so closely associated

with Commodus that her figure appears engraved with his on certain coins

of the period, plays a very important part in the two first tragedies,

with Eclectus her lover. Fadilla, sister to Commodus, and Pylades, a

Greek dancer and pantomime, appear in all three plays--Pylades giving

the poets a welcome opportunity to present the character of artist that

they always delighted in.

The first play of the trilogy, _The Race of Leaves_, is concerned simply

with the downfall of Commodus. There is, of course, no deliberate

presentation of a problem in any of these plays of the second period,

though a problem of some sort is implicit in every one. It is not, in

the trilogy, capable of statement as one clear force fighting another to

a single issue; but as the complex, fluctuating, diverse elements of the

epoch, making for conflict of morals, of religion, of class, of

political and Imperial interests. And if it be protested that that is

altogether too vague and abstract as a motive for drama, the reply is,

of course, that it is by no means presented as theory. It is wrought

into the persons of the drama and impels them. Imagination has so

possessed itself of the historical situation that what was rotten in the

State has crept insidiously into the life of the play, which goes to its

tragic end in consequence.

It would be a fascinating study, illuminative of the different mental

processes of the historian and the poet, to compare, throughout the

trilogy, what Gibbon made of the same materials. One must not be

beguiled far along that path; but in respect of Commodus, he is for

Gibbon (and, of course, the evidence supports his judgment) an unnatural

monster with “every sentiment of virtue and humanity extinct.” Which is

to say that the historian has collated the facts and fitted them

together into a certain pattern. The poet has done more than that. She

has absorbed the spirit of the time; she has penetrated to the very

soul of each of the persons of her drama, and that sympathetically: she

has _felt_ not only their individual reaction to the forces of their age

of transition, but the subtle, disintegrating influence of the age

itself.

Hence no rigid datum is postulated, even about Commodus. We see him,

through the action of the play, in the process of becoming what he was.

We see how and why he became a creature so abandoned to lust and cruelty

that Marcia, a Christian and his loyal friend, could yet bring herself

to mix for him the poison-cup. We see the whole desperate business

already implicit in his origins: not, as Gibbon somewhat mechanically

saw it, from the partiality of Marcus Aurelius for his beautiful young

son, but from the elements in Commodus of Faustina’s amoral nature, and

his reaction from his father’s stoical austerity. Thus we find Fadilla,

in Act I, speaking to her sister Lucilla of their father:

Philosophy,

That smiles on life, till life is made ashamed,

And sunders from each end for which it throbs,

Praise, glory, pleasure, how should it direct

Youth through its awful rapine? By the gods

Marcus is held as good and our fair mother

As evil ... yet our father poisoned life

In each of us from childhood, for his voice

Withered illusion, and our urgent youth

To him was nothingness, to us a lie

That could not prove the truth it made us feel.

He spoke of us as leaves within a wind,

Leaves shaken diversely: and so we are,

Unhappy children!

There are indicated in Commodus from the beginning the portents of what

he afterward became; but there are also spiritual graces (his love for

Marcia, his love for his sister Lucilla, and his faith in Cleander)

which hold him to humanity and reasonableness. But the seed comes to its

fruit through the logic of events: the grace and sweetness of humanity

wither as, one by one, those whom he loved and trusted prove traitors.

His deepest affection had been for Lucilla, and her plot to murder him

shakes him to the soul. But he cannot bring himself to sentence her, and

it is only under the shock of another perfidy that he is hardened

sufficiently to order her death. That act is the spiritual crisis of his

life, for in committing it he sins against the last ray of light left in

him. When Cleander is revealed as a traitor, and Commodus rushes out to

destroy his sister, he does in fact compass his own destruction, both

moral and physical. The scene occurs in Act II, and I quote it for the

reason that it is the crucial incident of the drama. But the rightness

of its psychology steadily wins the mind as one perceives how the

memory of Lucilla’s crime works in him at first to reject the warning of

Marcia and Fadilla because they are women; the reaction to pity after he

has condemned Cleander; his revulsion to hatred of Marcia because she

brings evil tidings and comes in ugly clothing; the swift change when he

appeals to her sympathy; his turning to perverse rage again when she

cannot weep with him for the traitor, and he rushes out to sentence

Lucilla--this, finally, in order to avenge himself on Marcia because she

had begged him to spare his sister.

Fadilla and Marcia have broken upon his revels, dressed in mourning as a

sign of their ominous news, and Commodus has commanded them to speak at

once, on pain of death:

_Marcia._ ’Tis you must die,

My lord, unless--[_to Fadilla_]--but tell him, Princess, all.

He will believe a lady of his blood.

Tell him of ruin, tell him he has lost

The Roman people, tell him he has lost

The moiety of his guard, that he must dread

From his own subjects what could never chance

By hand of barbarous nation.

_Eclectus._ All is lost;

Your Guard is broken; you are now defenceless,

And on the brink of slaughter....

_Fadilla._ Outside these walls a fiery hatred marshals

The citizens. They have a single shout

Of hunger after justice, and one name

For all they hate--Cleander. Every voice

Demands his head.

_Commodus._ An execrable plot!

I cannot listen any more to words;

They are the language of conspirators.

[_To Marcia._] But you have put your beauty quite away,

Made yourself hideous, distasteful. There

Again I catch design; my sister too--

Cleander smote her lover. Envious, Ha!

That was Lucilla’s keynote. Agony!

I will not give him up.

_Marcia._ He is a traitor.

I say this in Truth’s name.

_Commodus._ And through your eyes

I look as to the bottom of the well.

Marcia, come nearer! You are deadly sure ...?

_Marcia._ Eclectus!

_Commodus._ No, swear to me by your eyes....

_Marcia._ Cleander is a traitor. He has brought

A host together, he has armed your people

To strike you dead unless you quell this strife:

He fraudulently bore the public grain

To private granaries, till famine raged,

And still it rages on. Although I tremble

To move you with the sorrow worst to man

Of finding falsehood in the services

That fashioned every day, I, who must die

So soon beside you, yet proclaim with Rome

Cleander is a traitor. [_She gazes into his eyes._

_Commodus._ So you doom him,

So! Woman, how I hate you. From his youth

When every office nearest to myself

Was his, and he familiar with my pleasures,

My needs, my health, my privacy, my sleep,

Even then he was a traitor? All must end

If such a hollow, such inanity

Gape round me as existence. [_Re-enter Cleander._

... Let him die!

_Cleander._ ... The cup!

_Commodus._ He promised me

To bring it. It is brought. A poison-bowl!

Drink, drink, Cleander; pledge me!

[_Cleander drops the cup and crouches at his feet._

_Cleander._ I am lost,

Crushed by your sudden anger. Could I drink?

’Twas an oblation. Are you not a god,

And through my service? Dare you cast me off?

Dare you discard such deep fidelity?

Gods do not so desert.

_Eclectus._ You are condemned. The crowd impatient.

_Cleander._ Master, by our youth,

By all my fond devotion.... If I erred,

It was for you. I twisted circumstance

For you, I stole, I lied....

_Marcia_ [_calling_]. Laetus!

_Cleander._ Her voice--

The harlot, my accuser!

_Marcia._ Laetus! [_Laetus enters with soldiers._

_Commodus._ Take

Your victim, offer him!

[_Cleander is dragged away. Commodus wraps

his face in his mantle._

I shut my ears.

Truly I am a god; ’tis on this wise

The gods abandon, deaf to circumstance.

You cannot rate him. Why, he kept my rooms:

A little Phrygian slave, the cryer offered,

They bought him for me, and he jigged a dance

Of the mountain-loving Mother the first night

He placed my pillow. Marcia, cling to me!

_Marcia._ My lord!

_Commodus._ Cling, cling as to a drowning man.

O Veritas, I loved him. Do not weep.

[_A distant cry and shouts are heard._

For me, I must. A ghost cries after me;

And at the little bloodless Hades-moan

My heart grows soft.

_Marcia._ Oh, steel yourself. Cleander

Has fallen justly.

_Commodus._ So you will not weep!

He shall have justice in the Shadow-land.

Some parchment--Quick!--[_Exit._

_Fadilla._ What moves him?

_Marcia._ Something moves,

Something! When men rise restless from their tears

One must not ask their errand....

[_Re-enter Commodus._

* * * * *

_Commodus_ [_to Pylades_]. Bear this sentence

Forth to the hall, to Laetus. It condemns

One I found wholly guilty: she must die.

_Fadilla._ Gods, ’tis Lucilla!

_Commodus._ Bear the sentence, beauty....

Ah, Marcia, this is well; you do not move.

_Marcia._ How could I?

_Commodus._ What a rigid ugliness you stand. I hate you.

_The World at Auction_ follows _The Race of Leaves_ historically (though

it appeared earlier) with the inglorious episode of the reign of Didius

Julianus. This is he who is said to have bought the Empire with his

fortune and to have paid for it with his head; and that barter is the

whole plot of the drama. _Julia Domna_ takes up the chronicle after the

death of Severus has left his sons Caracalla and Geta joint emperors.

Its plot is concerned with the jealous struggle between the two brothers

and its fatal issue, which all the astuteness and the passionate

devotion of their mother, Julia Domna, could not avert.

Lack of space prevents one from dealing fully with these plays; and from

_The World at Auction_ it is impossible to do more than quote, from the

initial incident of the barter, Marcia’s protest. The Prætorian Guard

has just assassinated the uncomfortably virtuous Pertinax, and the

Imperial seat is vacant. We are introduced to the house of Didius, and

are shown his wealth, his vanity, his weakness, and the greed and

ambition of his wife and daughter; that is to say, the elements which

make for his downfall. His treasurer, Abascantus, enters with the news

that the Prætorians are putting Rome up for sale, and he proposes that

Didius shall bid for it. Marcia interposes, horrified:

Rome for sale!

The empire offered! Didius, do not listen;

There is no verity behind this cry;

The world may be possessed in many ways,

It may not know its lord; but oh, believe me,

It has its Cæsar; nothing alters that,

No howling of a little, greedy crowd.

Why should you rule this city? Have you raised it

To higher honour? Have you borne its griefs?

Will it remember you?

_Act I_

There follows a masterly passage in which Didius vacillates between the

indignation of Marcia and the persuasions of his family. At length he

yields to them (though still half afraid of Marcia) to the extent of

sending Abascantus to bid for him; and then turns whining to Marcia:

_Didius._ Is Rome bought and sold?

Alas, you see, she is. A purchaser

Is not ashamed to trade in noblest blood,

If once a state of servitude is owned.

We traffic in all creatures, and, if fate

Allow the traffic, we are justified.

_Marcia._ You are forbidden; something holds you back.

Rome to be bought! [_Showing the city._] Look there!

_Didius._ But if I stood,

An army at my back to overwhelm,

You would not interpose.

_Marcia._ It is the strong,

And they must be accoutred by the gods--

What helmets and what spears!--who may prevail

In circumstance so awful. Dare you call

The Mighty Helpers who have fought for Rome

To aid you in this enterprise? I know

The day will come she will bear many evils,

And many kingdoms build their seat on her:

But touch her with a manacle for gold!

O Didius, do not dream that what is done

Of foolish men can ever come to pass;

It is the Sibyls’ books that are fulfilled,

The prophecies--no doings of a crowd.

They are laid by as dust. “If fate allow,”

You say, “the traffic”! You may change the current

And passage of whole kingdoms by not knowing

Just what is infamy; a common deed

It may be, nothing monstrous to the eye,

And yet your children may entreat the hills

To hide them from its terror.

_Act I_

_Julia Domna_, the last of the three plays, is terrible in the fierce

truth of its imagination, and contains in Act II the most powerful bit

of drama that these poets have written. Once again they have taken the

bare bones of history and made of them human creatures of almost

appalling vitality and strength. The emperors Caracalla and Geta pursue

a vague and erratic course through the scene of the historian, and a dry

phrase about “fraternal discord” does not much illumine it or make it

comprehensible. But the poet brings to it the light of vision, and sees

in Julia Domna, their mother--a woman of rare beauty, grace, and

intelligence; able, subtle, of irresistible attraction and powerful

personality--the cause of the insane jealousy between the brothers which

not only explains their career, but makes the catastrophe inevitable.

And what gives this play its almost awful force is that Julia Domna,

though loving deeply both her sons, herself precipitates the tragedy and

brings about Geta’s murder. In this element of the drama there is a

tragic irony which gets itself wrought into the mere dramaturgic irony

of Act II with a total effect of great intensity. When the act begins

Julia is rejoicing that she has succeeded in keeping both her sons in

Rome. There had been a plan to divide the Empire and to give a separate

rule in East and West to each of the two brothers; but she--her

affection mastering prudence--had opposed it. She could not tolerate the

pain of parting from Geta; and the plan was defeated. The opening

conversation skilfully reveals the dangerous situation that she has thus

created. Her two sons, ravenous for her favour and openly loathing each

other, refuse to meet. It is only in deference to her that they consent

to inhabit the same building, where they are lodged in separate suites.

So long as she does not swerve a hair’s breadth from impartiality, and

so long as her wit can devise means to soothe and flatter each in turn,

she can hold them from violence. But secretly she is not quite

impartial. For Geta, her younger son, with his sunnier and gentler

nature, she has a deeper tenderness. And that betrays itself when,

taking Caracalla in what seems a propitious mood, she proposes to him a

reconciliation with his brother. His wrath is the more deadly in that he

had felt himself, a moment earlier, alone and secure in his mother’s

affection. He dissembles, and promises to make friends; but when Julia

Domna goes out to bring Geta, he quickly plots to kill him. He hides

soldiers behind his mother’s throne, instructs them to act upon a given

signal, and when Geta enters receives him with a speech of welcome. The

tragic irony of the scene is complete; Geta’s death, when it comes, is

of the last horror, and his mother’s agony a thing only to be realized

by a woman and expressed by a great poet.

The act is so complete a unity that to detach a part of it must

necessarily do the poet an injustice. One risks taking the central

passage, however, in the hope that even out of its context something may

remain of the imaginative truth which sees Caracalla, lulled for the

moment by his mother’s welcome, and exultantly promising her a boon, for

that reason turned to fury the more vengeful when the boon that she

names is begged for Geta. One may be prepossessed; one may, with the

cumulative weight of the whole tragedy in one’s mind, see more in a

phrase than the poets intended to put there. Nevertheless, it does seem

to me that Caracalla’s answer to his mother, “Rise from your knees,” and

her frightened rejoinder, “I am not kneeling,” are supreme touches,

awful in their brief, pregnant, startling rightness.

Caracalla, happy to find his mother alone, has been protesting his love

for her:

_Caracalla._ As wine

I have flushed your face. Are you so weary now

And so dejected? But your very raiment

Shines in my presence and casts off a dust

Of little stars.

... What is the boon?

_Julia Domna._ What boon?

... I had forgot.

_Caracalla._ But I will grant it,

I must in this great prodigy of joy

To find you thus, to give you health again

Simply by breathing near you. Majesty,

No son, but Hercules I think in me

Has pulled at Juno’s breasts again. I smack

The flavour still of those first draughts. Beloved,

If you would ease my reeling brain, confer

Some labour on me, some attempt; for you

I would disjoint the hills.

_Julia Domna._ Nay, of myself

And for myself I cannot heave a wish.

_Caracalla._ But for your greater honour--a fresh palace,

Baths of more tempered coolness, any jewel

That the East buries....

_Julia Domna._ ... For my greater honour,

And pride of glory! But there is a thing....

Come to me, for you cannot understand

Unless I speak it close.

[_She stretches her arms to Caracalla, and

whispers to him._

_Caracalla._ Rise from your knees.

_Julia Domna._ I am not kneeling.

[_Caracalla is silent. She turns away,

terrified._

_Caracalla_ [_with a slow smile_]. But there is a power

I may myself invoke.

_Julia Domna_ [_turning to him_]. O Caracalla,

Your daemon, the low voice of your own soul.

_Caracalla._ You cannot name the power....

[_After a pause, with a deep inclination._

When least you hope,

Your prayer is heard. Lo, I extinguish strife

With Geta, in your presence meet him here,

Within your room; and we will give this palace

One hearth, one board, one audience-chamber, one

Glad-smiling Lar--for we will be as one,

And rule as one. You shall embrace him even

Before my eyes. Go, fetch him out of exile;

Bring him to me.

_Julia Domna._ If from your soul you speak....

_Caracalla._ By Vesta’s Sacred Relics.

_Julia Domna._ You will meet him?

_Caracalla._ Within the hour.

_Julia Domna._ And will become as one?

_Caracalla._ Ay, as one son.

[_Julia Domna, still keeping her eyes on

him, goes out._

The Syrian bitch, what guile!

[_Calling to the soldiers in the anteroom

to order the murder of Geta._

Tarantus, heigh!

Other Roman work of this period is _Stephania_ (1892), a trialogue

dealing not very convincingly with the vengeance taken by the wife of

the Roman consul Crescentius on Otto III. There is much interest and not

a little beauty in this play, but no dramatic conviction. One comes,

therefore, finally, to _Attila, my Attila!_ (1896), which refuses to be

passed over in complete silence, though it does not lend itself to

quotation. The intellectual motive here is much more conscious than in

the other plays of the group. Indeed, the play is in spirit a survival

from the earlier period, and belongs to this one only in external things

of matter, form, and date.

Honoria, the heroine, is described by the poets as “the new woman of the

fifth century,” and the mere record of that fact is enough to indicate

the nature of the problem which will be dealt with. But Michael Field

did herself a greater injustice than usual in trying to define the

meaning of this drama in terms which suggest a local and temporary

phase. For just as neither Honoria nor the ‘new woman’ of the nineteenth

century was really new and transitory, but rather a reassertion of very

old and permanent things, so this play belies its preface; and instead

of treating a mere ‘movement’ in a given epoch, it is found to deal with

perennial human stuff.

Honoria, the little princess of A.D. 450, to whom even Gibbon was

sympathetic, is no mere smasher of windows--though she does that too in

her own way, by an illicit union with a young chamberlain of the palace

whom she loves against prudence and convention. She is, however, in her

complete significance, something more than a rebel against convention.

The poet wrought better than she knew, and gave in her Honoria a woman’s

presentation of the woman’s right to love and motherhood. She had

formulated the idea before, tentatively and somewhat in disguise, in

_The Cup of Water_; and her letters at that time amusingly reveal both

trepidation lest her real meaning should be discovered, and anger at the

blunderers who did not detect it. She need have had no fear: no one

guessed. The time was not ripe; and now, ten years after, with the

production of _Attila_, it still was not ripe. It may even be that we

have had to wait for the teaching of Freud to make plain all that is

implied in this play. Of him the poets knew nothing; and could they have

known, would have disliked intensely, as most healthy minds do, his

obsession with the idea of sex. Yet they have done the poet’s work so

well--which is to say, they have observed so carefully, thought so

fearlessly, and so vividly imagined--that they have presented (without

in the least intending to do so) an almost pathological study of

suppressed instinct: one which illumines and is in its turn illuminated

by the residuum of truth which does underlie the fantastic theories of

the psycho-analyst.

Yet once again it is necessary to qualify an impression of too stark a

problem. One repeats, therefore, that the problem, though distinct and

weighty, is implicit; it grew up in the artist’s despite. Honoria is not

a peg on which to hang a theory or a puppet with which to illustrate

one. She is a creature of great vitality who wins our affection and our

pity by her eager challenge of life and her disastrous defeat. We watch

her developing from an immature and impulsive girl who follows

innocently her newly awakened maternal instinct into a woman whose rich

emotional power and mental strength have been thwarted by repression and

perverted to an insane infatuation for the Hun king, Attila. But it

follows from those elements that the chief value of the play is its

psychology and not its dramatic power. The work will charm for half a

dozen reasons--its sympathy with the youthful rebel, its gem-like

utterances on love, its mental courage, its penetration, its dramatic

truth; but it never rises to the force of the great scenes of the

trilogy.

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 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

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.

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.

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 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 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:

_Cypros._ Do you hear him--hear my son; his ceaseless treading

As the creatures tread at night?

_Salome._ I hear him, mother;

He is stepping out her doom.

_Cypros._ You hear his treading,

Soft on the carpet, struck against the marble?

Would she were dead, who hated him to death!

* * * * *

_Salome._ Had he but looked on her,

Those mournful, sable eyes and lids in shadow

Under the pearl-laced crown, that brow in shadow,

And the obdurate mouth had been a charm

To honour as to fortitude. But, mother,

She strives to send no message; she is silent

As trophies or cold statues.

_Act V, Scene 2_

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:

_Herod._ But there are fortresses--

Masada by the Dead Sea coast;

There I could bury her as in a coffin,

Each sigh of wind a death-song over her.

Were not that best? A tower her monument,

Yet she not dead, not out of all account,

Still mortal....

Unseen of living nature, but alive....

With the cloud eyes of her, the silken cheek,

Even the voice of rough-edged undertone,

Enamouring offence. There none would love her,

None! But my treasury

Would have sealed riches, not a destitute,

Defaulting cave. Among the coins and jewels,

Locked-up regalia and spoil--a queen....

The difference!...

There in the rusty gloom accessible.

The difference! I think she shall not die.

_Act V, Scene 2_

Salome, however, has different views on the matter; and though Herod is

at first strengthened in his project by her opposition to it, he

reverts to the mood of vengeance when a member of the Sanhedrin comes to

plead for Mariamne’s life:

_Herod._ My wrath is on you.

Old man, I am the judge, I am the king--

There will not be a queen: I am her husband.

... Go back,

Far off!--Bid those that sit and croak with you

Remember how august the Sanhedrin

Would rule the sons of Jacob. Say the king

Will turn not from his sentence for an hour.

_Shemaiah._ God save you!

_Salome._ Herod--

_Herod._ I shall stay here, Salome; not with you,

But not alone.... There is no track for sleep

To wander after me; I shall not sleep.

Send Nicholas to read his History.

* * * * *

If I listen

To Nicholas it will be as a sea--

What men have done and suffered--as a sea

Pouring upon my ears; and it will tangle

Imagination that it shall not raise me

My bridal chamber at Samaria,

The adored head on my bosom, the young body

Loving me close, in very oneness, flesh

Even of my flesh--our bridal a flower’s heart

Of balsam, and our secrecy.... To-morrow

The people watch her to her death.

Salome,

Call Nicholas....

I shall stay here, for dawn

Comes on the other side: the sun

Comes on the other side.

Send Nicholas!

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 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:

_Herod._ Could he have said it of himself alone?

Could he have dared so break his oath? My silence--

Was it unsealed by him?

* * * * *

Mariamne, so you pleaded for your life,

And you prevailed. Will you not plead with me?

Will you not recollect and feign again

To me, your husband, with the words you feigned,

The love you feigned to love ... or was the man

Beloved, who was your lover?

[_Mariamne stands quite still._

Is this pride?

You are a Maccabee, an Israelite,

King Alexander’s daughter--I of Edom,

Descended from a slave of Ascalon,

Not to be answered by your royal lips.

[_Mariamne sighs a little: then, raising

her eyes, speaks quietly._

_Mariamne._ How was it drawn from him?

As the night comes up into the evening-tide.

I was sad, and he was sorrowful to death

That he had sworn a cruelty and wrong

So unavailing to repent, if done.

Spare him, lord, in belief of my clear words.

[_Herod gazes at her with awe, then muffles

his face in his robe, and speaks slowly._

_Herod._ Were you so sad at dying, when to die

Was but to rise up at my bidding, _Come!_

Was but to quicken to my cry, _Receive me

Back in your arms?_ Oh, you are slow of heart!

When I was dying of the pest in Rome,

And knew not I should look upon you more,

Death was not cold, death glowed with Mariamne,

I had prepared her welcome on that shore!

[_She flashes one rapid glance at him._

_Mariamne._ I will wait you on that shore, my lord the king.

_Herod._ O my gazelle, my noble distance-keeper,

Wilt thou indeed await me? Then why tarry?

_Mariamne._ But do not cast between us any more

One that is dead. Spare Joseph, merciful!

_Herod._ The dead between us, Mariamne? Doe

Of the high places.... How?

_Mariamne._ My grandfather ...

[_He grips her wrist._

[_In a whisper._] My brother....

_Herod._ Peace! Were you drowning in my arms,

Your voice would sink before me so, your thoughts

Would drop bewildered so....

* * * * *

_Mariamne._ Spare Joseph, merciful!

_Herod._ Mariamne, I would reason with you. Speak!

I would question the great blood in you: a servant

False to his oath, a soldier in accord

With foes, a sentinel

Who to the nearing spy betrays the path--

Can such men live? Are they for kings to use?

[_She moves away, looking out over the

tombs of her ancestors. He follows._

Flesh of their dust, pronounce: can such men live?

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.

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:

_Juanito._ Dawn found me tangled by the night, and crying

In the alien, stone wilderness, a captive.

They brought his arms,

His sparkling arms; they questioned of the Prince

Who wore them.

_Lucrezia._ But the moment....

_Juanito._ Of a sudden

The foe retreated, leaving me: I reached

The rough-hewn gorge....

[_Near to her and in a changed voice._

He lay there, naked;

He lay--his face under the sky: his wounds

A hero’s--twenty-three; across his loins

A bloodied stone, his life-blood round the rocks,

His hair a weft of red. How beautiful,

And wild and out of memory was his face!

The great wind swept him and the sun rose up....

_Act VI, Scene 3_

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 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 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:

_Cesare._ What is this parchment?

_Alexander._ You have read it,

They told me. ’Tis the libel from Taranto

Sent to Savelli.

Christ, we are a kindred!

Carnage and rapine, perfidy....

_Cesare._ Why mince it?

Assassination, incest!

[_Rising from the ground with clenched hands._

_Alexander._ But the Latin!

The dulcitude of apophthegm, the style!

What sap in all this rankness. Cesare,

I laughed an hour, applauded with wet eyes--

_Literae humaniores_--so the salt

Of the strong farce compelled me.

Do you stoop

To anger? Consul Julius Cæsar laughed

When choice Catullus spat an epigram,

And dined him that same evening.

One does not claim exact historical accuracy for the play, of course.

Certain incidents are introduced which will not be found in the

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

Holiness 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:

_Alexander._ Poto,

There was no scar on him, not the least wound;

That is the truth: and he stood armed again.

As bright as San Michele he looked down

Upon us from the wall, his gonfalon

Swathing around him as he stood. His face

Was to me as an angel’s.

[_He weeps quietly._] I repent,

I will change all to meet that boy again

In Paradise, no wound on him, no scar.

And yet the sight of him,

O Poto, drove down to the rasping quick

Of conscience through my heart. All shall be changed,

The Vatican be cleared of sin. These bastards....

Let me not see them more! Joffré, Lucrezia--

Joffré must mind his government afar,

I banish him. Lucrece--oh, I shall gather

The seas between us; she shall dwell in Spain,

Dwell in Valencia, deep, where I was born,

White little demon-girl!

[_He rises, trembling, and Poto robes him._

No priest henceforward

Shall hold two benefices; simony

No more shall breed among us. God would punish

Some sin in us; it could not be Giovanni

Deserved a death so cruel. Gently, Poto,

You are too violent.

_Poto._ Patience, Holiness,

You slit the silk.

_Act I, Scene 5_

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 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 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:

_Alexander._ O Poto, Poto, search

His haunts! The malice of these chamberlains!

Madonna Giulia, Monsignore Poto

Would search the place where Don Giovanni hides.

Have mercy on my son!

_Giulia._ Monsignore finds

Your Holiness so jovial he is conquered

By the same vein.

_Lucrezia._ Excuse him!

_Alexander._ Even our ladies, Poto,

Plead for the Duke’s seclusion. Without doubt

He waits for sundown to forsake the place

Where he was sociable.

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